I woke up, and for a solid fifteen seconds everything felt fine. I lay in a square of sunlight, on clean sheets, feeling rested. No one had hurt my sister. I had a boyfriend. Home felt different. It was the place my mother had made, had fought like hell to create and hold on to.
And then: I sat up. I looked down. My stomach loomed huge, an epic wave of pale fatty flesh that seemed to crash past my waistline. My fingers still smelled like french fry grease.
I was hungry. But I wasn’t hungry enough.
The mirror boy grinned at me while I brushed my teeth. Mocked my flab. Made sure I saw the skin jiggling on the underside of my upper arms. My chicken legs.
Tariq lingered for a little while. I carried him down the hall with me to breakfast, burning on my lips like the curse words I learned at age six and ached to shout in every room I entered. Tariq changed the scale of things, took the edge off the sordid squalid place. I breezed past stacks of mail, garbage bags sorely in need of a run to the dump, other garbage bags doubling as laundry sacks. I followed the weak light to the kitchen, where two of the four bulbs in the ceiling fixture had been burned out for months. Then I saw my mother, and not even Tariq could keep the pain at bay.
“Matt,” she said, sitting up from the kitchen table so fast I knew she had been asleep. Her face was red and groggy, and she winced in the sunlight.
“Hi, Mom. Thought you’d be at work.”
“Not today.”
A smell was in the air.
Scotch. A new bottle, open on the kitchen table. Next to the “Have You Hugged Your Mother Today?” mug that she used to make us chocolate milk in.
The sight of it brought me crashing back down to earth.
I remembered everything.
Tariq, Bastien, Ott—none of them had done anything to Maya. She left.
She left me. She left us. She left me. For him.
I stared at the bottle. Two ways to respond to this new development. Ignore it, or don’t. Call her out on it, or pretend you don’t see the bottle.
Maybe a better son would have done differently. Maybe a stronger person, one who put the needs of others above his own, would have said to himself, Hey now wait a minute; this is a bad sign and maybe I should see what’s going on.
But, honestly, I can’t tell you what a good son would have done, because I’m not one. So instead I went to the sink and started washing the dishes. Asked her how her day was—“Fine.” Said “Fine” very sincerely, when she asked me. Finished washing the dishes. Stood there.
“What’d you do for dinner last night?”
“Tariq and I went out for McDonald’s.”
Saying his name warmed me up inside, hot and rich like french fries.
“That’s good,” she said, and put her head down on the table. I pulled out the chair beside her and sat.
“Lotta night shifts lately,” I said.
“Oh, baby,” she said, not lifting her head. “It’s going to get worse from here.”
“Business bad?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Something to do with corporate. Downsizing. Outsourcing. Offshoring. Some crazy thing.”
“Is the plant going to close?”
She shrugged. The table trembled. “If this goes on for one more week I’m officially not a full-time worker. If I’m not a full-time worker I lose my—our—health insurance.”
I put my hand on her arm. One of hers grabbed mine so swift and hard I could feel the full force of her hurting. Her need. Her hunger. Her sadness.
“You look tired, Mom,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“In a minute,” she said, but let me take her to her room. She stood in the doorway and switched on the light and blinked her eyes and focused, and for a split second she was My Mother again, the Moving Mountain, wild of hair and sharp of eye, and she grabbed my head and pulled it in for a forehead kiss and stumbled to bed.
“Hit the light,” she said, already half-asleep.
I sat at the kitchen table for a while after that, staring at the bottle, debating dumping it down the drain, deciding in the end that it wouldn’t help. If Mom had a problem, she’d buy more booze, and it’d be a cowardly action made by a boy too weak to have the real, uncomfortable conversation that was needed.
So instead I did what I’d seen my mother do, when one of us was sick or sad or hurting in some other way she couldn’t help.
I cooked.
I found flour and sugar and butter and eggs and chocolate chips and did what the chip bag said to do. I whipped and I blended and I spooned onto a lubed-up baking sheet and I popped it into the preheated oven. Just like a real person.
They smelled like love, like heaven, like all good things. I wanted to eat them all.
I didn’t need to continue my Mission of Bloody Revenge. I didn’t need to track Maya down and rescue her. So why couldn’t I bring myself to eat?
Because she was still there, stuck to the side of the fridge: Skinny Mom.
Because there was only one thing in this whole world I could control, and that was my body. Not to mention that if I had any shot at helping our family, I’d need my starvation-charged senses back.
So I packed the cookies tightly in Tupperware and left her a note with hearts on it. Then I drowned in hot water the excess dough, which under normal circumstances I’d have scraped from the sides of the bowl with my fingers and sucked clean, but circumstances weren’t normal anymore, and never would be again.
I stared at my hands, still shiny with butter and sugar. So I ran them under the hot water until the deliciousness melted away and my fingers were scalded and red.
RULE #33
Your body’s memory for pain is far better than its memory for pleasure.
DAY: 24
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
I woke up choking, gagging, retching, jolted out of bed and onto the floor by the ghost of the tube down my throat. My body was back in the hospital, or so it believed, drugged and helpless and fed against its will.
“You okay, honey?” Mom asked but did not open my bedroom door.
“Fine,” I said, coughing up a throatful of warm phlegm onto my hands. “Bad dream.”
“Sounds really bad,” she said but went away.
All day long I carried that ghost tube with me, an uncomfortable itchiness, a dull throb, through the halls and classrooms of Hudson High. I concentrated on controlling the smell my skin gave off, shaping my pheromones to say Danger, do not approach, silently furious at everyone.
No bullies cornered me. No teachers called on me. There was a movie about Spartans instead of an actual lecture in history class. At lunch I ate two tablespoons of tsampa. I did not eat a third.
After that I raised my pheromone cloaking shield again, and stayed alone in my bubble until Tariq cornered me at my locker between sixth and seventh periods and smiled so deep my defenses evaporated.
“Hey, mister,” he said, looking sporty in his soccer jersey and thick striped socks over his jeans.
“Hey,” I croaked.
“Got plans after school?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“I’ve got a game. Up at Albany Academy. I want you to come with us.”
“On the varsity team bus?” I said. “I hate most of those guys, you know that. And the feeling is mutual.”
“They’re my friends,” Tariq said. “They’re not all terrible. You should come. I want you to be one of them.”
I wrinkled my nose.