Skinny (7 page)

“Don’t.”

I want to learn how to drive a car.

“Don’t do it.”

I want to climb the stairs and not be out of breath.

“Don’t want.”

I want to stand in front of that crowd at next year’s musical and have them clap at my success.

But then right before I let myself drift off to sleep, I hear it. A whisper in my dreamy, sleepy ear. Louder. Louder. Louder.

“It will never happen.”

The surgery is scheduled for three weeks before school is out. May 2 at 8:00 a.m. to be exact. It would have been better if I’d been able to finish the semester, but evidently surgeons don’t care too much about summer break. I have to cut my stomach up on their schedule.

Because of my grades, I’m able to get myself out of pretty much every thing. My average is high enough to be exempt from final projects, and I arrange to do all the other work ahead of time. All my teachers seem fine with my upcoming absence. Especially when I’m sufficiently vague about my medical issues. They really don’t want to ask a lot of questions. Mr. Blair is the only teacher left to talk to, so I hang around after the bell on Friday. I lean against the wall, waiting for him to explain the homework assignment to Kristen Rogers for the third time.

“Are you next?” It’s Jackson. He gestures toward Kristen and Mr. Blair.

“Go ahead,” I say. “I’m not in a rush.”

“Great. Thanks.” He smiles at me as he slides into place between me and the teacher’s desk. “I just have a quick question about number three on the homework and I can’t be late to spring training. The coach will kill me.”

“I see some things haven’t changed.” I smile back at him. Next week every thing’s going to change, but I don’t say anything about that. I just want him to remember how things were. His head tilts to the side and he looks at me quizzically.

“What do you mean?”

“You were always the last one to show up to every thing,” I say. “You know . . . when we were kids.”

Remember.
I plead with him silently.

His dark brows draw together over those beautiful blue eyes as if he’s thinking hard about it. “I guess so,” he finally says.

“He has no idea what you’re talking about,”
Skinny says.

He turns back toward Mr. Blair’s desk, tapping his pencil against the notebook in his hands to fill the sudden silence. I’m left staring at his broad shoulders in front of me, thinking of the past.

Sometimes on those spring nights when we were kids, Rat, Jackson, and I would chase one another with flashlights in the open space behind our back fences. We played until the hamburgers were finished grilling on the outside patio and our moms called us to dinner or until the moon rose so high in the sky that hiding in the dark was almost impossible.

The game went like this. If you were “it,” you won the game by shining the flashlight onto the hidden person like a spotlight. They’d have to freeze in the position you spotted them — arms stretched out, legs crouched, mouth wide open — until you released them with a click of the flashlight. If you weren’t “it,” there was only one place you could be safe from the flashlight’s beacon and only one way you could win the game. If you could successfully hide from the spotlight long enough to make it to the big boulder out near the walking trail, climb atop it, and proclaim loud enough for everyone in hearing distance, all the open back windows and sliding patio >doors that surrounded our little piece of wild, “Home free!” — then you were the winner.

I picture Jackson, atop that granite boulder, arms out-stretched above his head. In my mind I see him punching his clenched fists at the carpet of twinkling stars overhead with a look of absolute delight on his face shouting, “Home free!”

Don’t you remember?
I think.

I fidget with the cover on my notebook, trying to collect my thoughts, and desperately search for words of the past that will trigger the memories. I think about how we used to lie for hours in the grass out by the soccer fields and look at clouds. Rat saw cirrus and stratus clouds. I saw circles and triangles. Jackson saw bunnies and alligators and pipe-smoking old men. He was the best at finding something out of the white clumps of nothingness. When he was older, he was going to become a pilot and fly right through those clouds, he’d tell us.

“Do you still like planes?” I blurt out into the sudden silence.

Look at me, Jackson
, I want to say. Look for the something inside clump of nothingness.

He turns back around to glance down at me. Finally. But he still has the same puzzled expression on his face.

“Sure,” he says, vaguely.

“You had all those models of planes in your basement.” I don’t give up. I need to see the recognition in his eyes now. Before the surgery next week changes me forever. “You wanted to be a pilot.”

He laughs. “I don’t have much time for airplane models these days. With football and band and” He motions toward Mr. Blair’s desk. “. . . homework.”

“You wouldn’t understand,”
Skinny hisses in my ear.
“You just hang around the house eating yourself into a stupor.”

“I guess you’re really busy,” I say.

“And I have to get a workout in there somewhere or I’m never going to make varsity.” He flexes his arm. His bicep bulges against the short sleeve of his T-shirt. The height and the muscles are new this year. He doesn’t look the same, but I haven’t forgotten what he’s like on the inside. And his eyes are exactly the same. I know those blue-green eyes with the darkly fringed lashes. I’ve seen them crinkled with laughter, muddled with fever, sparking with anger, and squinting in pain. I saw those eyes when they were blue-green with delight at his first time on a skateboard. And when they were gray-green and clouded with tears over the death of his cat, Mr. Whiskers.

Once they were even black-green when they glittered at me from behind a Spider-Man mask on Mr. Peter’s front porch. But most of all I remember the deep, grass green of his eyes, intense and compelling, right before I closed mine and kissed him.

Look in my eyes, Jackson. Remember. Me.

But there is no sign of recognition. Mr. Blair finishes with Kristen and waves Jackson up. I watch as he leans over the desk, listening intently, his rumpled brown hair falling down into his eyes. My hands itch to push it back away from his face, but I just stand there. Remembering.

What if I don’t wake up?” I mumble under my breath. The annoyingly cheerful woman with the smiley-face scrubs wraps a big rubber band around my arm, ignoring my question completely. She snaps it into a tie above my elbow and slaps my forearm. The fat of my arm jiggles as she frowns down at what she sees.

“That may be a good one there.” She prods at my arm, searching for a place to stick the waiting needle.

I try to look sympathetic. I don’t know if I should apologize or what. What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry my veins are all covered up in fat just like the rest of me?

“I’ll be right back.” She’s going for help. The first one always goes for help. Everything that is alive and pumping inside of me is somewhere underneath all of this.

“The odds of death are one in two hundred. That’s pretty slim,” Rat says. He’s sitting on the end of the hospital bed in the pre-op room.

“Thanks,” I say.

“But I guess if one hundred and ninety-nine people had the surgery this week then . . .” He doesn’t smile. He isn’t kidding.

“That’s not helping.”

“Where’s your dad?” Rat asks, and I know he’s trying to change the subject.

“On his way. Got called in for a traffic accident.”

“Bad?” Rat asks. We both know that a town with I-45 running through the middle of it at seventy-five miles an hour always has the potential for deadly accidents.

“Could have been, but it turned out okay. Larry Joe Green’s three cases of beer were strapped into the child safety seats instead of his two kids.”

Smiley Face returns with a helper and they set to work on my arm again. I feel the prick one more time and then a sharp pain as the needle digs in deeper.

“Ah, there we are. I was afraid for a moment we were going to have to call this whole thing off.” Smiley Face laughs like she has just told a hilarious joke. Helper Nurse bustles around the bed, hooking up tubes and bags to my arm. She slides a metal cap over my finger and moves the monitor stand over closer to the bed. Numbers flash on the screen accompanied by an occasional beep. I watch the monitor and hope the line doesn’t go flat. I’ve probably watched too many medical dramas. I know flat lines are not a good thing.

The song playing over and over in my mind is “The Point of No Return” from
The Phantom of the Opera
.

The nurse asks Rat to move over to the chair by the windows. She pushes the thin blanket off my legs and starts fiddling around with my feet. First she pulls a pair of stockings on me, then straps on some leggings over the top.

“These are the hottest things out there.” Patting my legs, she smiles at me. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

She plugs the leggings into a machine under the bed and they start to fill up with air, squeezing tightly against my calves over and over again with a weird pumping sound. The sound masks the scared panting noise of my breathing.

“It’ll help your circulation,” Rat says. “So you don’t get blood clots.”

The nurse looks at him in surprise. “You’re a smart boy. Want to be a doctor someday?”

“Not a medical doctor, if that’s what you mean,” says Rat, “although I will probably get my PhD in nuclear physics.”

The nurse doesn’t know what to say about that, so she just nods and leaves again. Rat continues to read the booklet we received at the informational session.

“Is this going to work?” My voice shakes a little.

“Probably,” says Rat, pushing the glasses back up his nose, his big blue eyes unblinking behind them. “Most people lose from thirteen to twenty pounds in the first month, and most of this weight is lost in the first two weeks because of the diet. It takes about a year to lose the rest.”

“But is it going to work for me?”

“The odds are that it will,” Rat says solemnly. “It says there is plenty of time for weight loss after the gastric bypass surgery has healed.”

And then he smiles. One of those rare “Rat Smiles” that so few people have ever seen. The angles of his face soften, his eyes crinkle, and two huge dimples appear out of nowhere. I could swear you almost hear music like when angels appear in the movies when Rat smiles. It makes me feel better. How could it not?

The curtain pulls back with a squeak, and my dad is there.

“Hey, Mr. Davies.”

“Rat.” Even my dad doesn’t know his real first name. “How’s it going here?”

“Good. She’s almost ready,” Rat reports like he’s the doctor in charge. “They have her IV started, and we’re waiting for the anesthesiologist.” He stands. “Here, take this chair. I need to go to the bathroom.”

If it was anyone else, I would think he was being sensitive to leave me and my dad alone for a while. But it’s Rat, so I think it probably means he has to go to the bathroom. He pulls the curtains back and disappears. Dad drags the chair over closer to the bed and sits down.

My dad sent me a letter once when I was thirteen. He actually mailed it to our house. I guess he didn’t know how else to get my attention. It was after he tried to say something to me when I took a second piece of chocolate cake after dinner. He looked at me like he’d been looking at me a lot, with this critical, disapproving look.

“He’s sorry he has such a fat, ugly daughter.”
It was the first time I heard Skinny clearly. She’d been mumbling around inside my mind for a while, but this time her words came out in fully formed sentences.
“You are such an embarrassment.”

“Do you really need that second piece?” my dad had asked.

“Yes,” I mumbled around the huge bite I’d stuffed into my mouth, “I do.”

I ate every bite. My dad kept glancing over at me with that disgusted look on his face, and I kept stuffing in the forkfuls of chocolate. When it was done, I put the fork down on the smeared plate and stomped upstairs to my room. I pushed my headphones in my ears and turned the
Rent
soundtrack up loud enough to drown out every thing else.

The letter came a few days later. I didn’t recognize the round, loopy handwriting. I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad’s handwriting like that. On a single page of notebook paper.

Dear Ever,

The reason I want you to lose weight is because I love you, and I want you to be happy. I want you to fall in love someday and have children of your own. If that’s what you want. I know what boys are like. Finding someone who will take the time to look beyond just your looks might be hard. I want you to have a healthy, long life full of many exciting opportunities. Being overweight may keep you from doing everything you want. That’s why I want you to lose weight.

I love you, Dad

I crumpled the letter into my fist and sat there on my bed for a long time. Finally, I unclenched my fingers and smoothed out the paper. I read it again. It just wasn’t fair. God made some people naturally skinny and some people naturally fat. I’d never know how my life would have been different if I’d been one of the ones He made skinny. I didn’t know how He chose. This one will be blond, with long thin legs and great skin. This one will be short and fat with legs that rub together when she walks. I just knew I wasn’t one of the lucky ones.

“Your father is right. No one is going to love you.”

Eventually, I folded the letter into a tiny little square and stuffed it into the bottom back corner of my sock drawer. My dad and I never spoke about it. Over the next six months I gained fifty more pounds.

“Are you sure you want to do this, peanut?” Dad reaches for my hand across the thin white sheet. “You know I love you no matter what, right?”

“I know, Dad.”

“I’d walk right out with you if you want to change your mind.”

Are those tears in his eyes? This isn’t helping me. “I know, Dad.”

“I just wish I could talk to her one more time.”