She tried to help in positive ways, too. Mom signed Ahmed and me up for swim classes near Aunt Dorothy’s house. Two days a week, we went to class and then walked home. I started to lose weight, but swim classes were soon over. Next, Mom enrolled me in dance class. That helped for a while, too, but when classes ended, the weight came back again. My diet never changed. It was whatever Mom cooked or whatever she’d bring home after singing in the subway. Burgers, Chinese food, pizza, whatever. There were usually Oreo cookies and ice cream around because that’s what my mom liked to eat. Shit. Me, too. She’d yell at me not to eat those things, but the yelling paled compared to the satisfaction I got from eating the Oreos. Also, fuck outta here! Maybe if the house was filled with salad.
In junior high the panic attacks became an everyday occurrence. Children who were sweet little kids the year before become monsters in junior high who make fun of you relentlessly until you cry. And when you cry, they make fun of you for crying. There is no escape. Even your best friends hate you. And you hate them just as much. You only hang out with them because junior high is easier in packs, but it’s still horrible. Not only do kids not give a fuck about your feelings, they actually want to hurt you. My junior high was like a Vietnamese minefield. I would pray every day that God would make me less sensitive. I knew that no matter what someone was going to make fun of me every day, and I prayed to be able to hold my tears. The boys I had crushes on would call me a cheeseburger (now that I think of it, I don’t know why being called a cheeseburger hurt me so badly, but it was like a knife to the heart when I was twelve). Junior high is where I learned that if I couldn’t stop the jokes about my weight I could make them first. Like exaggerating my weight was part of some elaborate comedy act. If we were in phys ed and made to run around the gym a few times, I knew I’d be slow. So I’d make a big deal of how tired I was and how crazy it was that anyone would believe that I could “drag my fat ass around a gym.” My classmates would laugh and root me on as I loudly yelled, “Oh, GOD! I’m not gonna make it! I’m just gonna lay down and die!” while slowly jogging around the room. This way, at least I didn’t cry, and my fellow junior high psychopaths laughed and wanted to be around me. Sure, they were partly laughing at me, but the joke was on my terms so they were also laughing with me. I think. I had friends in junior high. Plenty of friends. Most of them continued to hurt my feelings one way or another, though. I would try to hurt their feelings, too. I don’t feel comfortable saying that I was a victim of bullying. Yes, I was bullied, but I was also the bully. Some of the worst, most regrettable things I’ve ever done in my life, I did in junior high. Junior high is a battleground. It’s as if every day there’s so much shit weighing on you that you have to find someone weaker to dump it all on. As horrible as it was, I had the greatest time in junior high. I just kinda wanted to die every day, too.
High school wasn’t much different than junior high except there were even more cute boys who pretended to like me only to laugh in my face when I looked hopeful. By now I realized that my parents, Mom especially, held more responsibility for my weight than they ever claimed. It wasn’t all her fault, but it certainly wasn’t all mine, either. I didn’t cook for myself or buy groceries. I didn’t bring cookies and ice cream into the house. I didn’t know salad could be something other than my mom’s version: iceberg lettuce with ketchup-and-mayonnaise dressing slathered on every piece. (We’d all feel smug and satisfied with ourselves for eating that version of a salad, and then we wouldn’t do it again for like a year.) Oddly enough, as soon as I realized that my weight wasn’t entirely my fault, it became my responsibility from that moment on. I figured I could do better. Now I was always making meal plans with my friends. Trying new diets where I would only eat packs of ramen noodles and only drink Crystal Light. The women in the commercials for Crystal Light all looked so pretty, skinny, and happy. And the word light was in the title! Obviously, it was better for me than Kool-Aid. Those diets never lasted long because McDonald’s and soda felt better and the most consistent food in our house was still takeout.
During high school, I stopped eating lunch. I never ate breakfast to begin with, and now I gave up lunch completely, too. There were no nutritionists around to tell me that it’s counterproductive not to eat, so it felt like the healthy thing to do. It wasn’t just because school lunch was horrible and there were mice running around our lunchroom. (Literally! The local news came to do a story on how terrible my school’s lunch was. They even interviewed ME! My first-ever interview!) I stopped eating lunch because I couldn’t help thinking that people were watching me eat and were disgusted by me because I was fat. I just stopped. Hungry or not, I wouldn’t eat until I was home from school, whether it was at 3 p.m. or 10 p.m.
Exercising was out of the question during high school for several reasons. Swim class was long over. Also I was super lazy. Going to gym class was wildly inconvenient. It was the last period of my day on the tenth floor; most of my classes were on the fifth floor. Walking up five flights and changing clothes in a locker room full of high school bitches just to get picked last to play volleyball didn’t seem worth it. My senior year I had to take gym at night school and write an independent study on sports in order to graduate. Night-school gym class was from seven to nine-thirty twice a week in the basement of my high school. The final exam consisted of one hundred push-ups and three hundred jumping jacks. Every class got us closer to that final—if I didn’t pass it, I wouldn’t graduate. I couldn’t afford to be lazy. I started dropping weight fast. I’d get home starving at eleven at night, quickly eat dinner, and then go to bed just as quickly and get up the next day in time for eight o’clock class. It felt like finally someone was putting their foot down and making exercise a priority for me, and it was the New York City Public Schools. I lost a lot of weight; I graduated.
I’d survived childhood, but the weight was back on in a matter of weeks.