Based on how much I’ve gone on and on about how hungry I was, you might have gotten the mistaken impression that I’m an impoverished waif, starving from noble poverty. This is not the case. Whatever my mom’s money troubles, she keeps the cupboards stocked. We lose cable, sometimes, but never meals. Especially since Maya left. Mom told her closest friends—but not, for some reason, the cops—about Maya’s disappearance, and now people show up at our doorstep with all kinds of food, pressing plates of cookies and bowls of pasta salad and baskets of salami into my mom’s hands. That won’t last forever, though, and I for one am desperate for it to stop. Resisting a fridge full of my mom’s friend Shirl’s feta kalamata casserole is torture.
No, my hunger has no such dignity. I am that most wretched of creatures, the First World boy who sends his vegetables to the garbage when there are Starving Children in China. Across town there are trailer-park kids who eat three lunches at school because there’s no food for them at home, and here I am feeding the trash can.
In my defense, though, I like vegetables. I like food, no matter how healthy or unhealthy. I was always an obedient eater, unlike my sister, who, my mother will be the first to tell you, is Picky. She’ll say it like that, too, with a capital letter, like a medical condition or a Deadly Sin.
My sin, my condition, is way worse. I choose not to eat because I am an enormous fat greasy disgusting creature that no one will ever feel attracted to.
Now, you can’t see me, but if you could, you’d probably say what everyone else says.
What are you talking about?
You are so skinny!
Here, eat something.
No, really, take my sandwich.
And finally—
Matt, you’re crazy.
If you did say one of those things, I’d do what I do with everyone who says one of those things, which is: smile, nod, and silently hate you forever—for you lie.
Thanks to the magic of Afterschool Specials, I know that a disconnect between what I see and what others see is a very banal aspect of eating disorders. Here is the thing—what I have is not an eating disorder. I’m pretty sure boys can’t even get eating disorders. Lord knows there aren’t any afterschool specials about it.
My best guess is that a spell has been cast on me, so that everyone else sees me as a scrawny gangly bag full of bones, and I alone see the truth, which is, as I mentioned, that I am an enormous fat greasy disgusting creature.
This whole thing is not easy. It’s a fight, most days. Me vs. Food.
Food usually wins. My body, that traitorous thing, makes me cry Uncle. Drags me to the cupboard and makes me frantically scoop peanut butter out of the jar and into my mouth with my finger until I gag on it. But that day, the one that started out with me telling off Ott, I was winning. I was stronger than my hunger.
For once, I was in control of something.
By lunch, I was buzzing, flying, on fire. I watched in horror as boys chewed with their mouths open, spoke with their mouths full, spat flecks of food when they laughed, their voices sounding low and dragged out, like time had slowed down just a little for everyone in the school but me. Everything was going smoothly—
Then lunch fucked it all up.
You probably already know about lunch. High school cafeterias; the stink of scorched taco “meat” and spilled sour milk; hundreds of hormonal mammals heaping abuse on each other and preening for potential mates. If you told me it was a complex sociological experiment or a brutal gladiator-style reality show dreamed up by rich spectators somewhere, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
I spent fifty cents on a side of tater tots, not intending to eat them.
“Hey, Matt,” Ott said, swiveling on his seat. His voice had the high commanding tone that demanded his fellow barbarians come to attention, that signaled he’d be hurting someone for their benefit and amusement.
I didn’t say anything. I picked up a tater tot, dipped it in ketchup, put it back down.
Do your worst, Muggles, I thought. Sooner or later someone will come along and tell me I’m the Chosen One. And then you can be damn sure I’ll punish every one of you who hurt me. Me, and the people I love.
“Been wondering something.”
I turned to look at him. Bastien grinned and leaned forward, the slick, haughty haircut of a filthy rich kid cocked sideways. Tariq stared deep into his phone. Beyond them, dozens of people who don’t matter licked their lips or started up text messages and status updates to report the coming fireworks.
“How’s Maya? Haven’t seen her around in a little while.”
An oooooh went through the crowd.
“She’s fine,” I said, and, in a panic, stuffed three tater tots in my mouth.
“I’m really glad,” he said. “Because . . . that’s not what I heard.”
Bastien asked, “What did you hear, Ott?” in the loud, practiced tone of a perpetual accomplice. I hated him more, somehow, than Ott, even though I hated Ott an awful lot.
Ott, at least, was dirt poor, like me, with his mom working shit-shifts at Wal-Mart and his dad a hog-farm grunt like my mom. They both worked at the same slaughterhouse where Bastien’s dad made a cool million a year as a manager, his feet up on a fancy desk all day while she and a couple hundred other grunts swung hammers against the skulls of pigs and used massive knives to tear heavy strips of flesh.
A word, perhaps, will be useful here, on the respective bullying styles of these three. Bullying is an art, too, and their styles say a lot about who they are.
Ott is all physical. Big and dumb and broad-shouldered, he is at his best when he is punching things. There is no finesse to Ott’s abuse, no intellect. Thick curly black hair and the pouting lips of Roman busts in our history textbook—he is the thug Caesar of the high school hallways.
Bastien’s brutality is all verbal. Emotional abuse is where he excels. As far back as second grade, Bastien was stringing words together to watch people weep. Most of the time those words include faggot, or other equivalent snatches of hate speech, but he can be eloquent where eloquence is more effective. Slim-hipped and blond, with the chiseled cheekbones of an underwear model (from hell), Bastien is the kind of smiling psychopath you could very easily imagine becoming president or the villain in a Lifetime original movie.
Tariq’s bullying style is more abstract. He watches. He witnesses. He sees what they do, his friends—he validates them with laughter or silent approval. He never tells them to stop. He is their audience. The one they perform for. He, by the mere fact of his presence, makes whatever they do that much worse.
It goes without saying that I hate them all. What is perhaps less obvious is that I also desire them, desperately. By some cosmic joke, they are all heart-hurtingly beautiful.
Like I said. Nature is a jerk. Your body is a total asshole.
“What did you hear, Ott?” Bastien asked again, rubbing his hands together, leaning forward when Ott went in for the kill.
“I heard she ran off with one of the eight different guys she sleeps with.”
I stood up, stepped toward him.
But suddenly, it was gone. Whatever I’d tapped into that morning, when I’d been able to see right to the heart of his trembling cowardice and take him down effortlessly with words, it had vanished.
The tater tots. They stuck like mud in the gears of my body’s engine. I sputtered uselessly for five or six seconds that felt like infinity.
I made a noise. Maybe a gasp, maybe a sob. Whatever it was it made people laugh.
“Dude, Ott, chill with that,” Tariq muttered, very deliberately not looking up from his phone, working hard to hide the guilt on his face.
Laughter boomed in the stinking cafeteria as I turned and ran.
RULE #3