“You’re not telling me something,” I said, and she turned her head away, wondering, trying to get her memory online, trying to figure out what she’d told me and what she hadn’t, what was true and what wasn’t.
“Your sister’s fine, Matt,” Mom said finally.
“She’s not! Why are you not doing anything to—”
“And why are you so eager to believe that something terrible happened to her?”
“I—”
“Why do you refuse to accept the possibility that maybe she’s actually okay?”
“Because she left!” I said, my voice cracking. I couldn’t see so well, so I sat back down. “Because she left you. And me. And went away. And she wouldn’t do that unless . . .”
I stopped myself, barely. Had my mother really convinced herself that everything was fine?
“There’s got to be something we can do,” I said. “We need to go get her. Bring her back. Call the cops. Find out what happened. Someone did something. They need to pay for it.”
“Life doesn’t always work like that, Matt,” she said, and in the heartbreaking clarity of her sadness in that moment I knew she was telling the truth. Her truth. But this truth was slippery, elusive. In an instant it had escaped my grasp.
Mom was letting go of Maya. Relinquishing control.
She’d done it before. Let my father go, let herself go.
I’d placate her, but I wouldn’t follow her path.
Not ever. I rolled up a pancake and ate it with my bare fingers, and then did the same for three more. By the end I had stopped crying, and she had started.
And I wondered for the first time, if maybe it wasn’t Maya who was breaking her heart.
RULE #20
Skin is the largest sense organ. Every centimeter of it is packed with sensory receptors, though sensitive parts have much more than others—your fingertips, for example, have one hundred times as many receptors per square inch as your back does. Scientists don’t use the phrase “sense of touch” anymore. They say it’s too simplistic. “Somatosensory system” is the new thing. Because what we think of as “touch” is actually a complicated network of different ways of acquiring information from the environment. Touch is the most complicated sense, the hardest to master, and the one with the most potential to cause great harm.
DAY: 14, CONTINUED . . .
I experimented in secret. In the cafeteria at lunch, eyes closed, I slipped off my shoes and pressed my feet to the floor.
I saw, through the soles of my feet. I saw the shape of the room, the hallway beyond it, the whole school. I saw the crowds of kids moving past. I felt the heavy kids and the slim ones, the plodding confidence of the jocks and the delicate steps of shy girls.
I went to the restroom and grasped a metal pipe with bare hands. I felt with my fingertips, as sounds traveled through the pipes. The vibrations were sound waves, and my skin could decode them as well as my ear could. From one end of the school to the other, from top to bottom, murmurs in classrooms and gossip in the girls’ room and the thuds and whirs of massive machines.
I pushed it further, letting my body take the lead, surrendering to the sounds. My awareness extended along the pipes, into the ground, past the school, under the fields and into the houses beyond, the muted voices of televisions and arguments, my neighbors, their words incomprehensible, but already I could feel them getting clearer, the entire town a party line for me to spy on anytime I wanted, thanks to the plumbing that connects every building.
I stood in the hallway, feeling people move through the world around me. I charted the infinitesimal changes in air pressure as people came, went, stopped, stayed. My skin sucked up all that information, basking in the feel. I felt the vibrations in my hair. I felt like the whole world was part of me.
I drifted off. I lost interest in my own exercises halfway through. I thought about food or schoolwork, both of which were sources of much self-abuse. More and more my concentration would falter; I’d lose the thread of classroom conversation or forget how to use a Scantron form in the middle of a test. At home I’d read a hundred pages of Jane Eyre, only to realize I didn’t remember a word of it.
I was terrified. Of myself. Of the thing I was becoming. Of what I could not stop.
I took myself on a tour of my own body. Stripped down to a T-shirt, I pressed my fingers to different spots. Studied acupuncture charts, YouTube videos. Once you understand how the body works together, you can manipulate pressure points in yourself and others. To heal and to hurt.
But pressure point manipulation is the kind of thing people spend a lifetime learning, and you can mess yourself up pretty bad if you’re not skilled. Never mind the Five-Point-Palm Exploding-Heart Technique; there’s plenty of mundane tricks that can go horrifically wrong. And while eventually I mastered the moves to make my hand temporarily incapable of feeling pain while still remaining fully functional—testing it by holding a lighter flame to my thumb and feeling nothing—there were a lot of mistakes along the way.
I spent a long time around the neck. The throat chakra deals with truth, after all, and maybe the right acupressure points could render someone incapable of speaking lies. Like Wonder Woman’s magic lasso. Maybe I could pinch a nerve and make Tariq tell me everything.
It didn’t work. All I achieved was paralysis in my vocal cords, which went on for so long I was convinced it was permanent, and I screamed myself to sleep, silently.
I spent a long time staring at myself in the mirror. Standing there naked, forcing myself to endure the wretched sight, as I poked and pulled and tapped out little tunes on the keyboard of my body. I thought about how easy it would be to tap the right sequence and stop my breath, arrest the flow of blood, burst the brain, make my muscles melt.
I felt the blood move through my own veins, the organs pumping and tightening, the muscles dragging my bones.
And I puked. More than once. Because the body is a pretty gross place. Astonishing, the complex systems of blood and guts and waste required to keep us alive for even one second. Overwhelming, the number of things that can go wrong. Knowing too much can be dangerous.
RULE #21
Caffeine is a central nervous system stimulant, and the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world. It blocks the action of adenosine, a hormone that causes drowsiness. Most importantly for our purposes, however: it kick-starts the human metabolism by triggering lipolysis, the breakdown of fat into energy. Everyone responds differently to caffeine, however, so the student of the Art of Starving should experiment with different amounts to figure out how much leads to heart palpitations and anxiety . . . and stop just short of there.
When your body wants something, that’s when it’s weakest. If someone knows what you want, they can hurt you in all sorts of ways.
DAY: 15
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
Monday was the first day of my suspension. At noon, my phone pinged. An email.