“It’s weird,” he said. “Girls have a sixth sense for that kind of thing. They know, somehow. A couple of the girls I’ve . . . dated.” His fingers drew air quotes. “They sensed something wasn’t right. I mean, they might not actually think Tariq is gay. But on some level, they know.”
One of the drunk white-trash dudes threw a beer bottle at the seagulls. They flew away, squawking, and the drunks laughed, and the two crowds sounded creepily similar. Of course the ugly birds were unharmed. Seagulls, like lots of disgusting things, are damn near invincible.
“Where was my sister going?” I asked. “It wasn’t a concert.”
“No,” he said. “Once we got out on the thruway, she had me take her to a rest stop, just south of Exit 20.”
“Why?”
“She told me to go home. Said she had a ride back, all lined up. And she made me promise not to tell anyone, anything ever. Especially you.” Tariq reached across, moved his fingers through my hair. “You gotta believe me when I say I really, really wanted to.”
“Okay . . . but?” He grasped my hand, and turned to look at me with enormous wet eyes. “There’s something else I need to tell you. About your sister.”
“Tell me,” I said, my voice on the edge of breaking.
RULE #30
Your body’s hungers are simple. It’s the mind that makes things complex, spinning a web of stories and fantasies and prejudices around something as basic as love, until we crave the stories more than the love itself.
DAY: 22, CONTINUED . . .
I have had many fathers, through the years. An imaginary man for every stage of growth. I’ve created dozens of different mythologies behind the person whose damaged DNA and fire-red hair I carry.
I feel that it’s important to tell you this now, here, in this held breath between Before and After.
One of my fathers was a king, reigning over a distant land or possibly in exile, hiding from wicked brothers or viziers or witches who wanted to kill him for his throne and birthright. As heir to incredible riches and with an army at his command, his wise advisers would find six-year-old me and restore me to my place beside his throne.
One of my fathers was a sports star, magically gifted in every game involving a Ball or a Team, and the switch for that magic gift lay somewhere inside me. He would return to take nine-year-old me by the hand and flip the switch. Then he would teach me how to excel in all the activities my peers esteemed.
My father was rich, and would die, and would leave a mountain of money to Mom and Maya and eleven-year-old me.
My father was a villain, a sneering Lex-Luthorian evil genius who stole everything from us—he alone was responsible for our state, and he would return for thirteen-year-old me to defeat in epic battle.
My father was an artist, beautiful and sensitive and gifted, and even if he would never be in my life, his blessings were with me, inside of me, my genetic birthright, and I would pass through pain to access the treasures he hid inside my DNA, and make marvelous things that would give meaning to my life and the life of all who beheld them.
But none of those men were really my father.
RULE #31
As they approach true mastery of the Art of Starving, students will see that eating disorders are merely one part of a broad spectrum of self-harm. Cutting, addiction, suicidal ideation. These are all ways to assert your power. To prove that you’re not weak. To show you’re strong enough to control your own destiny by destroying yourself.
DAY: 22, CONCLUSION
“What is it?” I asked.
Tariq turned away, held my hand tighter. He wanted to be away from here, away from me and my capacity for feeling pain, away from all the messy jagged things in his life. He wanted to be in the weight room, grappling with something simple, like steel, something he could make himself strong enough to master. He wanted to punch something. He wanted to punch everything.
“I know who she was going to meet.”
Words rose and fell in my throat. I turned to look out my own window. I watched the night come rolling up the river, flooding in from the west, taking everything away from me. It went on forever. I rolled down the window.
“Matt,” he said.
I heard the word inside his head, heard him wanting not to have to say it.
“She was going to meet your father.”
Eyes shut, I tried to breathe in the night. To smell the wind, to hear the universe. But I couldn’t. Tariq’s words made my chest heavy, made my lungs collapse, made it impossible to take a full breath.
McDonald’s had ruined me. I was powerless now when I needed my abilities more than ever.
“Let me guess,” I said eventually, my words ugly in a way I couldn’t help. “She made you promise not to tell me that, either.”
“Now you’re mad,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Take me home,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, and then— “Oh, shit, Matt! Look at your fingers!”
I’d been gnawing them again. Blood streamed down both pinkies. “It’s nothing,” I said.
He gave me a look that said it was most definitely not nothing.
Tariq drove me home. I got out of the truck. I slammed the door so hard it sounded like a gunshot. I shouldered my backpack, and it was light as air. The night was bitter cold, and I did not feel it. I did not feel anything.
“Matt,” he called through his open window.
I kept walking.
“Good night,” he said.
I managed to turn around, but I didn’t manage to smile. Or say a word.
I spent hours, that night, practicing. Researching. Googling Providence punk-rock show lineups. Writing emails to Maya. Trying to feel hunger again. Trying to see the past; trying to smell the future. Listening for echoes. There was nothing.
Long after midnight, a throbbing in my ring finger made me stop. I’d bitten the nail almost halfway away, on that and on several other fingers. Now that I focused on them I could feel it.
I went to the bathroom, sat on the floor, grabbed the pipes. Willed them to show me things I couldn’t see. But I couldn’t concentrate.
I gnawed on the nail of my ring finger again, tugging and tearing at it like a dog with a bone, like a starving dog trying to tear the last little shred of meat from a dry bone. And then— —with a ghastly squelching tearing sound, with a pain like from a piranha bite, the entire nail ripped away. I held it between my teeth for a split second before spitting it away with a scream, and grabbing a towel, stuffed one end into my mouth to silence the shrieks and wrapped the other around the wound to stop the bleeding.
RULE #32
Almost nothing is under your control. Your parents, your school, the government, the awful consequences of karma and history—all of these factors, and a thousand more, are conspiring against you. They tell you what you can do, what you can’t do. The true key to the Art of Starving is this: that your body is under your control even when nothing else is.
DAY: 23
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1100