Wintergirls (19 page)

One. These hands reach for a brownie next, and then a piece of fudge and a pink-armed gingerbread Emma girl.

I dissolve into a spun sugar blur until the doors of the auditorium burst open and the hall fills with applause and whistles, and warm bodies.

I sprint to the bathroom.

It doesn’t matter how far down I stick my finger, the cesspool won’t empty. I squirt soap into my mouth instead and gargle until the bubbles stream down my cheeks.

In the middle of the night, someone thrusts a sword into my guts. I wake up screaming for my parents, but Jennifer rushes in because my father is off on another trip and my mother doesn’t live here. She helps me drag myself to the bathroom. I can’t tell if I should sit on the toilet or stick my head in it.

I drop my drawers and sit. Jennifer wets a washcloth with cold water, wrings it out, and puts it on the back of my neck.

“I’m okay,” I mutter.

“You are not.” She presses the back of her hand to my forehead. “No fever. Could be food poisoning, I think.

What did you have for lunch?”

The blade rips through my belly again and I choke back a moan. “Soup and crackers. And we all ate the sliced turkey in our sandwiches for dinner.”

“Are you nauseous?”

I shake my head.

“Did you eat anything at the bake sale?”

Before I can lie, my head bobs up and down. “Cupcakes.”

“Cupcakes? You ate more than one?”

I nod again. “They tasted good.”

“I can’t see how a cupcake would do this to you. Maybe they used raw egg in the icing. Will you be okay if I go downstairs for a minute? I want to look something up.”

“What?” I grit my teeth. “Sure. When you come back, can you bring me peppermint tea?”

“You shouldn’t eat anything until your stomach settles.”

“Please, Jennifer. I know it will help.”

“All right, relax. Just breathe. Peppermint tea, coming up.”

Once she’s gone, I groan. I know exactly what’s wrong.

I am a gluttonous, gorging failure. A waste. My body isn’t used to high-sugar carbs laced with witchcraft. It can barely cope with soup and crackers.

The blade twists again. The laxatives I wolfed down when we got home are torching my guts. Plus, my phosphate levels are out of whack because of the unexpected sugar. Plus, there is a chance that I have been so gifted at starving myself that the empty string balloon of my guts is turning from pink to ghost gray as the cells die off from neglect. Or Cassie has made a gingerbread voodoo doll of me on her side of the grave and is stabbing it into bloody bits.

My head is too heavy to sit on my shoulders. I bend over and let it dangle between my legs.

“Lia?”

Through the curtain of my hair I watch Emma’s slippers shuffle into the bathroom. “Lia, are you going to die?” Tears are perched on the edge of her voice.

I force myself upright and try to ignore the black spots opening up in front of my eyes.

“I just have a tummy ache, honey. Nobody dies from that. I’ll be fine.”

Jennifer takes Emma back to bed and chooses to believe my lie about how I’m feeling much better and how I’m going to read on the toilet for a while, just in case. I spend most of the night shuffling between my bed and the toilet, emptying, emptying, emptying as the laxatives grind through me and do their dirty work. I scrub the toilet with the blue cleaner after every trip.

When I fall into bed, somebody starts beating on my chest with a baseball bat. I try to take my pulse, but my heart is hammering too fast to count. I’m sweating. My body is eating itself, chopping up my muscles and throwing them in the fire so the engine doesn’t seize.

There is metal in my mouth. I need to wake up Jennifer.

If I wake her up, she’ll freak.

If she freaks, she’ll call an ambulance.

If the ambulance comes, I’m doomed.

I roll over and ask Cassie to rub my back and sing to me.

When Dad comes home from New York City on Saturday, I’m dozing on the couch. He shakes my shoulder and I jump, not sure where I am or who I am or who he is. He doesn’t notice.

“Where are Jen and Emma?” he asks.

I sit up. Slowly. The worst cramps from last night are gone, but it feels like I did a hundred thousand crunches suspended upside down. “The mall. How was your trip?”

“Excellent,” he says. “My editor is extending the deadline and she’s giving me another advance to pay for a research trip to London. I am The Man.”

He tries to pump his fist in the air like he’s a pro football player, but he looks more like a lame college professor trying to hail a cab.

“That’s great, Dad.”

His smile fades. “Are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”

“I had food poisoning last night, from a cupcake.” I pull the blanket around my shoulders. “Go figure.”

“Did you call your mother?”

“No.”

“She is a doctor, you know.”

“Yes, I am aware of that. I didn’t need her to charge over here with an ambulance in the middle of the night.

Jennifer helped me. I’m fine, just tired.”

“Are you sure?” He lays the back of his hand on my forehead.

“Why are you doing that?”

“It’s what you do when your kids are sick.”

“You’re hopeless,” I say.

He gives me a quick hug. “In the best possible way.

I brought you girls some presents from the city, maybe that will help. Hang on.”

He leaves the room and comes back with a plastic bag.

“Take a look.”

I empty the bag. I’m guessing that the magic wand filled with sparkles is for Emma, which means the books are for me: all stories about the agony of middle school, written for twelve-year-olds. Unless the books are for Emma and the wand is for me. That could be useful.

“Do you want strawberry, grape, or honey?” Dad asks as he walks into the kitchen.

“What?”

“Strawberry, grape, or honey? It’s almost lunch—I’ll make us peanut butter sandwiches.”

I tuck the magic wand under my arm and follow him, blanket trailing behind me like a cape. “I’m not hungry.

My stomach is still off.”

“I’ll make tea and toast instead. Have you taken your meds?”

My head shakes “no” before I can stop it.

“That settles it. You need to have something in your stomach and then you can take your medicine. Have a seat, kiddo.”

While the bread for me is toasting (2 slices = 154), he makes two sandwiches for himself, both with crunchy peanut butter and grape. He sticks a mug in the microwave for the tea and absently takes a bite of one of the sandwiches. He gets a plate out for my toast and takes a second bite. He just eats and goes about his business, buttering the toast (100) without asking me, getting the milk out of the fridge and carrying it to the table with the plate and tea. Half of his first sandwich is already gone.

How does he do it?

I can’t remember what it’s like to eat without planning for it, charting the calories and the fat content and measuring my hips and thighs to see if I deserve it and usually deciding no, I don’t deserve it, so I bite my tongue until it bleeds and I wire my jaw shut with lies and excuses while a blind tapeworm wraps itself around my wind-pipe, snuffling and poking for a wet opening to my brain.

I am so tired. I have forgotten how to sleep, too.

Dad blathers on about a bunch of moldy letters in the London archives and how if we get a good deal on the tickets, we could all go to England, which will never happen. I swallow my pills and drink my tea. Just as I reach for half a slice of bread (38) + quarter tablespoon butter (25) = 63, the phone rings.

I start to get up.

“Don’t,” he says. “Let the machine answer.”

After the beep, Mrs. Parrish’s voice crackles on the speaker. “Lia? Lia, please call me back. I’m not angry, I promise. We’ve looked everywhere and we can’t find Cassie’s necklace, the one with the silver bell. I thought maybe if I wore it . . . Can you help me?” Her voice breaks and she sobs once, then sniffs. “I just want you to call me, Lia. I can’t . . . I need you to help.”

After she hangs up, Dad erases the message. “She should be talking to her therapist instead of bothering you.”

I study the cracks in the grout between the floor tiles.

If I could turn into a wisp of smoke, I could slip into them and disappear.

“It’s okay,” I lie. “She’s stuck. It’s sad.”

“Is that how you feel, too?” He sips his milk. “Stuck and sad?”

I should have pretended to stay asleep when he came in. “No.”

“That’s what it looks like to us.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

The peanut butter tries to glue his mouth closed, but it’s not strong enough. “I had a long talk with your mother last night.”

“You talked to Mom twice in one year?”

“No sarcasm, please.” He takes another bite of his sandwich and chews. “Chloe thinks you should be evaluated.”

“Evaluated?”

“Jennifer does, too.”

“Evaluated for what?”

He stops eating. “To see if you should go back to the hospital as an inpatient.”

The cracks in the floor open wider. “You want to lock me up again?”

“Chloe said she was going to call this morning and talk to you about this.”

“She didn’t.” I shiver. The cold is soaking through the windows. “Do you think I should go back?”

“Honestly? It seems a little extreme. Your grades could be better, but you go to school. You don’t sneak off at night and get into trouble. I’d like you to put some weight back on. I told your mother that going back to the nutritionist for a few visits would probably be enough.”

“But Mom wants to lock me up.”

“The evaluation could prove her wrong—think of it that way.”

“She’s already scheduled the appointment, hasn’t she?”

He picks up the magic wand and tilts it so the sparkles run down the inside, perfectly sealed in plastic. “Ten o’clock, two days after Christmas.”

The cracks in the floor gape open, bottomless stone canyons. I teeter on the edge.

“Lovely,” I say. “I’ll be able to write an essay about my Christmas vacation on the feeding farm where they stuffed tubes up my nose and made me eat butter and gave me pretty little pills and then they vacuumed out my brain and turned me into a fat zombie. What fun.”

“You won’t be admitted unless you really need it.

Don’t you want to be healthy, to feel better?”

“You’re just trying to get rid of me.”

“I’m worried about you. I want my little girl back.”

I stand up and pace between the table and the stove.

“I tried the hospital. Twice.” The cape slips off my shoulders. “You said it was the last time because I used up all the insurance.”

“If you have to go inpatient, your mother will sell some stock and I’ll remortgage the house. But it doesn’t have to come to that. If you’d just eat—”

“I don’t need to eat like you.”

“Dammit, Lia!” he yells. “That’s not true and you know it. Are we supposed to let you starve yourself to death?”

That yelling-Daddy-voice used to scare me. Now it just makes me vicious. “Your wife watches me step on the stupid scale every week.”

“And your weight is going down. This week was what, 104? You swore to me you’d stay at 110.”

“I have a tiny frame and a fast metabolism.”

“Again with the bull!” He sprays sandwich spittle across the table. “You begged me to let you move in. You couldn’t live with your mother a minute longer. You said she was the problem and I believed you, just like I believed you when you promised to be honest.”

I try to lower my voice. The more he loses control, the more I have to hold on to it. “You suck at promises, too.

All those canceled weekends, the trips we were going to take, the house you said you’d buy on a lake.”

He glares at me. “Don’t change the subject.”

“I need time, Dad,” I say. “I just can’t stick food in my mouth. I have to start my whole life over again.”

“When will that happen, exactly?” His voice turns ugly as well as loud, the voice that used to fight with my mother when I was supposed to be sleeping. “Sometime this year? This century?”

“I’m working on it,” I say.

“No, you’re not. You’ve been here for six months and you haven’t unpacked your damn boxes.”

“Oh, you finally noticed?” I snarl back.

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“You’re never around. Jennifer takes care of everything so you can go to your meetings and the library and your squash games and your fancy dinners. Oh, wait a minute—when have I seen this before? Got another girlfriend, Daddy? Ready for round two in divorce court?

Don’t forget to line up a good shrink for Emma; she thinks you’re a god.”

His face is the color of a heart attack. The muscles in his jaws are clenched so tight his teeth could crack.

Any minute now, he’s going to pick me up and throw me through a window and I won’t touch the ground for a thousand miles or so.

He picks up the milk jug and pours more into his glass.

He takes a long drink of milk and very deliberately sets the glass back on the table. “Stop turning this into an ex-amination of my faults. We’re talking about you, Lia.”

The lines in his face sag with disappointment. His eyes are red-rimmed with long nights and too many mistakes and a defective daughter. It’s easier to fight back when he yells.

“I wish I understood what goes on inside you.” He tilts the magic wand again but doesn’t look at the sparkles.

“Why you’re so afraid.”

The merry-go-round spins inside my head, spins so fast all I can see are honey-yellow, strawberry-red, grape-purple splashes streaking past my eyes. I should never have come to this house, but I had nowhere else to go.

“Please, Lia.” His voice has dropped to a whisper.

“Please eat.”

The merry-go-round snaps and splinters and bits of color fly through my head.

I snatch the sandwich on his plate and shove it in my mouth.

“Is this what you want?” I scream. “Look—Lia’s eating! Lia’s eating!” With every chew, I open my mouth wide so the bread and jelly and peanut butter and saliva spill into the canyons beneath us. “Are you happy now?”

He calls my name as I run out of the room.