Wintergirls

by Laurie Halse Anderson

  I leave school early (cramps—ha) and spend Friday afternoon baking, because Emma signed her mother up to bring something to the Holiday Bake Sale, and Jennifer went out and bought cheap cookies with tacky red-and-green icing. I make gingerbread girls, each with a pink cast on her arm, and a loaf of Nanna Marrigan’s date-nut bread. The measuring spoons want to stick sugar and butter and molasses into my mouth. I pretend I am allergic to the ingredients. One taste and my lips and tongue will swell up and I will choke to death.

  I use the leftover gingerbread bits to make a voodoo cookie, a sturdy girl with yellow-red hair, a blue dress, and a black hole for a mouth. After she cools, I lay her on the cutting board and smash her with the rolling pin until she is a pile of gingerdust.

  When Emma comes home from tutoring, she smells the cookies and shrieks so loud the rest of the needles fall off the Christmas tree. She throws her arm and her cast around me and squeezes, almost fracturing my ribs. I let her paint my fingernails the same color as hers so we can be twins.

  Jennifer is a little stunned by the cookies. Emma reminds her that she signed up to work the bake sale and I offer to take her place, which surprises her even more.

  We only have time for turkey sandwiches (230) before we have to leave for the concert.

  Park Street Elementary School smells exactly the same as it did when I went there: warm sweaty bodies, cheap spaghetti sauce, Magic Markers, and paper. There is a tribute to Cassie on the bulletin board in the front hall. The picture was taken a couple of years ago, before the puking burnt out her salivary glands and they swelled up into walnut-sized lumps at the back of her jaw. Seeing it makes my heart pound, but I keep walking, turn right at the library, left at the end of the hall. The picture really is there, I didn’t make it up, it’s not a ghostly vision. Her dad is the principal here and her mom runs everything else. It makes sense to erect a shrine.

  Emma skips off to the backstage area to line up.

  “You sure you don’t want to come in and listen?” Jennifer asks me. “We could switch at intermission.”

  And sit with six hundred overheated parents all armed with video cameras? “No, really, you go ahead. Stay for the whole thing.”

  She hugs me, squeezing tight enough to make my ribs groan. It happened so quick I didn’t see it coming. She lets go, grabs my face in both hands and kisses my nose. “You can be so sweet sometimes, you know that? I owe you huge.” She leans close and whispers, “I can’t stand those women. They make me scream.”

  “No problem,” I say, trying not to stagger under the weight of her kiss.

  There are four cafeteria tables set up in the back hall for the bake sale. The tables are crowded with plates of cookies with ten kinds of chocolate chip, including wheat-, dairy-,and egg-free. The moms at this school watch way too many cooking shows. There are truffle brownies, cinnamon wafers, peppermint fudge. Someone baked cupcakes in bizarre flavors: pomegranate, green tea, cranberry, pistachio, and guava. (The cupcakes come with labels listing the ingredients for the allergic.) On the last table, near the cash box, are two buckets filled with chocolate-dipped pretzels rolled in jimmies, and three perfectly made gingerbread houses that are up for silent auction. One has stained-glass windows made out of melted candy.

  The moms I’ll be working with are shoving cookies into their mouths and letting the crumbs collect on their sweaters.

  “Want some fudge?” they ask, staring at my collarbones. “Try the seven-layer bars. They’re to die for.”

  I would love a seven-layer bar. I would love to pick up a piece of fudge, gossip about the latest episode of whatever, bite the fudge, laugh, chew it because it tastes good and it feels good in my mouth, and swallow and have my tummy glow with fudginess. But they are not for me.

  “No, thank you,” I say.

  “Look at how skinny you are!” they shriek. “You don’t have to worry, not like us!” They slap their thighs, wiggle their butts, pinch their bellies. “Take a piece. Take two!”

  A hand above twitches my puppet strings. The corners of my mouth turn up and I bat my eyelashes, shrug my shoulders a little. “I had a huge dinner,” I say. “I’ll have something later.”

  A wave of hungry people interrupts us and we sell, sell, sell. At one point I see Mrs. Parrish, dressed as Mrs. Claus, drifting through the crowd. Her wig droops to one side. A group of little kids rush up to her and wave, asking her to tell Santa they’ve been very good this year. She walks by without noticing them, heading straight for the bake-sale table. I hide behind a gingerbread house until she’s gone.

  When the concert starts, I tell the fat moms to go listen to their kids, I’ll guard the food and the cash box. This stuff doesn’t tempt me. It makes me queasy; that’s how strong I am.

  The moms give me a hundred chances to change my mind (“No, I’m sure, really, you guys go ahead, honest, really”), then they hustle toward the auditorium armed with emergency brownies in case of an unexpected blood-sugar crash.

  I sit behind the mountain of individually wrapped marshmallow treats. The band is playing either “Silent Night” or “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” I scan up and down the hall. Cassie has not popped up, not yet. There’s no snow in sight. It does smell like gingerbread, but that’s because of the bake sale. I don’t think she’s coming, not with her face stapled to the bulletin board like a WANTED poster, not with her parents here. They’d see her, too, I know it. All hell would break loose. She wouldn’t dare.

  I take out my knitting, hold the needles tightly, and loop the yarn. Knit, knit, purl. Knit, knit, purl. The yarn is damp from the sweat on my hands. Knit, purl, knit. No. I back up and undo the stitches. Knit, knit, purl.

  No, they don’t.No, they do not.They will not.

  The knitting sinks into my lap. The needles are too heavy, the yarn spun from iron. The cartilage in my fingers and knees and elbows is thinning. Hungryhungry battles starvestarve back and forth across the battlefield of my mind.

  Everything hurts.

  A door opens and closes and blows the smell of ginger and cloves and burnt sugar into my face and hair.

  So far today, I am 412 calories. I’ll burn that and a couple hundred more if I can find the energy to climb on the stair-stepper. I could eat half a cupcake (150), or a quarter (75). I could scrape off the frosting and just nibble at the cake.

  I shouldn’t. I can’t. I don’t deserve it. I’m a fat load and I disgust myself. I take up too much space already. I am an ugly, nasty hypocrite. I am trouble. I am a waste.

  I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don’t want to die. I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut out my heart or take every pill that was ever made.

  I take the cupcake guaranteed to taste the worst: pomegranate. It has pink frosting and red seeds on top. I lick off the seeds and bite. They explode in my mouth, wet-red tang, not like a berry, not like an apple, but darker, close to wine. I could eat a handful of these seeds, or six handfuls, or I could pour a bucket of them into me.

  No, I couldn’t. I just eat six seeds: 1.2.3.4.5.6. They feel warm going down my throat, not scary.

  I hear a door open, but I can’t see it. The puppet strings of this body are cut and I can’t feel these hands, or stop them from peeling the paper wrapper off the cupcake and shoving it in me. This mouth chews and swallows and hurry because here comes another and another until all the red-seeded cupcakes are gone. Every. Single. One. These hands reach for a brownie next, and then a piece of fudge and a pink-armed gingerbread Emma girl. I dissolve into a spun sugar blur until the doors of the auditorium burst open and the hall fills with applause and whistles, and warm bodies.

  I sprint to the bathroom.

  It doesn’t matter how far down I stick my finger, the cesspool won’t empty. I squirt soap into my mouth instead and gargle until the bubbles stream down my cheeks.

  045.00

  In the middle of the night, someone thrusts a sword into my guts
. I wake up screaming for my parents, but Jennifer rushes in because my father is off on another trip and my mother doesn’t live here. She helps me drag myself to the bathroom. I can’t tell if I should sit on the toilet or stick my head in it.

  I drop my drawers and sit. Jennifer wets a washcloth with cold water, wrings it out, and puts it on the back of my neck.

  “I’m okay,” I mutter.

  “You are not.” She presses the back of her hand to my forehead. “No fever. Could be food poisoning, I think. What did you have for lunch?”

  The blade rips through my belly again and I choke back a moan. “Soup and crackers. And we all ate the sliced turkey in our sandwiches for dinner.”

  “Are you nauseous?”

  I shake my head.

  “Did you eat anything at the bake sale?”

  Before I can lie, my head bobs up and down. “Cupcakes.”

  “Cupcakes? You ate more than one?”

  I nod again. “They tasted good.”

  “I can’t see how a cupcake would do this to you. Maybe they used raw egg in the icing. Will you be okay if I go downstairs for a minute? I want to look something up.”

  “What?” I grit my teeth. “Sure. When you come back, can you bring me peppermint tea?”

  “You shouldn’t eat anything until your stomach settles.”

  “Please, Jennifer. I know it will help.”

  “All right, relax. Just breathe. Peppermint tea, coming up.”

  Once she’s gone, I groan. I know exactly what’s wrong. I am a gluttonous, gorging failure. A waste. My body isn’t used to high-sugar carbs laced with witchcraft. It can barely cope with soup and crackers.

  The blade twists again. The laxatives I wolfed down when we got home are torching my guts. Plus, my phosphate levels are out of whack because of the unexpected sugar. Plus, there is a chance that I have been so gifted at starving myself that the empty string balloon of my guts is turning from pink to ghost gray as the cells die off from neglect. Or Cassie has made a gingerbread voodoo doll of me on her side of the grave and is stabbing it into bloody bits.

  My head is too heavy to sit on my shoulders. I bend over and let it dangle between my legs.

  “Lia?”

  Through the curtain of my hair I watch Emma’s slippers shuffle into the bathroom. “Lia, are you going to die?” Tears are perched on the edge of her voice.

  I force myself upright and try to ignore the black spots opening up in front of my eyes.

  “I just have a tummy ache, honey. Nobody dies from that. I’ll be fine.”

  Jennifer takes Emma back to bed and chooses to believe my lie about how I’m feeling much better and how I’m going to read on the toilet for a while, just in case. I spend most of the night shuffling between my bed and the toilet, emptying, emptying, emptying as the laxatives grind through me and do their dirty work. I scrub the toilet with the blue cleaner after every trip.

  When I fall into bed, somebody starts beating on my chest with a baseball bat. I try to take my pulse, but my heart is hammering too fast to count. I’m sweating. My body is eating itself, chopping up my muscles and throwing them in the fire so the engine doesn’t seize.

  There is metal in my mouth. I need to wake up Jennifer.

  If I wake her up, she’ll freak.

  If she freaks, she’ll call an ambulance.

  If the ambulance comes, I’m doomed.

  I roll over and ask Cassie to rub my back and sing to me.

  046.00

  When Dad comes home from New York City on Saturday, I’m dozing on the couch. He shakes my shoulder and I jump, not sure where I am or who I am or who he is. He doesn’t notice.

  “Where are Jen and Emma?” he asks.

  I sit up. Slowly. The worst cramps from last night are gone, but it feels like I did a hundred thousand crunches suspended upside down. “The mall. How was your trip?”

  “Excellent,” he says. “My editor is extending the deadline and she’s giving me another advance to pay for a research trip to London. I am The Man.”

  He tries to pump his fist in the air like he’s a pro football player, but he looks more like a lame college professor trying to hail a cab.

  “That’s great, Dad.”

  His smile fades. “Are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”

  “I had food poisoning last night, from a cupcake.” I pull the blanket around my shoulders. “Go figure.”

  “Did you call your mother?”

  “No.”

  “She is a doctor, you know.”

  “Yes, I am aware of that. I didn’t need her to charge over here with an ambulance in the middle of the night. Jennifer helped me. I’m fine, just tired.”

  “Are you sure?” He lays the back of his hand on my forehead.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  “It’s what you do when your kids are sick.”

  “You’re hopeless,” I say.

  He gives me a quick hug. “In the best possible way. I brought you girls some presents from the city, maybe that will help. Hang on.”

  He leaves the room and comes back with a plastic bag. “Take a look.”

  I empty the bag. I’m guessing that the magic wand filled with sparkles is for Emma, which means the books are for me: all stories about the agony of middle school, written for twelve-year-olds. Unless the books are for Emma and the wand is for me. That could be useful.

  “Do you want strawberry, grape, or honey?” Dad asks as he walks into the kitchen.

  “What?”

  “Strawberry, grape, or honey? It’s almost lunch—I’ll make us peanut butter sandwiches.”

  I tuck the magic wand under my arm and follow him, blanket trailing behind me like a cape. “I’m not hungry. My stomach is still off.”

  “I’ll make tea and toast instead. Have you taken your meds?”

  My head shakes “no” before I can stop it.

  “That settles it. You need to have something in your stomach and then you can take your medicine. Have a seat, kiddo.”

  While the bread for me is toasting (2 slices = 154), he makes two sandwiches for himself, both with crunchy peanut butter and grape. He sticks a mug in the microwave for the tea and absently takes a bite of one of the sandwiches. He gets a plate out for my toast and takes a second bite. He just eats and goes about his business, buttering the toast (100) without asking me, getting the milk out of the fridge and carrying it to the table with the plate and tea. Half of his first sandwich is already gone.

  How does he do it?

  I can’t remember what it’s like to eat without planning for it, charting the calories and the fat content and measuring my hips and thighs to see if I deserve it and usually deciding no, I don’t deserve it, so I bite my tongue until it bleeds and I wire my jaw shut with lies and excuses while a blind tapeworm wraps itself around my wind-pipe, snuffling and poking for a wet opening to my brain.

  I am so tired. I have forgotten how to sleep, too.

  Dad blathers on about a bunch of moldy letters in the London archives and how if we get a good deal on the tickets, we could all go to England, which will never happen. I swallow my pills and drink my tea. Just as I reach for half a slice of bread (38) + quarter tablespoon butter (25) = 63, the phone rings.

  I start to get up.

  “Don’t,” he says. “Let the machine answer.”

  After the beep, Mrs. Parrish’s voice crackles on the speaker. “Lia? Lia, please call me back. I’m not angry, I promise. We’ve looked everywhere and we can’t find Cassie’s necklace, the one with the silver bell. I thought maybe if I wore it . . . Can you help me?” Her voice breaks and she sobs once, then sniffs. “I just want you to call me, Lia. I can’t . . . I need you to help.”

  After she hangs up, Dad erases the message. “She should be talking to her therapist instead of bothering you.”

  I study the cracks in the grout between the floor tiles. If I could turn into a wisp of smoke, I could slip into them and disappear.

  “It�
��s okay,” I lie. “She’s stuck. It’s sad.”

  “Is that how you feel, too?” He sips his milk. “Stuck and sad?”

  I should have pretended to stay asleep when he came in. “No.”

  “That’s what it looks like to us.”

  “Who is ‘us’?”

  The peanut butter tries to glue his mouth closed, but it’s not strong enough. “I had a long talk with your mother last night.”

  “You talked to Mom twice in one year?”

  “No sarcasm, please.” He takes another bite of his sandwich and chews. “Chloe thinks you should be evaluated.”

  “Evaluated?”

  “Jennifer does, too.”

  “Evaluated for what?”

  He stops eating. “To see if you should go back to the hospital as an inpatient.”

  The cracks in the floor open wider. “You want to lock me up again?”

  “Chloe said she was going to call this morning and talk to you about this.”

  “She didn’t.” I shiver. The cold is soaking through the windows. “Do you think I should go back?”

  “Honestly? It seems a little extreme. Your grades could be better, but you go to school. You don’t sneak off at night and get into trouble. I’d like you to put some weight back on. I told your mother that going back to the nutritionist for a few visits would probably be enough.”

  “But Mom wants to lock me up.”

  “The evaluation could prove her wrong—think of it that way.”

  “She’s already scheduled the appointment, hasn’t she?”

  He picks up the magic wand and tilts it so the sparkles run down the inside, perfectly sealed in plastic. “Ten o’clock, two days after Christmas.”

  The cracks in the floor gape open, bottomless stone canyons. I teeter on the edge.

  “Lovely,” I say. “I’ll be able to write an essay about my Christmas vacation on the feeding farm where they stuffed tubes up my nose and made me eat butter and gave me pretty little pills and then they vacuumed out my brain and turned me into a fat zombie. What fun.”