ch.7

The thing about bad days is that they creep up on you. You can never see them coming in advance, so that they would be just a little bit more convenient, just so that you could look at the calendar and say “oh, I’m going to have a bad day next Tuesday? I’m not going to want to get out of bed and the only time that I do will be to venture to the kitchen for the gallon of ice cream that’s in the freezer? Ok, well, I guess that I need to tell my teachers that I’ll be sick that day and just go ahead and get all of my homework out of the way. And I should probably go buy some ice cream and some sappy movies, too.” No, they sneak up on you, making you roll over one morning and get hit with the full weight of the depression on you, like a wet towel thrown over your face while you slept.

            Today is a bad day. When my alarm goes off, shrieking in my ear and making me scream at it in three different languages to shut the hell up, I can tell this almost immediately. I open my eyes, still crusted over with lastnightsmascara and sleep, and see Miranda, sitting on my chest, sucking on a Popsicle and smiling evilly at me. Good morning, Lilith.

            I grown and roll over, trying to throw her off of me. When I see her everywhere, it’s a normal day. When I wake up with her sitting on me, it’s a bad day. When I can hear her talking to me, even though her mouth is wrapped around some piece of temptation, it’s time to just roll over, go back to sleep, and call the shrink when I wake up.  But Miranda digs her nails into my neck, making me roll back onto my back and look into her beady little black eyes. “You’re not here. You’re not sitting on my chest sucking on a Popsicle and talking to me. You’re a figment of my imagination. You’re my subconscious at work. You’re not real.”

            Now, now, Lill. You know that I’m real. I’m as real to you as your Momma is, or as your precious Lee is. Don’t you remember how you convinced your therapist that I was real? How he started saving a seat for me in your sessions and anytime that I wanted to say something to you he shut up?

            “That wasn’t real. He was humoring me. He was just trying to make me see that you weren’t real, that I was being ridiculous by insisting that you were there and you were sitting right beside me. So…go. The hell. Away!”

            Lil, that’s an ugly side of you….well, an uglier side of you at least. By the way, when was the last time that you stepped on a scale? She turns, obviously checking out my thighs. You should take better care of that if you want your man happy. Men hate girls with fat asses, you know. And you should take better care of your skin, too, if you ask me.

            “I didn’t ask you. Now will you please go away?”

            She shakes her head, you know that you don’t want me to go away; you know that you want me to stay here. You know that I’m the only real one in your life; I’m the only one that doesn’t see you as diseased. I’m the one that sees you as trying to be beautiful, trying to be perfect. You’re just starting to slip back into thinking that you’re beautiful “just the way you are” and all that shit. I can’t believe you’ve fallen for that crap, Lil. Didn’t I teach you better than that? Didn’t I teach you that there’s no way to be beautiful just how you are? That you constantly have to try and fight and starve to be beautiful? You’re getting further and further away from it every day, Lil. Every single day, you’re getting further and further from where you need to be.

            She fades off and I lay there, staring at the ceiling. My hands slide down my stomach, measuring it with my hands- I can barely get my hands around my hips and feel the fat pudge flitting between my fingers. My hands slid down, past my waistband to my hips, where the sharp jab of bone doesn’t meet me, the soft flesh and mealy feel of fat does. Gasping, my eyes growing big, I sit up and wrap my hands around my legs, feeling one hand give to flesh, not fingers, two hands do the same, the tips of the fingers just barely touching one another around my thigh. Startled, I get up, walking to my door and quietly opening it. Mom’s in the living room, sipping her coffee and watching CNN. I slip across the hall into her bathroom, figuring that the further it was from the front, the less that she could hear, and slipping down to my knees in front of the toilet, sliding two fingers into my throat and throwing up everything that I can then getting up and being carefully brushing my teeth, feeling like I can scrub away al of the filthiness inside of me, along with the filth off of my teeth.

            “Get off of me! Get off of me!” I’m screaming and thrashing against the sheets, a shadow hanging poised over me like a wave about to come crashing down. There are hands holding me down- one wrapped around my upper arm, one curled around the delicate structure of my neck- and I claw and scratch at them, trying to push this shadow away from me. I’m screaming and clawing, but it won’t move. I hit it, again and again and again, and feel the dull give of flesh which only makes me panic more.

            “Lil, baby. Lilith! Lil. Baby girl! Calm down, it’s me, baby!” It’s Lee’s voice but it’s coming out of my nightmare’s mouth. The monster- he’s swallowed my Lee, he’s taken my baby, just like he took everything else from me. I’m back in my nightmares, curled up on a mattress with the door locked, the nightlight on, praying that tonight maybe I can sleep through the night. There’s a bangbangbang on the door, the knob rattles, I curl up, kneestochest no it’s locked it’s locked it’s locked. The door bangs open, crashing against the wall like in The Shinning here’sjohnny! and I hope that maybe he’ll stop, maybe this time the nightmare will just think that I’m asleep and he’ll leave me alone.

            I’m screaming and clawing but I can still feel hands shaking me trying to wrench my head off of my neck, it feels like. I open my eyes and it’s not my nightmare’s face I see, but Lee’s twisted in confusion, not sure of what he’s supposed to do. He shakes me, a little more gently now, and gets off from where he was straddling me to hold me down. The sheets under me are soaked through, and I can feel the sweat on my forehead beading up and rolling down my face. “What?”

            “Baby, you had a nightmare. You were screaming. I was trying to wake you up ‘cause you really sounded like you were in pain. I thought that you were going to hurt yourself.” He rolls over and flicks on my bedside lamp and I can see the thin lines of blood on the sheets. “You were clawing yourself when I woke up.” He motions down and I see the lines, all over my body from my thighs all the way up my arms. “Are you ok, baby girl? Do you wanna talk about it?”

            I shake my head, pulling him back down and burying my face in his chest. He wraps his arms around me, leaving the light on and kissing my forehead softly, leaning his head onto my shoulder. “It’s ok, baby. It’s ok. I’m here. I’m not gonna let anything happen to you.” He whispers, rubbing my back.

            The snow is crunching under my (ok, Mom’s, but it’s not like she’s going to notice that I borrowed them!) boots, the wind whipping under the hood of my hoodie pulled up over my head.  My book bag is pulled close against my back in the vain attempt to keep that part of my body, at least, warm. P.S.- it’s not working. The school is a little bit warmer, thankfully, but still cold to me, bundled up, my body barely visible under a tank top, thermal shirt, sweatshirt, and hoodie that Mom found in the Men’s department at Wal-Mart when I first got back from treatment and was always cold. Pulling it closer around me, I looked around the buzzing halls for Jessica, one of the only friends that I seemed to still have at this school. I used to be popular, I think as I rub my hands together, trying to get them warm enough to open my locker and store my books, just as the headcheerleader sauntered by, with at least half of the male population of the school attached to her hip. Well, maybe not that popular, but I had more than two friends!

            At one time, I ran with three or four different cliques in middle and high school: the artists (I painted and wrote- mostly horrible, teenangst filled poetry, but some good essays and short stories, too) , the punks (I had a total weakness for Social Distortion, the Misfits, and the Dickies. My biggest crush from the time I was in diapers was Sid Vicious, and my first words were “Mike Ness”), the band nerds (I played the flute. Save the phallic jokes- I’ve heard them all), and my own little clique of all the ana-mia girls that sat at lunch, not eating, flipping through fashion magazines and feeding off of each other’s growing weakness. But, when I left for treatment, many of the ana-mia girls either “disappeared” or were put into the hospital; the punks were scared off by how small and scary I looked when I came back, and by how withdrawn I was (irony, right? These are the kids that sport Mohawks so tall that they have to duck when they go through doors and have piercings in every conceivable, and many not so much, spots); the band nerds blew me off when I dropped out and started avoiding them, and when I quit writing or even caring about what they wrote, the artists blew me off, too. So I was left with Jessica, one of the crossovers like me that still ran with the punks and the artists, and Lee, who just thought that he could, but who would change his clique as often as he changed his socks if he were allowed to by the strict rules of high school.

            I could hear Jess’s combat boots clomping down the hall before I saw her. Now, for those of you who haven’t been in high school in the last forty or fifty years, or for those who haven’t been through at all yet, here’s a lesson for y’all: in high school, no one is a pure breed. And, no, that’s not a racial remark. It just means that in high school, no matter how much one tries, they are not purely fit into one clique. Sometimes the band nerds are jocks, too; the punks secretly jam out to Taylor Swift; the cheerleaders have huge  crushes on the punks or the metalheads; the jocks secretly are gay; the gays…well, the gays really can be anything, it just depends on if they’re flaming or not. But, the funny thing about this is that you feel that everyone can tell your dirty little secret, like it’s tattooed on your forehead with a marker that only you can’t see, so you feel that you have to overcompensate by being a total stereotype of the clique that you’re in.  Jess gets by with the black leather jacket, the Army combat boots, the three foot Mohawk dyed bright pink, the piercings (eyebrow, snake bites on her lip, six in each ear, a bar in her tongue, her bellybutton, and a certain place below the belt that I honestly didn’t wish I knew was pierced.) and the foul mouth and cynicism directed at anyone that looked funny at her. You could always hear her coming all the way down the hall, between the clomping of the boots, the jingle of the piercings, and the loud, nasty comments she shot at anyone and everyone in her way.

            “Holy shit, Lil, did you eat a lot? You’re looking bigger! Or did Lee finally knock you up?”

            “Well, not that I know of. Guess I’m just dressed like a bag lady.”

            “Well, looks better than that sack of bones that you usually look like!” Ah, Jess, brash as ever.

            “Thanks, Jess, I’m sure that Lee will really appreciate that. Where is he by the way? He didn’t show up to walk me to school this morning….” I trail off, unzipping my jacket and shoving it into my locker, pulling out a pair of Converse I wore at school and unlacing my boots.

            “You two are going to send relationships back to the fifties, Lil.”

            I look up, suspicious. She never made comments like this, dancing around the subject. Jess’s motto of life was “let’s be as blunt as we can and get the fuck on with life”.

            “Jess…” I start, giving her the look that I referred to as my Death Glare.

            “What? You gotta shit or somethin’?” I tilt my head and give her a withering glare, or some facsimile of one. “Ok, ok. Well, I heard Maria talking this morning….” She looks upset, and I step back, shocked. Never in the years that I have known here has she looked upset. Pissed, yes, many times, but never upset. She puts her hand on my shoulder, awkwardly petting me until I turn and glare at her.

            “I’m not a fucking dog, Jess, don’t pet me!”

            She pulls her hand away like it’s a hot oven, a look of shock painted on her face. “Hey, don’t bite the messenger.”

            I throw my boots into my locker, the metal on the tips of the shoelaces hitting against the back and a dull thud resounding through the halls. “Who is it?”

            “Bobbi…” she replies, looking even more upset at delivering this news.

            Bobbi Marzon, the dumb slut in my English class, sits in the front row, her plaid skirt a la Britney Spears hiked up practically around her hips, chewing on the eraser of her pencil and staring blankly at the board, surrounded by drooling jocks trying to hide their hard-ons with their open books. I glare at her as I stalk into the room, taking my usual place tucked into a back corner where I could alternate glaring at her and paying attention as Ms. Himmelshil gabbed on and on about some poet called The Emperor of Ice Cream that no one understood.

            I don’t get what he sees in her!

          Eh, she’s a slut. He just wants to bone her. You know he’s crazy about you.

          If he’s so crazy about me, why is he worried about boning her?

          He’s a boy. You know boys think with that head….besides, you two haven’t….

          Jess! Well…not since I got back from treatment…..He’s been scared to. Have you seen me naked lately?

          Not in the vicinity outside of my mind, no babe. Ha-ha. Sorry. But you can’t look that scary!

            I shrug, she doesn’t understand; no one does. When I look in the mirror, it’s Miranda that’s saying I’m fat and ugly. But underneath her, I still have that one remaining shred of me, of who I was before all of this, that is jumping up and down, throwing a spotlight on the harsh reality of the sharp angles of my body.  My hipbones protrude; the fragile tibia and fibula of my legs are in sharp relief against the skin. My rib cage is outlined under the tight leather of my skin, my collarbones sharp as the wings of a broken bird. My back, too, the shoulderblades are sharp and yet fragile, like the wings of an angel. I’ve gained almost ten pounds since I’ve been back from treatment, and yet it still scares me to have Lee look at me naked.  The first night that I was back from treatment pops into mind and suddenly, I’m not staring at Bobbi anymore, I’m staring into my own memories.

            “I don’t want to do anything, Lee. I told you!”

            “Not even go get a milkshake? Remember, you used to love the chocolate from McDonald’s…” he trails off, and the blanket of Holy Shit This is Awkward descends on the room yet again.

            “No…I don’t want to. I’m not hungry.” I know that I’m being a bitch, but I’ve been cramped up in that stupid treatment center for the last two months, and just when I’m getting settled there and don’t have to sleep with a nightlight on, I get sent back home to my fucked-up life where Mom tiptoes around me and the man that I don’t call my father anymore tries to call me to see how I am (not like he really cares, but it’s all about the presentation).  Now there’s a list of rules and regulations taped up on the pantry door, where, until recently, my food list stayed. All of my “diet” and “health” foods have been thrown out, replaced with high-fat, high-sugar premade fulloffatmmmmgood shit. Now there are new protocols, new rules, new schedules and it’s really fucking me up.

            The door opens and slams, and the familiar cominghome noises start: Mom stepping out of her heels, sighing, hanging up her purse and coat, tucking her keys into her coat pocket, smoothing her hair and scratching her left ear exactly three times. Then there’s the soft padding of stockinged-feet padding down the tile hallway to where Lee and I are sitting on the couch.

            “Hey, there, Lee. Good to see you here, honey, we missed you hanging around.” Lee raises an arm in salute, keeping on hand firmly on my knee and smiling at me.  He’s been around here for so long that Mom has accepted him as family; therefore he no longer is obligated to jump up and go through all of the niceties that newer boyfriends would have to. Not like I would have any new boyfriends, I think, none of them can appreciate true beauty. I keep my eyes on the TV screen, knowing the Lee, protective as ever since he wasn’t allowed to see me for about two months, will answer all of my mother’s questions. “So,” I can almost recite what she’s doing as she does it. She unbuttons her suit jacket and throws it onto the chair where she’ll pick it up from when she goes to her room in exactly 4.3 minutes. “What did y’all do today?” the question is so normal it bothers me. We shouldn’t be having nice, normal conversation; we should be walking around in a perpetual state of awkwardness. What’s the point of acting like everything is nice and normal when it’s not? What’s the point of pretending?

            “Well, there was school, of course, and then we came back here. I’ve been trying to talk Lil into going to….” I subtly kick Lee in the shins and he glances at me, shocked. I give him a pointed glare, raising one eyebrow, knowing that Mom isn’t looking at us, she’s going through the mail for today. He shakes his head, giving me a look like I’m not going to lie to your mother! “McDonald’s for a milkshake, but I don’t think that she feels like it.”

            “Well, maybe we could all go out for pizza tonight.” Mom says, sounding too chipper and cheerful. I can tell that she’s being whatshecallsforcefulandicallpassiveagressive, trying to get me to eat without using themanwhoisnolongermyfather’s methods of sitting me down and trying to force the food down my throat. I’m mentally calculating- one slice of thin crust vegetarian pizza is 300 calories. 300 goopy, gross calories of nasty yummytasting delicious fat sliding down my throat into my stomach. Do I want it? Yes. More than I have ever wanted anything in my life. Do I deserve it? No. No more than I deserve anything that I manage to get.

            “I guess so…” I say, trailing off and shaking my bangs in front of my face, running my fingers through them.

            “That sounds great, ma’am.” Lee pipes up. I glare at him from under my bangs, but he just shrugs, well, what do you expect me to do?

            “Lil, come on, baby. It’s time to weigh you. Then maybe we can both change and we’ll go. Be thinking about where you’d wanna go, Lee! ” She calls to him, throwing the mail into the recycling bin and gathering up her jacket and heels, walking into her bedroom.

            “Ok…just, let me go put on my bathrobe, ok Mom?”

            “Lil…” she sounds weary, and I feel bad trying to pull this with her, but if she saw me without my bathrobe, standing there in my underwear, she would throw Lee out and have me on the next bus back to treatment- after, of course, she’d spent all night shoving pizza, popcorn, and ice cream into my face. Of course, Lee being here is to my advantage, without him here she would have me strip down in a second, but with him here (since, after all, he is a guest) she’s less likely to throw a fit.  “Fine. But hurry, ok, honey? Maybe you can bring your clothes and just change down here after we weigh you…that’d be a lot faster. Besides, then you can borrow my makeup.” She winks at me, like this is some huge prize for Being a Good Girl, that I get to play dressup in mommy’s old clothes that hang on my underdeveloped, malnourished body, her heels that make my calves hurt, her makeup that hides the dark circles under my eyes and my skin that’s gone an odd waxy color and that looks orange under the lights. There is no makeup that can hide how ugly I’ve become; none that can make me look like my old self. It’s not like Maybelline makes anorexic makeup “candle wax yellow” they could call it, or “ash grey” for the darker skinned girls.

            I nod, hurrying up the stairs and grabbing a tank top and jeans out of my closet then, after a few seconds of hesitation, adding a t-shirt and one of Lee’s old hoodies to the pile, throwing my Converse on top, and pulling my robe over my arms, wrapping the belt loosely around my waist. I grab my pile, holding my robe closed, and rush into the bathroom, running the tap until the water runs cold over my wrist, pulling my glass out from under the sink and filling it to the top, drinking, filling again, and drinking again. I can feel the water sloshing in my stomach as I struggle down the stairs with my clothes, trying to hold my robe closed, not letting Lee see me.

            I walk into Mom’s room, heading straight for the scales that she kept in the bathroom, right beside her shower (which used to be good, I could wait until she left for work and then hop in the shower, steaming up the bathroom and sweating out at least five pounds of pure water weight, and then hopping out and jumping right onto the scales.) But now I have to think about how I’m going to make this work.

            Mom is leaning in to the mirror, running her fingers through her hair when I slide in behind her.  “Ok, honey, you know what to do.” She holds out her hand and I hand her the green notebook, the thing that I hate more than anything else in this world, stepping onto the scales. “72.4” she says, sounding tired, exhausted as she reads off the numbers that are staring at us, sounding disappointed. So first I’m too fat, and then I’m too thin? There is just no pleasing this woman!

            “I’m sorry, Momma.” I sound pitiful, stare at the floor, make my eyes bigger, and try to make them fill with tears. For a few seconds, I let Miranda have full reign- one foolproof way to make sure that I can really cry.  “I’ve really been trying, I really have!”

            Mom sighs, pulling me in to hug me and I feel real tears fill my eyes. I don’t deserve this. I open my eyes, breathing in her scent, the one that reminds me of the happy times that we had when I was little, before the nightmarethatican’ttellaboutbecauseifidoi’mabadperson, and notice grey hairs peaking out from the black hair that I inherited, before I decided to dye it. Momma’s getting old. This thought is strange to me, somehow I always saw my momma as eternal, the type that would never die because she was just too damn stubborn to. The nightmare could die a million times and I would never feel any hurt or cry any tears over it, but if Momma died, well I couldn’t even think about it. “I know you have, baby. We’ll get through this and you’ll gain the weight back.” She pulls back, smiling, and nods to the pile of clothes on the counter. I notice the lipstick is bleeding in the corners of her mouth, making her bare a strange resemblance to It in that book that I read in treatment- the one that I couldn’t even finish because of the creepy father that just brought back too many memories for me- and I smile, turning so that I don’t have to focus on that or on the hurt and pain in her eyes. “I’ll be dressed in a few minutes, Momma.”

            Pulling off the robe, I turn around- I don’t want to look at myself right now. 72 is good, it’s better than 100, better than the fat, bloated piggy that I was when I was halfway through treatment. But it’s not as good as 50: fifty is the number of almost-perfection, the number where 0 is so close that you can almost taste it. After fifty it will be an absolute cake walk. After fifty, I will almost be absolute perfection. The cups of my bra are sagging, Victoria’s Secret makes no bras for boobs that are virtually nonexistent, the sides of my panties flopping against my hipbones, only held in place by the bones that are jutting out of my skin, sagging against the wasteland of my lower-belly, against the long valleys of my thighs. I run my fingers over my ribs, playing the piano across my breastbone, into the hollow drum of my stomach. Mom knocks on the door and I jump about thirty feet in the air, the entire future played out in my head, but she doesn’t open the door, thankgod. “You ‘bout ready, baby?”

            “Yeah, Momma, just one second!” I call back, shakily, pulling my tanktop over my head.

ch.6

11:46. the lights on the clock glow in the dark of my bedroom when I roll over, not able to sneak, being too excited. For the last three years, I have done everything in my power to keep away from all of the “extracurricular activities” that my peers were busy doing. While they were out parked in their boyfriend’s cars, I was sitting in the floor of my room reading next week’s assignment. While they were thinking about how they could sneak out to see that hot new Ashton Kutcher movie at midnight, I was thinking about if I could write my paper on Keats instead of Hemmingway this year. When everyone else was screaming the chants along with the cheerleaders at the pep rally, I was tucked into a corner of the library banging my head against the wall trying to figure out Geometry proofs. But tonight, the week before my last week as a senior, I was going to finally be one of Those Kids.

            It was tradition at the school for the seniors to have a prank. Every year, the pranks became more and more elaborate, the years before locked in perpetual sibling rivalry for the attention of the faculty. The ultimate goal, I suppose, was to be threatened with a withheld diploma. Supposedly, this was better than any other recognition during high school. Oh, you were the captain of the football team? Ok, well, that’s good, I guess. You were published in a nationwide newsletter of high school writers? Oh, great. You got threatened with a withheld diploma because of a high school prank?! Dude!! That’s freaking awesome!

            How I got sucked into this, I’m not quite sure. There was a meeting after third period, and at first it was just because Lee dragged me to the meeting, promising that it would get me out of ten or twenty minutes of the most boring class on the planet- PreCalculus. So, perched on a rat-gnawed lab stool in the back of the Biology classroom, batting away Lee’s hands from giving me a gyno exam under the table, I listen as the class president outlines the ideas for the senior prank, and we all vote. Then, I watch in horror as I raise my hand to volunteer to help.

            Quietly, I slip out of bed and pull on the outfit that I’ve had laid out on my bed since five o’clock last night. Black t-shirt, black jeans, black hoodie and hat. Tiptoeing down the hall, I slide the door open and smile, looking out to see Lee leaning on the hood of his Jeep, grinning at me, doubled over against the cold. We slip into the car and drive to the school, where most of the senior class has congregated outside of the school, looking just as nervous as I’m feeling. Looking around in the half-light from the lights on in the front of the school, we all look as if we’re five years old, playing dressup in our older sibling’s clothes, fear at being found out and excitement painted on our faces at the same time. Silently, the president pulls a key out of her jacket pocket, the silver glinting in the moonlight, and smiles. The vice-president moves among the group, dividing us up into the groups that would take over the different parts of the prank. Even though I’m holding on to Lee’s arm for dear life, he taps me gently on the shoulder. “Lil, can you help with the tree? It’s not heavy, I swear, but there’s not many that would take that.” I look up, horrified, doeeyes pleasepleaseplease don’t separate us. But he looks at me, expecting me to comply. Come on, Lil, get it together, you can live for a half hour without your boyfriend attached to your hip. But I’m not so sure anymore, stuck in front of the school, vulnerable with his hoodie wrapped around my once-again ever-shrinking waist.

            Jeffery is the goody goody of the school. The All-American Boy: basketball player, track runner, sophomore and Jr. Year class president, SGA class president, the Best and the Brightest of the School. I get paired up with him and Joshua, one of The Bad Boys who I sat next to in our Anatomy class last year. I smile at him. He laughed at the word “penis”.

            Breathe fogs up the air in front of me, making it opaque in front of me. I lean my head back and breathe into the air, making the clouds puff up between me and the stars glittering like diamonds above us. Jeffery and Joshua stand in front of me, smiles pasted on their faces, looking at me curiously, not quite sure how to react to this strange girlwoman in front of them that they’ve never had much contact with and ending up looking a bit uncomfortable at the idea. “C’mon, Lil. We got three or four trees that we gotta get outta here or else the rest of the class is gonna have our heads. So here’s the plan…” they both crouch down on either side of the tree, grasping it by its trunk and the bottom branches, and braces their feet. “It’s not that heavy so with the three of us it should be fine. We’ll make short work of this and you can go find your boyfriend.” They grin, trying to make me feel better about myself, trying to make me think that everything would be ok, little did they know.

            “On three, y’all.” Jeffery calls to the two of us. “One…two….three.” We all lift, rising from crouchingonourkneestakeakneesomeone’shurt position, and I immediately feel the lightness in my chest, that feeling like someone has just taken a scalpel to my chest, cutting me open like the frogs that we dissected three months ago, letting all of the cold air into my insides, freezing my heart, my lungs, the blood pumping through my veins, all in one fell swoop.  I feel my legs give out from under me, and roll back onto my butt to try not to break anything when I go down, curling up into myself. I lay on the ground, feeling it pressing up to meet me, inviting me to come curl up under it and be warm, to leave everyone who’s rushing to me, to leave Lee who’s dropped the duct tape and let go of the ladder that he was holding as soon as he heard me hit the ground and started sprinting so that he could be the first one to get to me. To leave, to curl up and be warm, to curl up and just let everything drift back into place, like the Red Sea after the Hebrews walked through it, the gravitational pull of the earth pulling the hole that I would leave closed.

            The grass is wet beneath my back, soaking into my t-shirt and making the cut from where I fell the other day sting. My hair is sticking everywhere, my cheeks, my back, my neck, where ever it touches, it sticks. The earphones are blaring in my ears, blocking out everything else in my mind, for once making Miranda shut up and leave me alone. I’m staring at the stars, glimmering in the sky like the dioramas that we made when I was little and we were learning about space. I almost suspected that if I were God, I could look down into the little box that was earth, with the flashlight set up behind the black piece of satin that had holes punched in it with a sewing needle. The kitchen window is open and Mom’s voice drifts out of it. She’s singing to the radio while she cleans up the kitchen, making believe that for once she didn’t have a fuck up of a daughter that she always had to sit and watch: sit and watch when she wakes up in the morning to make sure she showered without “accidentally” cutting her legs or under her arms in the shower; watching as she weighed herself to make sure that she wasn’t cheating or lying about how much weight she had gained; watching as she packed her bags for school and watching as she dressed to make sure that she had what she needed and that she would be warm enough going from class to class. Watching to make sure that she swallowed her vitamins and medications and that she had something in her stomach- both so that she wouldn’t get sick from the medication on an empty stomach and so that she wouldn’t pass out and get into an accident on the way to school. Watching when she came home, to make sure that she was ok and hadn’t had a bad day; watching the calendar to know when the time was to take her to see her therapist, her nutritionist , her counselor for school. Watching to make sure that she ate when she got home and that she ate at dinner. Watching to make sure that she didn’t break something from a small fall on the ice outside of the door, or the puddle that most people would just dust themselves  off from. Watching to make sure that the doctors ran the right test to make sure that The Incident wouldn’t happen again, that she would be able to watch her baby grow up and move off and get married and have babies. Constantly watching, it’s no wonder that she needed a break- even if it was just a twenty minute break while she washed the dishes, peering out of the window every so often to make sure that her baby was still ok, laying in the grass in the front yard, staring at the sky like an infant with a pair of diamond earrings.

            The music is so loud in my ears that I don’t hear Lee come up, I see his shadow fall across my stomach, my chest, my neck, engulfing me like it feels when we’re in my bed and he’s forgetting everything, forgetting to be careful and letting himself go like he did before I had The Incident. He smiles down at me, his teeth glittering in the lights from the porch light, and lays down beside me, plucking my earphone out of one ear and putting it into his. He runs his hand down my arm and pulls my hand into his paw of a hand that can engulf my entire hand without even trying. I shiver, like I always do when someone’s interrupted me- it’s like my mind automatically drifts off when I’m alone, going over the philosophical things that all of the girls told me they thought of right before they tried to check out, their minds “drifting” or “going AWOL” for a little bit- and I have to snap back from wherever my mind has been. It’s a very discombobulating experience and I don’t like it. Not one bit.

            “Whatcha thinking  about, Lil?” he asks, “You looked like you were a million miles away from me.”

            “Do you ever think about what happens after we die, Lee? I mean, do you think there’s really a heaven or a hell and that someone judges us to see which we go to?”

            “I don’ know, Lilla. I think that I got fed too much Southern Baptist fire and brimstone shit to believe in anything now. I’m the only man in my family that hasn’t considered a vocation in the church.” He’s quite for a bit. “I don’t think that anyone’s really evil, though. I mean, of course, there’s some exceptions- Hitler and Mussolini- you know people like that….”

            I shiver a bit, “My father.” I whisper.

            Lee nods, “Yeah, people like that. The people that you read about or hear about that you think ‘how is that one person so evil? What happened to make them that way?’ So, yeah, I guess in one way there is a place that those people go, maybe it’s to heal, maybe it’s to pay off a debt that some deity believes they owe for the evil that they inflicted when they were here on earth. But the regular people that are “evil”…” he makes the air quotes, “No, I don’t think that they would go to the same place.”

            “Dante thought that there were seven levels of hell.”

            “Now, when the hell did you read Dante?”

            I shrug, “I had a lotta time when I was in recovery. I read Dante ‘cause Ms. Strauss said that I’d find them mentally stimulating.”

            He laughs, wrapping one arm around my waist, “You read so much, baby girl, and you should be a lit critic.”

            I laugh, “Yeah, right. If I ever make up my mind I’ll probably stay away from that- too much pressure. You know me, I want to make everybody happy, and that job requirement calls for people that really don’t give a fuck what others think about them and what they say.” I sigh, “But, really, I’ve gone in circles about that and couldn’t ever come up with an answer.”

            “Well, we know that theologian or priest is out for you then.”

            “Never know, if Sinead O’Conner can do it, I think that I could too.”

ch.5

Today, sadly, it was Gym. Coach Torres couldn’t help that he had muscular calves, sculpted from years of running the miles back on his high school track team. He couldn’t help that he was also muscular from years of being a Gym teacher, having to help girls climb the rope or get off of the rings, from years of running the boys through the rules of football and soccer, and hockey. He couldn’t even help that he wore his shorts just a hair too short, or that he often didn’t wear his shirt because the janitors had no idea how to turn the heat off in the Gym (or the rest of the school for that matter). It really wasn’t even his fault that he would often come up behind you and give you a pat on the back for doing a good job, and was known to give out hugs to the kids that were going through a hard time, like Caroline McGee, whose mom died in a car accident last year. When she came back from being called to the office and went to the locker room to get her things together, he waited until she came out, gesturing for her to come up on the stage and hugging her, letting her fall into his embrace in front of the entire grade. Even this didn’t feel bad or strange to me; he was an older man, already with a full head of silver hair, and was just raised in a different time, a time when it was ok to try to comfort a student that was hurting, one that reminded you of your own children, a time when the only thing that was considered comforting was the physical touch of another human being that could empathize with what you were going through.

            I held together all through Gym, for whatever strange reason, even after Coach came out in shorts that were shorter than usual. Even after he came up behind me and patted me on the back, murmuring a “good job, Lill” to me. I held through after two of the Groping Couples that I had the misfortune of sharing a locker block with, rolled over, slamming my locker shut, and nearly catching my hand in it in the process, just because he had his hand up her shirt and they were two baby steps away from having sex on the floor. I held it together on the way home, when Lee’s hand crept from my knee up my thigh incrementally until he was one step away from giving me a Pap smear in the front seat of his truck. I held it through when I was busily digging in my purse for my keys and heard leaves crunching behind me- even if I did jump thirty feet into the air and yelp as if someone had held my hands over a bonfire, I still held it in. It was just when I walked into the house- shutting and locking the door behind me, and going around to check that all of the doors and windows were locked, as was my custom- and I noticed the blinking red light on the answering machine that I began to lose it. That blinking red eye, the one that never, in my entire life brought good news.

            I debated just leaving it, acting like I had never seen it, and letting Mom deal with it. But, no, I was a big girl now; it had been over two years since I had permanently moved into Mom’s house, not shuttling back and forth between Mom and Him every few weeks. I could handle it, this was just one phone call, and it was just one message. And I didn’t even know if it was from Him. It could very well just be a telemarketer that was trying to offer Mom some new kind of student loan that she didn’t want or need. But by the boulder that had dropped into my stomach when I saw the light, the feeling that I had since Gym class, of being too big for my skin, of feeling like I was trapped in some weird gore film where, at any moment, my organs were just going to explode from my body because they had mysteriously just gotten too big and stretched my skin to the point of explosion, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew who it was. And I knew exactly what He would say. I grabbed my iPod off of the kitchen table where I had thrown it with my purse and books when I walked in, and plugged the little white buds into my ears, turning it up all the way before I would turn on the answering machine. The whine of his voice cut through the music so I left the room, making three laps around the house, then going up the stairs and making another two before I came back, seeing the red button off and hit the button. Message deleted, the automated voice informs me. Thank God, I think.

            In my closet, in the veryvery back, there is a small crawl space. At one point, it must have been where a family of mice or maybe even bunnies (in my imagination, it was always bunnies. We had a class pet that was a baby mouse when I was in second grade, and a class pet that was a family of bunnies when I was in third. I always liked the bunnies best and would often finish my tests early so that I could just go and sit in the Reading Corner with one of the bunnies snuggled up to my ear, feeling the soft down tickle inside, making me shiver with excitement and a happiness that I couldn’t quite put a name to but that I later realized was a feeling of safety and security that was brought every time I could feel another heartbeat next to mine. The same feeling that I got when Lee lay in my lap or held me in bed) that had burrowed through the outside wall into the closet, maybe for the winter. But by the time that I had moved in full-time, any and all animals, rodent or otherwise, had vacated, leaving me a small hole that I could fit my entire arm into, from wrist to shoulder blade (and could have fit in more, if my damn head didn’t get in the way). At first, this was where I hid my Supplies: the laxatives that I took regularly (Health class be damned), the penknife that had been my great-uncles-the one that he took to Korea with him and used to rip open packages when he got home- wrapped in one of Grandpa’s silk handkerchiefs, a box of double sided razors, and a pack of tissue. Later, after Miranda had a name, and grew in her power, I would write things down- the dark secrets that no one would ever know about me, because they were just too painful to tell people about, even things that she told me to write, often getting up in the middle of the night just to root around in the dark for a scratch piece of paper and a pen and scratch out what she’s telling me. I shoved all of my wrappers into a shoebox, filling it with them thrown over old letters from my therapy friends like tissue paper over a present on my birthday.

            I flip the pages that have already gotten brittle, crackling under my fingers like the fried chicken that Mom is making downstairs,  staring at the beautiful women with their huge eyes, puffy lips, thin arms and legs, ribs that you can make out through the wispy silk of their dresses. My scrapbook, the thing that finally convinced Mom that I needed to get help- along with the nightmares, of course- but that, somehow, I managed to dig out of the trash every time she found it and threw it away. Miranda hisses in my ear, but I ignore her, running my fingers over the beautiful faces, the eyes that looked as dead as the bodies should be. I run my hands over the waists that a man could wrap his whole hand around, the arms that resemble the brittle sticks that fell from the trees when the wind came after a hurricane, the legs that looked like the skeletons that were hanging up in the locker down at the school in the A and P classroom. I run my hands over these women as I read the quotes that I wrote in my child-like handwriting, the bubble letters with the hearts dotting the “I”s. this was what I wanted, this was what I aspired to be: beautiful…and dead.

ch.4

The world is made up of shades of grey. Some days all that you can see are colors that are as grey as a concrete sidewalk on a rainy December day. Others there are only one or two things that really stand out: maybe it’s the copper color of a woman’s hair that catches the sun as she gets out of her car; the light blue of the summer sky in Alabama; the brilliant purple of someone’s umbrella. But that is only on the good days: on the bad days everything is grey: the hair, the sky, and the umbrellas. Sometimes, like when I’m with Lee and things start to go downhill, I can almost feel it happening. It’s almost like a door inside of me slams shut, a steel door with bars on it, a steel door that has a million and one locks on it. The door hides all of my emotions, everything that I’m feeling, and everything except Miranda, the one who can’t be locked away. It makes me curl in on myself, shutting the rest of the world out, and scares those that can see it. I can see it in Lee’s eyes as he sits down beside me on the bed, gently taking the book I was reading out of my hands and throws it on the floor. He kisses me, gently, and I push him away. “Baby girl.” He groans into my neck, the hollow between the shoulder socket and the chest bone, the tendon that is connected to that one place on the back of my neck, the one place that he would kiss as I stood at my locker back in high school, trying to hide it as he did from the prying eyes of the teachers.  I push him away more, angry at the world, not wanting anyone to touch me, wanting everyone to just leave me the hell alone. I push him away, get up, and walk to the end of the room furthest away from him, feeling the soft underbelly curl in upon itself, keeping me from getting hurt again. I can almost hear the door slam and, looking up, I can see the reverberation in Lee’s eyes as he takes a step backward.

            “What?”

            “Baby.” He stops, walks toward me, stops again, reaches out to touch my face. “Your eyes. Something in your eyes.”

            I’m sitting in the middle of my Biology lecture, the teacher going on and on and on about metabolism and good health, about the fact that you could eat anything that you want, as long as the ratio of calories consumed is less than the number of calories burned throughout the day. As if I didn’t already know this? Hell, if they wanted me to, I could stand up and teach this part of the class myself. From memory. Without notes or anything. When something becomes such a part of your life that you literally never have to think about it and do it with no intent to, then you are considered an expert. I am a master: me and the girls and the guys in the center were all the masters of what we did. The bulimics had throwing up down to a science, knowing exactly how long they could wait before they discretely excused themselves. The anorexics knew how many calories were in a particular food in the lunch line without even thinking about it. In middle school, I would pass by the girls, hearing softly, just under their breath, the murmuring that seemed to be our worry stones. Thirty three. Fourty five. I can go twenty minutes, but then I have to go to the bathroom. I think that Mr Rodriquez is starting to wonder about me, could I wait till my next class to go?

            The funerals started about two years into high school: like the Agent Orange that we had studied in our History classes, this was a carcinogenic that killed slowly. It almost always started the same way: friend requests clogging up my Facebook, clotting like blood after you have been cut so deep that it takes your cells a few minutes to even realize that they should be congregating at the cut. I’ve always thought (when I had the time to think, when Miranda would let me have four seconds in which I could manage to string together some semblance of a coherent thought) that, somehow, they knew that they were close to the end, so they tried to tie themselves to this life by the fragile strands of old friends that had managed, thus far, to elude Death, to duck around the corner with such grace and agility, to blend in with the bricks so the Death just passed them by. Somehow, they thought that this was some way to talk the angel out of taking them: But Look, I Have Friends, I Have A Life. I Can’t Die Now. And the angel would shake his head: I’m Sorry, Just Following Orders.

            At the beginning, it was just one or two; real friends that just managed to go down the same road that I did, that held my hand through it until the combination of high school and Miranda ripped our hands apart. Their profile pictures all seemed to be the same: thinthinthin girls with thinning hair, either bundled up in sweatshirts and sweatpants, or swimming in their size zero prom dresses, always hiding behind their boyfriends, their oversized clothes, belts that looped around their waist and had to have new holes cut into them with a pocketknife to fit, cover-ups on the hottest day at the beach. One or two had pictures up of them at the beach, laying on the laps of their boyfriends, sitting on a brick wall outside of a sorority, wine cooler (because, of course, beer was too fattening), and I was amazed at how interchangeable they all were.

            “Who’s that, Babygirl?” Lee slipped up behind me, wrapping an arm around my waist. I turn, staring into his blue eyes glowing in the bright green of the computer screen’s reflection. He raises an eyebrow at the picture and I grimace, knowing exactly what he’s thinking: that’s what she looked like When She Came Back. The skeletal face, the knees that were already starting to protrude from the  skin, looking like rocks had been shoved up between the skin and muscle, the hair that was so thin that it was falling out in clumps every time that they brushed their  hair, or even ran their  fingers through it. The clothes that hung off of the body as if they were nothing but a hanger.

            “I honestly don’t know.” I replied. “They all look the same to me.”

           

At first, I think that I am losing my mind: when I look into the mirror, it’s not my face that is staring back, its Miranda’s.  shaking my head and trying to clear it, I look again, and the same evil face stares back at me: eyes that look like two pieces of granite: cold, hard, unforgiving; hair that hangs like a cloud around that pale, beautiful face; a smile that grates on me like ice hitting that one sensitive tooth in the back of your mouth, making you jump. My head starts to pound. My throat dries up. Ugly. She sneers. Fat and ugly. No one wants you. No one ever has, and no one ever will. Even your own father thinks that you’re a mistake. He didn’t want you; he was perfectly happy before you came along and fucked everything up. Your own boyfriend doesn’t want you. Or at least he won’t after he sees how fat you’re getting. Look at that stomach! She crows, poking me in the belly. It’s getting HUGE!! Your thighs are enormous, too. She adds, reaching down and pinching the skin between her pointer finger and thumb, making it dimple between them. You’d better watch that, Lillie, or Lee is just going to be another memory and the only thing that you’ll be left with is me.

The first time wasn’t soon after Lee and I got together. I had just moved in with Mom and spent most of my afternoons curled up in the La-Z-Boy that she had sitting in the living room, staring at the TV from under the down quilt that my great-grandmother had patched together for her when she was thirteen. All it took was one phone call. Just one day. That ripped it all apart.

            “Is this…” the voice stops, there’s the crumplecrumplecrumple of paper being unfolded, the slight stop and hesitation of someone trying to pronounce a name, trying to see if they could possibly not fuck this up. “Lillith?”

            “Lil. Please. And this is?”

            “I’m Mrs. Mornes. Jessica’s mom. Do you remember Jessica?”

            That’s a loaded question if I’ve ever heard one: do I remember one of the people that I met when I was fucked up,  almost beyond the point of being saved? And, on the flip side, do I remember one of the first people that understood? One of the first people that helped me through what was then a constant mindfuck?

            “Yes, Mrs. Mornes. I remember Jessica well.” Thin girl that walked in on the first day of therapy acting like she owned the place and we were all just here because she wanted others to hang out with. A tough fuck-you-up-the-ass smile, hair pushed back from her face, so that you could be sure to catch the full range of her emotions. Her eyes could tell you exactly what she thought of you- even when her mouth didn’t.  She always wore fishnets on her arms, with a hole cut out so she could slip her thumb through it- even the smallest pair of fishnets in the store hung off of her arm like extra skin on my grandma’s arms. Her cheekbones protruded so much from her skin that they looked like they would pop out when she smiled, and on the day that we were supposed to bring something with us to therapy that made us feel safe, she showed up in a baby doll dress with an old, ragged purple teddy bear clutched to her chest. She never put that teddy bear down for the rest of the time that I was in there with her. It looked strange, this emaciated young girl who had tattoos and track marks from shoulder to wrist and cuts from hipbone to ankle, eyes lined with kohl, dressed in fishnet tights on her arms and a baby doll dress with pigtails in her hair, the one streak of bleach blonde hanging in front of her face. It was like Courtney and Kurt’s love child with Barney.  When the rest of us were eating, she was pushing the food around her plate- the doctors were constantly threatening her with the psych ward, but she told us that they wouldn’t put her in there because her mother would have a fit. Apparently, she was some big hot-shot in the town that she was from, and if the word got out that her daughter was in the psych ward it would be hell for the next election for whatever that came up. As a result, the doctors wouldn’t let her go when the rest of us got out, she wasn’t up to her target weight to go back home. After I got out and came back home, I would get letters from her every once in awhile, long rambling letters on the blank printer paper that the nurses would dole out in one or two sheets with a dull pencil that faded after a few weeks. When the letters stopped coming, a mutual friend told me that she’d finally been sent to the psych ward because the doctors just couldn’t take care of her anymore, and I put them into the shoebox that I kept in my closet.

            I’m sitting in the closet, pushed back into the corner like a pair of forgotten boots that are two sizes too small, curled with my knees to my chest. My phone is in front of me, so that no one will come looking and find My Place, the one place that I feel safe. I have to make sure that no one finds this place, as they have found my others before this, so that this place can be sacred, undefiled, so that this is my sanctuary, the one place left in this house, left in my life that is safe. The feelings come more and more now, creeping up on me, set off by a piece of mail on the front table in the hall, by the ring of my cell phone, the smell of a passing boy’s cologne at the school, even the sight of two people wrapped like ivy around each other in the hallways, making me run into the bathroom, lock myself in a stall and sit with my head between my knees, trying to breathe and erase the sight of two bright blue eyes from my mind.

ch.3

I wasn’t always The Weird Girl. Ok…I’m lying…I was. I was that chick in middle school that sat in the corner reading Jack Kerouac and waxed poetic about Andy Warhol. I was the one who, when I got a car, had everything from The Beatles to Eminem to Leona Lewis lying in the floorboard, and would pop them in almost at random. I was the one, whose hair color changed as often as most men changed their socks; the one who was always quiet, until I began talking about something and made everyone sit up and listen. I moaned and complained about The Preppie Girls, with their ponytails and bubblegum, trying to be all cute and virginal like Britney Spears (Hello, girls, that was the nineties. Get with the times or go all out and get frosted tips and dress in grunge like every other wannabe did in the nineties! Besides, Britney Spears wasn’t even a virgin in the nineties.) And hung out with the Punks, the Metal Heads, the Flirts, and the Tortured Poets. I was the one cracking jokes and laughing loudly at the lunch table. The only thing is that there’s a difference between being the Weird Girl Who Still Has Her Best Friends and being the Weird Girl Who Has Nobody Except that Crazy Voice in Her Head.

            Movies lie. Almost every movie that I’ve ever seen where the main character Has A Problem (which means anything from drinking too much to having too many piercings to sneaking out of the house at night- I’m sorry, I thought that was called Being a Teenager. ) has That Scene:  The Angry Teenager, coming home from a party at three in the morning or walking into the house with a black eye from an abusive boyfriend or stumbling around the house drunk/stoned/bleeding/pregnant,  facing her Tearful Parents who ask her What Happened, What They Did Wrong. Things turn tearful between all of them and the teenager, Overwrought by the Pain That She Has Brought upon Her Family, promises that things will be better.  But, in real life, there is no such scene. What happens can spring from anything: magazines, movies (really, the fat people are always the funny, ugly, fat friends? And this is supposed to mirror real life? Whose real life is this?!), family, even an off handed comment. Mine came a little bit from all.

            When I was in fifth and sixth grade, I lived with my father. Up until the time that I moved out, he was Daddy, the man who sang to me when I was little; who made all of my birthday cakes from scratch; the one who, over Christmas and for my birthday, took me to the bookstore, handed me a hundred dollars and told me to get whatever I wanted; the one who took me out for coffee (or hot chocolate in my case) at least once a week.  But, after I started developing, our relationship went downhill fast. I was built like my mother- all hips and thighs, with little on top (and then only after I turned sixteen), and for some reason, my dad didn’t understand this. I wasn’t fat by any means; I had the tiniest waist compared to the rest of my body and usually gained weight in my hips and thighs. I was never the girl that could wear a bikini, but was the one that could wear a short skirt, since my legs were one of the most muscular places on my body.

            One day I had gone out shopping with my friends, coming home with shopping bags full of clothes. It was about two weeks until our sixth grade graduation into seventh grade, and my best friend Keisha, was taking a group of us to the beach the next day after the ceremony. All of us had spent four or five hours trying on all kinds of outrageous outfits, with her finally settling on a cute little blue and green bikini and me finding an adorable black bikini top with red boy shorts. When I excitedly pulled this out, though, I was greeted with a disgusted look.

            “It looks really cute on, Daddy, I swear. Here,” I grab the bag and walk into the bathroom but, standing under the harsh fluorescent lights with the idea of criticism instead of encouragement waiting for me, I feel nauseous. Pulling the suit over my head and stepping into it, I stare into the mirror, pinching my side, feeling the years of fries and burgers, or late-night sundaes and pieces of leftover pumpkin pie and stuffing, I feel disgusted. The fat is spilling out of the top, I had gained five pounds of pure fat just on the ride home. I feel the bile rising in my throat, the fat spreading all over my body, covering the muscle with dimples and dimples of cellulite, the muscle dissolving, screaming in agony as the fat covers it. The fat smiles up at me, taunting me, while I pinch at it, wishing that it would just go away. I haven’t eaten that much, have I? I’m not that fat, am I? Yes, it seems to cry into my face, yes you are.

            I’d heard about eating disorders, of course. The Internet is what everyone blames for being anorexic, for learning the tricks and shortcuts of the trade,  but I rarely ever used the Internet for my information. I didn’t need to. I had something that was better, more accessible. Something that no one could monitor or change: the girl’s locker room. It was the place where everything flew between the lockers: stories about who was doing what (or who) in the woods behind the gym, gossip magazines, perfume, hair clips, the hottest, the newest, the sexiest, the sluttiest, the coolest, the funniest. It was where girls stood in front of the mirrors in their padded bras and bikini panties, pinching the insides of their thighs and complaining about how much they had eaten yesterday (like, oh my god, Becky, I ate three whole French fries! I’m such a pig!) . It was where girls traded tips, diet pills, excuses, laxatives. It was a dirtier place than any hovel in the ghetto could be, because it was much more accessible, and the prices were fair: if you didn’t tell anybody where you got what you had, if you lost the weight, if you found something better, if you shared and had the tips and tricks that made everybody else look like the Victoria’s Secret catalogue models, everyone would share. Now who said that my generation didn’t know how to share?

            The locker rooms were always freezing in the winter time: the windows stayed open in the vain hopes of diffusing the smell of sweat and the overpowering reek of twenty or thirty different perfumes, body sprays, and deodorants. Add to this the fact that many of the showers only sprayed a dribble of water so cold that it was a miracle that it didn’t come out as hail. I was one of those people that felt like if you could step out of the shower without your skin looking like you have just had the top two layers of your skin scrubbed off, then it was a waste of time to take a shower in the first place. But, seeing as how the gym was always twenty degrees hotter than the rest of the school and the gym teacher (a closeted lesbian like so many are down south; during the first few months of school, while all of the girls were changing, she would walk in, blow her whistle to get our attention, and then walk around, through all of the half-naked girls standing and staring at her.) decided that this week was the week that we were all going to learn to play volleyball, I had to shower, or else sit in the very back of my next four classes of the day and constantly feel like I reeked.

            Stepping out of the shower, I slide along the sides of the lockers, trying to get back to my locker as quickly as I possibly could without having to run in to anybody along the way. I clutch my towel to my (nonexistent) breasts, hearing the echo of my wet feet slapping the tile floor. It must be later than I thought; the locker room is almost empty. There are still a few people in here, but most of them are getting finished, shoving books and magazines into overstuffed backpacks, bumming pads and cigarettes, slamming lockers and twirling the dials, complaining about teachers, wondering if they can steal a kiss or two (or four or ten) from their boyfriends before their next classes, some girls lingering in the showers to steal a kiss or two from their girlfriend before class, making sure to hide carefully to keep away from being the newest scandal. I step into my panties quickly, hook my bra behind my back, and run my fingers through my wet hair, riffling in my backpack for a rubber band to pull my long, curly hair back with. Pulling my uniform skirt up over my knees, I hear two voices, so low that I wouldn’t have been able to hear them if they weren’t sitting in the next bank of lockers. Slowly, I put my backpack back on the floor: I was invisible, yes, but if anyone knew that I was in the locker room, they wouldn’t bother to finish their conversation, instead deciding to torture me- the freak.

            “Well, I noticed that I wasn’t losing much this week.”  I knew that voice. It was the voice that would sit behind me in Biology and poke me in the neck with her pencil, laughing when I jumped out of my skin. It was the face and the lips that would wrap around the Man of My Dreams (whose name, ironically, I don’t even remember now). Her name was Brittie  and She Was Perfect. Thin and blonde. The one girl that everyone- girl, boy, teacher, principal, police officer, straight, gay, questioning, a little bit of each- wanted to do. “So I told Daddy that I needed tampons and went to the CVS and asked the pharmacist. Said I was writing a paper on how girls our age lose weight. It took a little bit of flirting, and I had to kiss him in the back of the store, you know, give him a little feel to loosen up his morals,” I could almost hear her grinning, “and tighten up his pants, of course. Then he told me about this amazing prescription that he said would literally make you drop like twenty pounds in a week. The really really gross overweight people use it. I think it’s got, like, crack in it or something.” Oh thank god, I thought, for a few minutes there Brittie was sounding a little too intelligent. “But, anyway, he said that you weren’t supposed to buy it till you were, like, thirty or something. Until you were really old and fat and ugly and nobody would care if you were fat anymore because you were so damn ugly. But I got Rosita to go buy it for me. She’d do anything for her little Nina.”

            “What’s that mean?” he crony, a wannabe named Carmi (yes, they did all have names that ended in an “I” or a “y”.  Yet another reason we all thought that they were just clones of one another- increasingly more desperate, uglier copies of one another) whined. I slowly slid around the side of the lockers, peeking through the slats in one of the empty lockers that the teachers kept open after someone used one to store their pot on day and we all got busted. Carmi was sitting on the bench that ran in-between the two rows of lockers, pouting and smiling into her compact and squeezing the zits that congregated on her chin, making it always  look like pasta sauce just as it was bubbling on the stove, even under the two inches of makeup that she always wore. Her limp, dyed blonde hair was hanging in strings over her shoulders, the roots dark brown for at least two inches down from her part to the top of her forehead, her face plastered with makeup like oil paint. She looks up at Brittie, trying to smile and ending up looking like she was having menstrual cramps.

            “I don’t know. Like, beautiful or something. I think it’s like, German or something like that.” She replies, flipping her hair over her shoulder and reaching into her purse. She waves her hand: That Isn’t Important. “Here, you could use some of these, Carmi.” She passes a silver packet across the bench to Carmi, who takes it and sticks it in her purse, a complete copy of Brittie’s (except Carmi’s is just a really good knockoff). “Don’t take more than one every day. “

            “Why do you think I need these, Brit?” She whines.

            Brittie’s voice gets a mean edge in it, a razor blade hidden in a cupcake, “I saw you in the lunchroom he other day. Sloppy Joe day? If you keep scarfing them like that, hon, then you’re not gonna fit in those jeans that I got you for Christmas. You’ve already got rolls spilling over your shorts. You don’t need any more.”

            It was called a Slim Spray, a mystical mix of Hoodia, Chromium, and green tea that was supposed to suppress your appetite and reduce your food cravings. Just one little spray or one pill a day and you were good for hours! They were set up by the cash register at the JC Penny when Mom took me shopping for new school clothes. While she was off flipping through a rack of sizenegativezero jeans, I sidled up beside the register, grabbing one and slipping it across the glasscovered countertop to the sneering face of the cashier. She glances at me, then at the innocent looking red bottle in her hands, and raised her eyebrows. I shrug, LikeSheDoesn’tWantToLoseSomeWeight? FatUglyCowJudgementalOldBitch. When we got home that night, when Mom was snoring in her room, chainsawsnoringsoloudicouldhearitthroughthewalls, I got onto the computer, typing in the bottle’s name. There were websites-literally thousands of hits on Google in one tenth of a second- full of testimonials, thousands of them, telling how wonderful and convenient this spray was. Some of these women would post pictures; some of the men did, too. It seemed ironic to me that at the time, we were talking about the concentration camps of World War Two, because this is what the pictures reminded me of.

            The lights were off in Mr. Hershner’s class, which seemed to be all the license that some of the others in the class needed. Some were talking, whisperwhispers soft as the scurry of mice feet in the corners of the school; others were passing notes, slipping them into each other’s hands with just an occasional flash of white between the intertwined fingers. Three of the boys were having a contest to see who could hit various objects in the room with spitballs and, by the end of the class, the face of the clock, the chalkboard, desks, and, oddly enough, the ceiling were all plastered with the small white and blue striped balls of paper. Some of the other boys were having a farting contest, seeing who could literally gas us out of the room. At one point, it got so bad that I thought for a second that I could see the haze floating an inch off of the ground, looking just like the fog when I went running in the mornings, before the sun had come up. But something told me that it would take more than a few hours of sun to burn this haze off.

            I was sitting by myself in the back corner of the room, huddled in Lee’s track sweatshirt, pulled down over my knees, the sleeves pulled down almost to my fingernails. Trying to concentrate in this class, the last one before lunch, was almost impossible, and some days Mr. Hershner didn’t even try, instead popping a video that only distantly related to anything that we were studying in class at the time, into the VCR player that made us all think of Jurassic Park, and propping his feet up on his desk to surf the internet for, we all suspected, gay porn sites. (The man wore way too much hair gel and had fantastic fashion sense- need I say any more?) The fact that it was one of the only classes that I didn’t have with Lee, and that it was an extended period to fit in the three lunch periods made it even harder to concentrate. But today, I was having almost no problem paying attention as the camera panned across the worst concentration camp, Auschwitz, taking in the skeletal faces and emaciated bodies of the men and women that were rescued. Brittie and Carmi were sitting in front of me, paying attention as well for once. Before the video was even on, they were pulling their small travel-sized bottles of nail polish out of their rip-off designer purses, already trading them back and forth over the small faux wood tops of the desks, wondering which shade would look best on their skin tones and moaning about the sad lack of true colors for cool skin colors with yellow and blue undertones (whatever that meant) these days (as if they knew any other days). But as soon as the announcer said something about the rescued, who were fed little by little because they were so thin, the two perked up. It was almost like seeing our English Springer when we took him out in the field and he heard a bird, his head coming up, and his ears perking to stand straight up on his head. If the two girls were dogs, their tails would be wagging. As the camera panned over the chain-link fence with the emaciated men and women lined up behind it, I swear I heard Carmi sigh. Looking up, I could see the reflection of tears in her eyes in the dim light of the TV screen, “Beautiful.” She whispered, softly, her eyes gazing at the screen like it was a long-lost lover.