Skinny (25 page)

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

At Lights Out, I knocked on Eden’s door. When she yelled to come in, I found her sitting up in bed, brushing her hair, looking at a magazine that was spread open in her lap.

“They’re not in here,” she said. “So you can chill.”

“I didn’t think they were.”

Her legs were folded into a loose knot under her top sheet. I felt as if I hadn’t seen her in years. She was so much thinner, almost average-size. And she looked more confident, more grown-up, as if the light Whitney and Miss had cast on her had caused her to flourish. She set the hairbrush down and turned a page.

“I just wanted to say hi.”

“Hi,” she said, turning a page.

“Eden,” I said. “Did you know what was going on?”

She looked up and knit her eyebrows, which desperately needed plucking. I imagined sitting with her, plucking her eyebrows, waxing her legs. In real life, did sisters do things like that?

“The whole thing with Sheena,” I said. “That she was taking the girls to McDonald’s. You were trying to tell me, weren’t you? That day in the cafeteria?”

Eden shrugged one shoulder. “What does it matter now?”

“I guess it doesn’t.”

“Things are fine now,” Eden said. “No one’s bulimic or anything. That was just one dumb week. Maybe two. Bulimia needs to last longer than that to really be bulimia. Kimmy’s got a big mouth. Didn’t I tell you? Right from the beginning I told you Kimmy was the worst.”

“She just didn’t want to keep secrets.”

“Sometimes you should keep secrets. It wasn’t just her secret. She betrayed her friends. But anyway. It’s all in the past.”

“The past is tricky.”

“Okay.”

“You never know when it’s going to pop back up.”

“Whatever.” Eden looked back down at her magazine, revealing a complicated, zigzagging part.

I had a sudden objective vision of myself: a woman standing in a teenager’s doorway, speaking cryptically, studying her. But I had lost track of how to act. I felt, after today’s events, like I’d been hit by a bus and survived against my will. The very air had a dreamy, wavering quality to it, as if I were living inside a mirage.

Watching Eden, I remembered the night five years before when Mikey and I had dinner with my parents at that seafood restaurant. I saw the four of us around the table with the white tablecloth. Then, in the picture in my mind, I saw my father’s image fade and vanish. Beside him, Mikey’s image faded, too. And then my mother and I looked across the table at each other and threw our linen napkins onto our plates. As if to say,
Game over.
As if to say,
Who were we ever, really, without the men in our lives?

I was sick of waiting for my father to tell me what to do. I was through with all the secrets. It was time to tell Eden the truth.

“Do you want to go somewhere?”

Eden looked at me and laughed. “You and me?”

“Why not?”

“Now?”

“Yup.”

“Where?”

I glanced over my shoulder into the hallway. It was empty and quiet. “McDonald’s?”

Eden laughed again, but she wasn’t smiling. She scratched her head. “You’re . . . kidding?”

I saw us together in a shiny booth. I would buy her a Happy Meal. I wanted my sister to be happy.

But she didn’t look unhappy. She looked puzzled, shrinking away from me.

How could I have spent the summer assuming that Eden would come to me? I had done nothing to win her affection. And now I expected her to jump out of bed and follow me out of camp? I had spent nearly four years working in sales, pushing comedy club tickets on strangers who had had no intention of buying comedy club tickets. After dismantling my business, after losing my taste for sales, I’d had to wonder if I’d wasted my time.

Now I saw that I hadn’t. It was useful to know how to sell things.

“Forget it,” I said. “It’s late. I’m probably going to head into Falling Rock by myself.”

“For what?”

“There’s this new restaurant. I read a review of it today. Some hotshot young chef who turned down all these New York City restaurants to open some kind of comfort food joint in Falling Rock.”

“Which chef?” Eden closed her magazine.

“I don’t know. I skimmed the review. I never retain that kind of information. I don’t know much about chefs. Wish I did, though.”

“What do you want to know? I know a lot.”

“It’s supposed to be one of the best new restaurants in the country. Affordable comfort food with a southern flare.”

Eden pulled her legs out from under the top sheet and swung them over the side of the bed. “You think it’s still open?”

“I called earlier. It is.”

“And . . . you’d take me?”

“You want to come?”

“Obviously.”

“Hmm. All right. You’ve worked so hard all summer. Why not?”

“You could get fired,” Eden said. “Like Sheena.”

“Eden,” I said. “I can think of nothing that worries me less.”

I wondered if Eden would ask me about the seat belt extender. But she didn’t, because what was truly distracting was the clutter—my life, which filled up the car.

“Is this, like, everything you own?”

“Pretty much.”

“What about your furniture?”

“Our furniture is all crap from the Salvation Army and Craigslist. I could throw it away. It’s not like it’s really mine.”

“Whose is it?”

“I just mean that nothing’s really anyone’s.” I was stopped at the end of the dirt road that led from camp to the highway, signaling right, waiting to merge.

“You’re weird,” Eden said.

I started up the highway toward Falling Rock. I had twenty minutes, at most, to say my piece. Twenty minutes before Eden would realize that the restaurant I’d told her about didn’t exist.

“I like knowing I can fit everything I own into my car,” I said.

Eden scooted closer to her door and leaned her head on her window. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I like feeling . . . light.”

“I feel light.”

“Do you?”

“Lighter.”

“You are lighter.”

“Yeah, but the second I get home, I’m going to this bakery by my house where I worked last summer. They taught me how to bake all this stuff. Baklava. Cannolis. I got to use the pastry bag for filling. You know what I’m talking about? That plastic bag thing with the metal tip?” She turned toward me slightly. “I’m going to the bakery to get, like, one of everything.”

“Yeah?”

“I can’t wait. Not that I want to be a pastry chef. Pastry chefs are the losers of the culinary world.”

“Don’t you want to keep your weight off?”

Eden shifted in her seat, making herself comfortable. “I don’t know. It’s not like it will matter.”

“Won’t it?”

“I don’t believe it works. Weight loss. People want to lose weight so badly. People want to be thin. And they’re not. Our country’s getting fatter and fatter. Did you know that? So whatever we’re all doing isn’t working. I mean, right? If there was a solution, everyone would be skinny.”

“We have to try.”

“Why?” Eden asked. “I’ve tried before. I’ve eaten nothing but salad. I’ve done that. It doesn’t work. Not in the end. My mom gets all these dumb magazines. There are women who go on these weight-loss plans that sound like lies. Same crap in every issue. Like, ‘I started lifting weights three times a week and walking instead of using the escalator. I started adding spinach to my diet. And now look at me! I’m thin!’ ”

“And it’s not that easy, is it?”

“Maybe for some people. Not for me . . . My ears are popping.”

“Hold your nose and blow.”

“Can’t that burst your eardrums?”

“They’re just eardrums,” I said, smiling. I twisted the radio dial until I found something worth listening to. Lester Young. One of my father’s favorites. “Maybe fat camps work,” I said. “Maybe you guys will all go home and feel motivated and keep losing weight. Maybe the answer is to get at you while you’re young.”

“I’m not that young.”

“Well . . . maybe the youngest kids will benefit?”

“Or maybe we’ll all gain it back and our parents will make us come here again next summer. It could go on forever.”

“Do you like jazz?”

“How should I know?”

“You should,” I said. “You should like Lester Young. He’s in your blood.”

Eden was resting against her window, her feet bare on the glove compartment. Her toes were tapping out the rhythm. I could practically see our father slinging one arm around each of us, crushing us into him, saying, “My girls, my girls.”

Eden was sucking the gold star on her necklace.

“Who gave you that necklace?” I asked. I swallowed hard and gripped the wheel more tightly.

Eden let the star fall from her mouth. “A woman from one of my cooking classes. She got it in Israel.”

“Is she . . . Jewish?”

“Yeah.”

“So . . . she brought you . . .”

“I used to really like stars,” Eden said. “I used to draw them on everything. I used to wear stars a lot, too. I was obsessed with stars.”

“Stars?”

“It was stupid. I don’t know.”

“The star of David, you mean?”

“This one time, I made little loaves of star-shaped sour-dough bread and brought them to my cooking class. And then this woman went to Israel and brought me this.” She lifted the charm from her chest to see it. “Everyone thinks I’m Jewish because of it.”

“You have a Jewish name.”

“It’s not really a Jewish name.”

“Isn’t it?”

“It’s really gross how I got my name.” She let the charm drop.

“It was the garden,” I said. “It was the most perfect place in the world before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. And then they became self-conscious about their bodies. And—”

“Yes, Gray, thank you. I know the story of Adam and Eve.”

“I hate that story,” I said. “I hate that they had to go and do that. They’re responsible for everyone’s body image issues.”

“I was conceived in a town in Minnesota called Eden Prairie. My parents were on a vacation. I think they were skiing. Can you ski in Minnesota?”

“Maybe they were cross-country skiing.”

“Do you know what that means?”

“What
what
means?”

“Conceived?”

I took a deep breath. I opened my mouth. I said, “Eden, I have something to—”

And that was when I lost control.

I lost control of my father’s car three thousand feet above Peach River Gorge. It was as if an invisible hand—a heavy, desperate, determined hand—yanked the wheel away from me.

It was an old car, yes. And I was told that I hit a rock that flattened the tire, that started the chain of awful events. But I don’t know. I know what I felt. I would know my father anywhere.

CHAPTER SIXTY

I intentionally omitted something. Of all the parts of my story I would rather not remember, this part ranks fairly high. It’s the part that happened between the time Bennett woke me up and the time I went to the canteen to watch the end of
Bugsy Malone
.

When I stepped outside the dorm, alone, the rain was holding, but the night was wet, as if it had been crying. I meant to go straight to the canteen, to join the group, to chat mindlessly with Mia, as if everything were normal. But I couldn’t stop feeling the aloneness beading up on my skin like sweat.

I saw the cabin behind the cafeteria where Lewis had been staying all summer. His car—something blue with tinted windows—was parked in front of it, still and dark. I walked to the car and touched the hood. I walked up the two stone steps to the screen door of his cabin. Behind the screen, the main door was opened wide, so I went inside and turned on the light.

I saw his computer set up on a desk. A shirt had been tossed over it. More clothes had been tossed over the desk chair. And more on the couch, and even more on the floor, but his messiness wasn’t what struck me: Strewn around the linoleum were ten or twelve large white pizza boxes. Some were flung open, showcasing grease stains, crumbs, and crumpled napkins. Hershey Kisses wrappers were sprinkled around the floor like currency. I saw a white paper McDonald’s bag, a half-eaten bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, an empty box of Milk Duds, and by Lewis’s computer where the mouse should have been, a Twinkie, unwrapped, as if he’d been about to eat it when the cops came knocking.

In addition to the mess, there was a stench. Dirty laundry. Old garbage. Sour milk.

I turned out the light and backed over the threshold. I sat on the stoop and looked at the black sky. It was beautiful here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was quiet and lush. Slow and calm. But beauty made me skittish. As soon as it peaked, it began to fade. A forehead wrinkling. A photograph yellowing. Muscles melting to fat.

When I was growing up, my family—my parents, my father’s brothers, my cousins—used to rent log cabins in New Hampshire for a week in the summertime. At night, we would sit outside under blankets and watch the shooting stars. Someone always had to say, “This is so pretty.” Sometimes I was the one to say it, but I always knew it would have been better if no one said it.

I stood and wiped off the back of my shorts. I meant to go to the canteen then. I really did. But I listened to the cicadas and wished I could hush them—the squeaky taunt of their transience. And I walked straight to the cafeteria. I won’t say “as if in a hypnotic state.” I won’t say “as if someone were holding the back of my neck, pushing me toward it.” I know how the Ouija board works. I know that nothing is magic.

I walked through the cafeteria to the kitchen. I turned on the light and lifted the part of the tray rails that would allow me behind the food line.

I remembered the tour Lewis had given us on the first day. And I remembered his theatrical warning. I went to the walk-in refrigerator and opened the door, stepped through the heavy plastic strips that hung from the top of the door frame, and felt the cold air on my skin like relief.

I filled my arms with food.

And then I began to eat.