I Must Have You

by JoAnna Novak

  For my Mom and Dad—now, then, and always

  Copyright © 2017 by JoAnna Novak

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt

  Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-1941-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-1942-2

  Printed in the United States of America

  I thought about saying just two words: “I’m gone.”

  —Michael Jordan, January 13, 1999

  THURSDAY

  1 ·· ELLIOT

  I WAS IN THE GIRL’S bathroom forever. Marissa was being a putzy stripper. Over winter break, the stalls had been repainted dusky blue, and that masking-tape-lacquer smell lingered, even with the Sharpied Savage Garden lyrics and trains of hearts and smiley faces see ya, adios. On the back wall, across from the handicapped, there was a poster, a close-up of a grody penis flecked with squinty sores oozing root-beer-colored pus. The caption? STDS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR BOO. I’d studied the image a million times, trying to understand why that species appealed to Lisa. For two months now, since Thanksgiving, she’d been too busy dating Junior Carlos—and not just middle-school dating, but weeknight R movies, no parents dating—to be my best friend. I’d only seen one other wiener. Penises didn’t exactly call my name.

  “Elliot. Do I seriously have to do this?” Marissa looked like she’d swallowed a stick of Juicy Fruit, ten calories that’d linger in her stomach for seven years. She’d lost twenty pounds since we started, but her lips were still fat. “Can’t we wait?”

  My thoughts echoed off the quiet. I didn’t need a Marissa Turner problem.

  “Why weight?” I winked. She didn’t get it. “I mean, why wouldn’t you want your picture in there? Everyone does. That’s the best part of Real Talk.”

  “Yeah, I know. You gave me the last issue.” With a wooden-heeled clog, she kicked her ketchup-red backpack. All the zippers were festooned with Backstreet Boys key chains. “I can show you. I don’t wanna wreck this, though, when I could lose … whatever. I could lose a lot more. I’m so pre-tide today.”

  Her mouth stayed open: her tongue lolled like a dark purple slug, as if she’d sucked a Blue Raspberry Blow Pop. Maybe she’d been cheating.

  “Hey! Amy Heckerling represent! Crimson wave, not tide. Big dif! Also: I know what I wrote. You don’t need to prove anything. Girl! You hit a goal! Show that stuff!”

  “What stuff?” She planted her hands on her waist, like a challenge.

  “Let me look.”

  I grinned and glowered. With my arms crossed over my chest, in my black turtleneck and black leggings, I felt like Miss Petite Sophisticate, model of muted glamour. My dark brown hair was shellacked with my dad’s mousse, the lank strands bunned so flyaways wouldn’t interfere with my ferocious mind. Critic, gamine, beatnik: I could’ve passed for Susan Sontag or Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, but I was an eighth grader, a wannabe writer in French ballet flats. Someone whose mother thought sequined clothes bled cheap.

  Marissa wore lint-blue overalls from GAP. She was rubbing the metal hook and eye with shaky hands, her nails painted metallic red and glitter-mob gold. A few months ago, she’d been spready, a bus driver in the butt (when she crouched, the fabric pinched into crow’s feet). Now those overalls sagged. I nodded. A smile gripped my face. I didn’t need to look at Marissa to see her. I knew her numbers, her form: every day I monitored her. The way Anna, my mom, practiced writing poems or doing yogi moon salutes, I studied my clients’ bodies: I knew every sliver of flesh, every ounce, every wax and wane, every eclipse of bone.

  No, I didn’t want her bod, but most girls would be green-eyed. I was proud.

  “You’ll be an inspiration. Forget Calista Flockhart.”

  “Who?”

  “Ally McBeal?”

  “Oh, that creepy dancing baby? Yeah, Ethan Suva brought in a tape for Ms. McMahon to play in LA, when we were, like, talking about imagery or something, and then she had to turn it off ’cuz she started crying.”

  Park Junior High’s edgiest were boys: this depressed me. I fantasized about using the plastic cutlery I filched from the caf to saw my wrist and disrupt the system. No Doubt, Melissa Etheridge, Veruca Salt, Tori Amos: girl power and riot grrrl anthems and Take Your Daughter To Work Days were over-obvious efforts to convince girls they weren’t just girls, as though girlhood were so intrinsically limiting that it could never be synonymous with power or riot or even professionalism. Eighth-graders proved this. They were cowed by difference; they were boring, normal, good, predictably bad. That was another reason Lisa’s horn-doggedness worried me. Recovery had ruined her.

  “Get out. That’s brilliant. Ethan’s so right brain, it’s, like, whack.”

  “Huh? I heard he was bipolar.”

  “You know Ethan’s a savant, right? Well, he’s left-handed, which signals throttled creativity, and a sensitive constitution … artistic genius. Maybe he tapped into Ms. McMahon’s repressed feelings or, I don’t know. Do you think she had an abortion? Wait—didn’t your sister date one of his brothers?”

  “Yeah! God, that one really was a psychopath! How’d you know?”

  Don’t blow this, Elliot. Marissa and I were sorta becoming friends. When she called for pre-dinner advice, we talked about more than how to make a baked potato disappear without admitting a bite. I’d been chill, but in the bathroom’s Gak-green lights, I was flashing my uncool, like how I always mis-sang Spice Girls, shouting one more, “If you wanna be my lover,” as Mel B. rapped, “So here’s the story from A to Z.”

  “You told me at Befores? No clue. Sooooo … Afters!”

  I unzipped my soft black pencil case. I took out my camera, a Polaroid Spectra, boxy, easy, point and shoot. It had been a gift from my mom two years ago when, propped on the platform heels of Now and Then, a ’60s revival had swept Park Junior High’s sixth grade. I’d eschewed peace sign necklaces and lime-green tube tops and the aural malaria that was The Archies’s “Sugar, Sugar,” but I loved my throwback camera: it had helped me get Lisa flaca, and I’d been coaching other girls’ weight loss ever since.

  “Can I just keep my clothes on? Or, like, my shirt?” Marissa said. “Is my face gonna be in this? Can I do my lip gloss?”

  “After pictures don’t have faces. This is a focus on bodies. Don’t worry about your lip stuff. You know there’s calories in those.”

  “But my lips look like death.”

  “Hey! B Lunch is almost over. We have to do this. I’ve got to get to the library and make photocopies.”

  “I just don’t think I wanna. You can’t make me.”

  I watched her. She was a mannequin, rigid and melting under shop lights, thirty-five pounds heavier than me, but I could’ve blocked her if I had to, if she tried to bolt. I held the straight-arm hang record in PE. Anna, mommy-plus-one-glass-of-chardonnay, called me Tenacious, Acquisitive, Tireless—Walt Whitman�
�s way of saying I was a fighter. I checked: the bathroom door was locked so no one could burst in from the Fine Arts wing. I didn’t need Ms. Washburn here wringing her oil-pastelly hands. I needed Marissa Turner to undress and let me take her picture.

  I took a ujjayi breath, like Anna had taught me. When I inhaled, my ribs accordioned and I greeted every knot of my hunger. That was comforting. My stomach growled to my volition, which said in signature Spanglish: handle Marissa: ella es una simpleton. Marissa=distraction. Postre. You don’t miss tu amiga mejor; Lisa’s sick.

  The truth was Marissa wanted to be coerced. She wanted me to applaud her, celebrate her, Fatboy Slim praise her. And, she wanted my attention, even though my compliments meant zip. Once I gave a girl a goal, she wrote her own story. That’s why Lisa was special: she’d become such a whisper of herself, she almost died.

  “If you want to leave, there’s the door. Unlock it and go. Take that skinny butt to the APR. Have a taco salad or a flippin’ slice of pizza. Do it. Like, don’t even blot the grease. Wash it down with a chocolate milk. Have two cartons. As if I care.”

  “Elliot, you’re a jerk.”

  I unzipped my black Five Star Trapper and flipped to the last tab where I kept client notes and the draft of Real Talk: Meal Talk. Let Marissa feel ignored. I paged through mock-ups of next week’s issue: eight pages, folded hamburger style. 1999 was only fifteen days old. We were still in resolution season. I’d written purifying recipes to inspire my girls to replace their Mr. Pibb and Snapple and Hi-C. Celery water, Lemon Fizz, Cucumber Spaaaahh. “Scooch the Pooch” was a cartoon stick figure doing reverse crunches to blast her lower abs. On the back cover, a Polaroid-sized box, penciled with an X, waited for Marissa.

  My clients loved the Afters so much I was starting to believe my mom’s complaints: kids won’t read. (Not can’t, El, but won’t when given a choice.) My audience would grow up to be her students. They wanted gospel and testament, smack-you-in-the-face pictures, obvious proof. Sure, in Health, cockeyed Ms. Cummins lectured about the sorcery of magazines—complexions smoothed, boobs boosted—but those computer programs were out of our reach. We had snapshots—like the one of me and Lisa taped in my locker that verified we really had been best friends: Only a year ago, on a field trip, we’d used our good-girl cred to ditch the Navy Pier food court and wander the boardwalk’s bazaar, buy each other red rope bracelets from Guatemala, blow our lunch money in a photo booth where we mugged for the flash and traded reasons it was stupid to waste life chewing.

  “You know I hate this, right?”

  I looked up from my binder, feigning shock. “Be thankful you’re getting thin?”

  “Yeah right. Sooooo thin.”

  Marissa sighed, frowning in the mirror. She tucked her wavy black hair behind her ears. She stepped off her clogs and closed her eyes.

  With the grace of a zombie, she unclipped her overalls. The denim slipped over her hips and slid down her legs, eddying at her feet. She pulled off her daisy-printed Henley. She was teen-girl naked, in a buttercup bra-plus set I recognized from the dELiA*s catalog. The underpants sagged. Her hipbones pestered the cotton.

  I turned away. Leaning into the mirrors, I scratched a shriveled pimple off my nose. I tried to only see that zit. Nothing was worse than mirrors—especially skinny ones. Mirrors thickened your thighs and widened your waist. They tricked you into believing under-eye shadows spelled weight loss, coerced you into safety so total they’d practically scoop your Rocky Road. I didn’t need a reflection to tell me I wasn’t a pretty starver. I wasn’t a Lifetime movie, seed-bead printing, pipsqueak voice, Hard Candy nails, Clara in The Nutcracker, first-chair flute—I was Park’s only decent eating disorder book, The Golden Cage: a young woman, ascetic, brittle, recalcitrant. Not that I was jealous. Insecurity was a dog I sent to the pound when I got flaca.

  “Marissa! Gorgeous! Call Ford. Let’s get you an agent.” I didn’t pedestal clients, but Marissa really was super pretty. Park girls would kill for her parts, like pieces they lusted over in Seventeen or YM: concave abdomen with the merest comma of navel; licked luster of protruding ribs; inner thighs that evinced commitment to the hardest leg lifts. “You’re, like, famine-hot. Everyone’s gonna want your secret.”

  “I doubt that.” But she stood still, ready for me.

  I looked at her through the viewfinder.

  “Don’t smile. Remember, I’m only using your body—’cuz, your body is the smile, metaphorically, after all that hard work. I’ll crop out your head.”

  “It’s anonymous, though, right? Will there be other girls in this issue?”

  “No.” Idiot—there were never other girls. “You deserve kudos—like, props, not the granola bar. You worked hard: own that! Love your effort. Say skinny!”

  “Skinny.”

  She forced a wan Picture-Day smile.

  I clicked; the Polaroid spat. Marissa’s Before from three months ago was filed in my Trapper: in it, her boobs were up in her clavicle’s biz, a mini-muffin top gabled her waistband, her belly was a mango. I mentally patted myself on the back, vertebrae clunk-clunk. I’d requested Marissa wear the same bra-and-panties, so you could totally see how she’d become Tyra Banks’ gangly kid sister.

  “Perfecta. That’s that!” I said, shaking the film. “You can get dressed.”

  “Elliot, can I ask you a favor?”

  “That’s what you hired me for.”

  Marissa glared at the floor, twelve-inch square tiles, white with navy spangles. Not including the three half-tiles in the handicapped stall, there were 180. Ever since getting flaca, I’d loved to count: if pandemonium ever erupted, I’d have mastered my environment, the way my hero Michael Jordan envisioned the court, eyes in the back of his head. Marissa probably just thought it was gross to be in the bathroom, barefoot.

  “Can you take a picture with me? Like, in the mirror?”

  I was flattered, but not 100 percent. I was anxious, too. I hadn’t taken a picture with a girl since Lisa—I couldn’t repeat that mistake. Her mom had found graph paper where Lisa had compared us, measured our bodies in the photo and calculated their proportions, Lisa’s arm X-times bigger than mine, our knees and thighs, our necks. At the end of last school year, when she was sent to in-patient, her mom pulled up while I was waiting for the bus and handed me an envelope. Inside was a photocopy of the computations, smacked with a Post-It: leave Lisa alone.

  I fanned the Polaroid, pretending I’d misheard. “What?”

  “Take one with me.” She was a yeller, a cheerleader who stood on a lunch chair, chanting. Now her voice ducked. “You undress. I wanna see. Can’t you?”

  “That’s a no. Total no.”

  “What’s the big deal, Elliot?”

  “Well, it’s weird,” I said. “And sick. Plus, I don’t like to be in pictures. And if I do this for you, everyone’s going to want me to hop into their shot.”

  “We’re the same height, aren’t we?”

  I didn’t know how she knew this, but I liked that she did.

  “So?”

  “So it’s hypocritical to make people do something you hate. You’re my goal.”

  “Don’t go there, hon. You don’t want to be like me.” I was foxtrotting around a feral cat. “Are you a lesbo?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your body is never going to be mine and vice versa. I know it’s hard—I mean, inspiration is important. But focus on yourself. Unless you’ve got, like, a crush. In which case, cool—but I’m not into girls. So, like, why do you want to see me naked?”

  “Who said anything about your naked bone bag? Sicko! How rude!”

  “Original, hon. Full House called. Stephanie wants her catchphrase back. Watch your mouth. Remember: you talk dirty, you eat dirty.”

  “Give me the picture, Elliot. I don’t want to be in fucking Real Talk.”

  “No way. The photo’s mine.”

  “Well, the body’s mine.”

  “Well, I bought the paper.”

&nb
sp; Marissa snorted. As she pulled her overalls, her stomach bunched. In the After, her body was a slim brown column. I should print this issue in color, at least the photo, to show off her collarbones. Or circle them, draw a dialog-bubble: ALMOST!

  I didn’t notice her wind back her arm until her fist was coming toward my chest. The thud trounced me, like I’d been lobbed with a dodge ball. I staggered, saw stars, huckleberry blackness. Neon rhombuses. I was a fucking baby! I leaned against the wall and drove a fist into my stomach and winced: Lisa-one, Lisa-two, Lisa-three, Lisa-four.

  “Did you just punch me in the boob?” I sputtered. “What the hell? Ho bag.”

  “What boobs? Bony freaky.” Marissa had the picture. She pulled open the bathroom door. There was the hallway—green, green, green, the milky smell of puberty, beige.

  “Marissa, c’mon! Don’t act like a twat!”

  The lunch bell trilled. This was when I missed Lisa the most. When I realized I was nothing. I needed her. I was desperate. I held out my hand, ready for the Polaroid.

  “Elliot, c’mon.” Marissa had a playground expression that sang, Na-na-na-boo-boo. “No wonder Lisa’s over you. Stop acting like you’re the only girl who can be anorexic.”

  ··

  C Lunch had begun, but I stayed in the bathroom. Being near the toilets curbed my appetite. If you wanna lech up, if you’re fetishy for ana + brunette, I was into touching my swallow—one hand around my throat, my grip hugging my jugular: it made survival sexy. Kinky, even: my gorge, mi garganta cupped by the glabrous curve between my left pointer and thumb, that webby patch of striation I could never slather with enough Frosted Snowdrop. I kept this from my clients: starving gives you dry skin.

  I counted my slivers of Red Delicious, browning at the cut. My mom didn’t monitor the fruit; she just bought it. I fixed lunches.

  I chewed with my molars and tried not to taste. The flesh was wintersome. Mealy. Not good. I didn’t want to like food, anyway—I wanted to be adult—Pinter one-acts, Shostakovich symphonies, self-staged orgasms, a body above puberty’s stupefactions.