Every day, you breathe in clouds of unspeakably disgusting stuff. Every single person you pass is surrounded by a floating swamp of grotesque debris—dead skin, fecal flakes, microscopic filth. Your puny human senses keep you blessedly ignorant of these facts. Until you discover you can hone them.
DAY: 3, CONTINUED . . .
Hunger was the answer. It had to be. Hunger had flipped a switch, sent my nose into overdrive.
I skipped class. Went to the library. Ransacked Wikipedia. Learned about the nose, the human sense of smell, how they worked. How they could be controlled. Kept my nose in my elbow, breathing in my threadbare sweater and the pale flesh beneath. The stink of me was familiar, at least, and unlikely to make me lose my mind. Slowly, painstakingly, I opened myself up. Let myself smell the school beyond. The library at least provided a buffer, the warm calm smell of books, paper, glue, hot computer plastic, cheap copier toner. By the time lunchtime came around, I wasn’t ready to risk the cafeteria, but I did have a plan.
Breath held, I sprinted to the boys’ locker room. I took hand towels from the laundry bin beside the shower, each one damp with a different boy’s sweat.
I went to the side doors where the smokers go, where the alarm is broken, propped it open with the brick strategically left loose in the wall for that purpose. I sat down, outside, gratefully gulping down cold October air. Then I held the first towel to my nose and sniffed.
I smelled cotton and sweat; a flood of body odor that made me gag. The same horrific tidal wave of stink.
I shut my eyes. I let myself settle, rooting myself in the stomach-churn of hunger that radiated out through my entire body. I took ten breaths like that, letting go of a lifetime’s learning that hunger was something to be avoided, sated. Hunger was my friend. Maybe hunger was my friend. I sniffed again. Sniffed deeper. Let my nose do the work; let it sort through that churning stew of revolting pieces and find . . . find what?
And then I found: something. I wasn’t sure what. A shape, a ghost. An outline seemed to glimmer: a person, conjured up by smell.
I breathed deeper. I let go of everything I thought I knew about the sense of smell. About what my nose could do. I let go of my own small-mindedness. My own lack of imagination. My own disbelief that my nose was capable of this thing that was . . . more.
Again, I breathed in. And then again. My brain felt flooded. Not with images, exactly, but impressions. Ghosts. Memories. Things.
“He’s poor,” I whispered to my pitiful doorway and the empty soccer field beyond. “He’s white. I smell his clothes. The T-shirt he wore, before mopping up with this towel. The shirt is old. It was his brother’s before it was his.”
I breathed it in greedily. There was so much there! How had I never noticed how complicated a smell can be? How much information it carries? How many different pieces it’s made of? And how easy it is to disentangle them, to analyze every separate thread and search for its source?
“Will Rutkey,” I said finally, louder than I’d meant to.
I clamped a hand over my mouth, but I was still alone. And before I got too cocky, I pointed out to myself that I’d started off with an easy one. Will Rutkey had a pretty strong and distinctive smell.
I went back to the library. I read about how olfaction worked; how odorants are dissolved into the mucus lining the nasal cavity and absorbed by neurons that transmit information to the brain.
I let my hunger lead me.
I went to strange rooms, after school when the buses had mostly left but before the building got locked down. I went to wood shop and the art supply closets. I went in with my eyes closed and turned out the lights and focused on the shape of the space. I breathed it in. I let myself feel it, map it, even in the dark.
The air felt charged, dense with swirling data. I let the smells of the room draw the picture for me. I let go of the sense of sight. And I could feel: the metal and the wood and the overflowing ashtrays; the cinder-block walls and the cold cement floor.
I walked. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, electrified. A giddy feeling started in my stomach. Euphoria mixed with fear.
This is wrong, I told myself. This is so wrong.
All the Afterschool Specials agreed. Starving yourself is bad.
But it felt so good.
The sense of smell was stronger in women than in men, the internet told me. They had theories from scientists, stuff about choosing a mate and ovulation and nurturing a baby, but I thought of Maya and knew—it was because the world is more dangerous for a woman. They need to be able to sense predators, because they are most definitely prey.
I walked into a wall. Hard.
I had gotten cocky. I let myself get distracted by what I had learned. The articles and analyses swirling inside my head.
The sharpest senses in the world are useless if your brain keeps getting in the way. And my brain got in the way—a lot. I had a . . . an ability. One unlocked by hunger. Concentration and focus were where I needed to work. To develop the ability to tune out all distractions and focus on what my senses were telling me. What my hunger was helping me see.
Or was it hunger? What if it was something else? Power can come from lots of places. Superman got his abilities from the absorption of solar energy; Samson’s hair made him strong; waterbenders became stronger with the cycles of the moon.
I went to the cafeteria. Empty now, except for the janitor cleaning it up after lunch and the glorious clean smell of bleach. I went to the vending machine and bought a Honey Bun, which I hate, but at 500 calories they’re the most fattening things you can find in most high school cafeterias.
I ate it.
I waited.
Was it my imagination, or did the smells die down? I breathed in and out, easier, feeling the weight lift slowly from my chest. But maybe that was just the bleach. I couldn’t smell anything besides it. I left the cafeteria, walked through the halls, wandering with no direction in mind . . .
And found Regan and Jeanine, post band practice.
Regan was at her locker; Jeanine was standing beside her. Something had changed between them. Anyone could see it. But they smiled, and talked, and whatever epic confrontation they were going to have hadn’t happened yet.
“Hey, Regan, hey, Jeanine,” I said, stopping beside them.
“Hey,” they said, and Jeanine gave me a death stare and then smiled the fakest smile ever.
I stepped closer. Breathed deep. Smiled.
Because other than the Pink perfume that Jeanine wanted everyone in a two-block radius to notice, I could not smell a thing.
RULE #8
Most people don’t realize the extent to which their bodies enslave them. They live like hogs in a slaughterhouse pen, obeying their bodies, blissfully ignorant of the treasonous monster they are chained to, how it will hurt them, how it will fail them. Once you realize the true antagonistic nature of your relationship with your body, you will be far superior to most of your peers.
And yet—
one’s enemy is the greatest teacher, according to the Dalai Lama. Respect your enemy and you will learn far more than if you declare that only hate and violence can exist between you. The student of the Art of Starving has much to learn from the body they are at war with. They will listen to it. They will understand it. Only by doing so can they force it to achieve its full potential.
DAY: 4
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
At home, pondering what I’d learned, I realized: I needed a task. An assignment, something to focus on. Homework.
I needed to pick someone, learn their smell, and then follow them. Using only my nose.
I would let them get away from me—see how far away they could go before I lost track of their scent, and then focus on increasing that distance. Focus on picking that one smell out of the entire crowded school full of girls wearing too much perfume and stinking boys and backed-up toilets and dissected frogs and smokers in the stairwell.
And the second I had given mysel
f that assignment, I grinned. I even said, “Excellent,” out loud, like a cartoon villain, because I knew precisely who I would be stalking.
Tariq. Soccer star. In the weight room after school every day, with the body to prove it. One recent addition, which jarred with the rest of his clean-cut jock image: a pierced left nostril. Gifted player, passionate, so competitive that many of his own teammates were afraid of him.
Best friends with Bastien and Ott since second grade. An inseparable trio, egging each other on to increasingly alarming acts of cruelty. His aloofness from their petty violence did not make him better than them. And if they could call girls ugly just to watch them cry—in full public view of others—what other atrocities might they have collaborated on in secret?
Might one of them have involved Maya?
I found Tariq at the end of the day, standing between two banks of puke-green lockers, arms folded over his chest. Watching traffic. An illegible expression on his face. Was he waiting for someone, lamenting a failed test, looking for future victims? No one could tell. He was a statue. A cypher. I stopped nearby and stood there, smelling the air, sucking up everything I could. Trying hard to tune out the angry churn of my empty stomach.
Pine trees. Gasoline. The vanilla air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of his truck. The toxic cherry hand soap in the bathroom. But under all that—
“Matt,” he said, seeing me.
“Oh, hi, Tariq,” I said, after a pause that was hopefully just long enough to weird him out.
“How are you doing?”
I shrugged. “Could be worse.”
Worse like my sister. After what you did to her.
Whatever it was.
Tariq smiled. Avoided eye contact like he always did with me. Said nothing.
Smelling Tariq, letting my nose break the boy down into his component smells, I found myself significantly less afraid of him. Whatever he was—bully, monster, untouchable jock superstar—he was also very human. There was no reason to fear him. Especially since I could find out so much more about what happened to Maya by getting closer to him.
“I heard about a party this weekend,” I said, thinking fast, stepping closer. “Tomorrow. Down by the Dunes. Are you going?”
“Thinking about it,” he said, and smiled the slightest bit. “You?”
“Yeah.”
“Surprised to hear it,” he said. “Didn’t think it was your thing.”
“It’s not. I’m actually a narc,” I said, deadpanning. “I’m forty years old, infiltrating high school so I can catch teenage drug dealers.”
Tariq scoffed. “Then this party is definitely where you want to be.” He paused. “I can give you a ride,” he said, and his smile widened significantly.
It did things to me, that smile. Those beautiful teeth, those lopsided-yet-perfect dimples. My knees weakened. Revenge is hard when your target is so pretty.
Just remember: he used that smile on Maya.
“Sure. Pick me up down the block from my house, tomorrow around seven,” I said, and told him where I lived.
Even though I knew he already knew. Because that’s where he picked up my sister the last night any of us saw her.
“You got it,” Tariq said.
Pretty brazen, you’re probably thinking. A dude would have to be pretty cocky, pretty evil, or pretty stupid to buddy up with the brother of a girl to whom he did something terrible. Or a girl to whom one of his best friends did something terrible.
Of course, it was also pretty cocky and pretty stupid of me to agree to get in the car with him. But I’m both those things.
I needed to know more. I had nothing real to pin on him, so far, except that since my sister disappeared I obviously made him and Ott deeply uncomfortable.
Maya ran with a crowd of tough kids, sure, but those kids were poor like us. Like us, they couldn’t afford a car. But Tariq, rumor had it, had a brand-new truck his wealthy father had bought for him. And a clear interest in Maya’s company.
I overheard her on the phone with him. That night. I almost asked to tag along, until I heard the urgency in her voice. Urgency and something much darker.
We used to bond over how badly we both wanted him. I freely acknowledged that I had no shot and wholeheartedly cheered her on when he started texting her, then calling, then picking her up to go hang out.
The summer I was fifteen, Maya found me in the living room watching a horror movie Mom wouldn’t have let me see if she hadn’t been working an extra shift, and I thought for sure I was busted, because Maya enjoyed being a hard-ass disciplinarian even more than Mom did, but to my great surprise she came with a bowl of microwave popcorn and held it out to me, and when I reached for it she pulled back, so I’d look up at her, and she made eye contact and looked dead into my soul and said, “Just so you know, I know you’re gay, and I think that’s fucking awesome, because straight guys are the worst, and I know you’re probably not ready to talk about it with anyone else, and I’ll never tell a soul, but I need you to know that you can always come talk to me about anything.”
Which made me blow up and scream at her—a classic closet-case defensive overreaction—and go to my room and cry, and not talk to her for two days, and then once all that had blown over go to her and say, “What about [INSERT CRUSH-OF-THE-WEEK NAME HERE]? Do you think I have a chance with him?”
And from that moment on, we were forever gushing over boys together. Reading the How to Tell if a Boy Likes You quizzes in Cosmo and Seventeen together. Digging deep into the Facebook photos of the boys we liked, looking for summer vacation shots where they might be shirtless or sweaty or smiling sexily.
She was the only person on the whole planet who told me to be Me and be proud of it.
Then Tariq befriended her, and got her to let her guard down, and hurt her—he didn’t kill her, didn’t cripple her, but whatever it was, the psychological impact was such that she had to get the hell out of Hudson and away from everything she loved.
Now I would do the same to him.
RULE #9
Your body is an animal. Animals always know what to do. They sleep, they hump, they hunt, they eat. They run from danger or they die. Humans are different. They hesitate. They choose to stay in dangerous places—like high school—for a million crazy reasons. So your body will frequently find itself stuck in situations it cannot handle, and it will make you very sorry for putting it there.
DAY: 5
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
An email from Maya.
Hey Matt. I’m fine. Tell Mom I’ll try to call Monday.
Nothing more. I made a sound, probably a curse word, at the computer, very loudly.
And then I wrote back. I wrote back again and again.
I miss you
Where are you? I know you said Providence but I don’t think I believe you.
In between every email, I hit Refresh a hundred times, desperate for a response.
When are you coming home?
Mom’s so pissed at you, for missing school and stuff.
Something happened. Tell me what happened. Did somebody hurt you?
I think someone hurt you. And I think you’re probably planning a Bloody Revenge of some kind. I want to help.
I want you to trust me. I want you to tell me what’s going on.
Silence was her only response.
Silence was my sister’s weapon. When people hurt or angered her, she never got loud like Mom or mean and smart-ass like me. Silence was how she fought back. It wasn’t passive, or an act of helplessness: it was a cold cruel withering blade, lasting far longer than my mother’s rage or my own antagonism, strong enough to make us practically beg for forgiveness every time.
Except now her weapon had gone haywire, turned on herself, driven her from her home and her support system and into who-knew-what kind of danger.
I taped a note to the phone for Mom. Then I stayed up ’til midnight, when I heard her car pull up. I opened the door and surprised her smok
ing a cigarette on the front steps.
“Hi, Matt!” she said, hiding it behind her back. “What are you still doing up?”
“Can I have a cigarette?” I asked.
“No, stupid,” she said, as I knew she would, but I knew where she hid them, and anyway smoking was a skill I should pick up sooner or later. Maya and I tried Mom’s cigarettes when she was fourteen and I was thirteen. I threw up. She didn’t.
Tariq smoked. Smoking might help me worm my way into his life—so I could destroy it.
“It’s not your fault,” I said, speaking fast before I lost the significant nerve it took to say something like that to my mom. “What happened to Maya isn’t your fault.”
Mom frowned. She looked at her cigarette, and I thought, here it comes. She’s going to destroy me. Instead, her frown deepened. And then dissolved. Into tears.
“It is,” she whispered, turning her head away. “In a way, it most surely is.”
Something was there. Guilt? Simple sorrow? A secret she was keeping from me?
I flushed with happiness, with pride, and then with shame. I made my mother cry. I put my hand on her shoulder.
But I couldn’t stop. Because suddenly I had the power to get answers.
“Have you had any conversations with her, without me?”
“Once, maybe twice, she called when you were at school, and I was sleeping off a night shift.”
“What did she tell you that she wouldn’t tell me?”
“Nothing important, honey. You know I’d tell you anything you needed to know.”
She was lying. I could hear it. Something changed in the pitch of her voice on the word needed, something so small that a person without, well, superpowers could never have heard it.
I sank back, sat down on the cold stone of our stoop. “I just don’t understand why you aren’t more upset,” I whispered.
“Christ, kid, you don’t think I’m upset?” and the exhaustion I heard in her voice hurt more than the screaming angry fit I’d been fearing. “You don’t think I’m terrified? You don’t think I’ve been having a hard time sleeping—every night—even when I’m so tired I can’t get out of bed to take a sleeping pill?”
The Art of Starving Page 4
