Wintergirls

by Laurie Halse Anderson

  If I thought I could stop after one bite, two at the most, I would. But I am 096.00, close to dangerland. One bite of lasagna would cause a revolution. One bite, ten bites, the whole tray would pour down my throat. And then I’d eat Oreos. And then I’d eat vanilla ice cream. And Bluberridazzlepops, the rest of the box. And then, just before I exploded, my stomach ripping open and all the food falling into my body cavity, blood flooding me, then I’d have to go to the secret box in my closet and take out the laxatives and die of humiliation in the bathroom.

  I take out the pickle jar. One spear, kosher dill = 5.

  Kora and Pluto follow me upstairs. I check the secret box—emergency laxatives and diuretics—just in case. I haven’t used it in months. It’s a good thing I checked, because the supplies are low. Must remember that.

  When I lay down on my bed, the cats hop up. They curl into my hollow places and purr so deeply it echoes in my bones.

  040.00

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  041.00

  Dad has been dragging his feet about buying a Christmas tree. Jennifer snags one from a toothless guy selling homegrown Douglas firs out of the back of his pickup. The guy carries it into the house but won’t screw it into the tree stand until she gives him another fifty dollars. When Dad brings Emma home from basketball practice, she shrieks so loud that half of the needles drop off.

  Basketball is working out better than soccer. Jennifer’s bank sponsors the team and she told the coach that if Emma didn’t play enough, she’d pull the sponsorship and take the uniforms back. Emma does not know this. She thinks she’s the starting center because she’s so strong.

  I’m in the zone: half a medium-sized bagel (75) for breakfast, an apple (82) for lunch, and whatever I have to eat at dinner (500-600) to stay out of trouble.Dr. Marrigan e-mails Daddy and says that she’ll be at the hospital from now until Christmas, but after that, she has a week off and I’ve agreed to stay with her. She CCs Jennifer and me on the message. When Jennifer asks me about it, I say I haven’t made up my mind yet.

  Now that winter is here (this is official, because there is a tree shedding needles in our living room) it’s easier to hide under layers of long underwear and turtlenecks, bulky sweatshirts and puffy down padding. Just don’t look at the girl behind the curtain. Her knees are wider than her thighs. Her elbows are wider than her arms.

  Jennifer is getting suspicious of the scales. I perform surgery on the Blubber-O-Meter 3000 scale, tinkering with it until it shows that I weigh 104.50. She sighs heavily when she writes the number down.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say. “I’ll try harder, I promise. Just don’t be mad at me.”

  Jennifer reports the new number to Daddy. I am supposed to be in the shower, not eavesdropping halfway down the stairs.

  “Yes, she’s down a few pounds, but once you start your holiday baking, she won’t be able to resist,” he says.

  “If she loses any more, she should have a physical. Even if we have to make a big stink about it, like say the only way we’ll let her stay is if she does it.”

  “It won’t come to that. Why don’t you make a cheese-cake this weekend, with strawberries on top? She used to love that.”

  Adrenaline kicks in when you’re starving. That’s what nobody understands. Except for being hungry and cold, most of the time I feel like I can do anything. It gives me superhuman powers of smell and hearing. I can see what people are thinking, stay two steps ahead of them. I do enough homework to stay off the radar. Every night I climb thousands of steps into the sky to make me so exhausted that when I fall into bed, I don’t notice Cassie.

  Then suddenly it’s morning and I leap on the hamster wheel and it starts all over again.

  Five hundred calories a day is working. Truth = 094.00.

  Another goal weight. W00t.

  I should be diamond sparkly champagne shooting to the stars, but the loudspeaker between my ears crackles on, full volume, with another goal: 085.00, 085.00, 085.00.

  085.00 is dangerland. 085.00 is Fourth of July fireworks in a small metal box.

  The second time they admitted me for my own good, my whole body, including my skin, my hair, my baby blue toenails, and all my teeth weighed 085.00: 010.00 pounds of fat, 075.00 pounds of everything else.

  Wreaths of pus-colored fat were suffocating my thighs, my butt, and my belly, but they couldn’t see them. They said my brain was shrinking. Electrical storms were lighting up the inside of my skull. My tired liver was packing her suitcase. My kidneys were lost in a sand-storm.

  085.00 was not enough stuffing for a paper Lia girl.

  085.00 was skin that wanted to shed.

  085.00 was fluffy monkey hair growing all over to keep me warm.

  They said I had to get fatter.

  I told them my goal was 080.00 and if they wanted my respect, they’d better stop lying to me.

  When my brain started working again I checked their math. Someone made a mistake because they didn’t figure in the snakes in my head and the thick shadows hiding i
nside the cage of my ribs.

  085.00 is possible. I’ve been there before, in dangerland, sweet buzzing high gingersmoke air, crafty trolls hiding under bridges.

  But 085.00 makes me want 075.00. To get there I’ll need to crack open my bones with a silver mallet and dig out my marrow with a long-handled spoon.

  042.00

  When the college semester ends, Dad flies to New York for some research at a historical society and to get away from all of the crazy women in his house. Jennifer takes Emma to a basketball game. I stay home to study. I burn 858 calories on the stair-stepper, my legs smoking, hair on fire.

  When they get back, I’ve covered the family room with note cards and open textbooks. They don’t notice, because Emma is in pain and Jennifer is on the edge of total meltdown. During warm-ups before the game, mytripped on her shoelaces, fell on the court, and broke her right arm. They’ve spent the last two hours in the ER and now the arm is a hot-pink cast, and Jennifer’s mascara is a mess.

  I hug Emma’s good side and kiss the top of her head. “I know how you feel, Emmakins. I busted my arm in first grade when Dad took off my training wheels. I pedaled three feet and crashed. Hit the ground so hard I cracked the concrete. It’ll heal quick, don’t worry.”

  “This is a little more serious,” Jennifer says. “She fractured her ulna and her radius.”

  “That’s what a broken arm is,” I say carefully. “A fracture of the ulna or the radius, or both. Those are the technical names for the bones in your forearm. Do you want to talk to my mom about this?”

  “She’s a cardiologist, what would she know?”

  I open my mouth but decide it’s not worth the energy.

  “Clean off the couch, please,” Jennifer says, her face in the refrigerator. “She needs to rest with her arm elevated.”

  I make an Emma-nest with soft blankies and pillows and Elephant, Bear, and Snail, the inner circle of stuffed friends. As Emma lies back, remote in her good hand, Jennifer hands me her car keys and her debit card. “I need you to go to the drugstore and pick up the prescription that the doctor phoned in,” she says. “And get her some Popsicles—the kind with fruit juice, not corn syrup.”

  “I don’t want Popsicles, I want chocolate,” says the victim on the couch.

  I am not sure if I weigh enough to press down on the accelerator. I am 093.50 and have a 1,500-calorie deficit for the day. If I total another car, they’ll lock me up and throw away the key.

  “Um, I’m feeling kind of queasy. I don’t think driving is a good idea.”

  Jennifer reaches into the glass jar on the counter, pulls out an oatmeal raisin cookie the size of my head, and shoves it at me. “Can we take the spotlight off you for just one minute, Lia? Put some food in your mouth, quit whining, and go to the damn drugstore.”

  I chew the cookie in the driver’s seat, the car still safely in PARK. This cookie has no calories. It is not food. It is fuel—gas and oil so the engine doesn’t seize. I choke down a quarter of it and shift into DRIVE.

  The guy behind the pharmacy counter says they’re backed up because of the stomach bug going around and Emma’s medicine will take another ten or fifteen minutes. The store has so many Christmas decorations, there is barely room left for the body wash and cough drops. The music is playing a little too loud. Somehow they’ve figured out how to pipe in the smell of gingerbread cookies, too.

  I can’t find the laxatives and diuretics. They’ve moved everything. Aisle 4 is Santa’s Toyland. Aisle 3 has a snowdrift on the floor. A real snowdrift.

  I look around. Tired people are wandering in search of hemorrhoid cream and painkillers and mouthwash. Two ladies scuff right through the snow, sending puffs of it into the air without noticing. When it falls, it doesn’t melt. Kind of expensive advertising for a drugstore, but people have been saying that Amoskeag is the new Boston. I guess this is what they’re talking about.

  Cassie enters Aisle 3. The dead Cassie.

  “Hey,” she says. “Bottom shelf. That’s where you’ll find them.”

  She’s wearing a gray ski jacket over her blue dress and has her hair slicked back into a wet ponytail, like she just stepped out of a shower. The smell of ginger and cloves and burnt sugar is thick.

  “Aren’t you proud of me for figuring this out, how to follow you?” Her voice buzzes like dying flies are trapped in her throat.

  I bend down to the bottom shelf. She’s right. I grab two boxes of diuretics and three of laxatives. Any second now, she’ll disappear because she’s a hallucination.

  I stand up. She is so close to me, I could smell her breath, if she were breathing.

  “Go away,” I whisper.

  “Are you kidding me?” She kicks at the snow and it fills the aisle, screening out the rest of the store and muffling the blaring carols. The snowflakes hang in the air, not rising, not falling.

  “You don’t belong here,” I say. “Go back.”

  She frowns, confused. “But I want to hang out. It took a lot of work to figure out how to do this, you know. It’s not like it’s easy to go back and forth.”

  I cover my ears. “Stop it.”

  The night hauntings make sense. I’m tired then, drugged up, and have no sugar in my blood. But in Aisle 3 of Binney’s Drugs? Jennifer must have slipped something into that cookie. She’s trying to make me psych-ward crazy so she can get rid of me.

  Cassie leans against the shelf. “You should pick up some bleach. You need it to clean up after the moldy banana in the purse at the back of your closet. It’s disgusting.”

  “You’re not here. I’m not talking to you.”

  She tilts her head. “You really mean it, don’t you? You don’t believe you’re seeing me.”

  I try to walk past her, but my boots are frozen in the drifting snow.

  “What do I have to do to make you believe?” she asks.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in heaven or something?”

  “That’s a little complicated.”

  “You’re a figment of my imagination, or a hallucination caused by my meds or that damn cookie. You do not exist.”

  Her eyes flicker, like a light switch is turned off, then on again. “That really hurts my feelings.”

  “My sister needs her medicine. I have to go.”

  The light shifts and she fades a little. I can see the outline of the shelves behind her.

  She puts her mouth up to my ear. “You’re almost there, buddy. Stay strong.”

  I can’t move. I can’t run.

  “I know how bad you feel. Trapped,” she says. “It gets better, I promise. So much better.”

  She looks like she used to when she was begging me to go to the park with her so she couldn’t accidentally on purpose run into the latest guy she had a crush on. I should close my eyes until she vanishes. I don’t.

  “What are you talking about?” I ask.

  She wipes a snowflake off my cheek. “You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me. I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.”

  I pull back, try to shake the cobwebs out of my head. “What is wrong with you? Don’t you care about what happened?”

  She frowns.

  “Don’t you care that your parents have gone off the deep end? You shouldn’t have done it. You should have asked for help.”

  The snow rushes toward her and spins in a whirlwind that reaches up through the ceiling.

  “I tried.” The flames in her eyes burn my cheeks. “You didn’t answer the phone.”

  043.00

  It didn’t happen. I didn’t see her. Everything is fine.

  Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

  I take the medicine home to Emma, eat a cup of tomato soup made with water (82) and pretend to finish my homework. While the two of them watch a movie, I run scalding water into the bathtub, strip, and get in.

  The merry-go-round is spin
ning too fast. I want to get off. I want to close my eyes, or just blink. I want to choose what I see and what I don’t see. The crap we put up with when we’re awake every day—school, house, house, mall, world—is bad enough. Shouldn’t I at least get a break when I’m asleep? Or, if I’m doomed to be haunted by ghosts, shouldn’t they only work at night, and dissolve when hit by sunlight?

  I lift my arm out of the water. It’s a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can’t see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

  The merry-go-round spins again. To get off this thing I think I have to scream. But I can’t. My bone corset is laced so tight, I can barely breathe.

  When Cassie creeps into my bed that night and curls her hands around my throat, she doesn’t bring up what did not happen at the drugstore. Neither do I.

  My heart clangs like a fire bell all night long.

  044.00

  The show must go on.

  There is no way a kid with a fractured ulna and radius can play the violin in the Park Street Elementary School Winter Holiday Concert, so the band director is rigging up a metal triangle that Emma can ting at the right moment. She’s also in charge of the sleigh bells during “Jingle Bells.” She spends all of Thursday night practicing.