by Dona Sarkar
Shazan was the only one who really understood what Leah was going through. Shazan was the only one who supported her. Leah couldn’t lose her now.
Leah realized she was crying when the coach silently handed her a package of Kleenex.
“Coach—”
“You need to stay strong right now and not fall apart in front of her parents.” The coach made a severe turn into the hospital’s driveway.
Leah was out of the car before it was in Park.
“Shazan Ali’s room, please.” Leah was panting by the time she located the receptionist’s desk. Why hospitals were so difficult to navigate was beyond her. When people were desperate to see their loved ones, a labyrinth wasn’t the kind of obstacle they wanted to deal with.
The receptionist popped her gum and blinked at Leah, her puzzled look indicating that she did not understand the question.
“Look, Jiffy,” Leah said, reading her name tag. “She’s my friend. She was brought in for having a…she had a heart attack. I need to know where she is.”
“One sec.” Jiffy clicked on her keyboard and traced her acrylic fingernail along the computer’s ancient monitor. “Ah. Good.”
Leah waited expectantly for an answer. Instead, Jiffy opened up the latest issue of Star magazine. “Please have a seat and I’ll call you when something changes.”
“Hello? Shazan Ali? Room?”
“A seat, please.” Jiffy gestured toward the seating area.
“Can you just tell me her room number? I won’t sneak in. I swear.” Leah drummed her fingers on the counter. She would definitely sneak past this redheaded bimbo the first chance she got.
“Please have a seat.” Jiffy seemed to be reciting from the hospital receptionists’ guidebook. “And we will call you if anything changes.”
“Listen, you little minimum-wage-earning—”
“Leah, come on.” Coach dragged Leah away before she could lunge over the counter and strangle the receptionist. “Getting thrown out of here won’t help Shazan.”
Leah settled down into an orange plastic chair and shifted this way and that. “I can’t deal with this. I’m going to go look for her.”
She stood up, stretched and faked toward the bathroom. “Too much water.” She smiled sweetly at Jiffy. The second the receptionist looked down at her desk, Leah dashed past the desk.
“Hey!”
Leah didn’t look back.
“Get back here! I’m calling security!”
Whatever. She’d been thrown out of more respectable establishments than this stupid hospital.
“Hospital security, call on line one. Security—” the loudspeaker announced.
Ugh, she hated hospitals. The stark, white walls, everyone walking around looking somber. The plasticky Jell-O smell. Leah paraded down the central hallway, but all the rooms were dark and full of machinery.
“Looking for Shazan?”
Leah whirled around.
Bill Collins. Shazan’s ex-boyfriend. The reason she was here today.
“Why are you here?”
Bill ignored the question. “She was in the O.R. She’s in room 202. Upstairs.”
Leah hesitated. It felt like a betrayal to Shazan to accept this creep’s help.
“Come on. I’ll take you.”
Grateful despite her annoyance, Leah followed him into the elevator. “She’s going to be okay,” Bill said. “She’s young, strong. She’ll be fine. She has to be.”
“Do they, uh, know what happened?”
“It was those pills.” Bill punched floor two in the elevator keypad. “She took, like, ten of them. They said she overdosed on them and that stopped her heart. I told her to stop taking them. I told her…” His voice seemed to fade.
Leah scowled. “Yeah, you also broke up with her.”
“She had a real problem with those pills. She was obsessed with her weight. Every time I took her to dinner she would ask the waiter for the number of calories in her food. Then she would eat two bites and say she was full. It was nuts.”
What was wrong with that? Leah frowned. First her father and now Bill. Leaving the women who loved them and tried to look their best for them.
Jackasses.
“I don’t know what her problem was. She was absolutely perfect. She didn’t need to lose any weight.”
“You guys are really something,” Leah muttered mostly to herself. “You want girls who are skinny little twigs but get pissed when they try to watch their weight.”
“I loved her the way she was.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I don’t know why I’m having this conversation with you. You’re probably her supplier.” Bill punched the keypad again as if that would hurry the crawling elevator to the second floor.
“Hey.” Leah turned and slammed him by the shoulders easily into the elevator wall, her anger taking over her good sense. “I had nothing to do with this. She wanted to look good in her Snow Ball dress. She wanted to look good for you!”
“Get off me!”
Leah released him as the elevator door opened.
“Crazy bitch…” she heard him mumble as the elevator door closed with him inside.
Leah ran down the hall and realized she was crying again. Why hadn’t she said something to Shazan? If she had only said or done something this morning, none of them would be here today.
Room 202.
Leah stood outside the closed door, hand on the doorknob. Her mom and dad would be in there. Worried Pakistani parents who would want to know how this had happened to their beautiful, talented young daughter. And Leah had no answer.
She peeked in through the window. Shazan was lying in the bed, folded white sheet all the way up to her chin. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving. Her usually animated face was pasty white. Shazan’s mother, head covered with a hijab, sat at Shazan’s feet with her head bowed.
Leah couldn’t go in. She should, but she couldn’t. She turned and rushed back down to the first floor. Not now. Not while Shazan looked…like that.
Jiffy gave her a dirty look.
Leah gave her one back.
“Hey,” Jay called from the seating area. “There you are. Did you see her?”
“What are you doing here?” Leah accepted his hug and watched over his shoulder as the coach got up to talk to Jiffy once again.
“I came to get you.”
The words should have filled Leah with happiness, but the shock of seeing Shazan lying so still and silent in the bed had taken over her senses. “She’s so…I didn’t go in. Her boyfr—ex, ah, Bill is here, too. Somewhere.”
“Let’s get you home.” Jay didn’t release her from his grip. “You don’t look too good. I heard about the game.”
Leah pulled away. “I want to stay. I want to be here when she wakes up.”
“That could be a while.” Coach retook her seat next to Jay and picked up Time magazine. “Jiffy over there said she’s had surgery. It’ll take a while for the anesthesia to wear off. Another few hours before anyone can see her.”
Leah hesitated. The disinfectant smell of the hospital was giving her a headache and she felt useless just sitting around. Maybe some time with Jay would clear her head.
“Come on.” Jay sensed she was weakening. “Let’s get some dinner and we’ll come back.”
Dinner. Ha. The thought of food made her want to puke.
Leah let him lead her by the hand to his Mustang. “We have to be back in an hour, okay?”
Jay drove. Leah didn’t care where or how fast.
“What happened?”
“She’s been stressed lately. About everything,” Leah lied. She didn’t want to reveal her friend’s secret. Those damn pills. How could Shazan have taken so many? How could she have been so stupid? Leah thought back to her own pill ingestion. How many had she been taking every day? Three? Four? Was she in dangerous territory, too?
Jay glanced sidelong at Leah. “That’s it?”
Leah didn’t answer.
Leah gazed out at the busy parking lot of the strip mall. It was almost the holiday season. She’d almost forgotten about Thanksgiving the following week.
“I’ll have a mushroom-Swiss melt.” Jay folded his menu. “And a vanilla malt.”
Leah glanced up at the waitress. “Um. The same, I guess.” Her stomach was an empty hollow and she couldn’t even think of food.
“So tell me what happened at the game.”
Leah folded her hands, crisscrossing her fingers over each other. Funny, today her hands looked like a stranger’s. Long, slim…almost bony.
“We got a call that Shazan had passed out in the locker room. The paramedics said she’d had a heart attack,” Leah said, her voice trembling. The numbness of the hospital was beginning to wear off and the reality of the situation was starting to set in. A seventeen-year-old had had a heart attack. Somehow being benched from the next basketball game seemed so small suddenly.
Jay took a sip of his water, his eyes not leaving Leah’s. “How do you think this happened?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.” Leah avoided his eyes. “I just—”
The food arrived. Plates piled high with juicy burgers and mounds of extra-crispy french fries. Tiny cups of ranch and barbecue sauce decorated the sides of the dishes.
“Bill broke up with her this morning. I wonder if—” Leah absently reached over to Jay’s plate and took a french fry. The warm, salty potato flavor exploded in her mouth.
What the hell was she doing?
She nearly spit out the remains of the french fry onto the plate, but noticed Jay was watching her closely. She forced herself to swallow.
“Swear to me you won’t take those pills anymore.”
Leah blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I know about the pills. Jenn told me. Shazan bought them online from some Mexican Web site and she took, like, four a day. They sped up her heartbeat and burned calories. And did this to her. You know what I’m talking about.”
“I don’t—”
“Leah, don’t bullshit me. I watched you go from polishing off a double cheeseburger and finishing all the fries to picking at a salad for an hour.” Jay gave her a hard look. “You keep saying you’re not hungry. Exactly what Shazan always says. You are not going to end up like her. I won’t let you.”
“I’m not taking pills.” Leah stared at her still-full plate. That was true. She had finished off the last of them that morning. She’d been hoping to get more from Shazan after the game. And then this had happened.
“Swear?”
The silence went on much longer than Leah was comfortable with. She swallowed painfully. “Swear.”
“Good.” Jay picked up his fork. “Now let’s finish dinner and go get a brownie sundae at Ben and Jerry’s.”
Leah swallowed nervously. “I’m not really hungry.”
Jay raised an eyebrow.
“No, seriously.”
“You are eating every bite on that plate. I’ve seen you do it before and you can do it now.”
“Jay!”
“Just cut the crap. You have a problem. I think you might have an eating disorder.”
Another one. Her mother. Coach. Now her closest friend.
Leah rolled her eyes. “Look at me. Do I look like I have an eating disorder?”
Jay looked her up and down. “Yes.”
“What!”
“You’ve lost, what, sixty pounds in the past month and a half? That’s insane.”
“I’ve been working out.”
“And not eating.”
“I eat enough.” Leah picked up her burger and took a tiny bite. The Swiss cheese seemed to melt away in her mouth. The perfect tinge of spicy horseradish. “See?”
“Keep going.”
After another bite, Leah started to feel nervous. She set the burger down. Jay didn’t seem as though he was going to let up, and her napkin was out of reach so her bite-and-spit technique wasn’t going to work.
Leah finished about half the burger and most of the fries. She would get rid of it. She couldn’t allow this food in her body. She would do what she did in L.A. It was the only way.
“I need to run to the restroom.” Leah finished her glass of water and stood up. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“No.” Jay met her eyes. “You won’t.”
Leah blinked.
“Sit down.” The sunlight hit Jay’s face in a way that hardened his jaw and suddenly he looked much older than a teenager. And sounded it, too.
“What?”
“I know what you’re trying to do.”
“What do you think I’m going to do in there?”
“I’m not stupid, Leah. I know what you’ve been doing. Now, unless you want me to have a chat with the coach about your bulimia, you’ll tell me exactly how it came to this.”
twelve
Panic Room
150 lbs
She’d gained weight. She’d gained back two pounds and only had a week left till the Jade photo shoot.
Leah circled her room eyeing the newest addition, a beaten-up burgundy punching bag that she’d dragged out of the basement.
What the hell was Jay thinking, making her eat like that? He wasn’t her mother. He wasn’t even her boyfriend. What right did he have? He’d stuffed her stupid and left her on her doorstep.
Leah strapped on her gloves and gave the punching bag a hard thump. The only thing her father had left behind. A clunky, unwanted thing.
Like her.
Wham! That was for Jay. That was for him acting like he cared about her, only to sabotage her modeling career.
Wham! Wham! Wham!
Espresso Bean yowled in terror and ran for cover under the bed.
“Sorry, baby! I’m just very upset right now.” Wham, wham, wham.
It felt great. She’d spent the day punching the hell out of the bag. Instead of going to school. Or practice.
She was too humiliated to face her teammates after being benched for next weekend’s game.
And afraid. What if Jennifer had told the whole school about Shazan’s pills? And how Leah was her partner in crime?
Wham! Wham! Wham! That was for Jennifer’s little button nose and rosy lips.
How dare Jay accuse her of having an eating disorder? Not everyone was obsessed with their weight like his precious Jennifer Chan.
Dumb bitch had ratted her out. Now Jay didn’t trust a word she said. How dare Jennifer break up a perfectly solid friendship?
Wham! Wham! Wham!
“Ouch!”
Leah dropped her arms and rubbed her right shoulder. The shooting pain continued to travel down her arm to her wrists. She quickly unbound her hands and tried to rotate her shoulder.
“Ahh!” She couldn’t help the yell.
God, what had she done? The championship game was just two weeks away. She couldn’t do any damage to her throwing arm.
Ding!
A forum alert from the ANA Web site. That morning she had posted a frustrated note about the two pounds she’d managed to gain that week. Because of Jay. She had to be a hundred and forty pounds for the photo shoot. It was the only way.
Once her picture was in magazines, everyone would see. There was nothing wrong with her. She was fine. She was normal.
Leah noticed several replies to her post.
Drink only water. Yeah, right. That never worked. It just made her dizzy. She scrolled to the next one.
Exercise more. She was already running five miles a day despite her shin splints and a throbbing pain on the sides of each knee.
Sleep more so you’re not awake to eat anything. Leah frowned. That wasn’t bad. She could fake sick and stay in bed all week. Then no one would ask questions when she emerged ten pounds thinner by the end of the week. Stomach flu, she could claim.
Drink chicken broth. It keeps you
full, people think you’re eating and it has practically no calories. Dilute it with water.
Perfect. She loved this site. Chicken broth. Nothing but chicken broth this week and staying in bed.
She surfed through the pictures of thin girls on the Web site. Thinspiration, they were called. So thin, so perfect. Their slim arms, long fingers posed on slender hips. Chiseled cheekbones. Tiny thighs.
Girls like Nicole Richie and Mary-Kate Olsen pouted back at her.
They were so lucky. How did they stay so thin?
“Leah! Come downstairs please!”
“I ate already, Mama,” Leah called back. Not this again. Her mother hadn’t forced her to go to the doctor when Leah had insisted she was too traumatized after Shazan’s collapse.
Silence from downstairs, and then Leah heard her mother’s footsteps climbing the stairs.
God. Not now. Leah quickly logged out of the site and left her Internet Explorer window open to the high school’s sports page. Varsity cheerleader rushed to hospital after cardiac arrest.
“When I call you, you come downstairs. You hear me?” Victoria entered without waiting. She froze when she saw the punching bag. “Where did that come from?”
Leah rolled her eyes and gave the bag a slight shove. Her mother hated being reminded of her father, but she didn’t care. She liked seeing her mother thrown off balance. Leah couldn’t help but feel that maybe she had dragged the bag into her room just for the reaction. “The basement. You knew it was there.”
“I—” Victoria swallowed. “Yes, I did. Be careful. Don’t—let it fall on you.”
“I’m going to lie down for a while, I don’t feel too good. So, talk to you later?” Leah rubbed her shoulder. Still sore.
“You coming down with something?”
“I might be,” Leah lied. “I was feeling a bit feverish all day. Maybe I should stay home tomorrow.”
“Sit down.”
“Mama.”
“Sit. Now.”
Leah flopped down on the bed and closed her eyes. “I feel sick.”
“Jay called four times. Are you going to call him back?”
“No.”
“You cut school today.” Victoria’s voice reached Leah through her haze of thoughts. “And Coach Richards called me to say that you were benched for the next game, but you didn’t even go to practice today. What’s up with that?”
