“Business bad?”
“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “Something to do with corporate. Downsizing. Outsourcing. Offshoring. Some crazy thing.”
“Is the plant going to close?”
She shrugged. The table trembled. “If this goes on for one more week I’m officially not a full-time worker. If I’m not a full-time worker I lose my—our—health insurance.”
I put my hand on her arm. One of hers grabbed mine so swift and hard I could feel the full force of her hurting. Her need. Her hunger. Her sadness.
“You look tired, Mom,” I said. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“In a minute,” she said, but let me take her to her room. She stood in the doorway and switched on the light and blinked her eyes and focused, and for a split second she was My Mother again, the Moving Mountain, wild of hair and sharp of eye, and she grabbed my head and pulled it in for a forehead kiss and stumbled to bed.
“Hit the light,” she said, already half-asleep.
I sat at the kitchen table for a while after that, staring at the bottle, debating dumping it down the drain, deciding in the end that it wouldn’t help. If Mom had a problem, she’d buy more booze, and it’d be a cowardly action made by a boy too weak to have the real, uncomfortable conversation that was needed.
So instead I did what I’d seen my mother do, when one of us was sick or sad or hurting in some other way she couldn’t help.
I cooked.
I found flour and sugar and butter and eggs and chocolate chips and did what the chip bag said to do. I whipped and I blended and I spooned onto a lubed-up baking sheet and I popped it into the preheated oven. Just like a real person.
They smelled like love, like heaven, like all good things. I wanted to eat them all.
I didn’t need to continue my Mission of Bloody Revenge. I didn’t need to track Maya down and rescue her. So why couldn’t I bring myself to eat?
Because she was still there, stuck to the side of the fridge: Skinny Mom.
Because there was only one thing in this whole world I could control, and that was my body. Not to mention that if I had any shot at helping our family, I’d need my starvation-charged senses back.
So I packed the cookies tightly in Tupperware and left her a note with hearts on it. Then I drowned in hot water the excess dough, which under normal circumstances I’d have scraped from the sides of the bowl with my fingers and sucked clean, but circumstances weren’t normal anymore, and never would be again.
I stared at my hands, still shiny with butter and sugar. So I ran them under the hot water until the deliciousness melted away and my fingers were scalded and red.
RULE #33
Your body’s memory for pain is far better than its memory for pleasure.
DAY: 24
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
I woke up choking, gagging, retching, jolted out of bed and onto the floor by the ghost of the tube down my throat. My body was back in the hospital, or so it believed, drugged and helpless and fed against its will.
“You okay, honey?” Mom asked but did not open my bedroom door.
“Fine,” I said, coughing up a throatful of warm phlegm onto my hands. “Bad dream.”
“Sounds really bad,” she said but went away.
All day long I carried that ghost tube with me, an uncomfortable itchiness, a dull throb, through the halls and classrooms of Hudson High. I concentrated on controlling the smell my skin gave off, shaping my pheromones to say Danger, do not approach, silently furious at everyone.
No bullies cornered me. No teachers called on me. There was a movie about Spartans instead of an actual lecture in history class. At lunch I ate two tablespoons of tsampa. I did not eat a third.
After that I raised my pheromone cloaking shield again, and stayed alone in my bubble until Tariq cornered me at my locker between sixth and seventh periods and smiled so deep my defenses evaporated.
“Hey, mister,” he said, looking sporty in his soccer jersey and thick striped socks over his jeans.
“Hey,” I croaked.
“Got plans after school?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“I’ve got a game. Up at Albany Academy. I want you to come with us.”
“On the varsity team bus?” I said. “I hate most of those guys, you know that. And the feeling is mutual.”
“They’re my friends,” Tariq said. “They’re not all terrible. You should come. I want you to be one of them.”
I wrinkled my nose.
“Is that even allowed, for nonplayers to ride on the bus?”
“Probably not,” he said. “We make our own rules, you and me. But no, I checked with Coach. He’ll just make you sign a form. Meet us at three in the parking lot.”
“I will,” I said and marched to class, and got halfway through it before I noticed my throat no longer hurt.
The invincible feeling lasted until I arrived at the parking lot.
“What’s he doing here?” Ott said as I boarded the bus behind Tariq.
“He’s here to take pictures for the yearbook,” he said, and I swooned with love at how effortlessly he could lie.
“He doesn’t have a camera,” Bastien said, but clapped me on the back anyway. Bastien loved clapping people on the back.
“He’ll use his cell phone, asshole.”
The bus had a faint medicinal smell. Spit was dried on the glass. The seats were dark-green plastic, stretched thin and thick with Sharpie’d slogans. I had fantasized about this, the team bus, being one of The Guys. Usually those fantasies became pornographic. “No making out, I take it,” I whispered to Tariq when we sat down in the back row.
He punched me. Tenderly.
“This is crazy,” I whispered. “You’re not scared about these guys . . . suspecting something?”
He elbowed me in the stomach, then kept his elbow there, then tickled me with his free hand.
“I’m petrified,” he said finally.
“Want me to stand up right now and make an announcement?”
“You would do that, wouldn’t you?” He looked at me in happy disbelief. “But no. I just wanted you here. These are my brothers, even if I spend more time hating them than liking them.”
The ride up was terrifying boredom. Asinine jokes. Exaggerated stories. Poorly remembered movie plots. Watching Hudson’s autumn desolation scroll by. Listening to bad music from cell phone speakers. Trying hard to tune out the surging stink of eighteen rival pheromonal signatures. I tried to enjoy being near Tariq, to think that maybe I might sort of fit in.
I was doing a pretty good job of it, I thought. And then, somewhere near Schodack, Bastien knocked a Snickers bar out of some boy’s hands.
“Your fat ass doesn’t need that,” he said and picked it up off the floor and pocketed it. “Last match you were so slow you lost the ball two separate times.”
After that, I spent the whole ride sucking my gut in.
Near Albany, we passed the exit for Canajoharie. And I thought, for the thousandth time, about Darryl. My friend who’d not just moved away, but abandoned me. For the thousandth time, I wondered why. Wondering made my stomach hurt.
I hate soccer. I will not describe the game. Tariq looked amazing, though. His long muscular legs pumped harder and struck faster than anyone else’s. I basically watched his legs for ninety minutes.
Hudson High lost. This surprised no one, except for maybe half our team, boys who were clearly deluded about the nature of their own abilities and also the world they lived in.
The coach wouldn’t let me in the locker room, which is probably just as well. Terrible things would have happened, and I wouldn’t have been able to handle the sight of so much skin. Someone would have seen me staring. Or noticed something happening in my pants. And I’d be murdered.
So I paced the halls of that strange, fancy building, with its high ceilings and the eerie absence of stale-tater-tot smell. Everything was made of marble at Albany Academy, even, apparently,
the pale well-dressed boys and girls and parents frowning in my direction.
The Academy is a rich prep school, and they knew me for what I was: a poor, grimy student from another town, who only had the privilege of breathing the Academy’s sweet air thanks to their generous compliance with intramural athletic regulations.
I ignored them. This was a ninja knack I had long before starvation gave me superpowers, because if there’s one survival skill being a gay boy at a backwoods high school gives you, it’s the ability to be unbothered by the behavior of assholes.
Eventually Tariq returned, smelling like tea tree shampoo and dressed in a too-large sweatshirt, his black hair luminous, the rest of his team close behind him.
Bastien handed everyone an orange. Even me.
“Where’d you get these?” someone asked.
“Stole them out of a sports bag someone left in the hallway,” he said.
Everyone laughed. Everyone ate stolen oranges. The air filled up with the smell of peeled citrus. And while we were standing there, the team of us, waiting for who knows what, the Albany Academy team came through.
“You guys smell like cow shit,” someone said from inside the boisterous crowd.
“Cow? Nah, I think that’s horse,” another voice added.
“No,” said a wiry little guy at the head of the pack. “Pig. The hog-rendering plant is in Hudson, isn’t it?”
My fists tightened.
“My dad says it’s the last thing left,” Wiry continued, pushing the glasses up his nose with his middle finger. “Better up your soccer game, boys. Sports is gonna be the only way out for any of you.”
In the hooting and bluster that followed, I flashed back to my dodgeball massacre. To the pleasure of hurting people. And I stepped forward impulsively, into Wiry Boy’s personal space.
“What’s this skinny freak want?” he asked, then looked me in the eye.
I’m not going to lie. Skinny freak made me feel good.
I breathed deep, sucked in the smell of him. Memorized it. “Nothing,” I said, and reached out to touch his sleeve. “That’s a nice shirt.” With two pointed fingers I tapped in three different spots on his arm, triggering pressure points.
He yanked his arm away from me. “Get the hell away from me, freak.”
“Want an orange?” I asked, and lobbed mine at him. Not hard. His arm flew up to catch it—and then he screamed.
Muscles spasmed in response to the points I’d pressed, the signals from his brain diverted and rerouted, twisting his forearm in one direction and his wrist in the other, a harsh and sudden agony as the ligaments were stretched, stopping just short of a sprain.
“You okay, there, buddy?” I asked.
His friends stepped closer, eager for a rumble.
“Whatever,” he said, holding the arm to his body, confused and embarrassed to have no idea what just happened. “We’re going home. Have a nice drive back to your shitty homes in your starving, little nothing town.” He led his posse away.
Bastien stared at me. “What the hell just happened?” he asked, not unkindly.
“Guy broke his wrist recently,” I said. “I could tell by the way he carried it. Figured if I caught him off guard I could get him to move it in a way that would be pretty painful.”
“You’re a spooky kid, Matt,” Bastien said.
Heads nodded. A couple guys grunted agreement. I felt proud and happy, but weirdly exhausted. My heart was thumping so hard I could barely breathe.
You really need to eat something, a voice said, but I ignored it.
Ignoring the voices is an essential component of the Art of Starving.
“Where’s our bus?” someone asked, tapping on the windows, watching the parking lot.
“There’s like five buildings to this fancy-ass school,” someone else said. “Eight parking lots. Dude is lost.”
I turned from boy to boy, following a sweet grassy smell.
“Somebody here has marijuana,” I said, then pointed. “Somebody standing over here.”
Silence. Funny looks.
“One of you two,” I said, pretending to have a very vague sense when in fact I knew exactly who had how much dope and where it was stashed. “I can smell it.”
“Damn, son,” said a mellow kid named Danny. “You got a hell of a nose. I’m carrying. Why? You want some? I didn’t know you smoked.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I want to go put it in that guy’s locker, and then call the cops.”
Silence, then someone whistled. “Hardcore.”
“Badass.”
Danny grinned, dug deep into his back pocket. “Hell, I’ll happily sacrifice to that noble cause.”
“How are you going to find his locker?”
“His name is Wilson Horn,” Tariq said. “We’ve played them before.”
“The lockers have names on them,” I lied, since how could I explain to them that I’d know it by smell? “And they’re alphabetical. That’s how fancy this school is.”
“Matt and I’ll be right back,” Tariq said.
“It’s always the quiet ones who are evil geniuses,” Danny said, clapping me on the back as he handed over the three joints.
We sped off into the maze of darkened hallways. I let my nose lead me.
“You’re devious,” Tariq said, grabbing my hand. We slowed down and walked like that, holding hands, through the dark halls of a strange school, and I felt invincible.
“They don’t have names,” Tariq said. “How will you—”
I kissed him, hard and abrupt, pushing him back against the lockers. I tapped one of them. “It’s this one. I can smell him all over it.”
Tariq turned, sniffed, shrugged. “Really? That’s some supernatural nose shit, man. You sure you’re not a werewolf?”
“I’m only sure of one thing,” I said, and kissed him some more.
He spun us around, so my back instead of his was against the metal locker doors. He pressed his whole body close to mine.
Alone, in bed or at my computer, I indulged in the most obscene and elaborate fantasies. Savage brutal couplings to make Nicki Minaj blush. But with Tariq I was scared and timid, frightened of the thing I wanted so badly.
“You’re too sexy, you know that?” he said.
“Stop your lies,” I mumbled into his neck, and tried to break free. “We have work to do.” His body held me tight. He took the joints from my outstretched fingers and slipped them, one after the other, through the vents at the top of Wilson Horn’s locker. Pressed his other hand to the seat of my pants.
“Want to?” he whispered.
More than anything, I thought, but said, “Not now.”
“Come on,” he said, and began to unbuckle his belt with one hand while the other tightened around my wrist.
“No,” I said, harder.
“Fine,” he said, stepping back, his face tight with sudden anger.
And then, out of nowhere, he punched the locker beside me. I yelped. He winced, held his fist in his other hand, cursed several times.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my voice light but my heart dark and frightened. “Was that supposed to scare me?”
“No,” he said, his face a stranger’s. “Sorry. You’re not what I’m mad at.”
“Then don’t ever do that again,” I whispered.
Tariq nodded, but didn’t look at me. He turned his head back in the direction we had come. Where his friends waited. By the bus that would take us back to our lives. Light from that direction lit him up in profile: his long lashes, his proud nose, his parted hungry lips. I breathed him in, and I smelled:
He wants everyone to find out. More than anything else, he wants this charade to be over.
But he’s terrified of it.
We walked back slow, holding hands until just before we turned the corner and were greeted with the cheers of our team.
“It’s a Friday,” Bastien said as we walked out of that horrible building. “We’ll call the cops on Sunday, so it
won’t point back to us so much.”
The air was bitter cold and glorious. We stood there joking, laughing, watching our breath billow in the air, waiting for the bus. They were all terrible people, all monsters.
My powers could help me be one of them. And it felt so so good to be one of them.
RULE #34
Happiness is the most treacherous emotion. When you’re happy, all you want to do is stay happy.
DAY: 26
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1300
“You would like Gimli best,” Bastien said, and Tariq said “Ooooh” like it was a witty insult, and maybe it was, except my knowledge of Lord of the Rings characters was woefully limited.
We sat in the bed of Tariq’s pickup truck. Bastien’s car was parked beside us, engine running, headlights casting two long bright trails across the ragged lines of pine trees. His stereo thumped out classic rock, dumb empty songs, but the rhythm was nice and the mood was mellow and I didn’t hate it half as much as I would have hated it a week before.
Bastien took a long hit and then offered me the joint.
“Matt gets high on life,” Ott said.
“No shit,” Bastien said, handing it to him instead. “How’s that working out for you?”
“Pretty great,” I said and pointed up at the sky. “Did you guys know about stars? A bunch of bright dots in the sky for no reason? That shit is totally trippy.”
Everybody laughed.
“Legolas is where it’s at,” Bastien said. “Legolas kicks just as much ass as Gimli, but he does it with class and wit.”
“Trav says Legolas is a fairy,” Ott muttered.
“My brother’s an idiot,” Bastien said. “Everybody knows Legolas is an elf.”
“That’s not what he means.”
“Oh.”
Silence. Bastien had no comeback to that, bested again by his absent brother. “Then who does he like? Galadriel?”
Ott whispered, “Aragorn,” reverently, and Bastien nodded.
“Who’s Aragorn?” I asked.
“The King,” Bastien said. And I remembered from the movie: tall, handsome, brave, strong, perfect, tiresome. Mighty warrior, wise commander, total bore.
The Art of Starving Page 14
