Monday and the test both come too soon.
My test-taking ritual, especially for physics: I get up two hours early. I put my hair in a giant messy bun on top of my head so that it is all out of my way, and I wear something pretty close to pajamas, only marginally more socially acceptable. I swing through the Beans There Done That drive-through, which is the only place open at four in the morning because otherwise I would boycott it for the execrable pun. The exhausted dude at the window always blinks at me when I order an extra-large, extra-hot black coffee (the mocha with whip is my reward for getting through the test), as if he can’t believe he gets to avoid using the espresso machine. The paper cup is always too hot to handle for long, even with the heat sleeve, but I take a tiny sip anyway as I pull forward. My whole body and every part of the inside of my head jerks awake, glowing red and warm and bright.
The car windows are all rolled down and I take a sharp left out of the parking lot, balancing my cup and hitting the gas hard to shoot through the middle of downtown and veer onto the coastal road that will take me through three towns and back, just barely in time for class. My ritual is that I don’t think—I have been thinking a lot, too much, all the time, for the previous week, all the way up to the test. Now I need that drive to clear it all out, to breathe in the dust of the universe and breathe out the shards of stress or whatever our yoga instructor is always saying. All I know is that rituals are important.
But I can’t make myself stop thinking this time.
We ditched the rest of my birthday party and drove down to San Luis Obispo, all the windows open and blowing away all the things I didn’t want to admit to them. I felt cold and clear and cleaned out by the time we reached the all-night diner, filled with local college students who hooted as we walked in. Over disco fries, I said the words—weight-loss surgery. I didn’t look at either of them. Jolene touched the back of my hand lightly, and Laura made an angry noise.
“No,” I said. “Not right now. We can talk about it later.”
“Skee ball?” Jolene said, and we walked the three blocks over to Dizzy’s. She bought us all foam pirate hats with the tickets she won. We had more coffee at the diner when we realized none of us wanted to go home. We drove back as the sky was getting pale and bright.
Sunday I stayed in my room with my textbook in my lap and my phone turned off and my door locked. “She’s got a test,” I heard my father explain to Lucas when I dashed from my room to the bathroom across the hall, into the kitchen, and then right back up the stairs. Everyone knew the ritual and I was taking a lot of grim satisfaction in the idea that I wasn’t hiding from anyone, just doing what I always do. I forgot to say good-bye to Mateo and Lucas when they were leaving, or I didn’t hear them go.
I spent Sunday thinking about nothing but differentials, and now that there was no book in my lap, just endless empty space stretching ahead of me in the dark, my brain seizes the opportunity to drive me crazy. Dragging me through scenarios—where I told my grandmother off; where I ripped that little slip of paper up and threw it in her face; where I announced to the party that my grandmother was trying to bribe me (public shame is intolerable for her—there’s a reason she refused to accompany my brothers into town until they were of legal age); where she handed me an envelope with the business card of a used-car dealer tucked inside, no strings attached to trail on the floor between us and trip me up.
Worse: Picturing surgery. Weight-loss surgery. Doctors opening up a flap in my gut and lifting it like the hood of a car, digging elbow-deep inside of me. Hauling out all the broken parts and leaving them in a steaming heap on the floor of the operating room. Me sprawled on the operating table, helpless and huge. My grandmother standing next to my limp, torn-open body with a mask snapped over her face, in pearls and scrubs, looking terribly satisfied.
I’m cresting a slope, swinging around a sharp turn where the road feels carved into the cliff over the sea, and then I find myself abandoning my ritual, skidding into the turn-about, flipping a U-turn, and peeling out to the sound of clattering gravel. Heading back into town, past my house, pulling into the parking lot of the school. It’s still empty except for the janitor’s car. I know she’s smoking by the gym doors. She doesn’t look surprised when she sees me coming.
“Tonya, can I go in?” I say, and she smiles at me. She’s let me in before.
She says what she always does, which is, “Don’t tell Simons,” as she stands and swings open the door, gestures me ahead of her. “And don’t break anything.”
“Why would I ever talk to Principle Simons?” I say, as I always do, and then “thank you!” as I’m racing up the carpeted ramp toward the library.
The library is kind of like an aquarium: a couple of thousand square feet staked out by floor-to-ceiling glass walls. People who are less studious can stop and stare at the very studious people inside with the drooping mouths and the sense of being trapped underwater forever in a hell not of their own making. I don’t like the library very much. But it’s got computers—in fact, it’s mostly computers, because Principle Simons believes in the information superhighway more than she believes in most things except a Whole Spirit and a Healthy Mind. Maybe that’s why the door is locked. I rattle the handle, and then again, and then I step back and notice my reflection in the dark glass. My hair is sticking out of the bun and there’s a curl that’s fallen down my neck and my glasses are slightly askew and then a face is superimposed on mine and I scream as it comes at me.
“Oh man, I’m sorry,” Brandon says when he swings open the door, reaching for my shoulder. “I thought you saw me coming. I thought you were waiting for me to open the door.” I start to giggle helplessly and then he is giggling too, both of us giggling like idiots in the dark together.
“No,” I say, catching my breath. “No, I wasn’t expecting you. I wasn’t expecting anyone. So, you know, the screaming. But I’m—I’m good. I’m jumpy. I’m just. I have a test.” I realize he’s still got his hand on my arm and I duck around him into the dark library. We do have chemistry, no matter what he said last year. He’ll never find out that I cared, even briefly, what he thought about my size. “Thank you,” I say. Then, as it occurs to me, “Why are you sitting in the library in the dark with the door locked?”
“I didn’t realize it locked like that,” he says, and in the low lights from the hallway I can tell he is embarrassed, the way he ducks his head and scratches the back of his neck. The way he used to get embarrassed when we were kids and my mom teased him about how much he must love her beans and rice, since he was coming over for dinner every night that summer while Laura was at art camp. That was the summer he asked if he could kiss me and I shouted no and threw my plastic shovel at him and ran down the beach, my hair streaming behind me. I never told anyone about it. Does he even remember?
Instead I say, “I don’t know, you seem kind of suspicious.” It comes out accusatory and I cringe.
“I’m just studying,” he says, smirking, with his hands in his jeans pockets.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and he laughs.
“It’s only Literature,” he says. “Joyce. It’s just quieter here. Laura’s always—” He waves his hands around.
His gesture is the international sign language for, She’s always up until four in the morning painting and playing house music way too loud.
“I’m here for that, too,” I say stupidly. “But physics.” Why else would I want to break into a locked and dark library myself?
“I thought you usually drove around before a test,” he says.
I blink. “How do you know that?” My hand goes up to my messy bun, which is collapsing under the weight of its own gravity, and I can tell I look insane.
“Well,” he says. “You know. I think you’ve mentioned it. Laura’s mentioned it.”
I feel the giggles rising back up and I clear my throat hard and awkwardly.
“Okay,” I say. “So, uh, I just have to look something up.” I march past him to the bank of shiny Macs sitting in formation up and down the center tables. His bag and books are at the far right near the printer banks, so naturally I head to the far left and smack the mouse to wake up the monitor. And then I smack it again. And then I pound the space bar on the keyboard.
“You have to turn them on. Dr. Trujillo shuts them off before she leaves at night,” he says. I hate him a lot for a moment, and then sigh.
“Thanks,” I say, because I am not unreasonable, just awkward.
“You know, you can log in at home,” he says.
“Oh?” I say, as the library page comes up.
We’re both silent for a moment, and then I say, “I never like to do things the easy way.”
“That’s what Laura tells me,” and he’s smiling at me in the bluish light of the computer.
“Oh,” I say cleverly. “Well. I’m going to look things up now.”
“Okay,” he says, nodding, and he doesn’t move.
“Okay,” I say. “Good luck studying.”
“Right,” he says, and shakes his head and lopes back to his chair. He picks up his book but he keeps glancing over at me. I don’t know how I’m going to concentrate, but my hands are steady when I type in my log-in info, scroll down through the database listings to medical journals.
When I am certain he can’t see my screen, I type weight-loss surgery and hit enter.
Brandon leaves before I do, but I don’t pay much attention. I don’t look up from the monitor until the lights flicker on and then Dr. Trujillo is saying, “What are you doing in here so early? Did I give you a permission slip? I don’t remember giving you a permission slip,” in her slightly befuddled way.
I’ve taken notes. Almost automatically I reached for the stack of scrap paper and started writing down words like malabsorption and gastroesophageal junction and duodenum. I’ve gone beyond basic biology and how food proceeds through your body and then out, and now I’m deep in the minutiae of digestion and all the ways you can prevent it. All the ways you can starve your body with a surgeon’s knife. Right now I know what my stomach looks like, in cartoonish flat profile helpfully color-coordinated in primary colors, with arrows pointing to all the parts that can be improved, and dotted lines indicating which parts will instead be sliced off and discarded.
I know how digestion works, and how we can fool it. I know that the body is smart, and the body is adaptable, and the body will always try to find a way, but we are smarter. We are smarter than our bodies and science has figured out a method, a clumsy method full of hacking and stitching back up, to undo biology and remake it. A messy sewing project that’s designed to circumvent nature, bypass evolution, fix everything that went wrong with your guts somewhere along the way. Because that’s the overall message. Your digestive system might look like everyone else’s digestive system—side by side with a skinny person’s stomach diagram, your colors would match and your arrows would point to the same things and you could never definitively choose one and say, “There. That’s the gut of a person who never second-guesses her ass in skinny jeans.” But a fat person’s digestion is invisibly broken.
I understand the basic process of digestion now. I can draw you one of these gut diagrams. I could waltz into an operating room and announce that I’d take it from here, I’ve seen the pictures. I understand what weight-loss surgery does and why it works—because your stomach can’t fit any food inside it when it’s been cut down to a quarter of its original size. Because your intestines can’t absorb calories and fat when you’ve rearranged them to bypass those mechanisms that happen naturally (oh, the aha moment when I realize that that’s where the bypass in gastric bypass surgery comes from).
I can’t find any photos of real stomachs. I want photos of pink and glistening organ meat. I want pictures of torn-open guts. I want to see stitches and staples but these studies don’t offer anything but pages of statistics and diagrams and medical words. All of it seems one clean, logical step removed from reality. Dieting is a messy solution full of what ifs and possibilities and so many pitfalls, a thousand of them, and all of them assignable to personal failures and human weakness. A dieter can try and a dieter can fail—and does most of the time—and dieting doesn’t work because it’s more than calories in and calories out, these journals tell me. Dieting doesn’t work but it’s not the dieter’s fault that they’re weak. And it’s not the fat person’s fault they’re fat. But that can be fixed and that can be rearranged—literally—and everything and everyone can live happily ever after.
I can see clearly—oh, so clearly—why this appeals to my grandmother. The numbers, the biology, the idea that there is a simple solution to the endlessly vexing problem that your granddaughter refuses to even acknowledge exists. Just send her in to the mechanic, get her back the next day with her digestion hosed out and her windows washed and fluids topped off. It’s cleanly anatomical, filled with neatly delineated starts and stops.
I was tempted to print out all these studies, all these articles about weight-loss surgery, and carry them around with me but I was already carrying it around. I could feel all that information, all those words and pictures growing huge in my brain, making me feel larger and heavier than ever.
I drag it behind me out of the library and through the halls, weaving between all the people who have always known me and wouldn’t know what to do with a different me, one that had been tuned up and turned back onto the world with a whole new circuit board. The warning bell, and I start running because the word test flashes bright in my head. I have a test, something real, something I need to be present and focused for, something that is happening now.
Dr. Reinhart is closing the door of the classroom as I fling myself at it, red and damp and feeling all that tiredness crashing against my back as it catches up to me. And my head feels stuffed with everything I hadn’t gotten rid of, that was supposed to be blown out and cleared away by a fast drive down the coast. Full of everything I’ve added, things I need to think about, things I can’t think about right now because there’s too much that’s more important and I don’t understand enough about this feeling in my gut—my actual gut, the maladjusted lump inside me that is twisting in knots like it was aware it was being talked about. Aware that things could be coming down the pike if my grandmother somehow got her way.
Everyone in class has got their books away and their calculators and pencils on the desks and they’re all staring at me or whispering to one another, a little hum and buzz rising up that sounds like the fluorescent lights Principle Simons had all torn out because she was convinced they cause cancer. It’s like they’ve never seen someone late to class before. Reinhart says, “Nice of you to join us, Ashley,” as if no one has ever made that joke and she is the funniest person ever.
I face front, and the test is passed back along the rows; Emma, in front of me, turns to hand me the stack, smiling at me warm and friendly-like for no good reason because seriously we’re about to take a test, and then settling back in her seat. I realize I’m frowning at the back of her head as I drop the stack over my shoulder without looking, and I know I need to get some sleep before I start trying to set everyone on fire with my mind just for glancing sideways at me.
Reinhart says “Go” and I flip over the sheet. Feel better almost immediately. Everything here is familiar. It is easy to settle into the things I know and the things I understand. Things that are real, unequivocal. Things that can’t be broken.