Should you ever need a reminder of what a savage animal your body is—should you ever start to doubt that you are chained to a wild creature—just hurt someone. Hurt them bad. And see how your body feels after.
DAY: 11
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 800
I invented a thing.
Food masturbation, I called it. In as much explicit detail as possible, I imagined a hot and heavy scene of mouth intercourse with cheeseburgers or pizza or the seafood fra diavolo at La Concha D’Oro in Catskill.
All fantasy, of course.
It is significantly less messy than actual masturbation. But afterward, I feel just as dirty.
I double-fisted french fries, shoveling them into my mouth so fresh from the fryer that they burned my fingers and my tongue. Salt fell off in slow-motion snow showers. I scooped handfuls of fast-food pickles into my mouth, squirted mustard all over my face in hot wet splurts. I sucked ice cream direct from the Dairy Queen nozzle. I bought an entire pizza from Pizza Pit, on Lower Warren Street, and ate only the cheese, because I don’t know what kind of cheese they use or what they do to it, but the cheese from Pizza Pit is a thing of beauty.
I bought more pizzas. I ate them. My food depravity knew no bounds. I rolled a whole pizza up into a tight tube and ate it in five superhuman bites, barely chewing, until—
A hard blow to the stomach snapped me back to reality. Gym class. Dodgeball. Boys snickered at the sight of me struggling not to throw up.
“Lay off him, asshole,” Tariq said to whoever threw the ball. Hudson High is a small school; lucky me, I shared gym class with Tariq and eight members of the soccer team. He squatted at the sidelines, having already been hit.
Loss of concentration is a common symptom of eating disorders. The internet says so.
Not that I have an eating disorder, but I’m not eating, so a lot of the same principles apply.
Concentration is a human process. Concentration means trying to keep a lot of things straight in your head. When your body is starving, it doesn’t have any patience for complicated mental maneuvers. It just wants you to fucking kill and eat something.
Aggression. My mind came alive. Different parts lit up, clicked together. Things that had never made sense before suddenly fell into focus. Physics, sports, human society—the awakened mind could master them all.
Effortlessly, I scooped the ball out of the air.
“Nice catch,” someone on my team said, shock in his voice. I held the ball in my hand for a moment, felt its weight, turned it over to analyze every imperfection on its well-worn surface.
“Come on,” the coach called. They stared at me, all of these brutal boys, these bloodthirsty hairless primates, these bullies, these animals. These weak spindly towers of delicate sinew, these fragile heaps of dying cells.
I shifted the muscles in my arms, my legs. I swiveled my hips and knees and shoulders. I was a magnificent machine. I knew the logic of my own body, and I knew the logic of the bodies of my enemies. How had I not seen this before? I could do anything with this machine.
Someone laughed.
Ott’s mouth made the word faggot, but all sound had dropped out.
I could see how to hurt him.
With a swift punching motion, bringing one arm forward as I brought the other back, I threw the ball at Ott. It hit him in his gut so swift and hard he didn’t have time to block or dodge—
—and, quick as lightning, the ball bounced off his belly and returned directly to my hands.
Physics. Simple.
Ott roared in pain.
“No shit,” Bastien said. I took one small step forward to add momentum and repeated the trick on him. His scream when the ball hit his solar plexus was high and deeply satisfying.
Throw—hit—bounce back into my hands.
Another boy curled in on himself, holding his stomach.
Physics was not some complicated theoretical science: it was real and rough and practical. Simple logic; the unshakable cold equations of gravity and weight and surface angles. The body knows physics in a way the mind never will.
I felt like goddamn Magneto.
I knew this day would come, I thought. A reckoning is at hand.
Hunger was helping me become the kind of monster that can make it in this world.
With six swift throws, I incapacitated the entire other team. Changing it up some, aiming for the knees or crotch or head when I could see their reflexes were sharp enough to block a shot. One of them ended up on the ground. Crying.
And, just for the joy of causing pain to these boys who had caused so much pain to others—or would one day cause pain to others—I took out everyone on my team, too.
And yes, reader, you’re right, perhaps I was going too far. Maybe not everyone was a bully. But knocking them down just felt too . . . good.
The coach blew his whistle, a long angry shocked screech. Before the sound was finished, I had hit the whistle with the dodgeball, knocked it into his mouth and halfway down his throat. He coughed it up, spat it out. Everyone stared.
I smiled to myself, all the way to the principal’s office. I felt proud.
I had never been suspended before.