If We Had Known

by Elise Juska

  III

  It was easy enough to turn 1500 calories/day into 1200, and 1200 into 1000.

  There were only 60 calories in an orange, 40 in a cup of sugar-free Jell-O. Zero in black coffee. Celery (almost negligible) was tolerable if dunked in dressing (fat-free).

  She crunched her stomach in/out whenever it wouldn’t be noticed: lying in bed, sitting in class, walking across the quad.

  Twenty-eight laps, twenty-nine. In the water her body felt weightless, secondary. Her legs were thin pale blades.

  Dad had a nice visit, her mother reported. He said you’re doing really well.

  If she noticed Alexis looking at her oddly, she might realize she was twisting her lip, or pinching the caterpillar of fat on her knee, or chewing a bite of her rice cake fifty times. One night she came home from the library to find a little vial of berry lip balm on her pillow, like a mint in a hotel.

  Still no James sightings. She was surprised, but maybe it wasn’t so surprising. He didn’t go to parties, attended class only selectively. Still, if she let herself wonder too long, her mind ran wild. Maybe he’d dropped out. Maybe he was gone. Maybe dead.

  Maybe, she thought, James was hiding out in his apartment, maybe planning his own shooting—was that the reason he was so interested in them? Knew so much about them?

  Stop it, Anna. Stop.

  She was becoming acutely aware of mirrors again: the thin one at the fitness center, fat warped one in the girls’ bathroom. The world was made of mirrors, if you were looking. Freezers in the Save-A-Lot, car windshields, the glimmering surface of the pool.

  At night, in bed, the tally: laps (thirty-two), apple (calories: 100), frozen yogurt (calories: 100), Rice Krispies (120, no milk).

  She remembered something Theresa once said about addiction: Learn it once, and it’s like riding a bike, it all comes right back.

  IV

  This thing with your mom, Janie texted. It’s getting kind of crazy no???

  Evidently Nathan Dugan’s mother had come out with this unbelievable claim that her mother, Anna’s mother, had shown up at her house. That she’d come there the day after the shooting, apologizing for not helping him. An interview with her was on YouTube. It made me sad to watch it, Kim said. Anna didn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t afford to watch.

  She called home right away. I can’t believe that woman would make this whole thing up like that.

  Well. Her mother paused. There was a touch of something in her voice, an unsteadiness. She didn’t make up all of it. But I didn’t apologize for—that isn’t what I said. What I meant.

  Worst-case scenario: Student writes troubling essay, teacher misses it, student later kills four people, troubling essay is sent to local paper that reprints essay in full and random people won’t stop posting it online, then student’s mother does YouTube interview that makes teacher look even worse.

  Anna tried to focus on her classes. On eating, and not eating. She didn’t talk about the video/shooter/shooter’s mother, not with anyone. She avoided all social media. Still there was the sense of a thing, like a fly buzzing, always, just outside the frame.

  At least it was easier to hide her eating/not eating from Alexis, who was pledging now officially. Last week, she’d come back to the room clutching a symbolic beer bottle, having been conferred the status of a future sorority member. Congratulations, Anna said, with what she hoped was a trace of sarcasm. Alexis smiled at her, sort of sadly, it seemed.

  She decided to subtract one food item each day. Ketchup: unnecessary. Juice: borderline decadent. Sugar in coffee: replaceable with Splenda, potentially cancer-causing but calorie-free.

  Her calmest moments were buried underwater: echo of breath in her head, chop/glide of limbs, pressure of fingertips meeting the slick tiled edge. She stared at the black line at the bottom until her eyes burned.

  146 pounds: At this rate, she could drop twenty by Christmas break.

  Her mother called as she was walking home from Liquor Land, plastic bags tugging at her wrists. I wanted to let you know I won’t be teaching for the rest of the semester, and Anna stopped in the middle of the street. You were fired?

  No, her mother said. It was my decision. I’m telling you because I don’t want you to hear about it—

  Should I come home?

  Of course not, her mother said curtly. Why would you do that?

  Anna called Kim, called Janie. No answer. She drank a vodka-and-Diet-Coke, drank two more, and stared at the carpet, at the pattern of shaggy colored squares. She looked for some logic in the arrangement of orange/red/blue/green/yellow but there was none there.

  When Alexis came in, Anna was penciling on eyeliner. Oh, she said, and winced. The party is for pledges only. I thought you knew. Anna didn’t know. Had she known, she would not have consumed three anticipatory 40-calorie vodka-and-Diet-Cokes. Sorry, Alexis said. She was looking at her apologetically. She was wearing the purple satin shirt. Anna capped the pencil and told her she’d been thinking about staying in anyway; she actually wasn’t feeling good.

  After Alexis left, she was angry. 120 wasted calories—she was furious at herself. And hungry. She was painfully aware of Alexis’s junk food drawer: Smartfood, Pop-Tarts, seemingly thousands of Swedish fish.

  She plugged her mouth with gum, pushed in more when the flavor started dying. Her jaw clicked like a metronome.

  In/out. In/out. She did crunches on the checkerboard rug. She kept her head entirely inside a yellow square, feet entirely inside a red.

  Text Message Janie: Did you guys see what Mindy put on Facebook?

  Anna felt a fresh bolt of alarm—what now? She was still off Facebook but couldn’t resist checking. When she opened it, what she found was a photo album: fifty-four pictures from the party at Gavin’s back in August. Anna had no memory of Mindy taking pictures at that party. Then again, somebody was always taking pictures. There were Gavin and Mindy, sipping from the same red keg cup. Janie posing with the flip-cup girls. There was Kim, leaning into Tucker’s arm. And there was Anna, standing on the porch, alone. For a minute she didn’t even recognize herself. Her mouth was half open, eyes squinty, face enormous. Why the fuck would Mindy post this? Because she looked fat and sad and drunk and clearly Mindy wanted to embarrass her. She messaged Mindy before she could rethink it: could you remove this ridiculously bad pic of me immediately? THX. She felt heady, vibrant, defiant with anger. She untagged herself, vanishing the photo, and found herself staring at the YouTube link that had surfaced like a stubborn weed. Shooter’s Mother Speaks Out. From the hallway, she heard shrieks of laughter. Her face pounded with blood. She clicked the image, enlarging it, and found herself staring at a still shot of Nathan Dugan’s mother, sitting on a couch. Her face looked soft and stunned. It had been viewed 438,000 times. Anna stared at her, kept staring, like holding a foot in a pot of scalding water. I dare you, she thought, then clicked. What did I think? Mrs. Dugan said. The sound quality was airy, filmed on a phone. He made the whole thing up. A voice off-camera asked a question, and Anna nudged the volume higher. They act like I’m the one who’s a bad parent. I loved my son. The offscreen voice said: And what’s your impression of his teacher? Professor Daley? Anna froze. The line sailed through her body like the aftershock of a plucked hair, a prodded nerve. She rewound, relistened. And what’s your impression of his teacher? Professor Daley? There was no question it was James. Panic scissored up and down her spine. The teacher? She showed up here too, she said, and Anna felt her fear rising, her own inexorable internal tide.

  V

  Worst-case scenario: Student writes troubling essay, teacher misses it, student later kills four people, etc. etc. etc., student’s mother does YouTube interview with ex-boyfriend of teacher’s daughter who just wanted to stay as far away as fucking possible from any of this.

  This time, she texted CALL ASAP and Kim and Janie got back to her in minutes. They both sounded drunk; it was after eleven thirty. I can’t believe he did this to you!—Kim. What a smug asshole�
�Janie. But there was something else in both their voices, an incredulity that wasn’t about James but about Anna: that she could have been with someone like this.

  When she called James, she tried to keep it together but she was dissolving. How could you do that? she said, and started to cry. James answered surely, almost serenely, as if he had been waiting for this conversation. I had a responsibility, Anna, he told her. I did what needed to be done. People can’t just treat people that way, he said, and Anna had no idea if he was talking about her mother or herself or both.

  When she called home the next morning, she tried to tell her mother what she knew about the video, to say she was sorry, but the words lodged in her throat. Instead, her mother casually mentioned she’d canceled the Internet. I guess I’m becoming even more of a hermit without you here.

  In an essay of five pages, put forth an original thesis that describes the changing role of the self in contemporary poetry. Support your thesis with examples from our texts. (And have fun!)

  The checkerboard rug: It bugged her. To call it a checkerboard was actually not accurate because there was no pattern to it.

  She could make it from the bed to the dresser by stepping inside six squares, dresser to the door in three. She stepped only in the yellow squares—or, no, never the yellow. Only the red, only the green.

  Alexis no longer talked about them rooming together sophomore year. No longer called her roomie, as though to disavow the relationship in advance. She was busy with pledging, though forbidden to speak about it. She came home at two in the morning with Magic Marker on her face, dirt under her nails, and cleaned up silently, patiently, with an almost sanctimonious air—and she looked at Anna with pity? Like she was the one with the problem?

  When Isabel saw Anna in the hallway, she commented that she’d been looking down lately. And that she’d heard Alexis was pledging. If you’re lonely, you know my door is always open!

  At parties, with random girls from her dorm, she sized up other girls’ bodies: that one’s toned arm, this one’s sticklike thigh.

  She considered the Ativan in her sock drawer but didn’t want to lose her edge.

  Text Message Kim: Come back and visit this weekend! Gavin’s coming. Reunion!

  Text Message Janie: If I didn’t have practice I would so be there…

  Their texts made her lonely, made her furious. She couldn’t bring herself to reply. She was irrationally jealous of Janie’s new friends from basketball. Of Tucker, of all people, whom they now apparently called Brian. We miss you, Kim said, we being she and Tucker/Brian. That weekend Kim sent a picture: her and Tucker and Gavin, Kim in the middle. They were standing in the middle of a road, pine trees thick on both sides. The Grange. Anna knew the exact spot, where the woods backed into freshman dorms. She could smell the air inside the picture. She could feel it on her arms. Tucker and Gavin were holding beers, arms around Kim, who was holding up two fingers in a peace sign. Kim was wearing too much makeup. Gavin had slightly longer hair. They were all flushed and drunk and smiling, the flash of the camera a spasm of silver against the dark.

  VI

  At 500 calories/day, Anna could still function admirably, though by nighttime it was getting hard to concentrate. Her head hurt. Her legs, from all the swimming.

  One more lap or you’ll fail your psych exam. One more lap or the building will catch fire.

  She was satisfied if she lost a pound, despairing if she didn’t. 139. 138. 138. 138. She slid the little weight beneath her finger, trying to line it up perfectly. Sometimes this took five, ten, fifteen minutes.

  Text Message Janie: Where are u??

  The rug was making her crazy. The squares, she had them memorized. One red square, one yellow. Step on a crack and break your mother’s back!

  You’re looking good, Ralph said one morning, and she was elated all day.

  On the phone with her mother, Anna made herself sound upbeat, sound happy. Things are really good! Just busy! If she put her mind to it, she could be convincing. If her mother knew what was going on she would come and drag her home.

  Maybe you should talk to someone, Alexis said, once. It was night, and they were both in bed, Alexis speaking into the dark. About your eating thing. Anna didn’t move. She pretended she was asleep but stayed awake for hours, staring at the bottom of the mattress, in/out.

  Text Message Kim: Call me back please…

  It was possible, if she paid attention, to just fit her foot inside each square. She stepped deliberately, carefully, avoiding letting heel/toe go over the edge.

  She snapped at Ralph for taking forever with the fucking ID machine, which was malfunctioning, although obviously he knew just who she was.

  When she came in one night, Alexis was sitting on the top bunk with fellow pledge Esme. They were eating Chinese food. (Esme was stick-thin too; everyone was.) They went abruptly quiet when Anna entered. Clearly they’d been talking about her. Anna was tempted to climb in the bunk below them, but she couldn’t bear to cross the fucking rug. She went outside, lapped the quad twenty times. When she came back they were, of course, gone.

  Siena asked her to stay after class one day. Nothing bad! she said, a little too gaily. When everyone else left, she told Anna she was concerned. There was worry, real worry, on her face, and Anna fought the sudden urge to break down and cry—for putting her favorite teacher in this position. For being this student. Siena was saying she was a great student, a great writer, but lately she seemed quiet, distracted. Thinner, too—later that was all she’d heard.

  Sometimes in bed, she had to pee but it was too daunting, the journey from bed to door.

  She chewed so much gum her jaw ached.

  She felt her hipbones—knobs.

  She hit 135 and felt glorious even though she understood this weight loss was all really about fear and control and blah blah blah.

  Message from Janie: Anna this is really getting old

  Step inside a white square, and something horrible might happen/will happen/might happen. To her father, to her mother. Her mother might die, or Kim, or Janie. Or Alexis. She didn’t mean these things, but they stole into her mind and played on repeat, like bad songs.

  Message from Kim: Hellllllooooo?

  Was she swimming or was she drowning? They felt like the same thing. She was a lead weight. She was a stone. She was water, inside and out.

  VII

  The main thing she’d learned in therapy was that everything was really something else. Her worry about the locks on the door or the burners on the stove wasn’t actually about the locks or about the burners: It was fear. The anorexia wasn’t about food: It was control. The first time Theresa explained it, Anna had pictured those pans in darkrooms, the photo submerged in liquid, image emerging. Subtext, her mother might say, but it was more than that. The underlayer. The other, truer thing beneath.