The Year I Didn't Eat

by Pollen

  The downside is, when she leaves, they talk to me about her. She’s nice your mum, isn’t she? And so on. The worst was Paul, who was definitely flirting with Mum. They were laughing their heads off about nothing for a good hour. I stared at Mum, trying to get across a Dad-hasn’t-even-moved-all-his-stuff-out-yet vibe. She kept giving me these guilty glances. When she left, Paul said to me, Your mum’s great, you know. What a firecracker. I didn’t even respond to him: I just turned to face the wall. Luckily, Paul only had kidney stones, which meant he was in and out in a day.

  Bye-bye, knobhead.

  When they brought me in, the doctors diagnosed me with acute renal failure. Basically, my kidneys gave up completely. (That snap I heard? I asked Dr. Singh, the kidney specialist, about it. She said, Um, maybe you fell on a twig?) It wasn’t so bad that I needed dialysis: They just put me on an IV drip. I spent the first two days on that, trying not to think about how many calories are in it.

  Now I’m off the drip and on a restricted carbohydrate diet, which basically means lots of toast. Renal failure happens when there’s too much salt and protein in your lungs, so the treatment is basically just to eat toast and porridge and drink water until things calm down. I asked for some peanut butter on my toast, and they told me it had too much protein in it. That’s right: I actually asked for extra food, without anyone telling me I had to. And they said no.

  They let me have jam instead, though.

  For the first time in a whole year, I don’t feel hungry. I just feel … normal, I guess. Except it’s not at all normal to me. It’s like when you’re used to wearing a watch, and then you forget it one day and your wrist feels weird. You get used to stuff and only really notice when something changes.

  I’m allowed to get up and walk around the ward, as long as there’s someone with me, and I have enough energy to do it. I’m getting better. I can now concentrate on one thing long enough to read a book or have a conversation. Yesterday Dr. Singh said she thinks I could be out in a couple of days. I can probably go back to school next week. Lindsay and the nutritionist are coming to the ward later today, to help me figure out a plan. Which is, like, GULP.

  It’s easy enough to go along with everything while I’m in the hospital. I follow the rules; I don’t really have a choice. Also, there are no mirrors, which definitely helps. But when I’m back at home, and have to make it work all by myself, and forget all the habits and tricks I’ve come up with over the past year … I don’t know how I’ll cope. But I don’t exactly have a choice.

  Either I learn how to eat, or I die.

  “Hey, little bro.”

  As usual, I do my best to ignore him. I’m reading a book about Walter Rothschild, who’s one of the most famous zoologists ever. It’s pretty interesting. Once, he rode a zebra-drawn carriage to Buckingham Palace, to prove that zebras can be tamed.

  “I brought you a present,” Robin says cheerily, as if I’ve acknowledged him in some way already.

  I make him wait another ten seconds, just because, then turn around. “Hi,” I say. “Um, thanks for coming.”

  The light’s starting to fade. I’m guessing it’s like 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. Mum left at noon. She told me, I need to pop into work for a bit, but I’ll be back this evening. And your dad’s coming first thing tomorrow. My plan to be less of a burden on my family isn’t going so well.

  Robin shrugs and raises the coffee cup in his hand. “As you know, I’m mainly here for Suzanne.”

  “The girl in the coffee shop?” Robin talked about her last time he was here. In fact, he talked about little else.

  “The very same.”

  “You know her name now,” I say. “That’s a start.”

  Robin puts a hand to his chest and closes his eyes. “Suzanne and I are taking things slowly. We don’t want to rush into anything.”

  “Clearly,” I say. “Anyway, what happened to Ffion?”

  Robin bites his lip. “She, um, wanted to rush into something.”

  I frown. “So, what’s my present?”

  Robin gives the guy in the bed next to me a sideways glance. There are six beds in my room, and five of them are occupied right now, including mine. I realize that everyone is looking at Robin, curious to find out what he’s brought me. He doesn’t seem to be carrying anything.

  “Er,” he says. “Fancy a walk?”

  Robin doesn’t want to go to the café where Suzanne works. He says he doesn’t want to seem too keen.

  “It’s probably a bit late for that,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t respond. We walk the corridors in silence for a while.

  “The day you came here …,” Robin says eventually. But he immediately peters out.

  It was Robin who found me. It was the first thing Mum told me when I woke up. We said you were missing, and he ran right off. Goodness knows how he knew where you were. That’s how I knew Robin hadn’t said anything about the cache. He hasn’t mentioned it to me so far, either. All he said about finding me was, You’ve got to stop passing out on me, little bro. I know you’re skinny, but carrying you around is a pain.

  “After we put you in an ambulance, I went back to find your cache.”

  For some reason, my throat goes dry, like someone’s asked me to give a speech in front of a thousand people or told me they’ve got naked pictures of me that they’re going to post on the Internet. I’m not sure why I’m nervous—after all, it was Robin who got me into the whole thing. And it’s not like any of my diary entries were still in there. It had been empty for weeks.

  “How come?” I croak.

  “I figured that’s where you were headed. And since you hadn’t exactly been out and about much lately, I figured there might have been, y’know, a good reason.”

  I take a second to respond. “Yeah,” I say. I’m looking at the floor, which is polished so bright I can almost see my face in it. Am I imagining it or do my cheeks look rounder? To be fair, compared to how I looked a week ago, even a supermodel would look like a guinea pig.

  Or maybe that’s just what I want to tell myself.

  “Well, someone left you a note.”

  Robin holds his arm out. I go to take the thing he’s holding and notice my hand is shaking. It’s—guess what?—a blue note, folded up inside a little plastic bag, one of the ones you pinch at the top to make it airtight. And watertight. Does that mean she knows my cache got soaked, and I never got her last note? Does it mean she knew I wouldn’t be able to get back there anytime soon?

  Robin clears his throat and shifts his weight between his feet. “Is everything all right, Max?”

  Robin doesn’t usually call me by my actual name. I stare at him in a has-my-brother-gone-loopy way. “Um … you know we’re in a hospital, right?”

  He grins, but it almost looks like a grimace because he’s frowning, too. Something’s obviously on his mind. “No, I mean … with the cache. No one’s bothering you or anything?”

  He thinks I’m being bullied. He’s upset and nervous because he thinks the cache is making me like this, making things worse, and it’s all his fault.

  “Nope,” I say. “No one’s bullying me.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I promise.”

  Lindsay says she is delighted with my progress. The nutritionist, Dr. Siskin, who isn’t my usual nutritionist, agrees. The renal specialist, Dr. Singh, is here, too. The three musketeers. I feel pretty embarrassed that I’m taking up three doctors’ time. We’re in a consulting room off the main corridor of my ward. It’s tiny: If I lie down on the floor, I’d touch both walls, like in Robin’s flat. And I’m boxed in on three sides by people wearing white coats. It’s pretty stressful.

  Lindsay weighed me before we came in here. She wouldn’t let me see the scales: She says we really need to focus on getting my weight up now, and she understands how difficult it is, yada yada. Given how happy she and Dr. Siskin are, it’s not exactly rocket science: I’ve put on loads of weight.

  I don’t mind, though. Or a
t least, I don’t mind as much as I would have a week or a month or even six months ago.

  Anorexia kills. It’s the first thing you find if you google it: Anorexia is the most deadly mental health problem in the world, bar none. And kidney failure is the biggest cause of death. You still never think it’s going to happen to you, though. Even when it’s really bad, and you really want it to. When you’re desperate for all of the pain to end. It’s weird. You simultaneously think, I’m never ever going to get better and I can’t cope with another day of this and I’m never going to be one of the ones who actually DIES. I swear, anorexia is mostly about finding a way to hold five thoughts that all contradict one another together in your head. I got really good at it. But near killing myself has changed things. A bit. So I’m trying my best to go along with the whole don’t-tell-Max-how-much-he-weighs routine.

  “So what happens next?” I ask.

  Lindsay looks at Dr. Siskin, who nods.

  “Well, Max, that’s sort of up to you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re here to help you get better. Now, some people with anorexia prefer to do that while living with their families. But I know things with your family are tough at the moment.”

  I almost reply, Only because of me, but I stop myself, because I know it would make me sound even more selfish, even though I don’t mean it like that. La-la-la, it’s all about me!

  “What else can I do?”

  “Everyone’s recovery is different,” Lindsay says. And some people don’t recover at all, I think. I know why she does it, but it annoys me how Lindsay doesn’t even acknowledge the alternative. It makes me feel like a child. “Some people find the best environment for them to recover in is … away from their home.”

  “A residential treatment facility,” says Dr. Siskin.

  “Like a hospital?”

  “It’s much more relaxed than a hospital,” Lindsay says. She smiles. “More like a youth hostel.”

  Yeah, right, I think. “How long would I be there for?”

  “It depends how you get on,” Lindsay says. “We’ll do an assessment every week. It could be a couple of weeks. It could be a little longer.”

  That means months. Or years.

  “What do you think I should do?” I ask her.

  I can see Lindsay biting her lip. She doesn’t want to give me an answer. I turn to the others, to see if they will. But they all look at me with these dumb, patronizing grins. Professional grins that don’t give you a clue what they’re thinking.

  I’ve spent the past year obsessing about being in control of everything. And over the past few days, I’ve had to give up some of that control. And it’s felt … good. Better than it did before.

  And now they’re asking me to make a decision that could kill me, or save my life. I feel like screaming at them. I don’t want to be in control of this. Just tell me what to do.

  Please, just tell me what to do.

  27

  Last Christmas, I thought that was the hardest it could get. I was wrong. Today is harder. It’s like climbing a mountain, and thinking you’ve nearly reached the top, then seeing the summit curve slowly away from you. There’s still miles to go.

  I weighed myself this morning. I couldn’t help it. Mum and Dad hid the scales months ago, but I know where they are: in the airing cupboard, under the beach towels. I grabbed them and rushed into the bathroom before I could change my mind.

  I’ve put on three pounds since we went on holiday.

  At first, I was horrified. My stomach did a few somersaults, and I started wondering whether, if I tried to throw up, I could get rid of any of last night’s dinner. I’m disgusting. No girl will ever like me. My parents must be so ashamed of me.

  But I was prepared. I was ready to deal with this situation. This is a good thing, this is a good thing, I told myself over and over, doing my best to drown out the bad thoughts.

  Now, I’m standing in front of the mirror, naked. And I can see things I’ve never seen before.

  Fun fact: Anorexia literally changes the way you see things. There’s this study they did, where they asked anorexics to judge the size of their bodies in the mirror. I’m not sure where I read about it. Anyway, it turns out that it’s not just about wanting to be thin. We—by which I mean, anorexics—literally can’t see how thin we are. When I take my clothes off and stand in front of the mirror, I see a different naked body from the one you’d see, if you were standing there, too. The limbs look thicker. The ribs don’t stick out as much. Sometimes, even your own eyes lie to you.

  Two weeks ago, when I looked in the mirror, all I saw was the curve of my belly. I’d pinch my skin and pull it away from my arm and think, There must be fat under there. As if having skin is proof that you’re fat. But now it’s different. I lean in close to look at my face, and I can see the shadows under my eyes where the flesh in my cheeks has melted away. I never noticed them before. When I step back, I see how far my ribs jut out now, like the bars on a xylophone, casting zebra shadows across my body. I see the veins like rivers on my hands and forearms, and think to myself, Oh my God, I look like a piece of blue cheese.

  Okay, so it’s not exactly news that I’m thin. I’ve known I’m thin all year. It’s pretty obvious when the slightest breeze takes the warmth out of your body in seconds, or when you can’t sit on a bench because it hurts your ass too much. But now I feel thin. Even though I’ve put on two pounds in a week. Even though Ana is telling me I’m a zeppelin. Now I know she’s talking bollocks.

  I stand in front of the mirror and say it out loud. To myself, to Ana, to the skeleton staring back at me. “Max, you’re skinny.”

  I think for a second, then I add, “And today will be different.”

  Ram and Evie aren’t in my homeroom, but Stu is. I arrive before him and sit at a desk in the corner, as far away from everyone else as possible. No one says anything to me, although when Shinji walks in, he does that thing where he just tuts and rolls his eyes, like, Insulting you really isn’t worth my time, sorry, which makes me feel super-great.

  Lindsay and I have come up with three rules for me to follow. Rule One is, if I’m having a bad day, I go straight to Miss Madeley, the school nurse. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pounds. She’s even given me her mobile number. I’ve known Miss Madeley since first year, when Stu wiped out playing football, and she came with us to the hospital. She’s pretty nice.

  Rule Two is, stick to the menu. Lindsay says it’s important that I learn to manage my own eating—but for now, she wants to make sure I settle in smoothly. So she’s literally written me a meal-by-meal menu, like she did for Christmas last year. (I’ve really moved on in the past ten months, hey?) Only this time, there’s way more food for me to eat, and a strict schedule to stick to: 11 a.m.—one Go Ahead! Yoghurt Break; one banana. 1 p.m.—one ham sandwich (two slices of bread, one slice of ham, spread); one Mars bar (or equivalent chocolate bar); one apple. It’s a scary amount of food. But on the other hand, it’s kind of nice not to have to think about it.

  Because I’m an idiot, I’ve sat around the corner from the door, and Stu doesn’t see me when he comes in. He’s with a load of people from football. I guess they had practice this morning. He sits down with them at the front. I can feel my cheeks burning red-hot, as if I’d dropped my pants in front of the whole class. It’s not like I’ve actually done anything embarrassing. Except for Shinji, no one’s even noticed I’m there. But I feel like the biggest loser in the whole world. Like some desperate puppy, waiting for Stu to notice me.

  I count to ten under my breath. This is Rule Three, count to ten. Lindsay says that if you can deal with something for ten seconds, nothing can touch you. Because once you get to the end of the ten seconds, you can always add another ten and another ten and so on. The whole of human history can be broken down into ten-second chunks. You’re only ten seconds away from Darwin or the pharaohs or dinosaurs. I’m not that sure about Rule Three, mainly because it involves
more counting, and obsessive counting hasn’t exactly gone well for me recently. But I have to admit, once my ten seconds are up, I feel a bit less like jumping out of the window.

  I still don’t have the nerve to go up to Stu’s group, though. At the end of attendance, I slink out hoping no one will notice me.

  God, am I a loser or what?

  Things don’t get any better after registration. I look at my schedule, and realize my first double-period is PE. I’ve got all psyched up about finally facing everyone—but instead, I’ll be spending the next hour and a half sitting quietly in Mrs. Braithwait’s office.

  This was actually my idea. I figured that, sooner or later, someone was going to find out about the whole running-during-PE thing. And if I just had to stand around while everyone else did PE … I mean, I may as well have the word FREAK tattooed on my forehead. I asked if I could go somewhere and do homework during PE lessons instead. I didn’t know that that somewhere would be five feet away from the assistant principal.

  I knock on Mrs. Braithwait’s door at 9:01, and she says, “Enter,” in this deep, booming voice, like the Wizard of Oz. Mrs. Braithwait is kind of old-school. She wears these bonkers tartan twin sets, and her hair looks like one giant Lego. It never moves. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her smile, either. When you first meet her, she kind of seems like the schoolmistress in some Victorian novel. You can imagine her rapping orphans on their wrists with a ruler. I remember saying this when I came home from my first day at Deanwater. Robin told me I’d got her all wrong. Okay, she doesn’t smile much, he said. But she’s always got your back. Trust me, Mrs. Braithwait is the coolest. I never asked him what she did to get in his good books.

  “Max,” she says when I open the door. Not Hi, Max or Oh, look, it’s Max. Just Max, a simple statement of fact. If a tiger had walked in, I’m pretty sure she would have just said, Tiger.

  “Hello, miss,” I say.