Yes. I am an idiot. We’ve established this long ago.
But I made the decision to set all those concerns aside.
“I want to try something,” I said, leaning over, kissing him on the lips, then the neck, then the stomach, then onward. “Stop me if you’re not comfortable with it.”
“I can’t,” he said, and I knew he wasn’t talking about The Act. “I can’t do this anymore, Matt. I can’t watch you destroy yourself. I’ve been reading all about eating disorders on the internet, and people just drop dead all the time—like their hearts give out or their brains starve or something—”
He had never been more beautiful. His eyebrows were two thick troubled daggers. His fauxhawk stood up proud and fearsome as a shark fin.
This was happening. He was dumping me. The only good thing in my life was gone.
Distant lights flashed. Winter lightning, weird and wrong. The black stars fell into shapes, constellations, omens, portents. My fingertips burned, began to bleed again.
“I hope you do get better,” he said. “I really do. But you have to do something or—or I can’t be with you anymore.”
There was a silence, thick and heavy between us.
Then he whispered, “They say recovery can take years and—”
“Recovery takes years? Did the stupid internet tell you that? Because the internet also says gays are demons who will burn in hell forever, and communists kill babies. Just because something’s on the internet . . .”
He said nothing. Anger and frustration fizzled to life inside him.
“And you think you’re so great to be boyfriends with?” I asked, powerless to stop myself. “Mr. No One Can Ever Know About Us? Mr. You Are My Dark Secret I’m Ashamed Of?”
“I know,” he said, his voice a little harder. “And you deserve better.”
“So that’s why you’re dumping me? Gee, thanks, Tariq, you’re so considerate. But you’re still a goddamn coward, and you know what the proof is?” I wasn’t steering the ship anymore. My body swooned and trembled with the same shivering sensation as the night I ended up in the emergency room. “You know how I know you’re a spineless piece of shit? Because you think I’m an inspiration! Me! Disgusting, worthless, hideous me—you think I have courage? You must be some—”
He started up his truck.
I stared out his window, thinking Maya Maya Maya, all the way home.
Lightning followed us. We did not speak.
RULE #47
I got nothing for this one.
DAY: 37
TOTAL CALORIES: 0
Mom got fired. She got one week’s pay as severance, which is half of our rent, which was already past due. She came in full of false cheer, knowing we were doomed, determined not to let me see it.
“There are lots of layoffs,” she said, her voice heavy with wanting a drink. “I’m certainly not taking it personally!”
“But what about that transition job?” I asked when I got my head around what she’d said, which was a while.
“Turns out the transition is going to happen on a much faster timeline, so they won’t need any managers for it. Ended up going to someone else,” she said. Her smile was so fake it hurt us both.
“But you said your boss said—”
“Said it was out of his hands. Decision from upstairs. What do you want for dinner?”
I gaped at her, and she turned without another word and walked away.
I sat at the edge of my bed. Turned up my music so I wouldn’t hear her pouring out another drink. But I heard her anyway. I heard everything.
I could do so many things. Teleport, read minds, stop time. Why couldn’t I help her? Why couldn’t I help anyone? Why couldn’t I take away everything that made her life so hard?
I stared at my hands. Starving myself gave me powers. But what good were they? I was sick. I was destroying myself.
I went down the hall. Mom sat at the table, glass of scotch beside her mug of coffee. Her head hung. It wasn’t hunger or superpowers that told me how sad she was. It was being a person. Being open to the needs of someone other than myself.
Love could heal. Love could change people. Love was the thing that made me want to die when I saw her, when I saw how much she was hurting. Everything else, all the imaginary abilities my sick mind had conjured up, all of that was meaningless.
“Hey,” I said, heart hammering.
“Hey.”
I put a hand on her shoulder, and she leaned her cheek against it. I almost lost it right there, the courage I’d somehow mustered, so I reached out with the other hand and picked up the bottle.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Whiskey,” she said.
“Why are you drinking it?”
She sighed.
“I love you, honey,” she said. “But you’re my son and I’m your mother and I don’t want to have this conversation with you.”
Hunger and sadness made me brave, let me say the words I wasn’t strong enough to say. “I think you do,” I said.
“Well. I also think a lot of things that aren’t true.”
I kept on, undeterred. “But seeing you like this. It hurts. It makes me feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I can’t do anything about that.”
She looked up at me for the first time.
I whispered. “We should get help.”
Mom clinked her coffee mug against mine.
“I’ll make some calls in the morning,” she said, the emptiness of the promise echoing in the kitchen.
RULE #48
As previously stated, the manufacturers of the human body have a very strict returns policy. You can’t simply snap your fingers and say, “Okay, I’m done, take it away, boys.” You can’t just decide to stop being alive. You have to do something. Usually something pretty sucky.
THE LAST DAY
TOTAL CALORIES: 0
When I got to the slaughterhouse it was abandoned, shut down for the night, which would have been unheard of a month before, but these were the final days of its transition into obsolescence. The workers were home in their beds, asleep, unemployed, poised to lose everything, so no one could stop or even see me as I raised my arms and watched the massive hydraulic loading bay door open slowly as I walked in and followed the familiar metal walkway that my mom used to take me and Maya down when we were little. She’d point out the pigs in their cages and then take us down to the huge long freezer hall where the cleaned skinned hacked-apart carcasses were kept, always careful not to let us anywhere near the bloody slaughter rooms. I blinked those memories away.
How had I gotten here?
I was outside my body, watching myself. I was a force of nature. I could do anything. No one could stop me. What did it matter what a forest fire did? Who was to blame for a flood?
Easy as thinking about it, I used my power and erased my image from every camera I walked past.