32

A BOY OF ONLY FAIR-TO-MIDDLING COURAGE does what he has to do. I waited till Dani’s cranky Irish doorman slipped around the corner for a smoke, then snuck through her lobby. All the way up the gray staircase, the bottom foot or two of its walls were snowdrifted with white swoops of spackle. Patched up, sure, but very West Side to still need painting after all these months.

I’m not certain what my plan was, but I know it didn’t include getting busted by one of Dani’s obnoxious college-age brothers the very second I popped my head into the eleventh-floor hall. He had poofy black David Cassidy hair parted in the middle, and he was just coming out their front door when he spotted me. He looked me over skeptically while I tried to explain myself.

“Y’know what?” he said, before I’d gotten very far. “Save it. I suddenly realize it’s way too much work to pretend I’m interested.” He shouted over his shoulder: “Yo, Dani! You got a little admirer skulking around out here. Squeaky voice like his balls haven’t dropped yet.” He thought a minute, then yelled into the apartment, “See? I told you you had friends!”

A TV spasmed with canned laughter from somewhere inside. After a few moments, Dani appeared at the door in a Bruce Lee T-shirt and blue pajama bottoms, looking thin and winter-pale. A little “Oh!” of surprise escaped her when she saw me.

Her brother studied her. “Looks like someone wasn’t expected,” he said, peering at her in a way that somehow seemed both mocking and protective. “Shall I show your gentleman caller the gate?”

“No, no,” Dani said. “This is Griffin. From school. It’s fine.”

Brother was not satisfied. “What’s in the Big Brown Bag, Griffin from School?”

I was, in fact, carrying a big brown bag, which was helpfully printed with the words Big Brown Bag.

“None of your beeswax, Brian,” Dani said, leading me inside by the elbow. “Don’t answer him,” she ordered me.

—

What do you bring someone who’s sick? Food, right? Homemade chicken soup or a tray of lasagne or something. Much better than one of those hokey Get Well cards from Lamston’s—because what if Quig was totally full of it and Dani wasn’t sick at all? Food would work either way.

“So what is in the Big Brown Bag?” Dani asked me. We were sitting on the saggy blue velvet sofa in her living room, not far from several enormous homegrown avocado trees. Their leaves were big green paddles.

I lifted a large Tupperware tub from the bag and placed it on the Lucite-cube table. “Hungry?”

She didn’t say anything.

“This is a little breakfast delicacy I whipped up at home,” I told her. “Just for you, as a kind of peace offering. Me and Kyle invented it at the beginning of the year. It’s evolved over time, but today, I’m really pretty sure, I perfected it!” I peeled off the top—“Et, voilà, mademoiselle!”—and tipped the tub toward Dani.

She peered in reluctantly, then jerked her head back in horror.

“Gross! What is that? It looks like somebody already ate it!”

That cracked me up. “I know, I know,” I said. “But it’s as tasty as it is ugly, I swear. All we need to do is heat it up.”

“It’s green! What the hell are you trying to feed me here?”

“Well, it’s a scrambly little breakfast masterpiece I like to call the Eggsorcist. Repugnant, yes, but so diabolically delicious that after just one bite it’s sure to possess your body and soul”—Dani’s face was a total blank—“and maybe even lift you up in the air and spin you around above your bed while a gnarly old priest shrieks at it to release you.” (I’d never actually seen The Exorcist, but everyone knew about Linda Blair getting twirled around all freakily by Satan, and I thought pretending to have seen an R movie might make me seem less middle-schoolish.)

Dani didn’t say anything, so I kept blabbering: “Its ingredients are pretty simple: six jumbo eggs, six ladlefuls of Seabrook Farms creamed spinach, a six-ounce can of StarKist tuna, six tablespoons of lard, six Steak-umm strips, six dollops of Hellmann’s mayo, and six tablespoons of bacon grease—you know, that congealed goop from the coffee can you keep on the stove. All of which—and I think this is safely within the Recommended Daily Allowance—adds up to roughly six hundred sixty-six thousand calories a serving.”

For the longest time, Dani just stared at me, her face betraying nothing. Then a Dani-esque smile began to play across her lips.

“What?” I asked.

Her smirk grew broader. “You are an extremely considerate bozo, you know that?”

“But it’s the Eggsorcist!” I protested helplessly. “Surely you are not shunning the Eggsorcist?! Have a bite! You’ll love it.”

Dani was laughing openly now.

“What?” I pleaded. “What is it?”

She put her hand gently on my forearm. Still grinning, she looked into my eyes and said, “You do know that I was hospitalized for my anorexia last month, right?”

—

I’d never even heard of anorexia. Everyone knew that chubby girls like Quig ate too much, and that was a problem, but I’d always thought the skinny girls were doing just fine.

“So it means you can’t eat?” I asked, after she’d spent a few minutes trying to teach me about the world of eating disorders.

“I can. I just don’t. Not enough, anyway.”

I nodded as if there were something sensible going on in my head.

“And you know what?” Dani went on. “It’s weird. Deciding not to eat kind of felt really good sometimes, in a way. Like I was in control of myself for once. Like I’m choosing—was choosing—stuff entirely for me.”

She took me to the fridge in the kitchen and showed me a bunch of special milk shake cans she was supposed to drink three times a day now; they were all stacked up in the back, chocolate mostly, with a couple of pink ones that must have been either strawberry or cherry. They looked sort of gross and industrial, but she said they’d “fattened her up” to 106 pounds from the 94 she’d weighed when her mom checked her into the ICU the second-to-last week of school. Though I had no clue what a girl was supposed to weigh, neither number sounded like a whole hell of a lot. Last I’d checked, my own weight was 133 with my tighty-whities on.

“Did you know you’re the only one who came to see me?” Dani asked. “Except Valerie—she came the first weekend I got back from Roosevelt, and acted really weird, like I was contagious or something, and then she never came back. Other than her, it’s like no one at school even noticed I was gone.”

Dani padded over to the kitchen table and carefully lifted herself onto its enameled metal top. She let her skinny pajama’d legs dangle.

“I mean, my brothers have been okay, in a Neanderthal kind of way, and Mom fusses over me in this totally annoying, How could any daughter of mine do such a thing to herself way—at least when she’s not at one of her hairy-armpit conventions with her lefty friends up at Barnard.” She gnawed on her lip. “But otherwise, you know, I kind of got to feeling that if I stopped eating completely, I’d just”—she looked away from me, down at her swinging feet—“I’d just disappear.”

I went over and sat beside her on the kitchen table. Her thigh was surprisingly warm where it touched mine.

“You wouldn’t…,” I started. “I mean, you didn’t. I mean…I noticed.”

Neither of us said anything for a long time. When I finally turned to look at her, I was startled to discover that she was studying my face.

She smiled a small smile. “You’re pretty hard to figure, you know that? I mean, for such a nice guy, why do you do such jerky things?”

I looked down at my sneakers, my palms on the worn-smooth knees of my Levi’s cords. “Maybe I’m a jerky guy who does nice things?”

Nothing happened for a bit. Then I felt her small hand come to rest on top of mine. I’d never looked closely at her fingers before. They were elegant and bony: elegaunt. Maybe she was two things at the same time, too.

Dani’s breath warmed my ear. “I’m glad you came,” she said.