The Bubble Gum Thief (29 page)

As they left the bank, Victor asked, “We’re not really going to search George Clooney’s house, are we? Because that would be—”

Dagny fell to the ground. Her right knee hit the concrete first, then the left. She braced her fall with her hands, scraping her palms but protecting her head. Dagny sat up and looked back to see what had tripped her. There was nothing. She felt tired and weak, and a little dizzy. Her hands weren’t bleeding, but they were sore, and small chips of asphalt were embedded in her skin. Victor extended his hand and helped her up.

“Give me the key,” he said. “I’m driving.”

“I’m fine.” She dug through her bag and found the car keys. Victor grabbed them from her hand.

“
I’m driving
,” he repeated.

Dagny climbed into the passenger seat. She could barely keep her eyes open. Maybe she was sick. Dagny felt her forehead, but she wasn’t warm. Just tired. She hadn’t been running in the past few days. Maybe the lack of exercise had left her feeling depleted. There wasn’t time to feel sorry for herself. “Let’s head back to Washington and talk to the Professor. Figure out where we are, where we need to go. Maybe he’s got a return on the prints.”

“Okay,” Victor whispered, but it felt like he wasn’t listening.

They approached the highway, but Victor passed the on-ramp. “You should have turned,” Dagny said, but Victor ignored her. She closed her eyes again and felt the car gliding across the
road, riding the hills, taking turns. When Victor stopped the car, they were in front of a Target.

“C’mon,” he said, opening his door.

“I’ll wait in here.” She was too tired to move.

Victor walked around the car, opened the passenger door, and gently took her hand, helping her up from the seat. “C’mon,” he said and put her arm around his shoulder to steady her.

“You want a candy bar or something?” she said. She didn’t feel like walking.

“Just follow me.” He led her into the store, past the clothing section and home furnishings, all the way to the bathroom section, and then ducked into one of the aisles and scanned the shelves. Dagny leaned against a pole, watching as Victor grabbed a box from the shelf, opened it, and set a bathroom scale on the floor in front of Dagny. “Step on this.”

“No,” Dagny said. “Not this. Not here.”

“Step on this, Dagny.”

“I’m not getting on that, Victor.”

“Why not?”

“Weight is a very private thing.”

“You’re my partner, Dagny.” He said it with affection, as if he were talking to a member of his family. “Please.”

“Not partner. Not yet, kiddo.” She hadn’t stepped on a scale since Mike was killed. What would it read? Maybe 115. Maybe less. Okay, almost certainly less. But was it a pound or two? Or something more? She had no idea what it would read, and that scared her. “Victor, I don’t want to,” she mumbled. It was the first time she’d been weak in front of him. She hoped that he understood how hard that was.

“Dag, you have to. You need to see it.” He walked behind her and put his hands under her arms, then whispered in her ear, “I’m with you on this, okay. No matter what, I’m with you.” He lifted her in the air and set her down gently on the scale. As he released
her, the dial spun upward, flittering back and forth, before finally settling on a number.

Ninety-eight.

Ninety-eight pounds. She had dropped twenty-eight pounds in three and a half weeks. That wasn’t possible. “The scale is wrong,” Dagny protested.

“It’s not wrong, Dagny.” Victor grabbed another box from the shelf—a round tempered-glass scale with a digital display. He opened the box and placed the scale on the floor. “Try it.” Dagny stepped onto the scale. She waited for the red numerals to settle the way a defendant waits on a jury.

Ninety-nine pounds. Just one pound more than the other.

“It’s not right, Victor.” But this time she knew it was.

He grabbed another scale from the shelves and placed it on the ground. Dagny stepped on it. The dial flittered upward and settled quickly. It registered 100 pounds. One more pound than the last one. “See,” she laughed through her tears, “just twenty-six more scales and I’ll be back at my old weight.” She was joking, but Victor still took a fourth scale from a box and placed it before Dagny. She stepped onto it. Ninety-nine pounds.

Victor lifted Dagny off the scale, turned her around, and embraced her. “Let’s get you back on track so we can catch this guy, Dag. Okay? We can only catch him if we get you back on track. But you’re going to have to let me help you.”

Dagny had been through interventions before. They’d only worked when she’d let them. And it was hard to let them.

Victor put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “I’ve been reading up on this, and I’ve got it all figured out. We’ll buy one of these scales and take it around with us. Heck, I need it, too,” he said, patting his belly. “We’ll use the scale every day, just to make sure we’re on track. You and me both. What do you say?”

She nodded. “Okay.” She’d do this for Mike. Not for herself. “About the scale—”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s get the one that said one hundred pounds.”

Confrontation number one. In twelve years of schooling, Dagny had never been called to the principal’s office. She couldn’t imagine why she was being summoned now, with three days left in her senior year. She worried that her mother must have been killed in some horrible accident, but her mother was sitting across from Principal Weathers, tending to her fingernails with an emery board.

“Please sit down,” Weathers said. Her familiar smile seemed forced.

Dagny sat in the chair next to her mother. “Is something wrong?”

The principal leaned forward, resting her elbows on her desk. “You were told that you would be valedictorian the other day?”

“Yes.” Oh, God, they were taking it away.

“Traditionally, the valedictorian makes a speech at graduation. This year, we’ve decided...” The principal’s gaze moved to the ceiling. “We have decided not to have a valedictory speech at graduation this year.”

“Why?” Dagny demanded, nearly jumping from her chair. “I don’t understand.” She had already written a first draft.

“I could lie to you and say that we want to shorten the ceremony, or that we want more time for the guest speaker.” Weathers sighed, then returned her gaze to Dagny. “In light of your health, we don’t feel it would send a positive message if we let you speak.”

“What are you talking about?” Dagny asked, her voice settling between reasoned discourse and a scream.

“I am referring to your anorexia, Dagny.”

The word felt like a slap. Where had this come from? Rumors, whispers, the unkind gossip of jealous classmates? Dagny’s mother continued to file her nails and spoke without lifting her
eyes. “My daughter is not an anorexic, Mrs. Weathers. I would know. I am her
mother
.”

“How much do you weigh, Dagny?”

How dare this woman ask such a personal question. “One hundred and five.” It was a lie, but maybe the sweatshirt would fool her.

“I think it’s probably less than that. Someone your height should weigh at least one twenty, don’t you think?”

“Everyone is different,” her mother said, working on her cuticles. “There is no ideal weight across the board. It depends on the particulars of the body. Dagny has small bones. Of course she’s going to weigh less. She’s lucky.”

She wasn’t lucky, of course.

Two. “I’m calling your mother,” Lindsay announced, standing over Dagny. Her head blocked the overhead light, giving her face an angelic glow. Dagny pulled the covers over her eyes and didn’t respond. Lindsay had threatened to call her mother a number of times throughout the semester. This was the first time that Dagny didn’t object.

Her first year at Rice had gone well. She’d bulked up to 110 pounds and had held that weight through most of the year. But this year she’d slipped into old habits, and a few new ones—an apple for breakfast, a slather of peanut butter on a piece of low-fat bread for lunch, some lettuce and a tomato for dinner. For the last two months, she’d subsisted on little more than carrots, Diet Coke, and sugar-free mints. It had taken a toll on her body. She hadn’t had her period since November. She fell a lot—her knees would buckle on steps and hills. Her skin grew paler, whiter—like a ghost.

And she’d started to grow fur.

April in Houston is like July in St. Louis, but it felt like the Arctic to Dagny. When her body wasn’t able to generate enough heat from the few calories she ingested, she began to grow
lanugo—a soft, downy fur—on her chest and arms. Lanugo grows on fetuses and the malnourished. The fetuses shed the lanugo before birth.

During all of this, Dagny maintained near-perfect grades. She was president of the debate team. She edited the opinion page of the
Thresher
, served on the school’s honor council, and won the state’s collegiate mock trial tournament. She pursued all of the varied interests of her life with the same passion that fueled her anorexia, and she was just as successful in these endeavors as she was at starving herself. To be anorexic requires discipline and determination. It was a point of pride for Dagny—though not one she dared voice aloud—that she had never binged and purged. Bulimia was for the weak. Anorexia was for the strong.

Dagny expected the usual indifference and denial that accompanied her mother’s visits, but this time was different. “My God,” her mother exclaimed, mouth agape. It was enough to scare Dagny. If her mother thought something was wrong, then it was way past wrong.

After exams, Dagny checked into the Sunny Hill Treatment Center in St. Louis. She spent the first month there envying thinner anorexics, looking down on the bulimics, trading techniques, and finding ways to hide food so that it would look like she was eating. When she dropped from 83 pounds to 72, the medical staff moved her to another wing, where monitors watched her eat and the bathroom doors wouldn’t lock. Though it helped change her behavior, it didn’t change her mind. It took the death of Becky Ettinger to do that.

Becky was a mirror image of Dagny—a brainy white girl from the suburbs, just one year older, an inch shorter, and five pounds lighter. Dagny didn’t know her well—they’d spent one evening bonding over music and another playing checkers. One morning, Becky was gone—her bed cleared, her belongings gathered. A rumor spread that Becky had escaped—that she had slipped
out in the middle of the night and caught a bus, heading somewhere west. Maybe California. But then another rumor spread that Becky had died from cardiac arrest. Becky’s roommate confirmed it. Twenty-one and dead.

Dagny spent the next two months trying to change.

She left treatment healthier and far more self-aware than when she had entered. Armed with tools to carry her forward, she was determined not to backslide. She had learned that a healthy diet and lifestyle could require just as much discipline as starvation, and that reaching the concrete goal of 120 pounds could be satisfying in a way that “thinner” never was. For a while it worked.

Three. “You haven’t eaten in a week.” Julia dragged a chair over from a neighboring study carrel. “You’re scaring me, Dagny.”

“That’s not true.” Dagny had eaten some nuts that morning and a bowl of cereal the day before.

“I mean a meal.”

“Do we have to do this here?” The Harvard Law School Library hardly seemed like the place for an intervention.

“No. Let’s go to student health.”

“Not interested. I have to study.”

“How much do you weigh?”

“What?”

“How much do you weigh?” Julia asked.

“How much do
you
weigh?” Dagny retorted.

“One eighteen.”

Really? That seemed so high, Dagny thought. She didn’t look that big.

“How much do you weigh, Dagny?”

“Ninety-nine,” she said, adding ten pounds to the real number.

“If you’re going to lie and make up a weight, you should pick one that’s reasonable. Even if you were ninety-nine, that would be way too low.”

No, it would have been too much.

“Come with me.”

“I don’t want to, Julia.”

“You know you’re not healthy, don’t you?”

“No.” Maybe.

“Come with me.”

Four. “You’re getting too bony.”

“What?” They were under the sheets. His hand was on her hip bone.

“You’re all bone, Dag. You need to gain some weight.”

“So you want me to get fat, Nick? That’s what you want?”

“Calm down, for crying out loud. I’m just saying that you’re too skinny. You need to put on a little, that’s all.”

“How much should I weigh, Nick? What do you want me to be?”

“I don’t know. How much are you supposed to weigh? Aren’t there guidelines for that sort of thing?”

She pulled his hand off her hip. “So you don’t find me attractive?”

“No, of course I do.” He kissed her cheek, then her neck. “But you’re too skinny, that’s all. I don’t want you to feel like you can’t eat for my sake.”

It wasn’t for his sake. It was just who she was. She liked it when her hip bones stuck out from her body. She liked it when she could look in the mirror and count her ribs. She liked it when bracelets fell off her wrists, or when a shirt from the juniors’ department fit comfortably.

She liked being anorexic.

She knew it was a problem, and she vowed to change. But she didn’t change fast enough for Nick.

Five. “I think we need to talk.”

Dagny didn’t like the sound of that. “About what?”

“You know I like you. I mean that, Dagny.”

“I don’t like the start of this.”

“Well, you need to know that. You’re one of the best agents I’ve got. Which makes this—”

“Am I in trouble?”

He took a deep breath. “Did you eat anything today?”

So it was this.

Six. They sat in a window seat at the Waterfront, a posh steak house on a barge parked along the Kentucky side of the Ohio River. She ate most of her salad and some of her salmon, and it was more than she had eaten all week. They didn’t talk about her weight or Roberto Altamont. They talked about movies and college and music and travel. Still, she wondered how long Victor had been planning his intervention, and how he could have known that forcing her onto a scale would be so effective. Numbers meant something to her that words didn’t. They were facts, not characterizations; they were statistics, not generalizations. Words were words, but numbers were real. She realized that maybe she was ignoring Julia’s calls, and her mother’s, not because she was so busy with the case but because she knew she was in trouble again. Was she running from them? Running from help?