I meditated, dug deep down into my freshly emptied stomach. And found: nothing.
Every time I shut my eyes, I saw Tariq. His eyes on me. Not when he learned the truth, there in the Spring Garden parking lot, because in that moment he had exuded only care and concern, but later, when he dropped me off at home. When he’d had some time to think about things. When I got out of the family wagon and they all gave me a rousing good-night, and our eyes met, and he looked away just a little too fast, and I saw the rising fear in his eyes, the realization of just how messed-up I was.
If he broke up with me, I’d die. I knew it. Ever since the moment I learned the truth about who he was and how he felt about me, he’d been the thing propping me up. The thing that took the place of my Mission of Bloody Vengeance. The thing I loved instead of myself.
I took On the Road out of my backpack. It still smelled like his house, faintly like him. Pine and cigarettes and his mom’s vanilla candles. Underneath that, I smelled the previous borrower—patchouli and chocolate—and beneath that another—beer, summer—a whole shifting totem pole of people who had borrowed that book.
I read it in one sitting, crouched beneath my freezing window, crying in spots at the wild madcap journey these two men were on, and how much beauty they found, and how much sadness, getting up often to make coffee or get cigarettes, and it was dark when I neared the end, and I felt like I owned the night, and I was my own person, and I was still reading when I heard my mom stir as she got ready for the night shift, but before that, somewhere on Sal and Dean’s fourth or fifth crisscross of the country, I made a decision.
RULE #45
Some sicknesses are so severe they can trump even the most powerful positive force on the planet.
DAY: 35
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 50
Reader, I made love to him.
December 27: no school. I held the book in my hands and waited until dawn had passed and a reasonable hour arrived, and then texted him, bantered back and forth a bit, told him to come get me. I felt it inside me like a bubble of pure light, this secret: I knew what would happen today, but he did not.
“Hey!” he said when he met me down the block, when I was up in his truck, when he smiled and we kissed. He had no idea what was about to happen. I did. I had never felt a power like that, not even when I could make it snow or conjure fire out of the air or smell a bully’s deepest shame and know exactly how to use it to destroy him.
Was there a new distance between us? Was his happiness at seeing me any less than what it had been before he knew about my sickness? I couldn’t tell.
“I stayed up all night,” I said. “I read On the Road in one sitting.”
“And?”
“I loved it,” I said.
“Me too!” he said.
“I have to read it again.”
“Yeah you do. Where do you want to go today?”
“To the pines,” I said. “The deep pine clearing.”
“You sure?” he asked, blowing on his hands because his truck was sluggish and the heater slow to come around. “Pretty cold out there.”
“We’ll sit in the truck,” I said. “Our portable home.”
“Sounds good,” he said and kissed me again and looked at me from the driver’s seat, across the wide gulf that separated us, and his eyes scanned me in the light of day looking for signs of my sickness.
“They weren’t gay,” I said. “Were they? The two guys in On the Road?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Best friends, but pretty straight. They sleep with an awful lot of women. And there’s gay people in the book, friends of theirs, and they certainly don’t let society’s expectations limit them, so it’s not like they would be too afraid or repressed to act on those impulses if they felt them.”
“True,” I said.
“That’s our book,” he said. “The gay-guy version of On the Road is our story to write. Our wild and crazy adventures when we leave this town and drive to every awesome hidden secret place on this super huge planet.”
“That book sounds amazing.”
The truck rattled on through empty after-Christmas streets, stopping for Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.
“It felt so . . . forbidden, somehow,” I said. “Staying up all night. When I was a little kid my mom used to make me take naps, and I hated it, and not sleeping felt like such a rebellious act.”
“Yeah,” Tariq said—but his mind was elsewhere, on me, on last night, on what he learned about me. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “About . . . that thing?”
For a second I couldn’t speak, I was so grateful to him for not saying it. To hear him use the words eating disorder would make it too real, too frightening. “I don’t know.”
“You have to get help.”
“I know.”
“You’ll die if you don’t.”
“I know.”
He turned to me. “So what are you going to do?”
“Eyes on the road,” I said, but he did not take them off me. “Eyes on the road!”
“Answer my question.”
A car horn blared as his truck inched into the opposite lane.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay! The ER doctor gave me some numbers for therapists. I’m going to call them.”
His eyes still on me. The truck still drifting.
“I don’t have the numbers with me!”
More car horns. Some brakes squeaking.
“Okay!” I said. “As soon as I get home! I’ll do it.”
“It won’t be murder if I drive us into a tree and you die,” he said, eyes on the road again, straightening the wheel. “It’ll just be hastening the inevitable.”
“Such a drama queen,” I said.
He parked in the pines, the deep old-growth forest his father never touched, pines that had survived so long they were too big to be chopped down and fit inside any home, had earned the right to live out a natural lifespan without being sacrificed on the altar of Christian ritual.
“How long have you . . . had this?” he asked, putting the car in park.
“I—” and I realized I didn’t know. Long before I began to school myself in the Art of Starving, I’d been limiting what I ate. Fasting and then bingeing. Lying to myself. Googling eating disorders to figure out tips. “A while now,” I said. “You never guessed?”
“Of course not,” he said. And turned up the heat and blew into his hands again.
Because I’m such a disgusting fat greasy hog, I wanted to say, but not as much as I wanted to say, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” which is what I said.
“You have to confr—”
“I want to talk about your Christmas present,” I said. That stopped the flow of words from his mouth, started a slow smile spreading across his face.
“The best Christmas present a Jew ever gave a Muslim was how I think you described it,” I said.
Silence. “Shut the eff up,” he said. “Don’t play with my emotions like that.”
“Who’s playing? Take off your shirt.”