He shrugged. “Seinfeld reruns? One of my dad’s Jewish friends? I don’t know.”
“That’s racist,” I said, aiming a soup spoon at him. How did the spoon get in my hand?
“Whatever, Jew.”
“Whatever, Muslim.”
Outside, twilight had turned everything a deep dark blue. The tint gave a sad grandeur to the sorry spread of strip malls and trash and rust outside the window. I pressed my fingers to the table beside my water glass and pushed, just a little, with my mind, sending tiny shock waves through the table that made ripples in the water. I pushed harder and the ripples got bigger. Tariq frowned, unsettled without knowing why, looking around like maybe a little earthquake was happening.
“I’m sorry I’m taking you away from the weight room,” I said.
“I’m happy to be here,” he said. “With you.” But was he? I wouldn’t blame him if he was desperate to be anywhere else. I was irritable, starving, unpleasant. I stared at his face, wondering what he was feeling. I couldn’t penetrate whatever force field surrounded him. I’d have to make my powers stronger. “After this, we should go to a movie and make out,” I said. “Or maybe forget the movie part.”
He smiled, and a flush of desire forced me to bite back a moan. Black stars bloomed by the dozen. The whole diner spun. “Bastien’s having a party. Tomorrow night, at his house. You up for that?”
I wasn’t. But then my eyes locked onto Tariq’s, and I was. “Yes,” I said. “I am super up for that.”
I lowered my face to the bowl of soup. I looked up, at the crowd in the diner, at all the crisscrossing lines made by people, the smells and emotions and energy that swirled around them, the traces they left, tiny as molecules sometimes, but still there, right there, right in front of me, a code I couldn’t crack, a riddle I couldn’t unravel. Because I was weak. Because I chose earthly attachments like Tariq and food over limitless power. I looked up, through fogging eyes, at the connections between people, the way they carried their pasts on their backs and their futures strapped to their chests, the way time itself was a shifting wave like smell or sound, something I could crack or control, if I pushed a little further, if I became a little stronger.
My glass of water broke.
I started to cry.
“Hey,” Tariq said, looking bewildered, leaning forward to grab my hands under the table. “Hey, Matt. Don’t cry. Everything’s . . .”
His voice trailed off. He looked down at his plate, at the carnage of pizza fries. And suddenly I wasn’t afraid of homophobe lunatics with guns or the waitress spitting in our food or someone from the slaughterhouse or his father’s tree farm seeing us and snitching. Nothing on earth frightened me as much as the thought that Tariq might leave me.
“Come around the table,” I said. “Nobody knows us here. You don’t need to be ashamed of me.” A sob-hiccup.
He came around. He draped his big strong arm across my shoulders. He stared out at the diner and dared anyone to give us a second glance. No one did.
“What’s going on, Matt?” he whispered.
“My mom is going to lose her job. And my sister won’t talk to me. And I . . . And I . . .”
I stopped myself. I had been way, way too close to telling Tariq the thing that would make him run screaming out of my life. He’d tolerated so much of my awfulness. Expecting him to be understanding about my self-imposed starvation was absurd.
“Yeah,” he said. “Keeping us a secret is hard for me, too.” There were lots more things he wanted to say, and he wanted to say them so bad I could hear them. Some of the things were precisely what I needed to hear. But he didn’t really say them, so they didn’t count.
“I’m sorry,” I said, conceding defeat in the who-can-stay-silent-longer contest. “It’s the solstice. I’m a Wiccan, so I’m very sensitive to these things.”
“Eat the goddamn soup,” he said in my ear, then bit it lightly.
I ate two spoonfuls of the soup. I wept because it tasted so good, and because Tariq cared so much for me, and I wept because I was so, so weak.
RULE #39
Separation is an illusion. All living things are one. Trapped in our bodies, chained to dying animals, we forget that each of us is one with all creation. Only the Supreme Master of the Art of Starving can pierce through this illusion.
DAY: 30
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 200
I am strong, I told the mirror boy. He grinned a Real Boy’s smile, something he could turn on and off at will, because no one would ever again say to him, Why aren’t you ever smiling in any photographs?
I can pass, I said, and he believed me. Dressed in a hoodie and jeans and sturdy boots, I could have blended in with any gathering of average American adolescent males. A knit cap covered my wildfire hair.
We can do this, I said. We’ve done this before. If the mirror boy had any doubts, he kept them to himself.
An hour later I was at Bastien’s house, along with every high school A-lister in the county.
“This isn’t going to be too miserable for you?” Tariq asked as we approached the front door.
“Your friends aren’t all awful,” I said. Truthfully. “And parties are interesting, from an anthropological perspective. Such a strange ritual . . .”
Tariq laughed. “Let’s just hope the natives don’t turn out to be cannibals.”
“Anyway, if you enjoy parties like this, they can’t be completely worthless.” I touched his arm. He fought the urge to flinch away. “I want to know how to live in your world.”
I was being sincere, and he could see it.
“My world sucks,” he said, and he was being sincere. “But it’s nice to just make stupid jokes, to play video games, to feel on the same page with people. You know?”
“Totally,” I said. “Wolves get something out of being part of a pack.”
“You’re so deep,” he said, knocking lightly on my forehead. And then Bastien’s front door.
And then we were inside. Tariq’s house was nice, but Bastien’s made it look like mine. So that’s how rich you are if you run a slaughterhouse, I thought, looking up at the double spiral staircases connecting the front hall to the second floor, the wide windows that let in so much light, the wings branching off in both directions to untold wonders. The potted palm tree, two stories high, indoors, standing right in front of us.
“Wow,” I said.
“Yup. Everybody always wanted to come play at Bastien’s house. The best video game systems, the best snacks . . .”
“ . . . the blood of the workers on his hands . . .”
“That, too,” my communist boyfriend said.
“I promise to try my hardest not to jump your bones,” I whispered.
“I appreciate that.”
The party was perfectly banal. It needs no description, deserves no aggrandizement. Parties happen every night. Kids get drunk and loud every night. A thousand parties are happening right now, as you read this, wherever and whenever you are.