The Year I Didn't Eat

by Pollen

  “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “You’re apologizing for me insulting you?” he says.

  I don’t say anything.

  Shinji spits on the ground. “Pathetic.”

  Shinji is Darren’s best friend. He’s pretty much the opposite of Darren physically: He’s sort of like a younger, more muscular version of Mr. Stott. His legs are the size of tree trunks. In Stu’s opinion, Shinji’s not actually any good at rugby, but he’s so strong he makes the first team anyway.

  After the drill, Mr. Stott calls us over to work out teams for the game. One thing I like about him is that he doesn’t let people pick their own teams. Instead, he divides everyone up himself, so people like me don’t have to go through the humiliation of being picked last, week after week.

  We head slowly toward him, chatting and joking and messing around, until he booms, “Hurry up!” at which point we run. When we arrive, he looks at us and shakes his head. “That took far too long. Everyone sprint to the posts and back. Except you, Mr. Howarth.”

  I gulp.

  The rest of my class run off down the rest of the field while I shuffle toward Mr. Stott like a shy zombie. I can already feel my hands getting clammy.

  He looks me up and down. “No contact, is that right?”

  I look down at the grass. “Yes, sir.”

  I’m expecting him to call me a sissy or something. Or maybe he’ll just plain refuse my parent’s request and give me a speech about how I’ve got to toughen up.

  But instead, he puts a hand on my shoulder. “Everything all right?”

  “Uh … yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “You happy to run while we play? You’ll freeze to death otherwise.”

  I look at him in disbelief. This is a bit like someone asking a pig whether, instead of being made into sausages, they’d like to play in mud for a while. “Yes, sir.”

  “Off you go, then. Stick to the normal crosscountry route.”

  I guess Mr. Stott didn’t get the memo about me running on my own. I’m not going to correct him.

  I spend the rest of the lesson running. I do three loops of the whole school: along the little stream at the far edge of the fields, around the music building, through the woods where we do pond dipping for biology sometimes. It’s the best PE lesson I’ve had in months.

  Stu comes over to me as we go back inside. “What was that all about? Stott told us you’re on some special training program.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. He made it sound like you’re running for the county or something.”

  I shrug. “Who can say?”

  Maybe Mr. Stott isn’t so bad after all.

  January 7

  Dear Ana,

  I have about a million questions floating around in my head. But the biggest one is, why?

  Why me? Why now? Why not last year or next year?

  If you break your leg, it’s because you fell off your bike. If you get pneumonia, it’s because you inhaled some pneumococcal bacteria. But figuring out why you decided to climb into my head isn’t so easy.

  Maybe it doesn’t matter. You’re here. It’s happened. Some angry god grabbed a bolt of lightning and tossed it to earth, and it happened to hit me.

  But that can’t be right, can it? There’s got to be a reason. And I really, really, really want to know what it is.

  Near our house there’s this big National Trust property called Ashford Park. We used to go every year or two when me and Robin were younger. In front of the main house, there’s this giant hedge maze, which is pretty much the main reason anyone goes. The first time I went in on my own—I must have been, like, seven—it took me as long to get back out as it did to get to the center, because I didn’t memorize the route as I went. But the next year, I’d figured out it was probably a good idea to think about what I was doing, so I could retrace my steps.

  If you know how you got somewhere, you know how to get out, right? Why should anorexia be any different?

  The only problem? I have NO IDEA how I got here. I don’t have a single clue how you managed to climb into my head. Which means I’m totally lost.

  5

  Mum comes home super-pissed. She’s spitting feathers again is how Dad puts it, once Mum’s out of earshot. Apparently, the other partners have scheduled a get-together for the night of the school management committee meeting without telling her. This kind of stuff happens a lot. Mum’s the only female partner at her firm, and a lot of them like to make her life difficult. Dad pours her a very large glass of wine.

  Dad’s cooking dinner tonight. During the week, he does most of the cooking because he always gets home hours before Mum does. We’re having chicken Kiev, boiled potatoes—which I’ll skip—and peas. It may not sound like an anorexic’s ideal meal, but from a counting perspective, it’s easy.

  I love things that come in a box with calorie numbers on the back.

  In the meantime, I do my chemistry homework. And because the universe hates me, it’s all about calories. A calorie (symbol: cal) is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1 g of water by 1°C at a pressure of 1 atmosphere, my textbook tells me. A kilocalorie (symbol: kcal or Cal), also known as a food calorie, is the energy required to raise the temperature of 1kg of water by 1°C at a pressure of 1 atmosphere. When people talk about the number of “calories” in food, they’re almost always talking about kilocalories.

  I already know this bit. When I first learned what a (food) calorie was, it blew my mind. Anything that can be divided by a thousand must be pretty big, right? I started getting annoyed by the missing kilo whenever people talked about calories on TV. Like they were lying to me, trying to make me fat.

  But there’s something else that’s bugging me. I go into the kitchen to find Dad.

  “How was your day?” Dad says, before I can say anything. He’s standing over the stove, fiddling with the heat on the potatoes.

  “Okay.”

  He turns around and looks hard at me. My parents give me a lot of these kinds of looks now. I’m-asking-a-serious-question-and-I-want-you-to-take-it-seriously looks. “PE is going okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. I don’t say, PE is now the best part of my week because I get to go running on my own.

  “Good. Do you want to weigh the peas?”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll weigh mine after they’re cooked.”

  “Fair enough,” he says.

  “Dad, are the—”

  “Oh, bugger,” Dad says, swiveling back to the stove. The potatoes are boiling over, there’s a shallow pool of starchy water around the burners. Dad picks up the pan, pours a little water out in the sink, and turns the heat down. “That’s better,” he says. “Don’t cry over spilt milk and all that. You got homework to do?”

  “Yep,” I say. “I’ve got a question.”

  My dad never gets upset about anything. (Well except, like, recycling.) I’d say he was pretty relaxed about the potatoes, but he would’ve been the same even if the water had spilled over his shoes, too. Or if I told him I wasn’t doing homework anymore and was giving up school to join the circus.

  “Shoot,” he says, pointing at me with what can only be described as finger guns.

  I cringe. “Um, anyway … Calories measure the energy it takes to heat up water, right?”

  “So I’m told,” he says, going over to the freezer to look for peas. “Though before we go any further, I’d like to point out that I last studied chemistry when John Major was prime minister.”

  “Yeah. But you know everything,” I tell him. “Does that mean, if you heat up a meal, it’s more calorific?”

  Dad opens the freezer, fishes around for the peas. He pulls them out, turns to me, and frowns. “Humans can’t absorb heat energy, Max.”

  “No, but we’re endotherms, right? We use energy heating up our bodies.”

  He raises one eyebrow. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “So if I eat something hot, I have to use less energy keeping myself warm.
”

  “Maybe, but it’s a tiny amount of energy.”

  “Is it?”

  “Well, let’s see.” One of the things I like about my dad is that he doesn’t treat me like a kid. We can have normal, adult conversations. He puts the peas down on the side and picks up his mug. “Say you have a cup of tea, two hundred fifty milliliters, give or take. It’s, what, eighty degrees Celsius when you drink it? That’s sixty above room temperature. So you’ve added sixty times two hundred fifty calories. What does that work out as?”

  I think for a minute. “Fifteen thousand.”

  “And that’s calories. So fifteen kilocalories.”

  At least Dad appreciates the difference. “Yes,” I say.

  “That’s assuming you drink it all in one go, when it’s at eighty degrees. I reckon ten calories is probably more realistic.”

  “Probably,” I agree.

  “That’s less than one percent of your daily calories. And the body generates lots of excess heat anyway. I doubt it makes any measurable difference at all, come to think of it.”

  “Okay.”

  Dad puts a hand on my shoulder. The hand of doubt. “Max, this isn’t going to become a thing, is it?”

  I flinch slightly. I try not to, but I can’t help it. “No,” I tell him.

  He nods slowly. “Glad to hear it.” He doesn’t exactly look convinced.

  I can’t stop thinking about it. Not the tea bit, because I don’t really drink tea anyway. Not even the hot food bit, because I figure, like Dad says, unless you’re outside on a freezing day, it probably doesn’t make much difference. But say you drank a liter of ice-cold water when you were already cold. Your body would have to work extra hard to heat you back up, wouldn’t it? You could cheat yourself into burning calories faster.

  Robin steps through the door just as Dad is dishing out. Good timing. As soon as we sit down, he starts telling us about his day. Robin’s now eight months into his apprenticeship, and he’s starting to learn what he calls the good stuff. Today, apparently, was all about the different types of dovetail joints.

  “I’m not sure I knew there were different types of dovetail joints,” says Dad.

  I’m thinking, I’m not sure I care.

  “Oh yeah,” says Robin, “There are loads.” He leaps up, goes over to the sideboard, and picks up a pencil and paper. “You’ve got your basic dovetail, like this”—he starts sketching—“which you’d use for an ordinary drawer. But if you don’t want people to see the end grain, you can do this …”

  I look across at Mum. She seems really quiet tonight. Like, more so than normal. Maybe she’s still cross about the meeting, but she normally gets over stuff like that pretty quickly. After all, she’s kind of used to it. This feels different. Right now, she’s staring into space, and occasionally eating a forkful of something. Okay, so I’m not exactly in a position to criticize other people’s eating habits. But it’s like she doesn’t even care. I can’t even get my head around anyone not caring about the food in front of them.

  After sketching five different types of dovetail joints, Robin puts down his pencil, satisfied, and resumes shoveling food into his mouth. “How was your day, anyway?” he says to Dad, through a mouthful of boiled potatoes.

  “I was scouting sites for the new recycling center,” Dad says. “It was a barrel of laughs, as always.”

  Dad has been scouting sites for the new recycling center for three years. About a year ago, he thought he’d found the perfect place, out near the bypass. But the rich families who live in Woodgrove Park—half a mile away—kicked up a fuss.

  “That other site was perfect,” says Robin. “Great access, isolated, no environmental issues. Those posh idiots.”

  “Robin,” Dad says in a warning tone. “I wouldn’t want it near my house, either. It’s easy to criticize.”

  As well as never ever getting cross, Dad is annoyingly reasonable. In my experience, most people are hypocrites about at least one thing. For example, Robin lectures us all about forest conservation, but also eats beef, which is the biggest cause of deforestation worldwide. Stu freaks out about spoilers but will happily tell us the plot of a book he’s read without asking.

  But Dad isn’t like that. Even if you do catch him doing something hypocritical, he won’t get defensive about it. He’ll say, “Good point,” and change his behavior. Once, when I was eleven and a total smartass, I told him that it wasn’t fair for him to get at us for leaving lights on as he always leaves his phone charger plugged in. He’s turned it off at the wall ever since.

  You may think this is a good quality in a dad, but I disagree. It’s like living with a monk or the pope or Barack Obama. There’s nothing you can really complain about, and you just end up feeling guilty the whole time.

  “Max, have you sorted your you-know-what yet?” Robin asks me.

  I shake my head. “No. But I’ve decided where it’s going. I’m going to put it up on Saturday.”

  “What’s all this?” Dad cocks an eyebrow.

  “Nothing you need to worry about,” says Robin.

  “Fair enough,” Dad says.

  See? He takes whatever you say at face value. I’m sure parents aren’t supposed to be like that.

  “Right, who wants dessert?”

  Robin nods. I shake my head. And Mum doesn’t even respond.

  January 10

  Dear Ana,

  According to, like, every single website I’ve looked at, I shouldn’t even call myself an “anorexic.” Instead, I’m supposed to say that I’m a “person with anorexia,” because I’m still a person. Having you inside my head doesn’t stop me from being me.

  I guess I agree with that—but the whole argument seems kind of dumb to me. If I call Dad a county council worker, I’m not saying he’s not also my dad and a man and a member of Bolford Choir. My opinion is, right now, I kind of have bigger fish to fry. So to speak.

  Plus, even if I wanted to stop thinking about myself as an anorexic, I’m not sure you’d let me, would you?

  “No one wants to hang out with an anorexic.”

  “Proper anorexics can make themselves sick, you know.”

  “Who cares what some sad little anorexic thinks?”

  When I’ve got you in my ear 24/7 saying stuff like that, I don’t exactly have much choice.

  I finally chose a spot for my cache. I’m actually pretty proud of it. According to Robin, a good cache is one that’s “hidden in plain sight.” It’s not much fun if your cache is in some random place, like in one of a hundred identical fence posts, or if people have to wade through a tunnel to get to it.

  So, want to guess where I’m putting mine?

  There’s this massive oak tree on the west side of the Common. It’s amazing. Dad told me once that he reckons it’s over 250 years old. It’s got these huge branches that spread out in every direction, kind of like if you peel string cheese right down to the bottom. Some of them are only a few inches off the ground, which means it’s pretty awesome for climbing, and I reckon it would be a pretty awesome place to hide a cache, too. If you climb up three branches, there’s this little hollow in the trunk from where they cut off a branch or something and you can’t see it from the ground.

  Perfect, right?

  I tried to put it there today, but it didn’t go well. I had Sultan with me, and when you have Sultan with you, people always want to stop and talk. This woman who works with Dad basically gave my goofy mutt a full body massage while I just stood there, answering her dumb questions.

  “How’s school?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Oh, you like that, don’t you, Sultan? Yes, you do!”

  By the time she finished, it was too dark to go into the woods.

  But it’s okay: I can do it tomorrow instead. It turns out, when you don’t hang out with anyone—or, you know, eat—you end up with a lot of spare time.

  6

  I’m bored out of my mind.

  Generally, I really like biol
ogy, even if the human bits make me, um, faint. Sometimes. Occasionally. (Apparently, being an anorexic isn’t enough: Max Howarth has a whole separate, extra way to make himself a social outcast. Whenever someone starts talking about anatomy or disease or bodily functions, all my blood goes to my feet, and I collapse. Trust me, it makes me seem super-cool.) But I like nonhuman biology. I want to do a zoology degree, then become an ornithologist.

  I just have to, you know, make sure I survive that long.

  Today is a review class, which is easily the most annoying thing ever. For example, Mr. Edwards, our teacher, has just told Gopal that his answer to a question about enzymes wasn’t right, because he said they get deformed at high temperatures, not denatured. His exact words were, “That’s correct, but you need to say it differently to get the marks.”

  That’s why I’m bored out of my mind.

  I’m doodling in my notebook, but I don’t even realize I’m doodling until Ram leans over and says, “Hey, that’s pretty good.”

  I instinctively cover the page, like he caught me looking at porn or something, and scowl at Ram. He looks surprised, which I guess isn’t surprising. It’s not like he was actually doing anything unreasonable. My face drops, and my cheeks start to burn.

  I move my hand to inspect my drawing. It’s the oak tree on the Common. Swirls of ballpoint twist out from the trunk. Now that I look at it, it’s kind of creepy, like a tree in a horror movie.

  I want to say sorry to Ram but I don’t know how, so I carry on doodling. I start filling in the hollow halfway up the trunk. I scribble over and over, until the page is saturated with ink and starts to tear. It’s kind of therapeutic.

  I still haven’t come up with a good clue, and it’s starting to bug me.

  “Sorry,” Ram murmurs.

  Wait a second. He’s apologizing to me because I lost my temper with him over nothing? It makes me feel about ten times worse than I already did.