Wintergirls

by Laurie Halse Anderson

  “You won’t be admitted unless you really need it. Don’t you want to be healthy, to feel better?”

  “You’re just trying to get rid of me.”

  “I’m worried about you. I want my little girl back.”

  I stand up and pace between the table and the stove. “I tried the hospital. Twice.” The cape slips off my shoulders. “You said it was the last time because I used up all the insurance.”

  “If you have to go inpatient, your mother will sell some stock and I’ll remortgage the house. But it doesn’t have to come to that. If you’d just eat—”

  “I don’t need to eat like you.”

  “Dammit, Lia!” he yells. “That’s not true and you know it. Are we supposed to let you starve yourself to death?”

  That yelling-Daddy-voice used to scare me. Now it just makes me vicious. “Your wife watches me step on the stupid scale every week.”

  “And your weight is going down. This week was what, 104? You swore to me you’d stay at 110.”

  “I have a tiny frame and a fast metabolism.”

  “Again with the bull!” He sprays sandwich spittle across the table. “You begged me to let you move in. You couldn’t live with your mother a minute longer. You said she was the problem and I believed you, just like I believed you when you promised to be honest.”

  I try to lower my voice. The more he loses control, the more I have to hold on to it. “You suck at promises, too. All those canceled weekends, the trips we were going to take, the house you said you’d buy on a lake.”

  He glares at me. “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I need time, Dad,” I say. “I just can’t stick food in my mouth. I have to start my whole life over again.”

  “When will that happen, exactly?” His voice turns ugly as well as loud, the voice that used to fight with my mother when I was supposed to be sleeping. “Sometime this year? This century?”

  “I’m working on it,” I say.

  “No, you’re not. You’ve been here for six months and you haven’t unpacked your damn boxes.”

  “Oh, you finally noticed?” I snarl back.

  “What does that mean?” he asks.

  “You’re never around. Jennifer takes care of everything so you can go to your meetings and the library and your squash games and your fancy dinners. Oh, wait a minute—when have I seen this before? Got another girlfriend, Daddy? Ready for round two in divorce court? Don’t forget to line up a good shrink for Emma; she thinks you’re a god.”

  His face is the color of a heart attack. The muscles in his jaws are clenched so tight his teeth could crack. Any minute now, he’s going to pick me up and throw me through a window and I won’t touch the ground for a thousand miles or so.

  He picks up the milk jug and pours more into his glass. He takes a long drink of milk and very deliberately sets the glass back on the table. “Stop turning this into an examination of my faults. We’re talking about you, Lia.”

  The lines in his face sag with disappointment. His eyes are red-rimmed with long nights and too many mistakes and a defective daughter. It’s easier to fight back when he yells.

  “I wish I understood what goes on inside you.” He tilts the magic wand again but doesn’t look at the sparkles. “Why you’re so afraid.”

  The merry-go-round spins inside my head, spins so fast all I can see are honey-yellow, strawberry-red, grape-purple splashes streaking past my eyes. I should never have come to this house, but I had nowhere else to go.

  “Please, Lia.” His voice has dropped to a whisper. “Please eat.”

  The merry-go-round snaps and splinters and bits of color fly through my head.

  I snatch the sandwich on his plate and shove it in my mouth.

  “Is this what you want?” I scream. “Look—Lia’s eating! Lia’s eating!” With every chew, I open my mouth wide so the bread and jelly and peanut butter and saliva spill into the canyons beneath us. “Are you happy now?”

  He calls my name as I run out of the room.

  He does not follow me.

  047.00

  I turn up the space heater in my room to the highest setting and crank the volume on my speakers as high as they will go. The music liquefies the air and blows the papers off my desk. I crawl into bed, but the mattress is stuffed with stones and shells and I can’t get comfortable. I open books, but the stories are all locked up and I don’t know the magic words.

  WhatWhyWhenHowWho? WhatWhyWhenHowWho? WhatWhyWhenHowWho?

  What am I afraid of? Why can’t I even want to get better? When am I me and how do I know that and who would I be if I did what they want?

  How did I get like this?

  Maybe Mom took drugs when she was pregnant with me. She started her residency that year—she probably went the whole nine months without sleeping and I was born with over-caffeinated-fetus syndrome. Or Professor Overbrook smoked weed laced with an experimental chemical and he knocked up Mom with mutant sperm.

  Whatever.

  I dust my shelves and the windowsills and walk downstairs to get the vacuum cleaner, a glass of ice cubes (Professor Overbrook tries to talk to me, too bad he doesn’t exist, I don’t have a father or a mother I just have white spaces with no walls), and the box of garbage bags. Once the carpet is sucked clean, I rip open one of the cardboard boxes packed full of my crap from Mom’s and stuff it all into a garbage bag. Don’t even look at it. Don’t listen to my fingers telling me it’s a doll, a necklace, a Jane Yolen paperback, a collection of coins. I crush ice between my teeth and swallow the slivers. Everything is garbage.

  Professor Overbrook walks in as I’m tying off the third bag. I watch his mouth move. He hands me a mug of fresh-brewed peppermint tea and a plate of the ugly-iced cookies Jennifer bought for the bake sale. He is going to his office to pick up some source material he forgot.

  After he runs away, I crumble the cookies into the toilet and flush. I slip some extra crazy candies into my mouth and wash them into me with ice water, then struggle through five hundred crunches—

  ::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/

  stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

  —even though it hurts my belly. Especially because it hurts.

  Lia the Loathsome calls the front desk of the Gateway. Lia the Loathsome tells the Charlie who answers the phone that if he doesn’t get Elijah on the phone this minute, she’ll call the police and report that Charlie sexually harassed her.

  He says, “Hang on.”

  While I’m waiting, I scrape off my fingernail polish. Dr. StupidParker says that when I’m sad it really means I’m angry and when I’m angry it really means I’m afraid. I can’t believe she gets paid for dreaming up crap like that. I feel like starting a war or blowing up a building or breaking every window in this house. I wonder what she’d say that really means.

  Elijah finally picks up the phone. “Hey there. What’s up?”

  Lia: I have to talk to you.

  Elijah: Are you Emma today or Lia?

  Lia: You lie all the time.

  Elijah: It’s a bad habit.

  Lia: I’m sorry. I apologize.

  Elijah: Okay. No worries.

  Lia: So, are we friends again?

  Elijah: I guess.

  Lia: Good. How’s your car?

  Elijah: It’ll be ready by the time Charlie closes up for the winter.

  Lia: Where’re you going?

  Elijah: Oxford, Mississippi, maybe. Or I might head back to Mexico. I liked it there. (He covers the mouthpiece of phone, talks to Charlie.) I have to go. Boss has this weird idea that I should actually work while he’s paying me.

  Lia: No, wait, I have a question.

  Elijah: Shoot.

  Lia: You said the first time you saw Cassie was when you found her body.

  Elijah: That’s not a question, but yeah.

  Lia: At the cemetery you asked me why I didn’t answer when she called that night. How did you know she called me?

  Elijah the Silent: />
  Lia: Are you still there?

  Elijah: Can we talk about this later?

  Lia: No. You have to tell me. She wanted you to.

  Elijah, after a deep breath: She checked in Thursday night, but I didn’t run into her until Saturday. She invited me to hang out so I went to her room after work. She’d been drinking—a lot. I ate a couple cookies and decided things were not cool. I took off.

  Lia: How do you know she called me?

  Elijah: I played cards with Charlie until midnight and decided to go downtown. Cassie saw me walking by and opened the door, crying her eyes out and babbling about Lia being mad at her, Lia won’t answer. I told her to sleep it off. She wouldn’t leave me alone until I wrote down your phone number and promised to give you her message. I got out of there as fast as I could.

  Lia: What did she say?

  Elijah: I told all of this to the cops, you know. They watched the security tapes; it’s a good thing Charlie’s paranoid. I never touched her. I didn’t even take her purse, though I could have. She showed up on the tape a couple hours after I left, staggering around the parking lot and singing to the moon. Then she went back inside.

  Lia: What was the message?

  Elijah: Nothing, really. Remember, she was trashed.

  Lia: Tell me.

  Elijah: She said, “Tell Lia she won. I lost and she won.” That’s the quote. It seemed real important at the time, but now it’s kind of silly, I guess. Did you guys have a bet? What did you win?

  I hang up the phone without saying good-bye.

  I won the wintergirl trip over the border into dangerland.

  048.00

  I turn the music back up to SHATTER and head for the bathroom to brush the phone call and the dust and the sandwich out of my mouth.

  1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.

  20.21.22.23.24.25.26.27.28.29.30.31.32.33.

  I did not win. I can’t believe she said that. Typical Cassie crap, melodramatic and over the top. It’s not my fault she flipped out so easy or her parents never paid attention. It’s not my fault she puked, or that puking was the only thing that made her feel better. she called me.

  I brush until my gums bleed, then I scrub harder. Red Lia juice dribbles down my chin, transforming me into a hungry vampire ready to suck the life out of anyone who pisses me off. Maybe that’s my problem. Maybe I am one of the undead. Vampires are pale, cold, and skinny like me. They secretly hate the taste of blood, hate the way they make people cry, hate graveyards and coffins and the beast that drives them. They will lie about hating it until someone drives a stake through their heart.

  . . . body alone . . .

  I put my mouth under the tap, rinse and spit.

  The scale shows up on the floor, the good one, the one that does not lie. I strip, stand on it, to weigh my faults and measure my sins.

  089.00.

  I could say I’m excited, but that would be a lie. The number doesn’t matter. If I got down to 070.00, I’d want 065.00. If I weighed 010.00, I wouldn’t be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.

  I open up the window and throw the scale into the front yard. Turn on the shower; hot water only, stare into the mirror. The holes in my face are filled with sand and pus. The whites of my eyes are lemonade puddles spilled over with purple shadows lying under them. My nose is hair and snot, my ears are candle wax, my mouth is a sewer. I am locked into the mirror and there is no door out.

  ::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/

  stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

  Nanna Marrigan’s bone-handled knife slides out from under my mattress, slithers into the bathroom, and lies down to the left of the sink, blade facing the glass wall.

  The pills I took an hour ago bang through my veins like metal trash cans blowing down the street. The snakes in my head wake up, slither down my brain stem, and snap at the dozing vultures. The birds flap their nightwings once, twice, three times, and circle high in the air. Their shadows blot out the sun.

  I use my shirt to wipe the steam off the mirror. It’s beading up on my arms, too, pearling on my lanugo fuzz, the little white hairs I’ve started growing to keep me warm.

  Stupid body. What’s the point of growing fur and letting the hair on my head fall out?

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” the stupid body answers.

  “You win,” adds Cassie.

  I win because I’m skinnier. I’m double zero. I stayed strong and didn’t try to have my cake and eat it, too. I didn’t even taste one bite.

  I press my fingertips into my cheekbones. If I rammed my head into a stone wall, I bet I could fracture every bone in my face. The fingers drift over my chin, down my throat, past the butterfly wings of my thyroid, down to where my collarbones hook into my sternum like the wishbone of a bird.

  Emma’s cats are in the hall, scratching at the bottom of the door to get in.

  My hands read a Braille map hewn from bone, starting with my hollow breasts threaded with blue-vein rivers thick with ice. I count my ribs like rosary beads, muttering incantations, fingers curling under the bony cage. They can almost touch what’s hiding inside.

  My skin slopes down over the empty belly, then around the inside sharp curve of my hip bones, bowls carved out of stone and painted with fading pink razor scars. I twist in the glass. My vertebrae are wet marbles piled one on top of the other. My winged shoulder blades look ready to sprout feathers.

  I pick up the knife.

  The tendons on the back of my hand tense, ropes holding down a tent while the wind blows. Thin scars etch the inside of my wrist, widening to the ribbons in the crook of my elbow where I cut too deep in ninth grade.

  I win, I won.

  I’m lost.

  The music from my bedroom shrieks so loud against the mirror it’s making my ears ring. I stare at the ghost-girl on the other side, her corset bones waiting to be laced even tighter so she can fold in on herself over and over until she disappears past zero.

  I cut.

  The first incision runs from my neck to just below my heart, deep enough so that I can finally feel something, not deep enough to flay me open. The pain flows like lava and takes my breath away.

  The knife carves a path in the flesh between two ribs, then, between the two ribs below that. Fat drops of blood splash on the counter, ripe red seeds. I am so very, very strong, so iron-boned and magic that the knife draws a third line between two ribs, straight and true. Blood pools in the bowls of my hips and drips to the tile floor.

  Black holes open in front of my eyes and the wild bird trapped in my heart beats her wings frantically. I’m sweating, finally warm.

  The music sto—

  049.00

  The bathroom door swings open.

  Emma sees the blood painting my skin and the red rivers carved on my body. Emma sees the wet knife, silver and bone.

  The screams of my little sister shatter the mirrors.

  050.00

  The emergency room is filled with fog. Angry shadows fly up and down the walls and the across the ceiling.

  Cassie holds my hand and whispers the numbers. “Your heart was thirty-three beats per minute in the ambulance. Wicked bradycardia. The EKG was weird, probably because of the dehydration and blood loss. You’re breathing okay, but you have the blood pressure and temperature of dirt.”

  I close my eyes.

  When they open, she has lab results.

  “Anemia,” she says. “Plus low blood sugar, low phosphates, low calcium, low T3—don’t know what that means—high white blood cells, low platelets. They sewed you up with black thread, thirty-three stitches, isn’t that weird? Oh, and you have ketones in your pee. Keep this up and we’ll do New Year’s together. Stay strong, sweetie.”

  “Where’s Emma?” I ask.

  A nurse drapes me in necklaces of plastic tubing and green wires, and
decorates the room with plastic bags filled with water and blood. She pricks me with a needle.

  I lie down in a glass-coffin dream where rosebushes climb the walls to weave me a thorny fortress.

  051.00

  Two days later, two days before Christmas, I am judged fat and sane enough to be kicked out of the hospital. The plan to send me straight back to New Seasons won’t work. There is no room at the inn for a leather Lia-skin plumped full of messy things. Not yet. The director promisesDr. Marrigan he’ll have a bed for me next week.

  I’m stable enough to go home until then. They all say I’m stable.

  I failed eating, failed drinking, failed not cutting myself into shreds. Failed friendship. Failed sisterhood and daughterhood. Failed mirrors and scales and phone calls. Good thing I’m stable.

  Dad picks me up at the hospital. He visited every day without Jennifer (making sure he never ran into Mom) and he cried with his head on my mattress, but he hasn’t said much, not even when he helped me get in the car.

  It snowed while I was attached to the tubes. The white fields reflect the sun and make it almost too bright to see. I put down the visor and some girl stares back from the mirror in. Part of my brain—the hydrated, glycogen-fed part—knows that I am looking at me. But the bigger part doubts it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to look like anymore. Even the name on the hospital bracelet seems weird, like the letters are in the wrong order, or part of the name is missing.

  I flip the visor back up and hope Dad didn’t see me wince.

  The doctors tied me back together with twine. I keep forgetting about the stitches until I move too fast and the pain erupts. They pumped me full of sugar water, too, and meals served on plastic trays divided into five rectangles. This brain was on one drug and this body on another; this hand shoved food in my mouth too fast to count the bites. They tied me back together, but they didn’t use double knots. My insides are draining out of the fault lines in my skin, I can feel it, but every time I check the bandages, they’re dry.