“What?” he said, wide-eyed, genuinely surprised at Tariq’s objection. “It’s true! Right, Matt?”
“Pretty true,” I said, laughing, because dumbass Ott had just stumbled on my secret. He’d decoded everything. He had sensed my growing powers.
Ott smoked pot, and we smoked cigarettes. And even once the weed had mellowed him out, Ott remained on edge with me. I caught glimmers of hostility aimed in my direction; shards of discomfort. I knew why, of course, but I didn’t know how to dig into it. My initial assessment had been correct: Tariq was the one I could get the truth out of. Because he wanted something from me. Friendship? Approval? Forgiveness?
We walked back through the pine forest, Tariq’s father’s empire, his family fortune. Tariq was desperate to confess. I was so close to convincing him to do just that. And once I had what I needed, it would be so easy to burn this whole place to ash.
RULE #22
The internet is an excellent place for people with eating disorders. Packed with sites and forums with all the tips and tricks you need to cover up your eating disorder until you disappeared from this earth altogether.
Which is to say, the internet is a terrible place for people with eating disorders.
DAYS: 16–18
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 600
My second day of suspension meant something very special: an entire day of Quality Time with my mother. It coincided with that rarest of events, a Whole Day Off for her.
“Word at the plant is that you murdered twenty people and then told the principal to go screw himself,” she said when she woke me up that morning.
“Lies and slanders,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I killed at least fifty people.”
“Can’t believe I raised such a slacker,” she said. “Now get dressed.”
“What the hell,” I mumbled, my mouth filthy with sleep taste. “It’s earlier than when I get up for school. And I don’t go to school today!”
“It’s not a vacation, slugger, it’s suspension,” she said, pulling wide the blinds. “Get dressed.”
Hunger was a fog, a blanket of gray mist that covered everything. Hunger wrapped me up in a snug blanket of cold and quiet, blinded me to the distant dangers and fears that normally kept me in a stressed-out state of high alert. I took my morning ration of two tablespoons of tsampa, just to be on the safe side.
Something was different when I came downstairs. A disturbance in the air. An echo.
Music. Real music, not a recording.
Could I hear the past now?
“Were you playing Maya’s guitar?” I asked.
“Christ, kid, you heard that? Thought you were asleep. Plus, I didn’t even turn the goddamn amplifier on.”
“I didn’t know you played the guitar,” I said because I couldn’t tell which one was more astonishing, the fact that I could maybe hear the past or the fact that I’d never known something so important about her.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about your fat old mother,” she said. “I used to have hopes and dreams the same as you two.”
“You wanted to be a rock star?”
She showed a thin and rueful smile. “I wrote songs, had crazy ideas about playing them for people.” Then she flapped her hand to whisk away these unhelpful, unwelcome memories. “But winter’s coming, and it’s a Tuesday. Which means half off at the Salvation Army. We’re going shopping.”
Once we got there, I fingered jackets and pants in an ecstasy of information, glimpsing scraps of every garment’s past life. A fight between a boyfriend and girlfriend; the shirt she donated, along with every other article of clothing he owned, while he was at work the next day. The mothball vacuum cleaner smell of the closet where a coat spent a decade; the hard tavern nights of smoke and barstool pleather that a pair of jeans endured. The pajama bottoms an old man died in. A hat a meth-head loved, until she ended up in prison. And through it all I thought of my mother and the lives she didn’t get to live.
“Pick out whatever you want,” she said. “Call me Mrs. Moneybags, but only on Tuesdays. And only here.” The night before, I had spent entirely too much time on an eating-disorder support website. I read it and felt sick and sorry for these poor miserable tormented souls. But I also scribbled down copious notes.
For example: baggy clothes. Buy big bulky items to hide inside. That way no one will remark, as my mother did, on how thin you are. No one can tell underneath all that fabric. And when I met my mom at the cash register weighted down with oversize sweaters, et cetera, she was overjoyed to see how fully I had thrown myself into the trip, considering that clothes shopping had always been one position higher than “dentist” on the list of Things I Hate.
“These are gigantic,” she said, holding up a hoodie that could have housed ten of me.
“It’s the style.”
“I thought skinny jeans and tight shirts were the style.”
“Yeah, yesterday’s style,” I said. “I’m fashion forward.”
“You’re ridiculous, is what you are.”
I nodded. “Yes. Yes I am.”
In the car, she clutched her leg and winced and waited a solid three minutes for the pain to die down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like that’s my fault.”
“Shh,” she said, waving her hand to dismiss that “crazy” concept.
“I can’t believe they won’t give you any time off,” I said. “A week, at least, so you heal properly.”
“They offered,” she said, putting the car into drive, wearing her I Do Not Want to Continue This Conversation face. “But there’s layoffs coming, and being a woman I got to work harder than the others.”
“That’s a shitty fact,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is. We haven’t been bowling in forever. You and your sister loved that. Wanna go to Chatham?”
“You can’t bowl with your leg like that,” I said.
“I can watch you. Treat you to one of those paper boats of fried chicken fingers you used to love so much.”
I thought of the things we used to do, the Mom-and-the-Kids activities she could actually afford when we were little and had the day off from school. McDonald’s, the mall, Friendly’s. All involved food. Food was how we bonded, how we talked.
“Let’s go down to the boat launch,” I said. “Feed the ducks.”
We bought popcorn at a gas station and parked at the edge of the Hudson, but there were no ducks.
“Too cold,” she said, sitting down on a bench. “Too late in the season.”
She threw some kernels into the water and ate some. I even had a kernel or two myself. Rains up north had swelled the river, and random debris bobbed and swam with the current. In the sunlight, out in the world, she looked older than I’d ever seen her. Her drab brown hair needed cutting, and her pale skin had lines I’d never noticed. My mom was the terror of every hog in town, the fearless warrior who brought my sister and me into the world and then carried us safely to (relative) maturity. Yet in the grand scheme of things, she was no different from any piece of flotsam on the river, carried helplessly south. We all were.