And,
—I smoked a cigarette, you know.
All of it speculation and lies. How is it different from the exchanges I have with other girls today?
• • •
Too soon, we turned thirteen. I stayed squat, but her impish body lengthened into something sinuous and wanted. Men watched her. I watched them watch her. She gave me the bras she outgrew, and I would try them on at home, in awe of how much space I had to fill. Her pelvis widened, a plane of skin stretched over hip bone.
We both began to dress with precision.
The landscapers at her house would stop their pruning when we went outside and mounted our bikes.
—They want you, I said once. She glowered.
—They can’t want me. I hate my chin.
She never realized the two statements were unrelated.
—Your chin is cool, I said. It gives you character.
She snorted.
—Character is just another word for something nobody wants.
—I’m all character, I said.
She didn’t disagree.
• • •
Was it that summer, or later when we started smoking pot? The chronology skews here. But when she met Finn, he brought it with him. The three of us would go behind the garden shed, two bowls packed, and up until the first hit I would resent his very existence. He probably felt the same way about me. Then the ooze of the stuff would sink in, like an egg cracking and running over my skull, and I would suddenly see how transient he would be in our life. After Finn came Bruce, with his ingrown chest hairs and the possessive gesture he would make with his fingers curled around her wrist like kudzu vine. Then Si, with his dark skin and stringy calves; then Trent with his lisp and his tin of salvia; and then Glen, who stayed for years, large-eyed and small-scale cruel.
He put a June bug under a jam jar with the end of a burning blunt and watched it suffocate.
When his mother got drunk and cried at Christmas dinner, he filmed it.
And then there was the night when we were all tripping and he drew his hand back and hit her, slow motion, and together they laughed until I had to leave the room and steady the ringing in my ears by lying in the yard and letting the grass tickle my palms, my cheeks, the wobbling core of my stomach.
They were perfect for each other.
• • •
Our sophomore year of high school, I stood on her mother’s bathroom scale while she sat on the toilet seat, her hair wrapped in a shower cap. The smell of dye seeped through the air.
—I can’t get rid of my thighs, I said.
I waited for her to say, So what, they give you character.
—Well, if you didn’t eat so much cereal . . . she said.
I cut out cereal altogether. Her face, her thinness, the watching landscapers, the parade of boyfriends: all of them leered at me when I stared at the pantry door. I leered back. My body wanted. But something within me sustained itself on pride alone. The satisfaction of resistance was intoxicating. So I became a vegan.
—Why a vegan? my mother asked, suspicious. She must have remembered—though it’s hard for me to fathom this—she must have remembered being young and female and measured, always measured. She must have remembered the want.
—It’s an ethical decision, I said.
—Jesus, she said. If it’s ethical does this mean you won’t wear those hideous lambskin boots anymore?
My eyes clipped over her. All I saw was her age, her weight. I saw her wrinkles, and the fat on her arms that swung when she hit a golf ball or put away a dinner plate. I didn’t see the story her body told.
• • •
The first three, five, eight pounds are hard. Then, there is a plummet.
In a season’s time, my knees began to bruise against one another when I slept. There was an inlet of nothing between my ribs. My belly button deflated until I could feel my pulse thrum behind it when I lay flat on the bed. The hairs on my arms thickened into a downiness. I could see the tendons crisscross on my forearms.
Nobody said,
—Wow, this is moving a little fast.
Instead I heard,
—You look fabulous!
And,
—What’s your secret?
And,
—I see you’ve lost that baby fat!
And Shannon, skinny Shannon, desired Shannon, said,
—Eat a fucking bagel already.
I knew she was jealous, and it thrilled me. It wasn’t long before we were dieting together.
• • •
Only when we were high, really high, would we binge on whatever we could find in her parents’ refrigerator. Pizza rolls. Leftover vichyssoise. Goat cheese and saltines. Buttered popcorn. Raw hot dogs. Our first binge was an ice cream raid. Mouthful after mouthful of Cherry Garcia until I could feel my frontal lobe crushed into a deep freeze, so high it was hard for me to focus on the nutrition facts, and when I did, something deep within me rioted. I told her that I’d left my purse somewhere, then wandered down the hall to the bathroom farthest from the locus of her kitchen.
When I finished, I rinsed my mouth under the tap and leaned against the sink and shook. Something hideous stared back at me in the mirror. But I felt victory flood my stomach. I had rid myself of the ice cream but it lingered in her, clung to her, ugly, cloying gluttony.
Until, of course, I returned to the kitchen and found that she had locked herself in her parents’ bathroom as well.
She emerged smirking.
I wanted to hate her.
Instead, we watched MTV together, sprawled out on her living room floor, and I fell asleep with my head on her heel.
• • •
My mother was getting anxious.
She took the laxatives out of the bathroom.
She started making me oatmeal at breakfast and leaving a multivitamin on top of the napkin, next to the fork.
She would say things, infuriating, insincere things, such as, You know you’re perfect just the way you are, right?
Or sometimes she would flail about, searching for a mother-daughter bonding experience.
—I know how much seeing Shannon means to you but how about you and I order sushi and see a movie tonight?
Her anxiety skirted the line of bearable until I found the self-help book on raising difficult teenage daughters in her bedroom when I was looking for hidden cigarettes. The subtitle: How to Reach the Young and Aching Heart. I was revolted. By the time she got home from work, I was so dizzyingly livid that every eloquent argument about her betrayal had spun away from me.
I had planned to say, I find your neuroticism rather destructive, Mother. But my young and aching heart got the best of me. When she walked through the door with her hair in a windswept swirl, her face lined and appallingly vulnerable, I felt myself surge, and all I could say was, Fuck you. The shock in her face deep enough to split into her womb.
—Fuck you, I said again, and ran, and in the driveway I yelled it one more time—Fuck you!—and the neighbor’s dog started braying.
It took me five minutes to get to Shannon’s now. Any faster and I’d get dizzy. She wasn’t on the back porch, and the light was out in her bedroom. In other circumstances I would have left to avoid interacting with her parents, but the situation was desperate.
Her father answered the door. He had the look of a retired news anchor. Always wore loafers. Always smelled like Altoids.
—I thought Shannie was with you, he said.
—I was supposed to meet her somewhere but I forgot where, I said. Lame.
—Well, she said you were going to the beach, he said. Don’t stay out too late.
He shut the door before I turned away.
• • •
By the time I got to the beach it was dark and I had to fumble my way up the steps. I found her on the sand with Glen. Under Glen. Everything tinted in lunar blue: her legs stretched out in the sand, her torso pinned and shadowed beneath him, his absurdly exposed ass. I
froze, then stumbled away to the dock, sat with my back to them, waiting. The Milky Way cut a stripe above me. The sky had a summer vault to it and the air was warm, but occasionally a billow of cool air would drop on me, like snow. Glen grunted in the distance and then I heard her laugh carry over the dunes. I stood up so they could find me.
She grabbed my hand as if we were still children. Her palm was sandy and warm.
—Hey, Glen said, I got something for us to try.
He took a plastic bag of leaves out of his pocket.
—I’m not in the mood for weed tonight, I said.
—Good. This isn’t weed.
Shannon giggled. I wanted to hit her.
—This, he said, is a little something called Datura.
—Never heard of it, I said.
—Glen says it’s like salvia, only with more hallucinations.
—I don’t feel like tripping tonight, I said.
The whites of her eyes flicked to Glen in the dark. I told you, she said. I told you she wouldn’t be into it.
I plunged my hand into the Baggie.
—Do we smoke it or do we eat it? I said.
We ate it. It wasn’t like pot at all.
Glen’s face was crawling with ants, tiny winged ants, all of them traveling through the tunnels of his nose, his ears, his tear ducts, searching for food. I went to brush them off and they disappeared.
—Stop it, they’re just ants, man, he said. And when he laughed more of them poured out of the corners of his mouth.
—You’ve got them, too, he said.
The waves broke in the hazy dark and I was suddenly aware of their potential. The enormity of them unspooled me until I was too tangled to slow my heart. Surges were breaking over me, again and again, and every time I came out of one I pulled in my breath just in time to go under once more. And then they were gone.
—Where’s Shannon? I asked.
He shrugged. Even in the dark, I could see the endless expansion of his pupils. I ran from him. I thought I could feel every individual grain of sand clinging to my feet.
And then it was daylight and I’d found her. She was at the water’s edge, building a drizzle castle. I watched her. She was a child again, all rayon and eyes, plunging her fat arm into the bucket and pulling up doughy wet sand, letting it drip out of her fingers into turrets and mortared walls.
When she turned to face me, I was a child, too. The straps of my one-piece cut into my chubby shoulders, and my bangs sprang over my eyes.
—I’m so thirsty, she said. Her voice plaintive. I felt her thirst until it became my own.
—I’ll get us water, I said.
I took the bucket from her. The ocean dragged up my shins, then my knees. I walked farther, was struck by a wave, and the bucket filled with water on its own accord, but it wasn’t enough, could never be enough, and I couldn’t tolerate another minute of this unbearable thirst, and I plunged my face into the water, tasting the salt, the winged ants leaping from my skin, and she was waving at me from a bright spot on the shore to come back but I refused her and I drank and I drank and I drank.
I barely remember the crush back to shore, the waves shunting me, the roll of head over ankle and sand forced into tear ducts and the sizzle of salt in my nose. But I remember after, the sweep of hard wet shoreline, and retching onto the foam, my muscles scraping against the insides of my ribs like they were cleaning the hull of an empty ship, heaving so many times it felt as if I were the one filling the ocean with its water. Some of the leaves I’d eaten came up; I plucked pieces of them off of my tongue and stared at them in the moonlight, in dumb-sick awe at how even the simplest things could be poison.
Shannon’s hand weighed heavy on my shoulder. Not a child anymore. I could see the steely edges of her jaw, the sunken depression of eye sockets flanking her nose, her hair frizzled around her temples. She was smiling, ghoulish in the moonlight, on a Datura trip infinitely better than my own.
—You look so beautiful, she told me. Like a skinny, glowing angel.
I gagged again.
It was the last time she ever touched me.
I fell asleep in the sand by the dunes.
• • •
It was a beachcombing old couple that found the three of us later that day. They’d been looking for sea glass and instead they found teenagers. The old woman woke me, her breath in my face smelling like a moldy book. Her body kneeling over mine, probing my neck for a pulse. She jumped when I opened my eyes.
—Help me, I whispered.
Once I’d said it, I couldn’t take it back. Help me. It travels from one tributary to the next and the words never swim back upstream.
Police were called.
And then, much worse, our parents.
My mother drove me in weepy silence to the hospital for an IV, and when we left she brought a stack of pamphlets with her. She put them in my lap on the drive home. They were all brochures for treatment centers.
—Choose one, she said.
I put my finger on the first one in front of me. A clinic out in Braintree. I spent the rest of my summer there, tracing my body on sheets of butcher paper in a group exercise on self-perception, staring at myself in a full-length mirror for the first time in a year, measuring my food in front of a saccharine counselor, trying to pinpoint the moment where I’d decided to equate success with starvation.
—Your brain doesn’t make the right choices, the counselor told me. All you have to do is show up and let other people make your decisions for you.
There was no deadline on the ban on my decision making. They told me to stop calling Shannon. I listened.
• • •
I found out from my mother over a carefully monitored dinner of chicken Kiev that Shannon’s parents had forced her into treatment, too.
—What made them do that? I asked.
My mother cut hard into her chicken, her knife screeching deep into the plate. I knew then.
• • •
I saw her on our first day back at high school. She was standing in the junior parking lot, digging her backpack out of the trunk of a car I didn’t recognize. Whose car? A new boyfriend? A new friend? Her new car? I ran to her.
—Shannon.
When she turned to face me I could see the bitterness framing her mouth.
—Shannon, I said again.
I’d missed saying her name.
—You were always such a jealous bitch, she said. But I never thought you’d stoop so low.
—I didn’t. My mother called.
It was too late. She’d prepared her own story, swallowed it, and let it sit within her, next to her fury, until it ossified into a truth that would never leave her.
—You just wanted me to get fat with you, she said. You always were a needy, clingy friend. Suffocating.
—I’m sorry, I said. I’m so sorry.
—It’s not enough, she said.
Later, after I’d locked myself in the school bathroom, after I’d finished and leaned my forehead on the cool porcelain edge of the toilet like a hand smoothing out my fever, I knew that sorry was the wrong response. I knew that an apology wasn’t my responsibility. It was wrong, but I carried the apology anyway. I carried it whenever I saw her in the hallway at school, her arms looped around her binders, her face tilted away from me, always tilted away from me. I carried it on the stage at our high school graduation, when I saw her on the other side of the auditorium, capped and leering when they called my name. I carried it when I sat in the parking lot of CVS in our town and saw her loping toward her car across the street, oblivious of me, her hair cut short now, swathed in a sweatshirt in deep July. I carried my sick apology here to college, waiting to spot her on our campus, waiting for an absolution from her that I would never receive.
• • •
A balloon in the foyer popped. All of us jumped and I was sucked back into our pledge mistress’s voice, the cadence of congratulations, the stern pronunciations that these women seated in this circle we
re going to become our sisters, our confidantes, our bridesmaids one day.
We all glanced at one another, sharing portions of hope and skepticism.
The mistress rose and drifted over to the untouched cake on the dining room table. She shook a box of birthday candles into her palm and speared the icing until there were twelve candles scattered over the patina, one for each girl seated. Lights went out. She picked up the cake, her face illuminated from below, her mouth cast in a deep pool of jaundiced light.
The candles guttered as she walked.
—Gather in, she said. And we obeyed, shuffling in the dark.
—To a new pledge class, she said. A new chapter in your lives.
We blew out the candles.
When the lights flicked on, we waited nervously in line for cake that nobody wanted to eat.
Shannon was behind me, I knew, and then her breath was in my ear.
—You going to eat some cake, cow? she whispered.
My desire to apologize to her left me completely, swift and simple.
Why hadn’t it come before? But I knew that answer before I finished asking myself: I had learned, in the last two years of our estrangement, that I could manage without her.
—I’m not letting you take this house from me, I whispered.
—I won’t have to try, she said. You’ll fuck it up on your own.
I could have lunged at her then, taken her skinny body down onto the dining room floor and flailed against her until the two of us were exhausted with our hatred for each other. I could have burst into tears. I could have gone to the bathroom and retched myself deep into the bowl. I explored all of the possibilities at once and settled on none of them.
And then it was my turn in line; a slice of sugar-speckled cake on a plastic plate was in my hand.
The mistress handed me a fork.
—Enjoy, she said.
I stood frozen while Shannon took her slice with the solemnity of communion. The mistress studied us, her eyes in analytical slits.
—You’re both the Scituate girls, right? But you don’t know each other?
—Never met, Shannon said.
—Well, she said. I’m sure you’ve got a lot in common.
The mistress held the strings of our arms and legs and we dangled from her, this new puppet master that we’d chosen, ready to obey.
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