Yes! I texted back.
And yet: fear was what I felt when I slammed shut the door of his truck and buckled my seat belt and heard him say, “Hey,” and felt myself quiver.
“I want to kiss you so bad.”
His hand found mine, gripped it hard. “Not where people might see us.”
I nodded, even though my lips burned with frustration.
“Shall I take you home?” His thumb pressed into my palm, triggering a secret button that turned me into a drooling fool. “Or shall we . . . not?”
“Not,” I whispered.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “You?”
And when he asked, I was shocked to see that I was, that I wanted food, and that I wanted to eat food with him. Food is love, I had learned, kneeling before our fridge, looking at all the dishes brought by worried neighbors and friends who loved my mother and my sister.
“McDonald’s,” I said. “Take me to McDonald’s.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
“My mother never let us get food from here,” I said ten minutes later when we were parked at the back of the Fairview Plaza strip mall lot with our laps full of drive-thru food. “Said she didn’t trust meat killed so far away.”
“Your mom’s a smart lady,” he said, scooping fries into his mouth. “This stuff is terrible for you.”
“But so, so good.”
I ate. I loved eating, and I loved watching Tariq eat. He bit down on three fries so they protruded from his mouth, then leaned across the cab of his truck to stick them in my face.
“You’re gross,” I said, then bit down on the offered fry stubs. Our teeth clinked together. We chewed, swallowed, laughed, kissed. I touched his face and his stubble tingled, electrified my fingers. He reached out his arm, draped it over my shoulders, pulled me in tighter. By the time he sat up straight and put his hands back on the wheel, I was grateful for the paper sack hiding the significant tenting of my lap.
“So how is this going to work?” he asked, shifting the truck back into drive.
“How is what going to work?” I asked—even though from his hard, distant tone I knew where he was taking this.
“Us. You and me.”
“What do you mean?”
Tariq looked at his greasy fingertips. “We can’t let anyone know about it. If my dad finds out he’ll throw me out of the house so fast and hard . . .” He pulled out of the parking lot, sped up into the gathering dark.
“Of course,” I said, because hadn’t I known already that it could never be like it was in my fantasy? That the world wasn’t ready for us to hold hands in the halls of Hudson High? That Tariq had a lot more to lose than me? “Although if he did throw you out, you could come stay with us.”
“I’d be staying in the hospital, actually,” he said, and I heard his voice crack. “Because he’ll beat me within an inch of my life.”
“If anyone tries to hurt you, I’ll break them into a million pieces.”
Tariq laughed, but I wasn’t joking. And I wasn’t exaggerating. Tariq had no idea what I was capable of. How I felt—who I was—who he was.
“I know I can’t make you understand,” he said. “You’re different from me. Plus your mom, your sister, they love you for who you are. And fuck everybody else. But I’m not like that.”
“Okay,” I said, and felt my immense happiness shrink just a little. I’d imagined, stupidly, that being Tariq’s boyfriend would validate me in the eyes of my peers. That being with him would help me step out of the shadows of shame. But that was a childish fantasy. “I’ll be your deep, dark secret. Your friends will never suspect.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m just not ready to . . . ” He shivered, and I knew that shiver, that fear I’d lived with for so many years, the terror of admitting, even to yourself, that you’re gay. How did he know—how had I known—that as soon as you say it, a door closes, and you step into a whole other life that looks nothing like the one you’ve spent every day up until then expecting?
Tariq headed toward my house. Mom hadn’t been home when I came in the night before. According to her schedule for the week, penciled in on the kitchen calendar, her shift should have been over two hours before then. Maybe she’d gone grocery shopping, I’d thought, or maybe she’d gotten assigned an extra shift. But she always texted me when those things happened, so I wouldn’t worry.
And it was only here, now, remembering this, wondering What if she went to a bar, that I realized: I hadn’t thought about Maya once all day.
“Wait. Drive us to the river,” I said. “There’s something I have to ask you.”
RULE #29
God, your mom, me, Muhammad, Cosmopolitan magazine—nobody’s rulebook is right for you. No one will have all the answers. Sooner or later you’re going to come up against something they can’t answer.
When you’re a kid, you follow the rules you’re given, but growing up means figuring things out on your own.
DAY: 22, CONTINUED . . .
Hudson has beautiful sunsets. Clouds crossing the Catskills, wind sweeping up the river and pollutants in the air all add up to some glorious spectacles in the sky around twilight. By the time we got to the Hudson boat launch, the place looked like a nineteenth-century landscape painting, except for the seagulls fighting over roadkill and the dudes on cheap boats drinking even cheaper beer.
“So what’s up?” Tariq asked.
Fear kept the question bottled up tight behind my lips. Fear that once I asked it, the bubble of this impossible, undeserved happiness would burst.
What happened the night my sister got hurt?
But the words would not come out. I wanted him to say them, wanted him to bring them up. Wanted him to explain why he’d spent so long sitting on a missing piece of the puzzle. I shut my eyes and tilted my face toward his. I thought the words as hard as I could. But he didn’t say a word.
A bottle broke on board one of the boats.
“I know my sister went to meet you,” I said, quick as I could before doubt could smother the words back into my mouth. “The night she ran away.”
Tariq flinched, turned away.
“I’m sorry, Matt. I should have told you.”
I didn’t say anything. Just waited.
“She asked me to pick her up, near your house.”
“Why you?”
“We were friends, and she needed a ride, and I had a vehicle. No big deal, she said. A concert your mom wouldn’t let her go to. So I said yes.”
“She had a crush on you. We both did.”
He laughed, abashed. “Yeah, well. As I was taking her where she wanted to go, she asked me out. And I don’t know why, but I said I couldn’t. Because I was in love with someone else. And she asked who. And even though I never breathed a word of this to anyone before, I told her it was you.”
I said nothing. I shut my eyes, listened to the tiniest of fluctuations in his voice, the slightest of shifts in his smell. But McDonald’s was making a mess of me. My abilities had evaporated.
My voice was barely audible. “What’d she say to that?”
He paused. “Actually, she kind of surprised me. I thought she’d be cool with it—it’s why I told her—but she actually kinda got mad. Or, maybe not mad, but . . .”
“Silent?”
“Yeah! Exactly.”
“Silence is how Maya handles pretty much any negative emotion. It’s her defense mechanism. But I don’t know why she would have been upset by what you said. She’s not homophobic. She helped me come out, basically.”
Unless her crush on Tariq was more serious than I thought. Unless she was really, truly, deeply in love with him.
Which would explain his response to my text to him from Maya’s number—I’m going to tell.
The secret Maya knew, the thing she could reveal to the world that would ruin his life, wasn’t some horrible harm he had caused her. The secret was that he was gay.
But it still didn’t add up. Rejection from a crush is not enough
to make someone run away from home. Something was still missing from the story.
“It’s weird,” he said. “Girls have a sixth sense for that kind of thing. They know, somehow. A couple of the girls I’ve . . . dated.” His fingers drew air quotes. “They sensed something wasn’t right. I mean, they might not actually think Tariq is gay. But on some level, they know.”
One of the drunk white-trash dudes threw a beer bottle at the seagulls. They flew away, squawking, and the drunks laughed, and the two crowds sounded creepily similar. Of course the ugly birds were unharmed. Seagulls, like lots of disgusting things, are damn near invincible.
“Where was my sister going?” I asked. “It wasn’t a concert.”
“No,” he said. “Once we got out on the thruway, she had me take her to a rest stop, just south of Exit 20.”
“Why?”
“She told me to go home. Said she had a ride back, all lined up. And she made me promise not to tell anyone, anything ever. Especially you.” Tariq reached across, moved his fingers through my hair. “You gotta believe me when I say I really, really wanted to.”
“Okay . . . but?” He grasped my hand, and turned to look at me with enormous wet eyes. “There’s something else I need to tell you. About your sister.”
“Tell me,” I said, my voice on the edge of breaking.
RULE #30
Your body’s hungers are simple. It’s the mind that makes things complex, spinning a web of stories and fantasies and prejudices around something as basic as love, until we crave the stories more than the love itself.
DAY: 22, CONTINUED . . .
I have had many fathers, through the years. An imaginary man for every stage of growth. I’ve created dozens of different mythologies behind the person whose damaged DNA and fire-red hair I carry.
I feel that it’s important to tell you this now, here, in this held breath between Before and After.
One of my fathers was a king, reigning over a distant land or possibly in exile, hiding from wicked brothers or viziers or witches who wanted to kill him for his throne and birthright. As heir to incredible riches and with an army at his command, his wise advisers would find six-year-old me and restore me to my place beside his throne.
One of my fathers was a sports star, magically gifted in every game involving a Ball or a Team, and the switch for that magic gift lay somewhere inside me. He would return to take nine-year-old me by the hand and flip the switch. Then he would teach me how to excel in all the activities my peers esteemed.
My father was rich, and would die, and would leave a mountain of money to Mom and Maya and eleven-year-old me.
My father was a villain, a sneering Lex-Luthorian evil genius who stole everything from us—he alone was responsible for our state, and he would return for thirteen-year-old me to defeat in epic battle.
My father was an artist, beautiful and sensitive and gifted, and even if he would never be in my life, his blessings were with me, inside of me, my genetic birthright, and I would pass through pain to access the treasures he hid inside my DNA, and make marvelous things that would give meaning to my life and the life of all who beheld them.
But none of those men were really my father.
RULE #31
As they approach true mastery of the Art of Starving, students will see that eating disorders are merely one part of a broad spectrum of self-harm. Cutting, addiction, suicidal ideation. These are all ways to assert your power. To prove that you’re not weak. To show you’re strong enough to control your own destiny by destroying yourself.
DAY: 22, CONCLUSION
“What is it?” I asked.
Tariq turned away, held my hand tighter. He wanted to be away from here, away from me and my capacity for feeling pain, away from all the messy jagged things in his life. He wanted to be in the weight room, grappling with something simple, like steel, something he could make himself strong enough to master. He wanted to punch something. He wanted to punch everything.
“I know who she was going to meet.”
Words rose and fell in my throat. I turned to look out my own window. I watched the night come rolling up the river, flooding in from the west, taking everything away from me. It went on forever. I rolled down the window.
“Matt,” he said.
I heard the word inside his head, heard him wanting not to have to say it.
“She was going to meet your father.”
Eyes shut, I tried to breathe in the night. To smell the wind, to hear the universe. But I couldn’t. Tariq’s words made my chest heavy, made my lungs collapse, made it impossible to take a full breath.
McDonald’s had ruined me. I was powerless now when I needed my abilities more than ever.
“Let me guess,” I said eventually, my words ugly in a way I couldn’t help. “She made you promise not to tell me that, either.”
“Now you’re mad,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Take me home,” I said.
“Okay,” he said, and then— “Oh, shit, Matt! Look at your fingers!”
I’d been gnawing them again. Blood streamed down both pinkies. “It’s nothing,” I said.
He gave me a look that said it was most definitely not nothing.
Tariq drove me home. I got out of the truck. I slammed the door so hard it sounded like a gunshot. I shouldered my backpack, and it was light as air. The night was bitter cold, and I did not feel it. I did not feel anything.
“Matt,” he called through his open window.
I kept walking.
“Good night,” he said.
I managed to turn around, but I didn’t manage to smile. Or say a word.
I spent hours, that night, practicing. Researching. Googling Providence punk-rock show lineups. Writing emails to Maya. Trying to feel hunger again. Trying to see the past; trying to smell the future. Listening for echoes. There was nothing.
Long after midnight, a throbbing in my ring finger made me stop. I’d bitten the nail almost halfway away, on that and on several other fingers. Now that I focused on them I could feel it.
I went to the bathroom, sat on the floor, grabbed the pipes. Willed them to show me things I couldn’t see. But I couldn’t concentrate.
I gnawed on the nail of my ring finger again, tugging and tearing at it like a dog with a bone, like a starving dog trying to tear the last little shred of meat from a dry bone. And then—
—with a ghastly squelching tearing sound, with a pain like from a piranha bite, the entire nail ripped away. I held it between my teeth for a split second before spitting it away with a scream, and grabbing a towel, stuffed one end into my mouth to silence the shrieks and wrapped the other around the wound to stop the bleeding.
RULE #32
Almost nothing is under your control. Your parents, your school, the government, the awful consequences of karma and history—all of these factors, and a thousand more, are conspiring against you. They tell you what you can do, what you can’t do. The true key to the Art of Starving is this: that your body is under your control even when nothing else is.
DAY: 23
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1100
I woke up, and for a solid fifteen seconds everything felt fine. I lay in a square of sunlight, on clean sheets, feeling rested. No one had hurt my sister. I had a boyfriend. Home felt different. It was the place my mother had made, had fought like hell to create and hold on to.
And then: I sat up. I looked down. My stomach loomed huge, an epic wave of pale fatty flesh that seemed to crash past my waistline. My fingers still smelled like french fry grease.
I was hungry. But I wasn’t hungry enough.
The mirror boy grinned at me while I brushed my teeth. Mocked my flab. Made sure I saw the skin jiggling on the underside of my upper arms. My chicken legs.
Tariq lingered for a little while. I carried him down the hall with me to breakfast, burning on my lips like the curse words I learned at age six and ached to shout in every room I entered. Tariq changed the scale of things,
took the edge off the sordid squalid place. I breezed past stacks of mail, garbage bags sorely in need of a run to the dump, other garbage bags doubling as laundry sacks. I followed the weak light to the kitchen, where two of the four bulbs in the ceiling fixture had been burned out for months. Then I saw my mother, and not even Tariq could keep the pain at bay.
“Matt,” she said, sitting up from the kitchen table so fast I knew she had been asleep. Her face was red and groggy, and she winced in the sunlight.
“Hi, Mom. Thought you’d be at work.”
“Not today.”
A smell was in the air.
Scotch. A new bottle, open on the kitchen table. Next to the “Have You Hugged Your Mother Today?” mug that she used to make us chocolate milk in.
The sight of it brought me crashing back down to earth.
I remembered everything.
Tariq, Bastien, Ott—none of them had done anything to Maya. She left.
She left me. She left us. She left me. For him.
I stared at the bottle. Two ways to respond to this new development. Ignore it, or don’t. Call her out on it, or pretend you don’t see the bottle.
Maybe a better son would have done differently. Maybe a stronger person, one who put the needs of others above his own, would have said to himself, Hey now wait a minute; this is a bad sign and maybe I should see what’s going on.
But, honestly, I can’t tell you what a good son would have done, because I’m not one. So instead I went to the sink and started washing the dishes. Asked her how her day was—“Fine.” Said “Fine” very sincerely, when she asked me. Finished washing the dishes. Stood there.
“What’d you do for dinner last night?”
“Tariq and I went out for McDonald’s.”
Saying his name warmed me up inside, hot and rich like french fries.
“That’s good,” she said, and put her head down on the table. I pulled out the chair beside her and sat.
“Lotta night shifts lately,” I said.
“Oh, baby,” she said, not lifting her head. “It’s going to get worse from here.”
The Art of Starving Page 13
