Skin and Bones (4 page)

Bones laughed.

She smiled at him and he smiled back.

Teresa studied her reflection in the TV’s dim screen, fiddling with the safety pin in her eyebrow. It looked dull.

She reminded Bones of a fat girl he met in a group therapy meeting a year ago. She’d been so depressed about her weight she’d quietly swallowed pills, chasing them down with Kaopectate to keep from throwing up. Her brother found her and called 911. Afterward she wore a hand-painted T-shirt to meetings to show she was learning to accept her body,
More to Love
.

Bones set up folding chairs and tables for dinner before going back to his room, where he was horrified to see Lard eating cottage cheese (one-half cup, 90 calories) from the carton. Even the smell grossed him out.

“Sharing a room with another person is hard enough!” Bones rushed to open the window. “But a person bringing food into my personal space is not okay! And I’m lactose intolerant!”

“You can’t be allergic to smells.”

Bones heard the empty container hit the trashcan behind him. “Tell that to the twenty-three million people with hay fever.”

“Trying to appear tragic in an eating disorder ward is redundant.”

When Bones leaned out the window he saw a string of twine tied to a nail below the sill. A bag of Cheese Doodles (7 ounce bag, 975 calories, 99% fat) hung from a clip on the end. Definitely contraband.

“It could be worse, man,” Lard said. “You could have a roommate who pukes in his pillow case. “Come on, it’s time for dinner.”

Bones felt shaky, unsteady at the thought of more food. The weight of regularly scheduled meals was so hard, and he hated other people deciding what he could and could not eat. The dayroom smelled like the burnt microwave burritos his sister bought at 7-Eleven. That and shattered hopes.

Lard pushed by him. “Let’s sit with Eve.”

To shake off impending doom, Bones noted that this was the first time he’d ever been invited to the popular table. Lard smoothed his hair self-consciously and chose a chair next to Eve. She wore shorts, an impressively tight T-shirt, and the type of running shoes that caused serious wallet-cramping.

Bones sat across from her.

Teresa joined them. “Chu man gave me an extra ten minutes on the treadmill. What a killer.”

That was the best news Bones had heard since checking in. “There’s a gym in the hospital?”

“Physical therapy,” Lard said. “But you won’t start on a program until your weight’s stable.”

“That means he’s going to force calories down you,” Eve said with obvious disgust. “I could loan you a bra for weigh-in. Stuff it with something heavy so the scales show a gain. Then maybe he won’t raise your calories so much.”

“Why tell him that?” asked Teresa. “Look at him, he’s thin as a toothpick.”

“I am looking at him.” Eve smiled. “He’s perfect the way he is.”

Lard leaned back dejected, as if everything he’d learned in life was dissolving before his eyes.

Bones sat there equally uncomfortable. There was nothing worse than having someone talk about you behind your back in front of your face. In the awkward silence that followed, Bones put on his gloves, letting the rubber snap his wrists. Eve looked at him sympathetically. “I feel your pain.”

Another table filled up. Unibrow came in. His mustache bristled when he set down their trays, but he didn’t say anything. He never did. Sometimes, if it weren’t for his fingers gripping a mop handle or dinner trays, you wouldn’t know he was alive.

Bones closed his eyes against the smell of decaying flesh on his plate—fear and despair for both the diner and the about-to-be dined. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the room. He was dying inside, slipping into the outer edge of a bottomless chasm. Any rush about being at the “in” table had taken leave.

“They only gave you eight peas?” Lard eyed Bones’s plate. “I could mainline those.”

“It’s not that I’m paranoid,” Bones said, mashing the peas into his chicken. “But I’m pretty sure the peas have been talking about me behind my back.”

Lard snorted.

Eve changed positions and two bumps strained against her T-shirt. She called Nancy over. “Can I have a saltshaker and some lemon wedges?”

Nancy came back with silverware, saltshakers, and lemon wedges.

Eve drenched her food in salt.

Bones did the same. It was the only thing that made food remotely palatable.

Then Eve squeezed lemon juice (1 calorie) into her water. “Lemon is a natural diuretic.” She was so smooth, so smart.

Bones gagged down his dinner, then stormed the bathroom, flung off his clothes, and climbed on the overturned trashcan. He stared into the mirror, shrinking back. Flab, a vile four-letter word. Not part of the plan!

His strategy was to use the shower like a sauna, cranking the handle full-force to the left. His skin burned but it wasn’t hot enough. Water should be boiling to melt fat. The stupid hospital probably controlled the thermostat.

Bones thought he heard his sister’s voice, in the distance and fading fast.
I hope you get better in there.

Lard stuck his head in the doorway. “Hang in there, man.” Bones slumped on the toilet lid, a towel tied around his waist. “They’re going to turn me into a raging Vomitus Interruptus,” he said. “I love my white teeth!”

“No, man. You done good.”

“Why don’t I believe you!”

“No pain, no gain.”

“I’ll never make it another day,” Bones said. “Not without knowing exactly how many layers of fat I’m putting on.”

Lard shook his head. “I give up.”

Bones stayed in the bathroom until he was so cold he had to get dressed.

Sometime after nine thirty he and Lard settled onto their prospective concrete slabs of beds. Lard was into
Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats: A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners
. Bones flipped through a
Weight Watchers
article, “Weight Loss Dos and Don’ts.”

The biscuit from dinner felt like a depth charge in his stomach. “How long have you known Alice?” he asked.

“We hung out last summer,” Lard said. “Her parents check her in, she puts on a few pounds, almost looks normal. I mean normal for her, but then she goes home and bakes laxative brownies. I love her like a sister, man, but I sure don’t understand her.”

“Does she have a boyf—” Bones couldn’t get the word out.

“It figures you’d like her skinny ass.” Lard snorted. “Better take a cold shower because you won’t see her for a while. Not until she’s stable enough to be taken off the IV. Then you’ll see her plenty. She likes the roof.”

“But does she—”

“I don’t think she has a boyfriend, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Bones let himself be overwhelmed by the kind of desire he’d only seen in movies and wondered if couples really did have sex while feeding each other Lean Cuisine—lying entwined afterward, making up poetry only they could understand. He wanted to stretch out beside Alice, count her freckles, play connect the dots with his tongue.

“…unless you count George,” Lard said.

“George?”

“A guy we hung out with last summer.”

“In the program?” Bones asked.

Lard nodded. “I still can’t figure out how he smuggled beer in here. But you don’t have to worry about him. Alice was always making fun of his man boobs.”

Bones dropped to the floor beside his bed, ignoring the dizziness in his sixth set of push-ups. He pictured Alice—the profile of her head and nose, the sexy curve of her neck. Just then Dr. Chu’s leather loafers walked across the floor toward him.

“What have we here?” he asked in a tone that meant trouble.

“Bones is looking for a screw,” Lard offered up quickly.

“It fell out of the frame of my glasses.”

“Here it is.” Bones held up two pinched fingers and nothing else.

Dr. Chu acted like he bought it. “How’re you doing?” he asked. “The first few days are the toughest.”

From here, Dr. Chu’s face looked too small for his head, like his creator had run out of clay. Bones wondered what Dr. Chu would say if he told him the truth. That he’d entered the program as a pristine specimen of anorexia nervosa—but was in immediate danger of becoming a person who throws up out the window.

“I’m okay,” Bones said.

“People who vomit don’t lose weight in the long run,” Dr. Chu said, as if reading his mind. “Bodies adjust when they think they’re being starved.”

Lard slammed the cover of his cookbook. “Can’t we talk about something else, like ever?”

Dr. Chu smiled again. He seemed to have a smile for every occasion, like a rack of greeting cards. “Gentlemen, lights out was ten minutes ago. Good night and sleep tight.”

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Bones said after he left.

“Yeah, man, they flippin’ hurt when they bite.” Lard got up and slapped off the light switch. Between the door being ajar and lights from the parking lot streaming in through the window, the room wasn’t all that dark. Bones watched Lard’s hulking mass move through the room.

Bones slipped under the covers tossing from one cramped position to another. The sheets were too stiff and too uncomfortable for his unstable state of mind. The mattress was hard as the floor. He felt like someone had stuck pushpins in his spine.

He finally got up and stumbled to the bathroom where he peed with taurine force. The color had lightened from Root Beer to Afternoon Lift, the herbal tea his mom drank when winding down after board meetings. Sure the last five days had been hell, but they had to have been hell for his family too. Bones knew no one at his house was sleeping.

Bones went back to bed. With the lights out the racket in the corridor seemed louder. He recognized Nancy’s voice and a deep male voice. Then he heard a weird noise. EE—UUU—RRRR—ACK! It sounded like someone was throwing up. No, more like someone was knocking down a brick wall with vomit. “Lard? Did you hear that?”

Lard grumbled irritably. “What do you think?”

“Who do you think it is?”

“Who cares?”

Bones didn’t really care, though he guessed it was Elsie. “What room will they put Alice in?”

“Her parents pay for a private room,” Lard said. “The one next to us is empty.”

Bones liked the sound of that.

“But that’s just a guess, man.”

“You’ll think this is a little weird, but you know what I thought when I saw her? I imagined us in our very own tenth floor apartment. No elevator. Medicine balls instead of chairs. A futon, silk sheets.”

“I can picture it, man. A living room furnished with weights, his and hers stationary bikes, a treadmill with a high-torque motor, electronic programming, and heart-rate monitor.
Jog to fitness in the comfort of your own home!
”

“And forget about a stove or refrigerator. We’ll just have a wheelbarrow filled with my go-to M&M’s. Digital scales strewn across the carpet, stepping stones of accomplishment.”

Lard snorted. “Your bathroom will be stocked with over-the-counter laxatives. Liquids, tablets, wafers, gums, chocolate, herbal. Powders that dissolve instantly in water.”

Bones laughed then turned serious. “Eve told me she’s leaving.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t sound very upset.”

“I hope she never comes back,” Lard said simply. “If that means she’s getting better.”

“It has to mean that, right? Otherwise why would she be going home?”

“She’s over twenty-one, man,” Lard said. “She can check out anytime she wants—”

“But she can never leave.”

“Very funny.”

Even though Bones had just met Eve, he knew he’d miss her.

Lard made a noise and Bones figured he was about to impart additional words of wisdom when the walls began to shake in a cacophony of snores. Bones sat up, felt under his pillow for his flashlight, and aimed the light on a blank page in his journal, thinking about his family and everything he’d put them through.

He saw himself in the hall when he first got here—watching himself as he dragged his duffel over the highly polished linoleum—watching his mom as she leaned unsteadily against the reception desk—seeing his cowardly self too chickenshit to look back for one last good-bye.

He was terrified to tell his family how
not
eating made him feel. How many hours he’d spent lying on his back with a ruler balanced on his hipbones. How he pictured a battalion of Pacmen marching inside his body, chomping away. How he’d awake to the sound of his stomach growling, ecstatic because it meant his body was eating itself.

If Bones’s parents knew the whole disgusting truth about his relationship with his body, he’d be locked up longer than six weeks. And it’d be a different kind of hospital. Lard droned on, a head-splitting buzz saw. The entire hospital could barf its guts out in the ward and no one would hear them.

God, Bones needed a scale.
Bad
. He dropped to the floor and alternated crunches with push-ups. Within twenty minutes he was drowning in a pool of sweat. His body was doing what it did best—dissolving itself. The ultimate liquidation.

Then he crawled into bed and passed out.

The next day Bones rolled over in the too bright, too loud morning. He got dressed and sauntered down the too bright hallway. He was setting up a card table when he noticed a piece of paper taped to the table’s underside. The lined paper appeared torn from someone’s journal. The note itself was partially printed in pen and more hurriedly scribbled in smudged pencil, like it had been written at different times.

Bones undid the tape, careful not to rip the paper.

It was Calvin Webb who saved specie homo sapiens. All by strumming his guitar. No electric cords. No amplifiers. No distortion peddles. Just the sweet hum of calluses skimming steel strings.

He lost himself in solo rehearsals for a band he’d heard about—a gang called CRAP (Criminally Rebellious Adolescent Population), kids about his age rumored to have run away, setting up camp in some crumbling 20th century hospital. Supposedly, like him, they played illegal instruments ripped off from the state depository: assorted brass and drums, a piano with non-synthetic keys.

Calvin longed to join them.

Bones put the paper in his pocket, wondering who’d written it.