Thinner Than Thou

by Kit Reed

  Elsewhere in the clubhouse, the bell sounds. The night shift rouses itself. There is work to do. Within seconds, the Reverend Earl’s people will hop to it and by the time he showers and combs his eyebrows and brushes his tongue and slips back into his pajamas, they’ll be ready with the offering. Oh, my love, he murmurs in a paroxysm of need. Soon he will go to her and settle into her, taking in the sweetness and the warmth. Love, he thinks, but the word pops like a bubble in his sad, gaping mouth. “Mom.”

  26

  The rumble that disrupts the nights on the penal corridor at Wellmont is so ominous that even girls who think they’re prepared to fight the rolling horror are never ready when it comes for them.

  The suspense is bad.

  The fact that no one knows what’s coming or what will happen when it does is terrifying.

  When they come for Annie, and they do come for Annie, she is by no means ready. All she’s managed to do, really, in the hours she’s spent wedged between the wall and the steel toilet, is to detach the triangular metal knob from the water valve. She has done it for the simple reason that at this point, with the ultimate coming down on her, there’s nothing else she can do. She’s trapped in her cubicle, with no exit and no place to hide. The first fool who comes in the door will spot her immediately, whether or not they’re looking for her. The cell is so spare that the girl clinging to the steel toilet sticks out like a rat in a punch bowl. At least she has this knob: not a weapon, exactly, because right now she isn’t strong enough to do much damage with it, just something to hang on to as the mysterious, disturbing squidge of rubber wheels on waxed vinyl rolls out of the middle distance, gets louder as it approaches and abruptly—stops. The thing is at her door. It’s right outside. Whatever it is.

  Annie tightens her fingers around her precious object as the door swings open, and she hangs on when the Dedicated, vindictive Eulalia switches on the lights with a delighted little “Hah!” She manages to cling tight to her treasure as Eulalia and the monstrous Ded hall monitor, who remains nameless even now, close in on her. It is Removal time. Annie isn’t sure how she knows, but the Deds call this procedure Removal time. Maybe the name is in the air or maybe Darva told her or maybe it was the small-print item in the daisy-printed manual they gave her with the lavender plush bunny in her welcome kit that first day on the ANO ward, the kind of hint an institution drops when the administration is trying to scare you.

  Removal takes longer than either side expects. Annie freezes while the two not-nuns-not-exactly-nurses try to unlock her arms from the base of the toilet so they can drag her out of its shelter. Panting and tugging, the two Dedicated women struggle to extract her. If Annie isn’t careful her captors will be snapping her fingers, one by one, so they can peel them off, and she will lose her prize. Understanding that this removal is going to happen whether or not she fights it, Annie pretends to lose consciousness and goes limp, letting go of the toilet, this stab at a safe position, everything but her metal knob. The Dedicated Sisters snag her under the armpits and haul her out into the patch of floor. Triumphant, Eulalia lifts her patient high, spinning her as easily as she would a styrofoam pool toy. She stretches the moment out, now that she has her. Clearly the woman is getting off on this. The Dedicated Eulalia raises her trophy higher than she needs to and drops her on the gurney that the little tank of a hall monitor rolls into the room just in time to receive her. Annie’s heartbeat flies out of control and settles. After all these weeks of warnings, after all these weeks of not knowing, she knows the terrible and strangely restful sense of finality.

  This, then, is the cart.

  She thuds onto the cracked plastic like a log.

  With her eyes shut, Annie keeps her fists closed tight, because in this situation, smart people know what to do. She goes limp, mostly, but, brought up on stories about escape artists, she knows to keep the muscles in her forearms taut. She manages to hold still even when, with the finality of a pair of expert morticians, the Dedicated Sisters pull the sheet up—and instead of stopping at the chin, keep on pulling until it skims her face and covers her all the way to the top of her head.

  Annie’s eyes pop open. There’s nothing to see but the sheet, the curve of her nose in the dim light that filters through the coarse fabric. It’s like being inside her own shroud.

  She thinks she hears Eulalia humming a death march. So, what? Is she on her way somewhere awful or is this their way of letting her know she’s dead to them?

  A lot of problems would be solved, she thinks, if I did die. Rolling along like a pig on a platter, Annie Abercrombie tries to imagine what’s next. Darkness, she thinks. In a way, it would be a relief. She sees the dark at the end of the tunnel as if it’s real, and frankly, it looks good. Compared to the stomach tube, she thinks, death would be a piece of cake. From where Annie Abercrombie is lying, with her toes pointed south and the harsh glow of naked ceiling bulbs showing up through the sheet as little blobs of light as the Deds wheel her down the hall, she thinks the end of the tunnel looks like an improvement.

  Anything’s better than this.

  As the gurney rolls into an elevator and she hears the hydraulic whoosh of closing doors, the Dedicated Sister Eulalia speaks to her at last.

  “I know you’re in there,” Eulalia says, and when Annie does not answer she gives the sheet over her helpless patient’s concave belly a mean jab. “I know you’re in here and I have one thing to say to you.”

  The other Ded rumbles like a power mower starting. “I wouldn’t,” she says. “We never tip our hand.”

  “That’s all you know,” Eulalia says bitterly. “Pah!” A wet gob hits the sheet. “Refuse my food, will you?”

  All that not talking, Annie thinks. Who knew you were this pissed off at me?

  “Eulalia, they’re not supposed to know!”

  Eulalia doesn’t care, she goes on in spite of the warning. She’s at Wellmont for life, but she is a short-timer on this job. “You think you’re so smart, with your pretty face and nice hair and your holy, sacred body. So OK, doll baby. That’s the last meal you’ll ever refuse.”

  Oh, God. They really are going to put in the stomach tube.

  Eulalia is probably gratified when she sees the sheet shaking with the force of Annie’s stifled breathing. Vindictive bitch, it probably makes her day. Dedicated Eulalia has done what nobody in this place has ever done. She has made Annie Abercrombie cry. If Annie thought she was headed for the bottom when they pulled the sheet up over her face, she is really at the bottom now. She squeezes her eyes tight and tries to hold her breath but she can hear herself crying so quietly that nobody will hear: heeeesheeeeesheeeesh.

  Over. I want this to be over, Annie thinks.

  When the tall, gaunt Dedicated and the short, squat one roll her down the last corridor and through a pair of doors that whoosh open at the touch of a panel and into a hushed, cold room; when they park the gurney against a wall with the thud of finality; when they snap out the lights and leave, whistling, it is a relief.

  “Sleep well,” Eulalia warbles, in case she doesn’t get it. “First thing tomorrow, it’s the stomach tube.”

  For a long time, it seems better not to move. Instead Annie lies still in the dark in a room that, she calculates from the time it took the Deds to move her from the door to here, is huge. As big as her high school gym, or worse. The sound of the air filtration system and the whish of the double doors closing tell her the room is like a cave—carved out of stone or walled with poured cement. The air in here is dank, it smells metallic. Except for Annie, breathing, there is no organic matter in the room.

  Then there is.

  Oh, my God, they’re coming for me.

  Not so. The doors at the far end of the room spring open as someone in the hall smacks the panel and a team of grunting women comes in, groaning with the effort, to make another delivery. The sound tells Annie they’re wheeling another gurney into the room, and there are more than two of them. Puffing and complaining, they dock it
in the enclosure next to the spot where Annie is parked. Unlike Annie’s handlers, these Deds jabber in undertones as they roll the gurney into place and thump the person strapped to it like handlers dispatching a troublesome steer. “Hah!”

  “You said it, boy wow, you sure said it. Hah.”

  “So now that she’s here, what’s she here for?”

  “Holding.” The fourth giggles. “You know, for something special. Veeery special.”

  She hears the rattle of rollers in a track as they draw a curtain around the bed.

  “Oh, holding,” one says with a dirty laugh.

  “And snogging.”

  “Wait’ll they get a load of her!”

  “What if she tries to run?”

  “What do you mean, tries to run, she can’t even fucking walk!”

  “Or walk fucking,” the fourth one says, too loud. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  “Fuck walking, walk fucking. Whatever he wants.” They are all laughing. They are all very young.

  “Keep it down, Marcella,” one says. The voices are receding now, but before they go, there’s the ritual joke. She delivers the opening line. “You know what they say!”

  In musical comedy tones, the wit of the group moves into the setup. She snickers. “Don’t want to wake her up!”

  The girlish Dedicateds are at the door now, in such spasms of laughter that they forget to turn out the lights. Someone hits the door plate and as they leave her partner comes in on the punch line. “With what they shot into her, even Godzilla wouldn’t wake up.”

  And they are gone.

  For thirty seconds, the room is silent. Then it isn’t.

  “Like I’m not Godzilla,” Kelly says.

  “Kell!”

  Rejoicing like Lazarus, Annie mouths the stiff sheet and uses her teeth to pull it off her face. She has to fight the restraints so she can turn her head. The curtain around the stall next to hers stands out like an Arab tent. The gurney the Dedicated novices brought Kelly in on must be the size of a king-sized bed.

  “I’m so glad!”

  “Me too.”

  They don’t know it, but they don’t have much time.

  Move on from the cautious are-you-OKs and the where-were-you-thens and the muted explanations, each girl dying to tell the other everything she’s been through and what they’ve done to her, and both intent on keeping it down because they’re afraid somebody will come in and separate them. They have to work fast because they don’t know when the next shift will come in and they’re terrified of being caught. When Annie and Kelly get out of here they’ll have plenty of time to talk, and if they don’t get out? It won’t matter what they forgot to say.

  Annie Abercrombie and her only friend here don’t need to discuss what they’re doing in this holding pen nor do they have time to talk in circles, trying to figure out who’ll come for them in the morning or what will happen to them then. There are only two issues here.

  Freeing themselves from the leather restraints that keep them strapped to the gurneys.

  Getting out.

  Although their bones seem big and knobby because the flesh has burned away, the wrists of anorectics are delicate and considerably smaller than they look. The Dedicated keeper Eulalia was so thrilled to get this one off her plate that she tightened the straps on Annie’s wrists to the last notch and decided that was enough. Another notch would have necessitated a trip back to the dungeon floor for a leather punch or a visit to the convent kitchens for an ice pick, unless they’ve all been moved to the lobotomy lab, or asking the hall monitor, whom she probably loathes, for the use of her knife. Instead, the angry Ded had tightened the restraints on Annie’s wrists as best she could given the parameters. Her priority was getting this miserable patient, this conceited, defiant inconvenient Abercrombie girl into the holding pen and out of her life. Eulalia may even have told herself, Who cares what happens to her now? Doesn’t matter. It won’t happen on my watch.

  Never mind that in the ultimate scheme of things, she will be blamed. Dedicated Sisters don’t think that far ahead.

  Now that she has something to live for, Annie drops her precious knob on the plastic mattress and doesn’t flinch when it rolls off the edge and falls to the floor. Sometimes you have to let go of things you care about in order to go on. She curls her hands until her thumbs meet her pinkies and worms out of the wrist restraints, no problem. Next come the straps around her ankles. Easy work, she sits up and undoes the buckles. Free, Annie slips down, surprised by lights that come and go as her feet hit the floor—am I passing out? Carefully, she retrieves the triangular knob: might come in handy, she tells herself, even though it won’t. She realizes she has no place to put it—no pockets, no bra and no cleavage—and, shakily crossing the floor between them, she pulls the curtain that separates her from the next bed. Poor Kell, trussed like a sacrificial maiden. At least she looks the same. Then, before Kelly can speak, she proffers the knob.

  “What’s this?”

  “Present. I brought you a present,” Annie says.

  “You didn’t even know you were gonna see me.”

  She presses her treasure into Kelly’s free hand and closes her fingers around it. “I hoped.”

  “Well, that’s cool.” Nice Kelly, forever polite. In return, she gives Annie the item she’s been clutching with some of the same fervor. “Here’s one for you.”

  Annie shivers. “What’s this?” She already knows.

  “Baby Hershey bar. I’m sorry, it’s kind of melted.”

  “That’s OK.”

  As Annie undoes the buckles on Kelly’s wrist straps, her friend studies her. “Eat it,” she says.

  “Um, later?”

  “Now.”

  “I don’t want to.” Annie wants to. She wants to eat this one and more. It isn’t very big. God, she’s hungry.

  “Get over yourself. You’re so shaky you’ll never make it to the door.”

  “Please don’t make me.”

  “Shut up and eat,” Kelly says. “You’re dead on your feet.”

  “No I’m not. I’m fine.” Working on Kelly’s ankle straps, Annie loses her balance and grabs the bed frame for support. God, when they cut off the IV they really left her flat.

  “Eat it, you’re about to crash.”

  “Shit, you’re right.” You can only get along without eating, she realizes, as long as you’re hooked up to an IV.

  “Do it. You’re gonna need it for the road.”

  “The road?”

  “Babe, we’re out of here.”

  “We are!”

  “A girl should eat.”

  Nodding, Annie does as she’s told. Before she knows what’s happening, her clever friend hands her another and she squeezes it out of the foil and gulps it down. Inhaling chocolate, she says thickly, “Where’d you get this?”

  “They’ve been feeding me. It’s weird. After they caught me they said I could have anything I want.”

  “That is weird.” Without thinking, Annie eats another Hershey minibar. Everything inside her snaps to attention in the sugar rush. “Too weird. We need to think.”

  Kelly sits up, massaging her ankles. “You first.”

  “Right.” Carefully, she pulls the curtain around Kelly’s gurney again, so they are enclosed. “In case they come in.”

  “Better do yours.”

  “What?”

  “Go back and do your curtain. Fix the bed so it looks like you’re still there.”

  “Right.” Working fast, Annie lines up a couple of pillows on her gurney, as if anybody’s going to mistake this for her huge, gross body, but, hey. She pulls up the sheet. Drawing the curtain to hide her abandoned bed, she returns to the little tent the curtain makes around her big friend. “OK, let’s go.”

  “That might be a problem,” Kelly says. “I’ve been eating so much I …” Her voice squeezes out in a little sob of humiliation. “I don’t know if I can walk.”

  “Oh, Kell! What are we going to do?” />
  “I don’t know, I … Oh my God, they’re coming!” They hear the doors bang open and the room fills with new voices—men this time, although in all their time at Wellmont they’ve never seen a man on the place. Cornered, the girls exchange desperate looks.

  Annie hisses, “What are we gonna do?”

  Fortunately, guys doing something are generally so filled with a sense of importance that they don’t hear small noises like Kelly’s barely audible, “Shhhh. Get on!”

  At the moment, Annie is afraid to move. If they see the curtain ripple they’ll be down on Kelly like raptors on a mouse.

  “So the Chunk Detail is pretty trippy,” some guy says, “but why does he want a new one now?”

  “Dude, we don’t ask questions, we just do the job.”

  “But that Betty, his sweet old Betty’s such a bouncer, I just thought—”

  “We don’t think, either.”

  “Isn’t he ever, like, satisfied?”

  “And we never ask. Wuooow, what’s this? Have we found the Dedicateds’ stash?”

  “Looks like ludes to me. Hey, Jack Daniels! What else have they got?”

  Laughing, the men who have invaded the holding area take their time getting to the job. Instead, they fan out, opening cabinets and looking into drawers. As with the Deds who brought Kelly here, there are four of them. But what are they here to do? At the moment they are distracted, plundering. Heedless and noisy, the way men are when they move into women’s precincts, they rattle around the holding area—looking for drugs?—the girls don’t know. There is a clatter—are they rifling supplies? The girls hear music, somebody’s pocket radio, and as these guys take command of the space, they hear what sounds like a volley of one-liners tossed off to spite the Deds. Like all guy jokes, these are gross and probably wonderful, but the girls hiding in the curtained stall are too frightened to take note and too anxious to laugh.

  The worst part is that whatever they’re here for, the men are in no hurry.