Mind and body both crave worldly things, but these attachments tie us down. Slow us up.
DAY: 29
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 400
“You don’t look so good.”
I opened my eyes. Tariq stood before me, hair still wet from showering. I sat on the fender of his truck. “Nice to see you, too,” I said.
“I wasn’t making a fashion judgment,” he said. “You look unhealthy. Were you asleep?”
“No,” I said, and didn’t offer an alternate explanation, because it would have gone something like this: I was trying to meditate my way back to the Spirit World beach where I met what might have been my sister or might have been a figment of my imagination. “And anyway you’d look rough, too, if you’d been shivering in the cold waiting for your closeted secret boyfriend to finish up being Mr. Soccer Star Man.”
“No one told you to wait out in the cold,” he said, and unlocked the doors. “Why are you mad at me?”
“I’m not,” I said and got in. “I didn’t mean to snap at you. You’re right—I’m not feeling so hot.” The shouts of post-practice locker room boasts echoed on his skin. His gym clothes were in his bag, on the seat between us, rank with the sweet scent of him. My powers were in full force. “I’m sorry.”
Irritability is another symptom of eating disorders.
“You want to do this some other time?”
“No,” I said sharply, then smiled. “I need this. We need this. Right?”
“Yeah,” he said and smiled back.
A date. A real live date. Like couples do.
Our destination? A diner, three towns to the south. Where no one would know us.
Tariq put the truck in drive. Once we were out of the parking lot, he took his right hand off the wheel and fumbled for my left one.
Hunger was a river, a surging primal force that had breached its banks and flooded me, making me into one long yelp of pain in which my stomach was merely the deepest spot. The sun was close to setting, and when I looked up I saw a sky full of black stars swelling and throbbing and bursting.
I rolled down the window and gulped cold air, tried that swallowing-the-energy-of-the-universe thing again. It didn’t do much for my pain. When I shut my eyes, the black stars didn’t go away.
“Tell me about your day,” I managed to croak.
“Practice was ridiculous,” he said, clearly relieved, and launched into a story.
That’s how we made it all the way to the thruway and south to Exit 20. He spoke, I nodded, attempted to make sounds like I was listening, like I wasn’t trying to keep a lid on the jerks and spasms my belly pains brought on.
“We should have picked a more romantic spot,” he said after we’d parked and walked into the busy diner, all clean chrome and dirty linoleum, where four glass coffeepots bubbled and steamed on the counter.
“Baby steps,” I said.
Every seat at the counter was occupied. All men, mostly middle-aged, frowning at their food. The oldest-looking one turned and watched us for what seemed like maybe a little too long.
A waitress showed us to a table.
“Y’all believe it’s dark so early?” she asked. A short, spry, aging thing.
“Crazy, right?” Tariq said.
“Solstice is close. After that, the days’ll start getting longer again. I’m a Wiccan, so I pay attention to things like that.”
“Two coffees,” Tariq said.
“I asked for a table, not your life story,” I muttered in her direction after she’d walked away.
Tariq frowned. “You sure you’re feeling okay?”
I was sure I wasn’t feeling okay. And coming had been a mistake. The place was full of food. Dead animals glistened and oozed on the plates of the people around us. Starches and fats shined in the fluorescent light. Butter and salt covered everything.
“It’s okay,” he said, leaning forward, putting one warm hand on my knee. “I’m scared, too.”
I was scared. I hadn’t realized it until he said so. But of what? These men, or the contents of the plates in front of them? Men didn’t just up and murder gay boys in diners. Did they?
I took Tariq’s hands.
“You’re freezing,” he said. We were silent a moment. Then Tariq said, “Matt. Please talk to me.”
I had to throw him off the trail of Matt is slowly killing himself in exchange for superpowers. “I want to find my dad,” I said, because Tariq knew something was up, and because maybe, just maybe, talking about it might help.
“What do you know about him?” he asked.
“Not much. Mom never talks about him.”
“What do you think happened after Maya connected with him?”
“I don’t know. How should I?”
Unfazed by my assholery, Tariq said, “I’m asking what you think. You don’t have a theory?”
I think they went back to his mansion or lavish Madison Avenue apartment, and she’s living the good life while Mom and I are miserable.
I think he kidnapped her.
I think he murdered her.
I think he told her lies and turned her against us.
I think she’s never coming home.
“I don’t think it was a cheerful family reunion,” I said. “Maya’s more the angry punishment type. She didn’t say anything to you about it?”
“Just that she had to make things right with her father. Why do you think it had to be something bad?”
“Because she abandoned us,” I said before thinking could talk me out of it.
Tariq nodded. We sat in silence and chewed on that for a while. Then food appeared in front of me. Where had it come from? Oh, right. Tariq. He had ordered. Time had passed. I looked at him, watched the healthy thoughtless way he put food into himself. His hair askew from the knit hat he’d been wearing.
“You ordered me chicken soup?”
“You said that was fine,” he said around a mouthful of pizza fries. “Anyway don’t they call it Jewish penicillin? The miracle cure of every Jewish family? You look like you’re in need of a miracle.”
“How do you know a thing like that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Seinfeld reruns? One of my dad’s Jewish friends? I don’t know.”
“That’s racist,” I said, aiming a soup spoon at him. How did the spoon get in my hand?
“Whatever, Jew.”
“Whatever, Muslim.”
Outside, twilight had turned everything a deep dark blue. The tint gave a sad grandeur to the sorry spread of strip malls and trash and rust outside the window. I pressed my fingers to the table beside my water glass and pushed, just a little, with my mind, sending tiny shock waves through the table that made ripples in the water. I pushed harder and the ripples got bigger. Tariq frowned, unsettled without knowing why, looking around like maybe a little earthquake was happening.
“I’m sorry I’m taking you away from the weight room,” I said.
“I’m happy to be here,” he said. “With you.” But was he? I wouldn’t blame him if he was desperate to be anywhere else. I was irritable, starving, unpleasant. I stared at his face, wondering what he was feeling. I couldn’t penetrate whatever force field surrounded him. I’d have to make my powers stronger. “After this, we should go to a movie and make out,” I said. “Or maybe forget the movie part.”
He smiled, and a flush of desire forced me to bite back a moan. Black stars bloomed by the dozen. The whole diner spun. “Bastien’s having a party. Tomorrow night, at his house. You up for that?”
I wasn’t. But then my eyes locked onto Tariq’s, and I was. “Yes,” I said. “I am super up for that.”
I lowered my face to the bowl of soup. I looked up, at the crowd in the diner, at all the crisscrossing lines made by people, the smells and emotions and energy that swirled around them, the traces they left, tiny as molecules sometimes, but still there, right there, right in front of me, a code I couldn’t crack, a riddle I couldn’t unravel. Because I was weak. Because I chose earthly attachments like Tariq and food over limitless power. I looked up, through fogging eyes, at the connections between people, the way they carried their pasts on their backs and their futures strapped to their chests, the way time itself was a shifting wave like smell or sound, something I could crack or control, if I pushed a little further, if I became a little stronger.
My glass of water broke.
I started to cry.
“Hey,” Tariq said, looking bewildered, leaning forward to grab my hands under the table. “Hey, Matt. Don’t cry. Everything’s . . .”
His voice trailed off. He looked down at his plate, at the carnage of pizza fries. And suddenly I wasn’t afraid of homophobe lunatics with guns or the waitress spitting in our food or someone from the slaughterhouse or his father’s tree farm seeing us and snitching. Nothing on earth frightened me as much as the thought that Tariq might leave me.
“Come around the table,” I said. “Nobody knows us here. You don’t need to be ashamed of me.” A sob-hiccup.
He came around. He draped his big strong arm across my shoulders. He stared out at the diner and dared anyone to give us a second glance. No one did.
“What’s going on, Matt?” he whispered.
“My mom is going to lose her job. And my sister won’t talk to me. And I . . . And I . . .”
I stopped myself. I had been way, way too close to telling Tariq the thing that would make him run screaming out of my life. He’d tolerated so much of my awfulness. Expecting him to be understanding about my self-imposed starvation was absurd.
“Yeah,” he said. “Keeping us a secret is hard for me, too.” There were lots more things he wanted to say, and he wanted to say them so bad I could hear them. Some of the things were precisely what I needed to hear. But he didn’t really say them, so they didn’t count.
“I’m sorry,” I said, conceding defeat in the who-can-stay-silent-longer contest. “It’s the solstice. I’m a Wiccan, so I’m very sensitive to these things.”
“Eat the goddamn soup,” he said in my ear, then bit it lightly.
I ate two spoonfuls of the soup. I wept because it tasted so good, and because Tariq cared so much for me, and I wept because I was so, so weak.