“Did you love my father?”
Mom drew in a breath, the standard moment of decision where she usually redirected me to a safer subject. Instead, she startled me.
“I did.”
“Good,” I said. “That makes me happy.”
She sighed. “We weren’t a good fit. No one’s fault. You can like someone and also really dislike them at the same time.”
“Sometimes it’s like that,” I said, thinking of Tariq.
Mom looked at me, then reached out to hold my shoulder.
I had to work hard not to use my new abilities on my mother. It felt wrong, an invasion of her privacy, an inversion of our natural roles. But in that moment I knew what she was feeling, maybe from the look on her face and maybe from the simple human telepathy of two people who love each other and know each other well. She looked at me, and she saw that I was a person, that I was learning things about pain and heartache and suffering that she did not know, could not know, that I had a whole world inside me that had nothing to do with her.
“Somebody hurt Maya, Mom.”
Mom sighed. “Your sister has been going through a really difficult period. Trust me. I know what she’s going through. You can’t see it because she’s still your big sister and you idolize her, but she’s been working through some really difficult stuff.”
“That’s not true. She was fine . . . and then she was gone.”
“Your sister acted like she was a hundred percent in control, but that doesn’t mean she was fine. When I was her age—” and here my mother paused, frowned, debated with herself— “when I was around her age, I ran away from home myself.”
“What?” I said, staring at her face, but not looking too closely, not sniffing beneath the surface to find out more. “Why?”
“It’s complicated. A lot of reasons. That’s what I want you to understand. It isn’t always just one terrible thing. Sometimes, it’s a million little ones.
“I’m telling you all of this now because I need you to know that Maya is going to be all right. Whatever she’s going through, no matter how painful, she’s going to get through it. Do you believe that?”
I tried to answer. No words came out.
“I turned out okay. Didn’t I?”
“The best,” I whispered, and lay my head on her shoulder.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, and stroked my hair.
Unlike our last conversation, I wasn’t sad. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to rage and scream and burn things down. I wanted revenge—for more than just Maya now. On a world that could turn my bighearted mother (who used to write songs!) into a shell. On a world that could be so hard on a person that her only escape was running away from everything she knew.
Many a magnificent supervillain was motivated by revenge.
Maybe that’s what I was becoming. A supervillain.
“You need a haircut,” she said at last.
“You need a haircut.”
“Fine. Let’s go get haircuts.”
Which we did. From the same guy who’s been cutting my hair since I was five. Except: now I could see clear as day that he was a closet case. Couldn’t tell if that was because of my abilities or my fledgling gaydar. Gaydar is a real thing, evidently—a superpower that even the most mortal among us can acquire—and when he was finished, he and my mother smiled at me in the mirror behind me, and it was the same cut I’ve been getting since puberty. I looked at my reflection in a state of confusion and shock, because this boy was not me, this haircut was projecting the image of some clean and well-mannered normal person who I most certainly was not. A haircut is a costume, a disguise we wear to trick people into thinking we’re someone better or more successful or cooler or just different than we really are, and this insight made me want to scream and shatter the mirror, and I controlled myself only with great difficulty, because my hunger had progressed so far that I was in a more-or-less constant state of war with my body.
All of which brings me to: vision.
Sight is the most limited sense. The one we rely on too much. The easiest one to fool. It’s the most human sense, the one that helps us navigate the man-made world of signs and symbols and words and fashion. We’re trained to trust our eyes above all our other senses, but that’s a lie. Appearances deceive. Sight must be subjugated to the other senses, or you’ll be misled.
That evening I flipped through photographs, slow then fast, then quizzed myself on their contents. Simple stuff—Was the person in photo #10 a man or a woman? How many African Americans were in photo #22?—then harder, How many people in that crowd? What word was misspelled in that page full of text?
Back at school, suspension over, I logged body language cues from the people around me, looking for tells and tics that betrayed when someone was going to lie, evade, escalate, distract. I gave a trophy in the trophy case a quick glance and then recited the names and years on the trophy by memory. I watched people for hours on end, learned the connections between body language and future action, until I could almost sort of predict what someone was going to do—before they did it.
I spent as much time as I could in the high school halls with Tariq and Bastien and Ott. By now the latter two had begun to begrudgingly accept me as a member of the human race. I scanned their faces, watched the way their jaws moved and their eyebrows twitched. I could see the shape of the secrets just below the surface and the careful way they looked at me.
But I wasn’t good enough to see what the secrets were, not yet.
At every meal, now, Mom said, “You need to eat, Matt.”
“I will,” I said, but I wouldn’t. I was too close.
And every time, the look in Mom’s eyes was too familiar. It was the same look that those boys had, during dodgeball, when they realized they should be scared of me.
RULE #23
The dying human brain floods itself with more than a dozen neurochemicals, desperate to stimulate the rest of the body into saving itself. These include dopamine, which makes you feel pleasure, and norepinephrine, which makes you more alert. Scientists point to this chemical flood as the explanation for near-death experiences and other vivid imagery reported by people who survive a brush with death, but the sophisticated student of the Art of Starving knows it’s the other way around. Those experiences are real. The human mind, on the edge of breaking free of its body, stumbles into other realities, sees impossible things, accomplishes incomprehensible actions. They are the cause of the chemicals, not their consequence . . .
DAY: 19
TOTAL CALORIES: 0
Hunger was a pack of wolves, starving and mad, running through my bloodstream, gaunt ribs showing through mangy scabbed fur, fangs bared at every shadow.