Your body is unique. A snowflake. No body is precisely like yours. Over thousands of years, the little differences between bodies add up to genetic drift, the differentiation of species. Evolution. So remember this the next time you curse some knob of fat or funny-shaped thumb, or sexual predilection for something society says you shouldn’t predilect: your differences might make you miserable, but they might also make you better.
DAY: 9
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
My sense of triumph was gone when I woke up. Only sadness was left, and hunger. Sadness over what had happened to my sister and sadness over Tariq’s open, desperate smile. Sadness over what I would eventually do to him. Revenge was necessary. He was a monster. But then, he was also a person.
When I came down the hall to find the massive breakfast Mom had made me, I was almost happy. Bacon, crisp and heaped on a plate, oatmeal bubbling on the stove, a pile of pancakes stacked high, a brand-new box of cereal.
Food was love.
Then I thought, food is failure.
I stood in the doorway for a good long minute.
“Can I have some coffee?” I asked, walking in. This made maybe ten years I’d been asking that question, so I was more than shocked when she said, “Sure, I made enough for both of us.”
It meant something, something big, as much as if she’d bought me a dirty magazine or box of cigarettes, but not even with my new abilities could I see clear to what exactly it meant.
I sat down. Mom gave me a mug, a spoon, milk, and sugar. I skipped them both. These vile substances are nothing but calories.
“You’ve had coffee before,” she said, when I took a long sip and smiled.
“Of course, Mom. Shouldn’t I have?”
Mom shrugged. Then she sighed, sat down across from me. Perhaps she finally saw, that morning, in that moment, that I was a person in the world and could do all sorts of things she told me not to do.
“Eat,” she said, pushing plates in my direction. And stared at me, eyes boring into mine.
All of a sudden, my chest hurt.
The bacon, probably made from the sister of the sausage I dropped into the dirt the night before, was pure salty fat, and therefore out of the question. So I slid several pancakes onto my plate, not intending to eat any of them, and added syrup sparingly.
“How is that?” she asked, tapping the well-worn copy of The Dharma Bums I took with me everywhere.
“It’s good,” I said, aware that this, too, meant something. Perhaps as close to a conversation about my father as my mother was capable of having. So I pushed it, just a little. “These dudes just wandering around, seeing the country, no attachments, focusing on living life, you know. Getting down to what’s important.”
Mom snorted, made a face, looked into the distance.
I sliced off a large strip of pancake, then cut it into smaller ones. “You don’t think that sounds good?”
“‘No attachments’ does not sound good,” she said, and I knew she was choosing her words carefully. “Some attachments are beautiful.”
Here, she patted my hand. So this was about my dad, and his lobster boat—which, from my heightened perspective, I realized was either a lie or a euphemism.
“What’s life, if not attachments?” she asked.
I didn’t say anything at first. My pancake had been reduced to pieces practically too small to see with the naked eye.
She was watching me.
So far she hadn’t said anything. But I had to eat something, as much as it pained me to do so. “I don’t know, Mom.”
Life was revenge. Life was making bad people hurt. Life was Maya.
“They restricted the runs again,” Mom said, rubbing the back of her neck, her voice aching the way it always did when she talked about work. “Another three pickups canceled. That’s two more guys laid off.”
Here is something you need to know about my mother. She loves her town. She loves the people in it. The ones she works with, the ones she grew up alongside. She loves the rusted wheelless vehicles along its roads and the falling-down houses with the roofs gone. I don’t know why. She’s a smart lady. She’s not small and hateful like so many of them are. And yet she loves the twisted pothole highways and the happy blanket of ignorance everyone wraps themselves up in, the deluded crazy stupid belief that This is all we need.
And I realized something, somehow. For myself! Not with my supersenses, but with my mind.
Had I not been born gay, I might have loved it, too. I would have been welcomed into the fold. One of us, they would have chanted, like the Freaks in that movie, and I would have lived happily for my whole life in Hudson. I would never have seen the fear and anger and hatred my neighbors and classmates carried around inside them, aimed at everyone and everything that’s different, because I would have shared those fears and hatreds with them. I wouldn’t have known how bad it was, kind of like how you can’t smell the smell of your own house because it’s so familiar.
A ludicrous sentence shivered up my spine and into my brain, shocking me, terrifying me, delighting me, and almost escaping my lips:
Thank God I am gay.
“How is school?” she asked, and didn’t look up from her mug.
“Fine,” I said, because coffee or no coffee, we hadn’t reached the place where I could tell her about how Ott slammed the locker door on my hand last week or Nate Smith threatened to rape me.
“That’s good,” she said, and got up to pretend to busy herself with something in a drawer. Gracefully, in swift flicks timed to the rhythm of the conversation, I scraped small forkfuls of pancake into the napkin spread in my lap. Then I crushed it in both fists and slipped it into my backpack and went to school with syrup-stinking hands I never once let myself lick.
My mother was worried. I didn’t need Starvation Superpowers to see it, smell it, hear it hiding between her words. And I probably wasn’t half as slick as I thought I was, disposing of all those uneaten pancake atoms.
But I escaped without having to ingest a crumb. I’d fight my next battle when I came to it.
School passed swiftly, effortlessly. And by evening the worry was still there, but bigger, or maybe by then I was hungry enough to see it for what it really was. Her worry was a knotted swirl, a tapestry woven of a thousand threads. Her fear of the factory shutting down or of losing more friends to layoffs; her fear of getting laid off herself. Her love of the town and her fear of the future. Her worry about me, what I was going through. Her fears about Maya.
Mom and me barely spoke at dinner—and whenever she wasn’t looking I tossed food pieces into the Ziploc bag I’d left open in my lap—but I could hear so much even when she wasn’t speaking.
For the first time since my powers emerged, I wished I couldn’t.