The internet is an excellent place for people with eating disorders. Packed with sites and forums with all the tips and tricks you need to cover up your eating disorder until you disappeared from this earth altogether.
Which is to say, the internet is a terrible place for people with eating disorders.
DAYS: 16–18
AVERAGE DAILY CALORIES, APPROX.: 600
My second day of suspension meant something very special: an entire day of Quality Time with my mother. It coincided with that rarest of events, a Whole Day Off for her.
“Word at the plant is that you murdered twenty people and then told the principal to go screw himself,” she said when she woke me up that morning.
“Lies and slanders,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “I killed at least fifty people.”
“Can’t believe I raised such a slacker,” she said. “Now get dressed.”
“What the hell,” I mumbled, my mouth filthy with sleep taste. “It’s earlier than when I get up for school. And I don’t go to school today!”
“It’s not a vacation, slugger, it’s suspension,” she said, pulling wide the blinds. “Get dressed.”
Hunger was a fog, a blanket of gray mist that covered everything. Hunger wrapped me up in a snug blanket of cold and quiet, blinded me to the distant dangers and fears that normally kept me in a stressed-out state of high alert. I took my morning ration of two tablespoons of tsampa, just to be on the safe side.
Something was different when I came downstairs. A disturbance in the air. An echo.
Music. Real music, not a recording.
Could I hear the past now?
“Were you playing Maya’s guitar?” I asked.
“Christ, kid, you heard that? Thought you were asleep. Plus, I didn’t even turn the goddamn amplifier on.”
“I didn’t know you played the guitar,” I said because I couldn’t tell which one was more astonishing, the fact that I could maybe hear the past or the fact that I’d never known something so important about her.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about your fat old mother,” she said. “I used to have hopes and dreams the same as you two.”
“You wanted to be a rock star?”
She showed a thin and rueful smile. “I wrote songs, had crazy ideas about playing them for people.” Then she flapped her hand to whisk away these unhelpful, unwelcome memories. “But winter’s coming, and it’s a Tuesday. Which means half off at the Salvation Army. We’re going shopping.”
Once we got there, I fingered jackets and pants in an ecstasy of information, glimpsing scraps of every garment’s past life. A fight between a boyfriend and girlfriend; the shirt she donated, along with every other article of clothing he owned, while he was at work the next day. The mothball vacuum cleaner smell of the closet where a coat spent a decade; the hard tavern nights of smoke and barstool pleather that a pair of jeans endured. The pajama bottoms an old man died in. A hat a meth-head loved, until she ended up in prison. And through it all I thought of my mother and the lives she didn’t get to live.
“Pick out whatever you want,” she said. “Call me Mrs. Moneybags, but only on Tuesdays. And only here.” The night before, I had spent entirely too much time on an eating-disorder support website. I read it and felt sick and sorry for these poor miserable tormented souls. But I also scribbled down copious notes.
For example: baggy clothes. Buy big bulky items to hide inside. That way no one will remark, as my mother did, on how thin you are. No one can tell underneath all that fabric. And when I met my mom at the cash register weighted down with oversize sweaters, et cetera, she was overjoyed to see how fully I had thrown myself into the trip, considering that clothes shopping had always been one position higher than “dentist” on the list of Things I Hate.
“These are gigantic,” she said, holding up a hoodie that could have housed ten of me.
“It’s the style.”
“I thought skinny jeans and tight shirts were the style.”
“Yeah, yesterday’s style,” I said. “I’m fashion forward.”
“You’re ridiculous, is what you are.”
I nodded. “Yes. Yes I am.”
In the car, she clutched her leg and winced and waited a solid three minutes for the pain to die down.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I feel like that’s my fault.”
“Shh,” she said, waving her hand to dismiss that “crazy” concept.
“I can’t believe they won’t give you any time off,” I said. “A week, at least, so you heal properly.”
“They offered,” she said, putting the car into drive, wearing her I Do Not Want to Continue This Conversation face. “But there’s layoffs coming, and being a woman I got to work harder than the others.”
“That’s a shitty fact,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It is. We haven’t been bowling in forever. You and your sister loved that. Wanna go to Chatham?”
“You can’t bowl with your leg like that,” I said.
“I can watch you. Treat you to one of those paper boats of fried chicken fingers you used to love so much.”
I thought of the things we used to do, the Mom-and-the-Kids activities she could actually afford when we were little and had the day off from school. McDonald’s, the mall, Friendly’s. All involved food. Food was how we bonded, how we talked.
“Let’s go down to the boat launch,” I said. “Feed the ducks.”
We bought popcorn at a gas station and parked at the edge of the Hudson, but there were no ducks.
“Too cold,” she said, sitting down on a bench. “Too late in the season.”
She threw some kernels into the water and ate some. I even had a kernel or two myself. Rains up north had swelled the river, and random debris bobbed and swam with the current. In the sunlight, out in the world, she looked older than I’d ever seen her. Her drab brown hair needed cutting, and her pale skin had lines I’d never noticed. My mom was the terror of every hog in town, the fearless warrior who brought my sister and me into the world and then carried us safely to (relative) maturity. Yet in the grand scheme of things, she was no different from any piece of flotsam on the river, carried helplessly south. We all were.
“Did you love my father?”
Mom drew in a breath, the standard moment of decision where she usually redirected me to a safer subject. Instead, she startled me.
“I did.”
“Good,” I said. “That makes me happy.”
She sighed. “We weren’t a good fit. No one’s fault. You can like someone and also really dislike them at the same time.”
“Sometimes it’s like that,” I said, thinking of Tariq.
Mom looked at me, then reached out to hold my shoulder.
I had to work hard not to use my new abilities on my mother. It felt wrong, an invasion of her privacy, an inversion of our natural roles. But in that moment I knew what she was feeling, maybe from the look on her face and maybe from the simple human telepathy of two people who love each other and know each other well. She looked at me, and she saw that I was a person, that I was learning things about pain and heartache and suffering that she did not know, could not know, that I had a whole world inside me that had nothing to do with her.
“Somebody hurt Maya, Mom.”
Mom sighed. “Your sister has been going through a really difficult period. Trust me. I know what she’s going through. You can’t see it because she’s still your big sister and you idolize her, but she’s been working through some really difficult stuff.”
“That’s not true. She was fine . . . and then she was gone.”
“Your sister acted like she was a hundred percent in control, but that doesn’t mean she was fine. When I was her age—” and here my mother paused, frowned, debated with herself— “when I was around her age, I ran away from home myself.”
“What?” I said, staring at her face, but not looking too closely, not sniffing beneath the surface to find out more. “Why?”
“It’s complicated. A lot of reasons. That’s what I want you to understand. It isn’t always just one terrible thing. Sometimes, it’s a million little ones.
“I’m telling you all of this now because I need you to know that Maya is going to be all right. Whatever she’s going through, no matter how painful, she’s going to get through it. Do you believe that?”
I tried to answer. No words came out.
“I turned out okay. Didn’t I?”
“The best,” I whispered, and lay my head on her shoulder.
“Oh, honey,” Mom said, and stroked my hair.
Unlike our last conversation, I wasn’t sad. I didn’t want to cry. I wanted to rage and scream and burn things down. I wanted revenge—for more than just Maya now. On a world that could turn my bighearted mother (who used to write songs!) into a shell. On a world that could be so hard on a person that her only escape was running away from everything she knew.
Many a magnificent supervillain was motivated by revenge.
Maybe that’s what I was becoming. A supervillain.
“You need a haircut,” she said at last.
“You need a haircut.”
“Fine. Let’s go get haircuts.”
Which we did. From the same guy who’s been cutting my hair since I was five. Except: now I could see clear as day that he was a closet case. Couldn’t tell if that was because of my abilities or my fledgling gaydar. Gaydar is a real thing, evidently—a superpower that even the most mortal among us can acquire—and when he was finished, he and my mother smiled at me in the mirror behind me, and it was the same cut I’ve been getting since puberty. I looked at my reflection in a state of confusion and shock, because this boy was not me, this haircut was projecting the image of some clean and well-mannered normal person who I most certainly was not. A haircut is a costume, a disguise we wear to trick people into thinking we’re someone better or more successful or cooler or just different than we really are, and this insight made me want to scream and shatter the mirror, and I controlled myself only with great difficulty, because my hunger had progressed so far that I was in a more-or-less constant state of war with my body.
All of which brings me to: vision.
Sight is the most limited sense. The one we rely on too much. The easiest one to fool. It’s the most human sense, the one that helps us navigate the man-made world of signs and symbols and words and fashion. We’re trained to trust our eyes above all our other senses, but that’s a lie. Appearances deceive. Sight must be subjugated to the other senses, or you’ll be misled.
That evening I flipped through photographs, slow then fast, then quizzed myself on their contents. Simple stuff—Was the person in photo #10 a man or a woman? How many African Americans were in photo #22?—then harder, How many people in that crowd? What word was misspelled in that page full of text?
Back at school, suspension over, I logged body language cues from the people around me, looking for tells and tics that betrayed when someone was going to lie, evade, escalate, distract. I gave a trophy in the trophy case a quick glance and then recited the names and years on the trophy by memory. I watched people for hours on end, learned the connections between body language and future action, until I could almost sort of predict what someone was going to do—before they did it.
I spent as much time as I could in the high school halls with Tariq and Bastien and Ott. By now the latter two had begun to begrudgingly accept me as a member of the human race. I scanned their faces, watched the way their jaws moved and their eyebrows twitched. I could see the shape of the secrets just below the surface and the careful way they looked at me.
But I wasn’t good enough to see what the secrets were, not yet.
At every meal, now, Mom said, “You need to eat, Matt.”
“I will,” I said, but I wouldn’t. I was too close.
And every time, the look in Mom’s eyes was too familiar. It was the same look that those boys had, during dodgeball, when they realized they should be scared of me.