Thinner Than Thou

by Kit Reed

  “That’s so terrible.”

  “No, that’s sooooo the way it is.”

  “You’re right: It is.” Annie is remembering herself at the first meeting with the counselor. Mom and Dad took her, like they thought talking would make her want to eat. She remembers all the crap Mom tried to feed her and the crying and the entreaties, and the question comes out of her on one long sigh. “But why do they do us like that?”

  “Because we’re an embarrassment to them!”

  Astonished, Annie says, “That’s what my mother said. Unless it was my dad. That I’m an embarrassment to them.”

  Kelly leans forward and the bed settles; her breath is sweet on Annie’s face. “So you get it, right?”

  “That they hate us? Sure.”

  This makes Kelly angry. “No, stupid. That they have no right! Like, everybody is supposed to accessorize and we’re not the right size or the right fucking shape.”

  “Accessories.” Annie has been trapped inside her own misery for so long that she didn’t see it. Now she does. The universal, gorgeous EXPECTED, the fact that nobody living really measures up. Not even poor Mom, with her Reverend Earl workout DVDs and her special formula that’s supposed to make her thin. In spite of all her shopping and pissing and sweating over hair and makeup, Mom is doomed too, because she doesn’t measure up and to make it even worse for her, she has a skinny daughter who will never measure up. Annie’s breath comes out in a little sigh of discovery. “So that’s what we are.”

  “Like, everything’s about the right car, the right house, the right look, you know, the perfect picture, happy couple, handsome kids …”

  “And we look bad so we make them look bad.”

  “You got it. Get it?”

  “Yes.”

  “So are you with me or not?” Slowly, to keep Annie’s end from dropping with a clank when the weight shifts, Kelly slides off the bed.

  “What are we doing?”

  “Running away.”

  Annie is pretty certain Kelly is too big to run anywhere. “I don’t know.”

  “Unless you just love being all bent out of shape.”

  “I hate it.” She gets down from the bed. The IV pole rattles to her side.

  “Lose that thing, you can’t get far pushing an IV pole.”

  Annie considers the needle stuck in the back of her hand. The Dedicated Sisters’ IV. What’s going into her, anyway? If she pulls it out will she feel better or will she die? “I know.”

  “So you’re coming, right?”

  In the silence, Annie strips the tape off and pulls the IV line out of the lead taped to the back of her hand. It is scary and exciting. The flow stops. She doesn’t die. She considers the IV catheter lodged in the biggest vein. (Darva: Don’t pull this out, they’ll only come in and set another one.) The needle is coarse and hard to remove. With her breath shivering, she strips the tape and squeaks with pain as she pulls it out.

  “You OK?”

  “Not really. Sure. Let’s go, I’m fine.”

  Kelly eases the door open, but she has to pass through the opening before light leaks in from the hall, she is that big. She has, however, managed to find a heavy black slipcover-looking thing for camouflage—a curtain, Annie thinks, worn like a poncho with a hole in the middle so her head pops through. She turns and Annie’s first thought is, What a pretty face.

  Annie broaches the doorway and then falls back. “The collar.”

  “I fixed that. Remember?”

  Annie nods. She starts through the electronic barrier when Kelly’s hand separates from the black curtain like a pink starfish trailing a cloud of black. She thrusts Annie back inside. “What?”

  “Black sheet I brought from home. Put it on.”

  Like two sorely mismatched shadows, the two escapees suck in their breath and proceed down the hall. Kelly goes first, adroitly dodging the cameras even though she has assured Annie that the hallscape Domnita sees is being projected on a loop. Did she lie about jiggering the cameras? Did she not? It doesn’t matter. At least she neutralized the collars that trigger the electronic fence. What’s more, Domnita isn’t watching. It’s past midnight now, and at her station, the angular, militant Ded in charge of the anorectics’ hall is collapsed face down in a little mound of sugar doughnuts centered on her desk. Ordinarily, food is perfectly safe on this floor, given the clientele, but there’s nothing in the Dedicateds’ table of organization that accounts for Kelly’s being mobile, or smart enough to reach this floor. Annie has to lean into her fat guardian and shove hard to get her to slip past the doughnuts without raking in a batch to take with. “Don’t, they’ll catch us!”

  “She’ll never miss one little one.”

  “I’ll get you some later,” she promises foolishly.

  “Yeah, right.”

  Tiptoeing, the girls move like ghosts down the long corridor where, in rooms on either side, IV poles rattle as anorectic girls shift and whimper in their sleep. Should they wake them all, Annie wonders, should they rescue them all or are they all as debilitated as she is, frightened and too weak to run?

  At the end of the hall Kelly stabs a button and when hidden doors open she shoves Annie, hard, maybe because she’s still pissed about the doughnuts. “In here.”

  Annie notes their location in the split second before Kelly throws a switch and the light in the little cubicle goes out. They are in a freight elevator going down.

  It is exciting and terrifying, plummeting downward at high speeds in the dark. It’s even more frightening to realize that they are minutes away from walking free. They’ll stop on the bottom level and take the basement route that Kelly scoped the other day, they’ll reach this exit Kelly found—door or window? She doesn’t know—and if it’s locked, well, Kelly’s so smart she must know how to take care of that. They’ll open the door or climb out the window into fresh night air and then they’ll … It is exciting and wonderful. They’ll simply walk out.

  The freight elevator stops with a little hydraulic whump. There is an awful moment in which the doors don’t open. Then they do. Kelly pulls in a tremulous breath. “Well, here we are.”

  “Wow, here we are!” Annie pulls the black poncho around her. “So where’s it?”

  “What?”

  “You know, the exit you found.”

  “Oh. Oh, that. Right down there.” Kelly points to the far end of another long, stark corridor. The ceilings here are low and lighted at intervals by incandescent lights. Crazy, all the Dedicateds’ technology and at this level they’re still using old-fashioned hundred-watt bulbs.

  “This doesn’t look like a way out, it looks like a basement.”

  “What, you want to waltz out through the lobby and set off gazillion alarms? Get real.” They’ve been moving fast. Kelly is out of breath. She leans against the wall. “Give me a minute. ’Kay?”

  There isn’t time! Annie is scared shit and crazy to get out of here. “Hurry, let’s do this before the alarms go off.”

  Kelly wheezes, “I took care of that.”

  “They could still catch us, Kell, let’s go, let’s go.”

  Kelly takes deep breaths. One. Two. Three. Four. The big girl is used up now, they won’t make it, they have to make it. “Momentito,” she says.

  “Hurry, they could be coming!” Annie is dying here.

  “OK,” Kelly says at last in a voice that bubbles with expectations. Producing a multipurpose tool Annie has never seen before, she heads down the hall. “One, two, three and we’re out!”

  15

  It is near midnight on the twins’ third night outside the Dedicated Sisters headquarters in Snowmass. There’s not much going on in the little encampment they have made on a rise overlooking the Ded headquarters. Dave Berman sits staring moodily at the remote entrance while Betz watches Dave and, rolled like a cigar in his sleeping bag, Danny sleeps.

  Betz doesn’t know how much longer they can hold out. They’ve eaten their way through the last of Danny’s winnings and
their cash is dwindling. In this resort town in the high Rockies, there are too many ski bums ahead of them in line to pick up the available odd jobs. There are no eating competitions in Snowmass that Danny can find, and he’s hungry all the time. As for leads, they have none. The three of them have taken turns asking bright questions in every business establishment in town and they haven’t learned a thing. The hopes that kept them going all the way through Iowa and Nebraska and into Denver and over the highest point in the Rockies are wearing thin.

  They are, like, so close, but not. They have been watching the Dedicated Sisters’ building for two days now and nothing has changed. Nobody comes and nobody goes. The featureless face of the tall slab is sealed. The monolith glistens in the moonlight like a gigantic oblong sugar lump. They have no way of knowing where in the building the Dedicated Sisters are holding Annie, or what they’re doing to her. They can’t figure out how to get in. They can’t find a way in and they don’t know how they’ll get her out. They don’t even know whether the so-called nuns ever leave the building and if they do, which part of the thing opens to let them out. They assume it will be the banded steel doors at the entrance, but the doors look rusted shut. Nothing good has come down the pike and there’s nothing coming that they can see. No removals or deliveries, no laundry truck or Dumpster they could use as cover, nothing to make the Dedicated Sisters show themselves or open the double steel doors. If this is headquarters, where is everybody?

  What if it’s only a front?

  What if the gigantic sugar lump they are surveilling is a block-solid brick put up to fool people, nothing but brick all the way to the top? There is no light showing. There’s no back door and there are no windows that they can see. Betz thinks they could bomb into the foundation in the Saturn and not budge the thing, they could run at the great steel doors with a battering ram and never make a dent. They could wait outside until a year from Thursday and not catch anybody going out or coming in. The building is so tightly sealed that she has to wonder whether people actually do come in this way, ever. Or go out. Is there, for instance, a tunnel that they don’t know about, Dedicateds scuttling underground, going through this mountain and coming out the other side?

  There is no way of telling, that they can find.

  They have circled the headquarters so many times now that they could do it in the dark. In fact they have done it in the dark, Dave leading, Danny and Betz stepping in his footprints, tapping the brick, listening for any change in the sound that would signal a hidden opening. They’ve done it so often that their teeth ache from the tension and their knuckles are raw.

  As soon as the sun dropped tonight, Danny pulled his sleeping bag up over his head and went to sleep.

  Dave has sunk into a bleak silence and nothing Betz can say or do will please him or bring the color back into his leaden eyes.

  She might as well be alone.

  This is bad, and not only because the quest has dead-ended. Without Annie here in living color to disillusion him or maybe just to cut him loose, Betz can’t really move in on Dave. There is, of course, the possibility that her sister and this impossible guy will fly into each other’s arms the minute they rescue Annie, excluding Betz forever, but that’s a chance she has to take. Does she really want Annie saved, or not? She is neither here nor there with this problem, and it is unsettling. She came out west to rescue Annie, you know, turn her loose so she can sign off on Dave for good and all, but what if Annie’s buried so deep in this place that they can’t get her out? Does Betz win nice Dave Berman by default? It’s disturbing, being around him all the time, her body keeps sending her messages that are encrypted. Incomplete.

  The clear mountain night is cold, the whispering sound of the aspens is playing on her nerves and even in the moonlight the back of Dave’s well-muscled neck is so finely drawn that all she wants to do is touch it, there, at the spot where the hairline blurs. She won’t bother him, really, she won’t make any noise, all she wants to do is sit close to the damn boy, and if he notices? It’s cold out here on the side of the mountain. The air’s too thin, and no matter what she does she can’t get warm. She needs the possibility. She wants to edge in there next to him, no pressure, no problem, they can just be Betz and Dave sitting together in the dark.

  A twig crunches. When you most want to be quiet, a twig always does.

  When they first saw the locked steel doors, Dave’s eyes turned from blue-grey to lead. All the light in his eyes went away. Now his voice is dark and heavy too. “What do you want?”

  “Snapple?” Embarrassed, she proffers it. It’s her last, and she’s using it, OK, she’s using it to bargain with. Snapple in exchange for a few words. With any luck, a smile. Anything she can get. “It’s cold.”

  “Oh, yeah, I guess so. Thanks.” He takes a swig and hands it back. “You?”

  “Thanks.” She drinks. It’s practically like touching his mouth. She takes advantage of the shadows, the whispering aspens and the sound of a remote stream, slipping in the question cleverly, like just another piece of the mountain night. “You love her this much?”

  “Who?”

  He sounds so disaffected that her head snaps up. “Annie. I mean, you drove all this way for her.”

  Dave doesn’t answer. Instead he surprises her. “Do you?”

  “What?”

  “Love Annie.”

  “She’s our sister.”

  “She’s my girlfriend.” Yeah, but there is that unexpected pause before Dave adds, “I think.”

  “You’re not going to tell me what that means, are you?” She wants to shift position so she can see directly into his face but she’s afraid to disturb whatever this is that they have going on.

  “When I find out I’ll tell you,” Dave says.

  “But when we started you were out of your mind crazy hot to find her.”

  “Yeah. I know what these places are like.”

  “You never said why.”

  “My cousin. They sent her up the river too.”

  “I’m sorry.” The silence that follows is so heavily loaded that Betz has to ask, “Is she OK?”

  He coughs. “She died.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “So I’m like, no way am I going to let that happen to anybody I know, not ever again.”

  Betz is wired now, excited and joyful. “Of course. Of course you are.” It’s all I ever wanted, she thinks. We can go home now. The minute she thinks it, she repents. Annie, I didn’t mean it! “We’ll save her,” she says urgently. I didn’t mean it, Annie, I’m so sorry. “We have to.”

  “And we will.”

  “We’ll do it come hell or high shit.”

  “Damn straight.”

  “And when we find her …” Her mind is racing ahead.

  His response is immediate. “We bring them down.”

  She knows better than to say: Like, how? “More Snapple?”

  “Thanks.” There is a long silence during which they pass the Snapple back and forth. She and this Dave Berman that she likes so much are close now, Betz thinks, but she can’t complete the thought. Close to what? Accidentally, taking back the Snapple, her hand brushes his hand. Accidentally, she supposes, his fingers curl around hers. She shifts the empty bottle to her free hand and puts it down. Without either of them making the decision, they are holding hands.

  Dave says flatly, “Nothing’s going to happen, is it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gestures at the glistening sugar lump. “Down there.”

  “I don’t think so. Not without Special Forces or cops to help us, state troopers, whatever, with grenades to blow open the doors and a SWAT team to get them out.”

  “Which we can’t call down because the Deds are chartered and it’s all within the law.”

  “Because our parents signed a contract. They put her there.”

  “And she’s right inside.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Oh, she’s in there,”
Dave says, “she’s got to be.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  At high altitudes everything is strangely exaggerated. Moods are heightened, senses are preternaturally sharp. Before the earth behind them stirs, their back hairs crawl as if they are connected and their bodies are hardwired. They are on their feet before the patch of undergrowth behind them starts to move.

  A trapdoor opens and, as if he’s come here especially to be with them, a lean, bald man climbs out.

  Dave murmurs, “God!”

  “Exactly.” He’s old, so old that they can’t tell how old he is, but he’s agile and dressed like their idea of a ninja in his black turtleneck and black jeans. “About God, at least.”

  Betz tries her voice. “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m Brother Theophane. Oh, not the Theophane, I’m just named after him.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “He was a monk.”

  “And you?”

  “The new Brother Theophane, of St. Benedict’s abbey at Snowmass. I’m one of the last.”

  “I thought the Deds owned this.” Angry, Dave jerks his head toward the building. “I thought they’d …”

  “Bought us out? No, we refused them. Flushed us out? No. God knows they tried.” Theophane shrugs. Even in the dark it’s an eloquent shrug. “Earl Enterprises doesn’t take no.”

  “Earl Enterprises?”

  “The Reverend Earl runs the Dedicated Sisters, didn’t you know? As I understand it, he runs everything.”

  “That’s awful,” Betz says.

  “He wanted a financial center in a safe place.”

  “Financial center?”

  “That’s why he tried to buy us out. We didn’t want to sell.”

  Dave jerks his head toward the building. “But they’re here.”