by Meg Haston
“I’ll be upstairs when you’re done,” she said, like I’d already given in. She waved me away with a chrome wisp of smoke.
“Hello?” I hurried down the steps to the street. I thought about running the steps while we talked, but he’d hear me. “Hey.”
“Hey, Sass. You okay? You sound—”
“Yeah. I’m good. What’s up?” I paced.
“I just wanted to see if you wanted to grab dinner before we play,” he said. “Milo’s, maybe?”
“Oh.” I froze. “I . . . Actually? Some of us are staying late to finish up peer edits. So I’m staying at the Stacks. And, uh, we’ll get food after.” Sweat poured down the greasy slope of my nose, landing salty on my upper lip.
His silence on the other end was heavy. Finally, he said, “Yeah. Okay. Just make sure you eat something, Sass. And if you’re not too late, we can still play.”
“Yeah. Okay. Later.” I held the End button long enough for the screen to go dark.
Upstairs, Eden had already ordered drinks and littered the table with her seminar notebooks. The bar was starting to fill, and I let the clinking beer mugs and townie chatter relax me.
“So I’m writing these song lyrics for my friends, these guys Nic and Reid.” She slid a purple pen between her perfect teeth. “They’re in a halfway decent band, and they’re playing the Pit this weekend.”
I sat across from her and rolled my glass against the back of my neck before I took a sip. “Josh and I do the Pit together every year.” The Pit was short for PeachPitPalooza, an annual local music festival and our town’s only cultural event, if local stoner garage bands counted as culture.
“If you want, you guys can come with me this year. The boys got me tickets to all the good acts.”
“Is one of them, like, your boyfriend or something?” I opened my throat and let my drink slide down. It was better that way.
She laughed and waved over a bartender. “Hell no. It’s just, I hang out with guys most of the time. Girls can be such bitches.”
“Yeah,” I said, even though I’d never understood girls and had no room to talk on the subject. As a kid I’d spent most of my lunchtimes and recesses watching girl clusters from afar, from the back table in the cafeteria where I read alone, or the edge of the playground. Other girls seemed to know when to laugh or how to toss their hair so it seemed like an afterthought. But no matter how long I studied them, I never understood. It felt like they were playing a game and no one had bothered to tell me the rules. It wasn’t that the other girls had been mean to me, exactly. They just never seemed to know I was there. In high school, nothing had changed.
“Hey, babe,” Eden said when the bartender neared our table. He was young, with a beard and a shiny wedding ring that was either cheap or brand-new. I watched Eden’s eyes catch on it. “Another round for my girl Stevie here? And I’ll want one in a second.”
My girl Stevie. I smiled into the bottom of my glass. It felt good to be someone’s something.
“You got it, Eden.” The guy headed back to the bar without even looking at me. That was the thing I’d noticed about Eden—everybody knew her name, and she knew no one’s. She picked her own names for other people: doll and honey and babe and sugar and other candied words she used when she couldn’t be bothered.
“So I’m stuck on the bridge—total writer’s block.” She slid down in her seat, and our knees touched. Neither of us moved. Her skin was warm and the perfect kind of slick. “The song’s about this girl—from the point of view of a guy—and he’s telling her that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of her past or her flaws or whatever. That he loves her no matter what.”
“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,” I blurted.
Her head snapped up. “That’s like—”
“It’s Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I said quickly. “I didn’t make it up or anything. “It’s from a poem. I swirled my fingertip over the rim of my glass. “Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive. Half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow—” I stared up at the ceiling. “I forget the rest.”
“Oh my god, that’s incredible,” she said. She looked at me as if the words were mine. “Hold on.” She slid out of the booth and back in again on my side. “It’s hard to hear you over there.”
Now it was our thighs and hips fused together, and I squirmed because my legs were goose-bumped and thick, and she must have been able to tell.
The bartender brought new drinks, and I drank mine fast.
“Another?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Got it.”
I should have stopped then. I was the perfect kind of drunk: Eden’s face was soft and my body felt good and loose and nothing seemed particularly important. But I was greedy and wanted more. So I reached for Eden’s drink and took a sip, and she let me.
“I like, relate to that poem,” I said. My words were thick. “I feel like that’s why my mom left. Because there was something wrong with me or she couldn’t stand to be around me or something.” I didn’t mean to say it. But the booze made things that were true a little easier to say.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes I look at my parents and their effing perfect marriage and I think the same thing. Like, I must seem so messed up to them.”
The room dipped, and I leaned closer to her.
“But here’s the thing.” She turned toward me, her eyes blazing, living green. “People like you and me? We’re real. So, okay, that means flawed or whatever. But wouldn’t you rather be real and flawed, then some synthetic perfect girl who never really lived?”
I was close enough to breathe her in, to consume her sweet, smoky breath. I wanted to believe her more than anything.
“Yes,” I said, to make it true. “Yes.”
“That’s why I dig you, you know?” she whispered, like we—just the two of us—were a secret the rest of the world could never hear. “You, baby girl, are real. I can tell. And if your own mother never saw that?” She ripped the bandage from my arm without taking her gaze from me. It burned. “Then fuck. Her.”
I copied the movements of her lips like a child, forming the words on my own. “Fuck her.” I wished my mother could see me, drunk and whispering close with this mystery of a girl.
“That’s right.” She slipped one hand around the back of my neck and leaned even closer. We breathed each other in. I wanted everything about her—wanted to exist exactly as she did, wild and unapologetic, giving the world the finger.
“Here you go. Two more.”
I jumped when the bartender set down our drinks with a deliberate thud; my body flooded with shame for all the things I wanted.
Looking back now, I realize just how stupid I was then: I had no idea that I was already losing myself in her. Disappearing into her wide electric eyes and philosophical musings and open mouth. Of course I couldn’t see it. She drew me in slowly, and by the time I realized how dangerous she could be, it was too late.
day eight
Friday, July 11, 5:32 a.m.
I’M first to the villa for weight and vitals the next morning. I yank the ties on my hospital gown into unforgiving knots. The fabric sticks to the curve of my belly and the tops of my thighs and my ass. I can even see the outline of my scar. My eyes are dry, my head cotton-stuffed. I lie still like a corpse on one of the couches in the villa while Hannah pumps the bulb on my blood pressure cuff. When I sit up, she slides a stethoscope over my back. She takes notes in a black three-ring binder, the kind I used for school. It’s strange, knowing I’ll never buy another binder. So I don’t think about it.
“You look tired this morning, Stephanie,” Hannah says as she leads me into the tiny room with the upright scale. She closes the door behind us, and there is barely enough room for both our bodies. She is too much at this hour—her lips slathered with frosty drugstore magenta, her every breath an effort. Her short orange hair is curled into perfect hard semi-circles.
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sp; “Didn’t sleep,” I mutter at my feet. I hate weight and vitals. So much measuring and recording, the nurses gathering up numbers as if they are desperate to solve some mystery. There is no mystery. I am dying.
“Sorry to hear that,” she says too cheerfully.
I stiffen when she slides her palms along my ribcage and over my hips, to be sure I’m not wearing underwear or hiding anything beneath my gown.
“On the scale for me?” she prompts.
The scale rattles beneath my weight as I step onto it, turned away from the numbers. The seconds here are always torture, as she slides the weights on the scale back and forth, back and forth, until they are just right. I hate that she can see the numbers and I can’t. It isn’t fair. They aren’t hers. They’re mine.
“Alright! Thank you, Stephanie.” As she records my weight, she purses her lips together for a fraction of a second. She recovers quickly, but it’s too late. I’ve read her. And I understand: I’ve lost weight. The realization shoots through me potent and fast, as good as the first high.
Good girl, I think, stepping off the scale and onto the cold tile floor.
Then, Oh, shit. I don’t want a tube. They’ll give me a tube.
I dress quickly and go outside, lying in the cold spongy grass beyond the patio. I have to think—the important kind of thinking that can only be done in secret. When other people know you’re thinking, they start to think for you. And the last thing I need is Shrink’s you can do its and I’m so prouds because I am doing it, my way.
It’s dark, still. I blink at the sky. One eye, then the other, so it looks like the stars are jumping. In the riding ring, the horses are restless.
“Doing a little stargazing?” At the sound of Shrink’s voice I suck in a cold, hard breath that makes my lungs feel like they’re the wrong size.
“Holy shit.” I sit up fast.
“I didn’t mean to scare you. Mind if I sit?” She settles next to me, in jeans and sneakers and a hoodie that’s dark green or navy or black. Her hair is damp and smells like coconut, which I know because she’s too close.
“What are you doing here so early? Do you live here or something?” My heartbeat is clumsy, like it’s trying to clap a rhythm it can’t quite find.
“Feels that way sometimes. But no.” She leans back on her palms and looks up at the sky. “I got here early, to see if you had any interest in a trail ride.”
“Like, on a horse?”
“Like, on a horse.”
“But I’m still on red,” I say, all panicked, like, I am still on red, right? Right? I check my wrist to make sure. “It’s against the rules.”
“Promise I won’t tell,” she says. “I just thought we could do something special.”
“Why?” A reward after my behavior in group yesterday seems unlikely. I eye her warily. Is she going to yell at me for purging? Ashley must have told. I’d prefer yelling to this gal pal routine, anyway.
“Because I know the binge experiential yesterday was difficult for you. So I’m asking you to take some time to do something relaxing. Something fun. Treatment is hard work. I know that, Stevie.”
I can feel the warm red blood humming just below surface of my skin. If she’s going to bust me, I’d rather she just get it over with. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve never been on a horse.” It’s almost not a lie. I’ve only ridden a horse once, when I was seven. At a birthday party for Emily P., who was the most popular girl in my class and who only invited me because her mother was the kind of mother who made homemade valentines for every kid in the grade.
“I’ll be right there with you. And it’s a chance to get out a little. Come on, it’ll be fun.” Shrink springs to her feet and extends her hand. “We have to get moving, or you’ll miss breakfast.”
I get up without touching her.
“That would be tragic,” I say.
Shrink takes a horse named Whimsy and I get Ernie, a coffee-two-creams-colored horse whose name sounds familiar, but I can’t remember why. I clutch the reins clumsily in one hand and gather a fistful of mane in the other. The hair is coarse and oily.
We do a lap around the ring, my horse following Shrink’s, and everything is coiled like a snake: my muscles, my hands, the too-small riding helmet that smells like another girl’s sweat. The line of raised flesh on my leg is tight, as if it’s ready to burst.
“Doing okay back there?” Shrink calls without turning around. She leads the way out of the ring and cuts across the pasture, toward the main road.
“Yeah.” I can see my breath in the early morning air, which seems out of place in the desert. “I’m fine.” I focus on an invisible line on the horizon, where the watery pink meets the just yellow, and go back to thinking. Technically, I should want a feeding tube. Tubes are reserved for the very best girls, the ones who are so close to death that they can reach out and almost stroke it with their skeleton fingers. But I have to prioritize, and what I want more than the honor of being almost dead is to be actually dead.
“. . . I know yesterday was difficult,” Shrink is saying. She tugs the reins on Whimsy until we’re just two girls riding side by side, carefree into the desert sunrise. We’re practically a tampon commercial.
“It’s fine.” Just say it. Does she really not know that I purged yesterday? Maybe I should have given Ashley more credit. Focus, Stevie. If I don’t want a tube, then the only option is to fake getting better until the Anniversary. By then, I can stash enough pills to do the trick. I hate this plan. It means that I’ll have to eat at least a little, and after yesterday I’m starting to think that I can’t. As in, I have trained my body so well that it will carry on the crusade, with or without me.
Mostly, though, I hate this plan because this ending is wrong.
“What was it like for you, the experiential?” Shrink takes her eyes from the road. Her cheeks are the same pink as the sky; the welt beneath her eye is turning green.
“Sucked.” I don’t give her any more than that. She doesn’t deserve it, after she’s taken away my ending. The one I designed was perfect. Poetic. And Shrink stole it. Every person should be able to choose her own particular brand of suffering. It’s a fundamental human right. Death. Liberty. The pursuit of unhappiness.
“Stevie, I want you to know that I understand—”
“You don’t.” I stare straight ahead, but I’ve lost the invisible line on the horizon. She ruins everything.
“I’m sorry?”
“You don’t understand because you’re not me, so seriously, just . . .” I don’t finish, because I don’t think the words are coming out in the right order and she won’t get it anyway. I chew the inside of my cheek, trying to slow the erratic flutter of my heart in my chest. It feels untethered, like it’s this angry captive bird that’s going to find a way to fly out of my body at any second.
“You’re right. I’m not you.”
“I’m not getting a feeding tube,” I inform her. “I decided.”
She doesn’t answer.
“It’s disgusting,” I say. “I’m not letting some nurse shove plastic in me.” In that moment, I know for sure. Whatever I do, I do on my terms.
“Okay, so you don’t want a tube.”
“That’s what I said.” My voice quivers as Ernie, then Whimsy, head up a small hill, kicking pebbles in their wake. I grip the reins so tight my hands start to tingle.
“Good. What do you need to do to make that a reality, then?” She steers Whimsy until we are side by side again. The sun pushes higher.
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.”
“But I don’t know the answer. I don’t know your answer, anyway.”
“I guess I’ll try not to lose more weight. But I’m not gaining.”
Shrink’s head lists to one side, like her helmet is too heavy. “I am really, really proud of you for making an effort to maintain your weight, Stevie. That’s awesome.” Her eyes are searching.
“Stevie . . .” She pauses. “I get the impression often that you think I’m not being honest with you. Game playing, maybe. I’ve gotten that feeling a few times since you started treatment.”
“Perceptive.”
“Here’s the thing, though. I’m not game playing. I will always be honest with you.” She pats her horse on the neck, and he tosses his head at her touch. “Do you know what I want for you during your time here?”
“Doesn’t matter.” I shrug.
“Well, I’ll tell you anyway. Here’s what I want. I want you to want to get better. I want you to learn how to eat and how to feel—and trust me, both will feel like absolute shit. I want you to get pissed when you need to and to feel sad when you need to. I want you to heal, Stevie. Okay? So there it is. No hidden agendas.”
Jesus, she has a talent for making things weird in record time. I wonder if this is what she’s like on a date. I picture her in some vegan café, and the guy across from her is like, Hi, my name is Dylan, and she’s like, I’m going to be completely transparent with you, Dylan. These tofu nuggets are making me saaaad.
“Why do you even do this?” I ask, before she gets any more TV-movie moment on me.
“Do what?’
“This. This.” I flap one of my hands between us. “Therapy or whatever. To fix people?” My stomach swoops a little and the desert around us suddenly feels faded and out of focus.
“No.” She squishes her lips together. “I think . . . I do it because I know that we all carry heavy burdens in life. I’m not naïve enough to think that I could shoulder someone’s burden for them. I have my own weight to carry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’ve got my own problems, just like everybody.”
I don’t think shrinks are supposed to say that kind of thing out loud.
“But I do feel honored to walk beside someone as they learn how to carry their own particular burden. Maybe they figure out how to adjust the straps on their pack, or how to lighten their load by unpacking a few things they don’t really need anymore.”