Three days had passed since Bones and Alice, Lard and Teresa had hung out on the roof. If Dr. Chu knew they had sneaked out after curfew, he didn’t call them on it. Maybe he thought they needed to decompress after such a FUBAR of a family session and trusted them enough to know they hadn’t left hospital grounds. Or maybe he needed to decompress himself.
Bones’s sister sent him one of those antiquated communications systems known as a postcard. It pictured a sprawling orange grove. When life sucks like lemons, hold out for Florida oranges. He found a funny one in the gift shop. I don’t suffer from insanity, I enjoy it.
Other than therapy sessions and endless writing exercises that began Dear Fear, Dear Fat, or Dear Comfort Food and great mental anguish during meals, Bones spent most of his free time helping Alice prepare for her audition. He could tell she was growing stronger every day.
“I won’t be a principal dancer at first,” she’d explained one afternoon in her room. “But that’s okay, as long as I’m dancing.”
Bones filmed.
Alice critiqued.
She explained the French names of movements with a pure and radiant smile that glistened with sweat. Battement meant to beat. Piqué to prick. Port de bras wasn’t what Bones had hoped—as in, does it hook in font or in back? It meant how the arms moved.
After lights out, sometimes at two in the morning, sometimes three or four depending on the night staff and whether or not it was Unibrow, Bones moved Alice’s bed so she had room to turn.
One night she showed up in his room in the dark. “Wake up, Bones,” she said, shaking him gently. “Follow me—I need a back rub.”
Another night he and Alice sneaked out of the ward and down the back stairs. They were nearly spotted in the lobby by a security guard but Alice saw him first. “Quick!” she whispered, dragging Bones into a storage room. They huddled in the dark listening to the sound of fading footsteps. Then Bones filmed her in front of the gift shop while she did amazing leap things. Mannequins smiled through tempered glass.
Before saying good night, he’d hold her hummingbird feet while she did crunches. Afterward she’d ride his back while he sweated out push-ups. Each tête–à–tête filled him with longing. He knew Alice was part of him and always would be. He’d been put on this planet to be with her.
“Was it good for you?” she asked, collapsing from exhaustion.
His cup runneth over.
The next weigh-in was worse than the first.
The room was a walk-in freezer.
Bones was a block of ice.
This time he was commando under his gown. Utterly defenseless. No weight belt, stainless steel cutlery, or lead pellets lurking in his seams. He pinched the back of his gown further embarrassed because Nancy was in charge of his exam.
“Take a deep breath and let it out slowly,” she said, stethoscope pressed against his chest. “You okay?”
He couldn’t stop shaking. “Sure.”
She slapped a blood pressure cuff on his arm, took his temperature, made a note, and told him to step on the scales. Fear tangled his legs, trying to crush his bones. What if he’d gained weight? Worse still, what if he’d lost weight? Then Dr. Chu would raise his calories even more. A lose-lose situation.
Nancy touched his arm gingerly. “One small step…”
Bones closed his eyes against bold numbers. He stepped up, froze. Metal burned the soles of his feet. The sound of clicking rattled in his ears. Little bullets aimed at his brain. What kind of lies would the scales tell this time?
“Dr. Chu will be pleased,” she said.
Bones stepped down, shivering. Nancy had returned the sliding weight to zero. “How much?” he asked.
“Dr. Chu will go over the results with you.”
“Can’t you tell me?”
“Sorry, Bones.”
“But it’s my body,” he said.
“You’ll have to talk to the doctor.”
What did that mean?
Bones didn’t want to think about his body fat or fat body and he sure as shit didn’t want to talk about it. He was more than willing to join a particularly vicious game of Scrabble in the dayroom.
Lard and Teresa were nestled on the couch intense over their tiles. Alice sat cross-legged in the easy chair; her ballet skirt hiked over her knees. She frowned, thumbing through the Scrabble dictionary. “I know derriere is a word.”
Lard looked up. “What’s that, Spanish?”
“French,” she said. “As in, I tripped over one of your bad jokes and fell on my derriere.”
Teresa added an R, E, and Y to Lard’s C-O-V-E-R making it R-E-C-O-V-E-R-Y. “Twenty-three points,” she said. “Your turn, Bones. And Alice? Foreign words don’t count.” Alice shrugged, deep in the dictionary.
“I don’t know why you cheat,” Lard said. “You’d beat us anyway.”
“Battement,” Bones said the French word meaning beating.
Alice grinned at him. “Impressive.”
“Cheating,” Lard repeated.
“It’s not cheating.” Her smoked almond eyes scanned the board. “Just implementing creative strategy.”
Bones focused on his X. O-X, A-X-E, or C-O-X. He needed an N for A-N-O-R-E-X-I-C, which would move his score closer to Alice’s, and more importantly, thoroughly impress her with his skill and intelligence.
Bones counted the Ns on the board. “Pass,” he said, turning in three tiles. He drew a T, S, and a blank. T-O-X-I-C S-E-X.
“Guess what?” Alice told Bones. “I found those blank menus I told you about. Apparently furniture was moved around a couple of months ago during an E. coli outbreak.”
“Most strains are harmless,” Lard said.
“So hey,” she said, leaning into Lard. “I need a favor.”
He took off his glasses and worked at a particularly stubborn smudge. A high-calorie-food byproduct, no doubt. “Forget it.”
Alice pulled a menu from her journal and laid it on the board. It was obvious she’d filled it out herself: vegetable broth, 15 calories; strawberry Jell-O, 14 calories; 1 saltine cracker, 13 calories. “Just substitute it for tomorrow’s dinner.”
“That’s a starvation diet, Alice,” Lard said, reading from the sheet. “As in suicide.”
“It’s my body,” she said. “Besides, do you think I’d hurt myself? With auditions coming up?”
He shook his head. “You can’t live on this.”
“Just another five pounds,” she said in a voice that was both entreating and vulnerable.
“Right. Then another five. Same old story and you’re back in ICU. Sorry, Alice, I’m not Dr. Kevorkian.”
“What do you know about it? You think it’s easy to train without a studio? That’d be like you trying to cook without a stove. Shit, I don’t even have a decent mirror, and I have to use the bed for a barre.”
“Fame…” he muttered.
“Now who’s being a pompous ass?” Alice dumped her tiles on the board before knocking the whole thing on the floor. “Sometimes I just hate you!”
“Yeah, well.” Lard stood up quietly. “Teresa, wanna help prep dinner?”
Teresa studied the scattered alphabet, evidence of how quickly life on the ward could turn sour. “Okay.”
“God, I need a cigarette,” Alice said after they left. She leaned forward and her leotard stretched even tighter over her chest. “I bet you wouldn’t have said no if you worked in the kitchen.”
“Uh, well, no.”
“You mean you’ll do it?” She appeared to be deciding exactly what to say before saying it. “If you get caught, you’re toast.”
“I won’t get caught.”
Her dark eyes danced. “Really?”
“Clandestine is my middle name.”
“An extremely attractive trait.” Alice smiled, fresh and radiant. “Gumbo keeps this box on the kitchen counter. Inside is a file with all of our menus. Signed, sealed, and delivered by Chu Man himself. It shouldn’t be that hard to swap them.”
And Bones knew just how he’d do it.
An hour before lunch the next day Bones stepped into the noisy, stinky steam of the kitchen with its violently hissing pots. It smelled like something that had been dead too long. Cattle, pigs, chicken, fish, all of the above.
“If you’re here to complain that the food is overpriced or the service is too slow or…” Lard shot over his shoulder.
“The portions are too big,” Bones said, scanning the cluttered counter. His eyes stopped on the file box of menus sitting by the cookbooks. Not exactly in plain sight, but not hidden either. He’d have to be careful. If Lard caught him he’d be cooked alive.
Gumbo shouted at Lard from a chopping block. “Rinse the pasta!”
Bones got out of the way while Lard tugged on oven mitts and grabbed an enormous pot. In one slick move he dumped the pot into a strainer and cranked the cold water handle. “What’s up?” he asked.
Bones shifted his weight hoping to seem his usual obsessive self. “Something’s assaulting the green beans in the garden. Like, seriously.”
Lard turned, his face red and sweaty. “What can I do about it?”
“Looks like a scourge, maybe red-bellied beetles,” Bones said, feigning concern. “Once the beans are wiped out the little bastards will move on to the tomatoes.”
Bones registered a flash of panic in Lard’s eyes. “I could make a spray,” he said quickly. “Black pepper with dish soap should do it.”
“Spray bottles are on a shelf by the freezer,” Gumbo hollered out.
While Lard and Gumbo sliced and diced in a frightening frenzy, Bones filled a spray bottle with water and poured in soap. When the other two were at the stove tossing veggies in frying pans, he did what Alice had asked, swapping the menus she’d filled out with the official ones.
Which as it turned out, was a grave mistake.
Bones paced in his room trying to figure out what to do with Alice’s menus—the real ones he’d taken from the box in the kitchen. In the end, he tore them up and flushed them down the toilet. Bye-bye, Brussels sprouts. Farewell, garbanzo beans. Adios, toasted rye crisps. He’d just finished the last flush when he heard Lard in the bedroom. “Hey, man,” he said. “I found more CRAP.”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll put it on your desk,” Lard said. “Back in a sec.”
Calvin wondered, not for the first time, if being CRAP meant you were a little bit crazy. If allowing yourself to have feelings, like they said, was the definition of madness. “Where did you come from?” he asked the girl.
“Womb-X,” she said, seemingly ashamed. She rolled onto one side, pulling her knees up, hugging them close, as if trying to disappear altogether.
Calvin stared at the curve of her back. Perfect, unflawed. He’d purr her name if he knew it.
He stepped lightly over her. She seemed confused to see him still there. “I hear there are others like us,” she said in a dreamy breath. “Up here. Hiding out.”
He kneeled, his neoprene against her flesh. She too had removed her auditory phone. Wires dangled dangerously from her ear. But he couldn’t believe she’d disconnected her feeding tube.
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
She looked starved.
She unfolded her arms, straightening her legs. He bent down, gently inserting his tube through the slit in her uniform into her navel clamp, allowing his life juice to flow into her.
They had to get away from here.
The story was fascinating in part because it was so frightening. And it seemed a sign, albeit in a freakish way, that Bones wasn’t alone. It had to do with Calvin’s longing for the girl he’d just met, and like Bones and Alice, they were in the early stages of getting to know each other.
“Chu Man wants to see you in his office,” Lard said, sauntering back in. “Since it’s your weekly progress report, try to act like someone who’s, you know, making progress.”