Most people don’t realize the extent to which their bodies enslave them. They live like hogs in a slaughterhouse pen, obeying their bodies, blissfully ignorant of the treasonous monster they are chained to, how it will hurt them, how it will fail them. Once you realize the true antagonistic nature of your relationship with your body, you will be far superior to most of your peers.
And yet—
one’s enemy is the greatest teacher, according to the Dalai Lama. Respect your enemy and you will learn far more than if you declare that only hate and violence can exist between you. The student of the Art of Starving has much to learn from the body they are at war with. They will listen to it. They will understand it. Only by doing so can they force it to achieve its full potential.
DAY: 4
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
At home, pondering what I’d learned, I realized: I needed a task. An assignment, something to focus on. Homework.
I needed to pick someone, learn their smell, and then follow them. Using only my nose.
I would let them get away from me—see how far away they could go before I lost track of their scent, and then focus on increasing that distance. Focus on picking that one smell out of the entire crowded school full of girls wearing too much perfume and stinking boys and backed-up toilets and dissected frogs and smokers in the stairwell.
And the second I had given myself that assignment, I grinned. I even said, “Excellent,” out loud, like a cartoon villain, because I knew precisely who I would be stalking.
Tariq. Soccer star. In the weight room after school every day, with the body to prove it. One recent addition, which jarred with the rest of his clean-cut jock image: a pierced left nostril. Gifted player, passionate, so competitive that many of his own teammates were afraid of him.
Best friends with Bastien and Ott since second grade. An inseparable trio, egging each other on to increasingly alarming acts of cruelty. His aloofness from their petty violence did not make him better than them. And if they could call girls ugly just to watch them cry—in full public view of others—what other atrocities might they have collaborated on in secret?
Might one of them have involved Maya?
I found Tariq at the end of the day, standing between two banks of puke-green lockers, arms folded over his chest. Watching traffic. An illegible expression on his face. Was he waiting for someone, lamenting a failed test, looking for future victims? No one could tell. He was a statue. A cypher. I stopped nearby and stood there, smelling the air, sucking up everything I could. Trying hard to tune out the angry churn of my empty stomach.
Pine trees. Gasoline. The vanilla air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of his truck. The toxic cherry hand soap in the bathroom. But under all that—
“Matt,” he said, seeing me.
“Oh, hi, Tariq,” I said, after a pause that was hopefully just long enough to weird him out.
“How are you doing?”
I shrugged. “Could be worse.”
Worse like my sister. After what you did to her.
Whatever it was.
Tariq smiled. Avoided eye contact like he always did with me. Said nothing.
Smelling Tariq, letting my nose break the boy down into his component smells, I found myself significantly less afraid of him. Whatever he was—bully, monster, untouchable jock superstar—he was also very human. There was no reason to fear him. Especially since I could find out so much more about what happened to Maya by getting closer to him.
“I heard about a party this weekend,” I said, thinking fast, stepping closer. “Tomorrow. Down by the Dunes. Are you going?”
“Thinking about it,” he said, and smiled the slightest bit. “You?”
“Yeah.”
“Surprised to hear it,” he said. “Didn’t think it was your thing.”
“It’s not. I’m actually a narc,” I said, deadpanning. “I’m forty years old, infiltrating high school so I can catch teenage drug dealers.”
Tariq scoffed. “Then this party is definitely where you want to be.” He paused. “I can give you a ride,” he said, and his smile widened significantly.
It did things to me, that smile. Those beautiful teeth, those lopsided-yet-perfect dimples. My knees weakened. Revenge is hard when your target is so pretty.
Just remember: he used that smile on Maya.
“Sure. Pick me up down the block from my house, tomorrow around seven,” I said, and told him where I lived.
Even though I knew he already knew. Because that’s where he picked up my sister the last night any of us saw her.
“You got it,” Tariq said.
Pretty brazen, you’re probably thinking. A dude would have to be pretty cocky, pretty evil, or pretty stupid to buddy up with the brother of a girl to whom he did something terrible. Or a girl to whom one of his best friends did something terrible.
Of course, it was also pretty cocky and pretty stupid of me to agree to get in the car with him. But I’m both those things.
I needed to know more. I had nothing real to pin on him, so far, except that since my sister disappeared I obviously made him and Ott deeply uncomfortable.
Maya ran with a crowd of tough kids, sure, but those kids were poor like us. Like us, they couldn’t afford a car. But Tariq, rumor had it, had a brand-new truck his wealthy father had bought for him. And a clear interest in Maya’s company.
I overheard her on the phone with him. That night. I almost asked to tag along, until I heard the urgency in her voice. Urgency and something much darker.
We used to bond over how badly we both wanted him. I freely acknowledged that I had no shot and wholeheartedly cheered her on when he started texting her, then calling, then picking her up to go hang out.
The summer I was fifteen, Maya found me in the living room watching a horror movie Mom wouldn’t have let me see if she hadn’t been working an extra shift, and I thought for sure I was busted, because Maya enjoyed being a hard-ass disciplinarian even more than Mom did, but to my great surprise she came with a bowl of microwave popcorn and held it out to me, and when I reached for it she pulled back, so I’d look up at her, and she made eye contact and looked dead into my soul and said, “Just so you know, I know you’re gay, and I think that’s fucking awesome, because straight guys are the worst, and I know you’re probably not ready to talk about it with anyone else, and I’ll never tell a soul, but I need you to know that you can always come talk to me about anything.”
Which made me blow up and scream at her—a classic closet-case defensive overreaction—and go to my room and cry, and not talk to her for two days, and then once all that had blown over go to her and say, “What about [INSERT CRUSH-OF-THE-WEEK NAME HERE]? Do you think I have a chance with him?”
And from that moment on, we were forever gushing over boys together. Reading the How to Tell if a Boy Likes You quizzes in Cosmo and Seventeen together. Digging deep into the Facebook photos of the boys we liked, looking for summer vacation shots where they might be shirtless or sweaty or smiling sexily.
She was the only person on the whole planet who told me to be Me and be proud of it.
Then Tariq befriended her, and got her to let her guard down, and hurt her—he didn’t kill her, didn’t cripple her, but whatever it was, the psychological impact was such that she had to get the hell out of Hudson and away from everything she loved.
Now I would do the same to him.