The Year I Didn't Eat

by Pollen

  I meant it as a joke. Mostly. But Dad grabs my shoulders and gives me this super-serious look.

  “I never want to get rid of you, Max. You shouldn’t ever think that.”

  “Thanks?” I say, pulling a stop-being-a-freak-Dad face.

  And then we both start laughing.

  When you’re anorexic, the line between happiness and sadness is thinner than spider silk. It takes the tiniest thought, the smallest push, to move you from one to the other. To ruin the best day ever or make a nightmare seem okay. I live on a knife-edge. I teeter back and forth; a feeling can last a second or an hour or a day. Sometimes, I’m in control just long enough that I think I’ve found a way to balance. To stay on the line everyone else seems to stay on without really thinking about it.

  Then the universe gives me a shove.

  I wake up when I hear the front door open. I check my phone: 3:02. I don’t think Mum’s ever stayed out past midnight before. I listen as she shuffles about downstairs, hanging her coat in the hallway, going to the bathroom, getting a glass of water from the kitchen. She pads gently up the stairs and opens the door to a room she’s never slept in before, as far as I know: Robin’s room. It clicks behind her. And then everything’s quiet again.

  March 3

  Dear Ana,

  Evie is weird. Like, super-weird. I mean, I know I’m not exactly one to talk. But if there was a competition to find the World’s Most Screwed-Up Teenager, I think we’d both make the playoffs.

  Today, in English, she did the weirdest thing yet. We’re studying this book called Holes, which is about these kids who have to dig holes in the desert as punishment for things they’ve done wrong. It’s pretty good, I guess, although it kind of makes me sad that I can’t do proper exercise anymore. I don’t think this is the reaction you’re supposed to have.

  Anyway, Evie was sitting right in front of me, so I couldn’t help watching what she was doing. What she was doing was plucking the hairs out of her eyebrow, one by one. That’s eyebrow singular: the left one.

  But that wasn’t even the weirdest thing.

  Halfway through the lesson, Mr. French—yep, our English teacher is called Mr. French—asked us what symbols there are in the book. English teachers believe everything in a book symbolizes something or other, from the weather to the color of the main character’s T-shirt. I reckon that most of the time the writer needed to pick a color, and they could just as easily have picked blue instead of orange.

  Anyway, Mr. French decided to pick on me.

  Mr. French: “Max, can you tell me what the most important symbol in Holes is?”

  Me: “Ummm …”

  I was hoping he’d just tell me or pick on someone else. But he didn’t. Mr. French has serious stamina. So eventually, I gave him the best answer I had.

  “Holes?”

  I got a laugh for that, a real one. And right in front of me, there was this huge snort, like an elephant sneezing. Which made everyone laugh again. “Very droll, Mr. Howarth,” said Mr. French, before telling us what the actual main symbol in the book is. (Onions, in case you’re wondering.)

  As soon as he looked away, Evie spun around and stared at me. Her left eyebrow was pretty much bare. She looked kind of crazy.

  What? I mouthed at her. And okay, I’m not 100 percent sure what she mouthed back. I might have got it wrong. But I know what it looked like.

  I love you.

  Then she burst out laughing and turned back to face the front of the class.

  At this point, I’m pretty used to people mocking me. But Evie has a grand total of zero friends at Deanwater High. And one eyebrow. She spends most of her time standing across the playground from me, Stu, and Ram, just staring. In my opinion, she’s definitely not in any position to mock.

  At the end of class, I went up to her and said hi. I wanted to ask her what she’d said without telling her what I thought she’d said. But I didn’t get the chance. She took one look at me, rolled her eyes, and said, “Leave me alone, dickhead.”

  Somehow, I now have two crazy girls in my life.

  10

  “There’s a new one,” Robin announces. “Come on.”

  I’m stretched out on the sofa, not watching TV. I don’t react for a moment because I’m too surprised.

  “Heellooo?” Robin says, waving his hand in front of my face like I’m a broken robot. “Is this thing on?”

  I pick up the remote, pause. “Where?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  After what happened at Auntie Jess’s house, I kind of assumed that was it: I’d blown it. Robin would never ever talk to me again. Sure enough, he’s barely said a word to me for three weeks. In fact, he’s gone out of his way to not even see me. For example, I’m pretty sure lumber companies don’t normally deliver at 8:00 p.m., right when we normally have dinner.

  So, yeah. It’s kind of a shock when he launches into conversation like it’s nothing.

  I get my shoes and my fleece, and we set out toward town. Robin doesn’t say anything else on the way. Ana starts to spin crazy theories, like, he’s going to take me to the woods and kill me, or just tie me to a tree and leave me there.

  It’s like when you have mice: You have to take them at least a mile away to get rid of them, otherwise they come right back.

  Even I can see she’s gone off the deep end today.

  Twenty minutes later, we’re by the Starbucks on Station Road, trying to look for a geocache without looking like drug dealers. Our outfits don’t exactly help. Robin is wearing his workshop jeans, which are speckled with blobs of paint and varnish and glue, plus a white T-shirt. I’m in some old combat trousers with holes in the knees, and an orange T-shirt that I got when we went to Amsterdam five years ago (it was big on me then, but still, I’m wearing a nine-year-old’s T-shirt, and it’s not even tight), and a purple fleece. If a police officer strolled by right now, I wouldn’t blame him for asking what’s going on here.

  The clue just says “Itsy bitsy,” which we assume means it’s something to do with a drainpipe; there are two running down the wall between Starbucks and the charity shop next door. Nothing else seems plausible. Sometimes, the tagged location is off by a few meters. But it’s never more than that.

  “Itsy bitsy,” Robin murmurs to himself for the fifth time, as though if he’d said it enough times, the cache might magically reveal itself. His eyes slowly climb the drainpipe.

  “Anyone found it yet?” I ask.

  Most caches get muggled eventually. That means someone who doesn’t know about geocaching finds it and moves it, or destroys it. If a cache hasn’t been found for a while, there’s a good chance it’s been muggled.

  “First one was two days ago,” Robin says, running his hand behind the pipe. “And the guy said, ‘Very clever,’ which I reckon means it’s well hidden.”

  “Okay,” I say, sagging slightly.

  We search for ages. We don’t, like, actually want to get arrested, so we keep doing these slow walks back and forth. Robin jokes that we should have brought stick-on mustaches and changes of clothes, in case anyone is watching us. I laugh, but not because he’s actually funny—he isn’t. I’m just relieved he’s talking to me. I still can’t work out if he’s just forgotten he’s mad at me or he’s trying to show me that it’s over.

  Anyway, we think we’re being pretty subtle until this old lady with a shopping cart comes up to us and says, Are you still bothering that squirrel? So much for being super-sleuths.

  Eventually, Robin gives me this pained look and shrugs. “I give up.” Me and Robin are similar in lots of ways, and one of them is, we both hate giving up on stuff.

  “It could have been muggled in the past two days,” I point out.

  He nods. “Maybe.” But you can tell he doesn’t believe it. I don’t either, really. I was just trying to make him feel better. He points at Starbucks and says, “Hey, you want to get a drink? My treat.”

  “Um, sure.”

  Robin has a super-mega-trip
le-double caramel latte, or something. I have a tap water.

  “Want anything to eat?” he asks me, grinning. He does this sometimes: jokes about it. I’m cool with it. In fact, I kind of like it. It breaks the tension. Unfortunately, Mum and Dad will never, ever get to this point. I tried to make a joke to Mum a couple of weeks ago. We were out walking Sultan, and we had to cross a cattle grid. I said, I better go around or I’ll fall through. Robin would have laughed his head off at this for sure. But Mum looked like I’d punched her in the gut.

  It’s different with Robin.

  “You know what, I’m good,” I tell him. “Thanks, though.”

  “Suit yourself, stickman,” he replies. “I’m having a muffin.”

  I laugh. Stickman is new. It’s a lot better than little bro.

  “What’s the occasion?” I ask him as we sit down.

  He gives me a strange look. I probably shouldn’t say anything. As Dad says, Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But I don’t understand why he’s being so nice to me, after ignoring me for almost a month.

  “Do I need an excuse to treat my little bro to a, um, tap water?”

  “In my experience, yes.” On top of everything else, Robin earns like zero pounds a week, and he’s like Dad: He never spends it. We’re not exactly the kind of family that just decides to go to Starbucks.

  “Then prepare for a new experience. I want to hear how everything’s going. Tell me: What’s new at Deanwater?”

  I shrug. “School is school.”

  “Any new faces? How’s Miss Jacobs?”

  Miss Jacobs taught Robin math. She also taught him how to love. Okay, I’m kidding. But … Miss Jacobs doesn’t look like other math teachers. She’s six feet tall, and she has this amazing raven-black hair. She’s pretty fit. Robin was in her first-ever class, when she was straight out of teacher training college, which I guess would make her twenty-two or something. And, um, he was a big fan. Even now, asking me about her, he looks a little misty-eyed.

  “I told you, I don’t have her this year.”

  Robin shakes his head. “It’s a cruel world.”

  “There’s this new girl in my class,” I say, before I think about what I’m saying.

  Robin raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say quickly.

  “It definitely does. Go on. What’s her name?”

  And against my better judgment, I tell him. “Evie.”

  “Even?”

  Well, I did kind of mumble. “Ee-vee.”

  “Oh, cute,” Robin says. He takes a sip of his drink and makes this if-you-know-what-I-mean face.

  “Robin,” I say.

  “It is cute,” he says. “I’ve never met an Evie before. Ee-vee. Nice.”

  “I don’t fancy her,” I tell him. “It’s not like that.”

  He spreads his arms, like Jesus at the Last Supper. “Little bro,” he says. “Who said anything about fancying? I”—he draws out the I—“didn’t mention anything of the sort. No, little bro, you brought that up all on your own.”

  I scowl at him.

  “I’m just saying.” He shrugs, then takes another sip of his drink, then waits a beat. “I hope you and Evie are very happy together.”

  Before he even finishes speaking, he braces himself for a punch on the arm. I don’t disappoint him.

  “Anyway,” he says. “I have some news.”

  “I knew it,” I say.

  He breaks a big chunk of his muffin and crams it into his mouth. We look at each other while he chews. I tap my wrist where my watch would be—I’ve stopped wearing it, because it just looks silly now—as if to say Spit it out then.

  I get bored of waiting and take a sip of my water. Eventually, after like thirty seconds, he swallows the muffin. He waits a beat before speaking.

  “I’m moving out.”

  I sputter and manage to spill water all down my front. “Shit,” I say. Then I look at him. I want to say a thousand things—mostly things that, if I said them in school, would get me immediate detention. I want to ask him whether it’s because of what happened with James and Louise. I want to ask him how he could do this. I want to plead with him to stay, and I want to tell him to get lost because we’ll be just fine without him.

  Instead I say, “How come?”

  He sniffs. I can’t tell if he’s upset or bored or embarrassed. “It’s time. Mum and Dad have enough to worry about these days without me knocking around.”

  I look down at my lap. I know exactly what he means. And before I can stop myself, I feel my shoulders shaking.

  “Oh, bro … I didn’t mean that.”

  I look up at him. There are these bright spotlights on the ceiling, and the tears streak the light across my eyes, like when you’re driving through rain and the streetlights become big orange brushstrokes.

  “It’s not like that,” he says. “It’s just … I mean … with Mum’s work and everything …”

  He stumbles, trying to deflect the blame onto anything but me. He thinks I’m crying because I’ve just found out that I’m a burden to Mum and Dad. But that’s not the reason. I already know I’m a burden to Mum and Dad; it doesn’t take a genius to figure that one out.

  I’m crying because I just lost the only person I can really talk to.

  I’m crying because now I’m totally alone.

  March 11

  Dear Ana,

  Today I saw Lindsay for the first time in over a month, because she’s been on holiday. It wasn’t too bad. I’ve lost half a pound, which is somehow enough to make me feel okay, but not enough to freak Lindsay out. The perfect amount.

  Even so, she decided to make up two new rules. As if I don’t have enough rules in my life already.

  Rule One: the not-keeping-a-food-diary thing is now permanent. Actually, I’m not as bothered about this as I thought I’d be. At this point, I pretty much know how many calories there are in everything anyway. And I hate to admit it, but since I stopped writing everything down, I do seem to spend less time worrying about it.

  Rule Two: I have to start taking vitamins. Technically, this isn’t Lindsay’s rule. It’s from my nutritionist, Dr. Roberts. I’m okay with this because he’s given me regular ones—not flavored or chewable or whatever. As long as it doesn’t seem like food and contains absolutely zero calories, it’s okay.

  We spent most of my session talking about Lindsay’s holiday, which got me thinking about last summer—aka, the time when you first decided to climb inside my head. Okay, so I still don’t have a clue why I ended up like this. But I do know when it happened. The two-week period when my life started to fall apart.

  Robin called it the Last Great Hurrah. He’d decided it wasn’t cool to keep going on holiday with your family in your twenties, but that he’d come one more time. He said it like he was doing us a massive favor. I’m sure it was nothing to do with the fact that he was totally broke.

  We went to Venice and Verona for two weeks. We arrived in the middle of a heat wave: It was 350C the day we landed, and that was the coolest it got. Luckily, we weren’t camping—Dad decided that because it was Robin’s last holiday, we’d stay in hotels instead. On the downside, he also decided to save two euros a day on the rental car by not getting AC.

  Naturally, because we’re Howarths, we didn’t let the heat slow us down. During the daytime, we traipsed around museums and churches and gardens. We went to Saint Mark’s Square and Juliet’s balcony, and we saw an opera, which is four hours of my life I’ll never get back. (The opera was in Verona’s Roman amphitheater. Thankfully, it started at sunset, or else I’m pretty sure we would have baked to death.) At one point Robin said to me, I can’t believe I chose to come on this holiday.

  Because it was so hot, none of us really felt like eating much in the daytime, except for the odd ice cream. So, our evening meal was pretty much the only thing we ate. And going out to restaurants on holiday was kind of new for us because we usually cooked our own meals at the campsite.r />
  The only problem was, it was expensive, especially in Venice. Robin didn’t seem to notice. He kept ordering these steaks that were, like, thirty euros, as well as a starter and a pizza. And because it was the Last Great Hurrah, Dad didn’t say anything. But I saw him and Mum looking at each other, like, Ouch, and then Mum would say, I think I’m going to have a salad, and Dad would have some plain tomato pasta or whatever.

  And I didn’t want to make things worse. So I had salad, too. It wasn’t so bad, actually—it turns out, if you don’t eat all day, you kind of go past hunger. I mean, I’d been drinking Cokes and eating ice cream, so I wasn’t exactly starving. But still.

  It’s not like I immediately became an anorexic. When we got home, I went back to having seconds every time we ate and, you know, actually eating lunch. But I reckon Italy planted a seed. Now I knew that I could not eat and still get on with my life.

  When school started again and Ram was off sick and Stu was at football training most lunchtimes and I had to eat on my own, I knew I could just … not do it. I’ve always been kind of self-conscious about eating anyway (I mean, no one likes eating on their own in public, right?). So I thought, why put myself through it?

  The answer’s pretty obvious now. Not putting myself through it meant giving you the chance to climb into my head. It’s a whole lot easier to stop eating than to stop not eating. But I didn’t know that at the time.

  11

  Robin’s moving out today. Me and Mum are helping.

  He’s renting a flat in Chorley: five minutes’ walk from the workshop, twenty minutes’ drive from home. It’s tiny. If he stretches out, Robin can touch all four bedroom walls at once. (He shows me as soon as he arrives; he seems weirdly happy about it.) There’s no kitchen, just a row of cabinets and a hotplate along one wall of the living room. There isn’t even room for a microwave, which is Robin’s go-to method of cooking. He says he doesn’t need one.

  It makes zero sense. His room at home is almost as big as this entire flat. We’ve got a shed to store his mountain bike in—whereas here, he has to put it in the hallway, right next to the sign that says NO BIKES OR PRAMS.