Skinny

by Donna Cooner

  Once they were even black-green when they glittered at me from behind a Spider-Man mask on Mr. Peter’s front porch. But most of all I remember the deep, grass green of his eyes, intense and compelling, right before I closed mine and kissed him.

  Look in my eyes, Jackson. Remember. Me.

  But there is no sign of recognition. Mr. Blair finishes with Kristen and waves Jackson up. I watch as he leans over the desk, listening intently, his rumpled brown hair falling down into his eyes. My hands itch to push it back away from his face, but I just stand there. Remembering.

  ABRACADABRA

  Chapter Seven

  What if I don’t wake up?” I mumble under my breath. The annoyingly cheerful woman with the smiley-face scrubs wraps a big rubber band around my arm, ignoring my question completely. She snaps it into a tie above my elbow and slaps my forearm. The fat of my arm jiggles as she frowns down at what she sees.

  “That may be a good one there.” She prods at my arm, searching for a place to stick the waiting needle.

  I try to look sympathetic. I don’t know if I should apologize or what. What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry my veins are all covered up in fat just like the rest of me?

  “I’ll be right back.” She’s going for help. The first one always goes for help. Everything that is alive and pumping inside of me is somewhere underneath all of this.

  “The odds of death are one in two hundred. That’s pretty slim,” Rat says. He’s sitting on the end of the hospital bed in the pre-op room.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “But I guess if one hundred and ninety-nine people had the surgery this week then . . .” He doesn’t smile. He isn’t kidding.

  “That’s not helping.”

  “Where’s your dad?” Rat asks, and I know he’s trying to change the subject.

  “On his way. Got called in for a traffic accident.”

  “Bad?” Rat asks. We both know that a town with I-45 running through the middle of it at seventy-five miles an hour always has the potential for deadly accidents.

  “Could have been, but it turned out okay. Larry Joe Green’s three cases of beer were strapped into the child safety seats instead of his two kids.”

  Smiley Face returns with a helper and they set to work on my arm again. I feel the prick one more time and then a sharp pain as the needle digs in deeper.

  “Ah, there we are. I was afraid for a moment we were going to have to call this whole thing off.” Smiley Face laughs like she has just told a hilarious joke. Helper Nurse bustles around the bed, hooking up tubes and bags to my arm. She slides a metal cap over my finger and moves the monitor stand over closer to the bed. Numbers flash on the screen accompanied by an occasional beep. I watch the monitor and hope the line doesn’t go flat. I’ve probably watched too many medical dramas. I know flat lines are not a good thing.

  The song playing over and over in my mind is “The Point of No Return” from The Phantom of the Opera.

  The nurse asks Rat to move over to the chair by the windows. She pushes the thin blanket off my legs and starts fiddling around with my feet. First she pulls a pair of stockings on me, then straps on some leggings over the top.

  “These are the hottest things out there.” Patting my legs, she smiles at me. “Lovely, aren’t they?”

  She plugs the leggings into a machine under the bed and they start to fill up with air, squeezing tightly against my calves over and over again with a weird pumping sound. The sound masks the scared panting noise of my breathing.

  “It’ll help your circulation,” Rat says. “So you don’t get blood clots.”

  The nurse looks at him in surprise. “You’re a smart boy. Want to be a doctor someday?”

  “Not a medical doctor, if that’s what you mean,” says Rat, “although I will probably get my PhD in nuclear physics.”

  The nurse doesn’t know what to say about that, so she just nods and leaves again. Rat continues to read the booklet we received at the informational session.

  “Is this going to work?” My voice shakes a little.

  “Probably,” says Rat, pushing the glasses back up his nose, his big blue eyes unblinking behind them. “Most people lose from thirteen to twenty pounds in the first month, and most of this weight is lost in the first two weeks because of the diet. It takes about a year to lose the rest.”

  “But is it going to work for me?”

  “The odds are that it will,” Rat says solemnly. “It says there is plenty of time for weight loss after the gastric bypass surgery has healed.”

  And then he smiles. One of those rare “Rat Smiles” that so few people have ever seen. The angles of his face soften, his eyes crinkle, and two huge dimples appear out of nowhere. I could swear you almost hear music like when angels appear in the movies when Rat smiles. It makes me feel better. How could it not?

  The curtain pulls back with a squeak, and my dad is there.

  “Hey, Mr. Davies.”

  “Rat.” Even my dad doesn’t know his real first name. “How’s it going here?”

  “Good. She’s almost ready,” Rat reports like he’s the doctor in charge. “They have her IV started, and we’re waiting for the anesthesiologist.” He stands. “Here, take this chair. I need to go to the bathroom.”

  If it was anyone else, I would think he was being sensitive to leave me and my dad alone for a while. But it’s Rat, so I think it probably means he has to go to the bathroom. He pulls the curtains back and disappears. Dad drags the chair over closer to the bed and sits down.

  My dad sent me a letter once when I was thirteen. He actually mailed it to our house. I guess he didn’t know how else to get my attention. It was after he tried to say something to me when I took a second piece of chocolate cake after dinner. He looked at me like he’d been looking at me a lot, with this critical, disapproving look.

  “He’s sorry he has such a fat, ugly daughter.” It was the first time I heard Skinny clearly. She’d been mumbling around inside my mind for a while, but this time her words came out in fully formed sentences. “You are such an embarrassment.”

  “Do you really need that second piece?” my dad had asked.

  “Yes,” I mumbled around the huge bite I’d stuffed into my mouth, “I do.”

  I ate every bite. My dad kept glancing over at me with that disgusted look on his face, and I kept stuffing in the forkfuls of chocolate. When it was done, I put the fork down on the smeared plate and stomped upstairs to my room. I pushed my headphones in my ears and turned the Rent soundtrack up loud enough to drown out every thing else.

  The letter came a few days later. I didn’t recognize the round, loopy handwriting. I don’t think I’d ever seen my dad’s handwriting like that. On a single page of notebook paper.

  Dear Ever,

  The reason I want you to lose weight is because I love you, and I want you to be happy. I want you to fall in love someday and have children of your own. If that’s what you want. I know what boys are like. Finding someone who will take the time to look beyond just your looks might be hard. I want you to have a healthy, long life full of many exciting opportunities. Being overweight may keep you from doing everything you want. That’s why I want you to lose weight.

  I love you, Dad

  I crumpled the letter into my fist and sat there on my bed for a long time. Finally, I unclenched my fingers and smoothed out the paper. I read it again. It just wasn’t fair. God made some people naturally skinny and some people naturally fat. I’d never know how my life would have been different if I’d been one of the ones He made skinny. I didn’t know how He chose. This one will be blond, with long thin legs and great skin. This one will be short and fat with legs that rub together when she walks. I just knew I wasn’t one of the lucky ones.

  “Your father is right. No one is going to love you.”

  Eventually, I folded the letter into a tiny little square and stuffed it into the bottom back corner of my sock drawer. My dad and I never spoke about it. Over the next six month
s I gained fifty more pounds.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, peanut?” Dad reaches for my hand across the thin white sheet. “You know I love you no matter what, right?”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “I’d walk right out with you if you want to change your mind.”

  Are those tears in his eyes? This isn’t helping me. “I know, Dad.”

  “I just wish I could talk to her one more time.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mom.”

  I look over at him, surprised. I know he misses her, but he’s never said anything like this before.

  “We used to talk about every thing. The good. The bad.”

  Now my eyes fill with tears.

  “I just need to talk to her.”

  I think of my stepmom. “You can talk to Charlotte.” I pat his hand awkwardly.

  “Charlotte’s great. I’m really lucky she came along. . . .” His voice trails off. “But it’s not the same.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “She’d know exactly what to say to you right now. She was so good at that.” He pats my hand carefully so he doesn’t mess up the tubes in my arm. “Remember when you were a kid and were afraid of the dark? I thought you’d never sleep all night in that room by yourself.”

  “Yes.” I smile at the memory. “She always asked me what exactly I was afraid of.”

  “And you said?”

  “One time I was afraid all the door hinges would turn into snakes. One time I was afraid of the seven dwarfs marching down the hall with shovels. One time I said I was afraid of fear itself. I think I heard that one on TV. She never laughed. She never said I was crazy. She would just sigh and lead me back to my room and she’d wait there, on the side of my bed, until my eyes were simply too heavy to keep open anymore.”

  “Then I’d yell for you to go to sleep,” Dad says, “and for your mother to come back to bed and turn out the light.”

  “But do you know what she’d always tell me before she left?” I ask.

  He shakes his head.

  “ ‘Your dad’s not mad at you. He’s just tired.’ ”

  “As usual, she was right.”

  We sit there for a while in quiet. Waiting. I’ve never been that great at waiting. Like when I was a kid, and sometimes even now, I could never wait for Christmas. When my mom would leave for the grocery store, I would go under the Christmas tree and carefully unwrap the end of each of my presents just far enough to figure out what was inside. Then I’d wrap them back up again before Mom got back. It actually kind of ruined Christmas, but it took away the whole waiting thing.

  The hard thing about waiting is the not knowing how it’s >going to go. That’s what makes me really crazy. It could be great — like the doctor saying the test results are back and all the cancer is gone. Or it could be really bad — like the doctor saying something terrible, something you can’t even imagine — but you’re just supposed to go about your life like that waiting thing is not hanging over your head every single minute of every single day.

  The sound of laughter and murmuring voices drift in from the hallway. Rat comes back and stands beside my dad because there is only one chair in the tiny pre-op room.

  “Anything happen while I was gone?” he asks.

  “Not really,” I say. “We’re just waiting.”

  The curtain is flung open, and the nurse with the smiley-face scrubs is back. This time she is with a tall man with blue baggies on his feet that make a swishing sound when he walks. I wonder if the baggies are to keep the blood off his shoes. That kind of freaks me out. Baggie Man introduces himself as Dr. Boyett, the anesthesiologist, and shakes my dad’s hand. He has >a big syringe with him and he grins down at me like he has brought me a piece of chocolate birthday cake.

  “How you feeling?”

  “A little nervous,” I say.

  “Nervous is normal.”

  “You’ll never be normal.”

  “Time for the good stuff.” Dr. Boyett sticks the big syringe into the tube snaking out of my arm and pushes the plunger.

  “That should take the edge off.”

  “How long before I start to feel something?” I ask, but before I can even finish the question, my head starts to feel lighter, like it just floated off my body. “Oh, there it is.”

  My dad laughs nervously. “That didn’t take long.”

  “Say your good-byes,” Smiley Face says. “They’ll be here for you any minute.”

  Rat’s face is serious, but he gives me a fake smile and a little wave, then steps back out of the way so my dad can move closer. A shadow moves behind my father’s shoulder. With the fuzziness seeping into my body, I can’t see clearly, but I know who it is. My constant companion. I should introduce them.

  “There’s something I’ve always wanted to say, Dad.”

  He leans in and pats the top of my plastic-covered head.

  “What, peanut?”

  I should be worried about something, but I’m not. I feel fine. Better than fine.

  “Dad,” I say. My mouth is dry. I lick my lips and try again louder. “Dad.”

  “I’m right here.”

  “There’s this fairy thing that sits on my shoulder and whispers in my ear. Bad things.”

  “He thinks you’re crazy-talking.”

  Another giant, blue-robed figure comes around the curtain.

  “You ready to go?” he asks.

  “I have to tell my dad something.”

  “Tell him quick. The operating room is waiting.” He unlocks the brakes on the hospital bed.

  My dad clears his throat. “I love you, Ever,” he says, and kisses me on the cheek.

  “I can hear her, Dad. In my ear.”

  He nods and smiles down at me.

  “He thinks it’s the drugs.”

  More people come into the room. I try to focus on my dad, but they start to roll the bed out from behind the curtains and down the hall.

  “I’ll be here when you get back.” He waves at me until the big doors swing shut behind my rolling feet, and he’s gone.

  “I need to tell him,” I mumble.

  The operating room is freezing. I know it, but I don’t really feel it. People move all around me. Some talk to me. Others don’t. They count to three and pull me over onto a flat table. Lying on my back, I squint up at the big lights. Someone behind my head says, “I’m going to put this mask over your face now, okay?” I guess I say okay because the mask comes down over my nose and mouth.

  “Now count backward from one hundred,” the voice behind my head continues. Obediently I start to count. One hundred . . . ninety-nine . . . ninety-eight . . .

  “Her name is Skinny,” I say. Then every thing goes black.

  Chapter Eight

  I am aware of noises around me. I’m moving . . . rolling . . . somewhere. I need to throw up. I try to tell someone, but I can’t speak.

  “It’s okay. You’re all right,” a woman’s voice says in my ear.

  I open my eyes to see doors flying open in front of me. I’m alive but forever changed. I close my eyes again. The next time I open them, Dad and Charlotte are peering down at me. Rat is there, too, hanging around in the background. His face pops in and out of my line of vision every once in a while.

  “How are you feeling, peanut?” The furrowed line between my dad’s eyes seems deeper than I remember.

  “Not sure,” I mumble. “Am I skinny yet?”

  They laugh like I’ve made a very funny joke.

  A nurse leans into my line of sight and pushes something into my hand. I can’t look down at it because my head is not connected to my body.

  “Don’t be a hero,” she says. “Push the button to get the pain medicine.”

  I push the button in my hand. It doesn’t hurt anywhere yet, but I don’t want to feel any pain. My eyes feel heavy, and I close them again. When I open them again, Rat is sitting in a chair over by a window. It’s dark outside, and he is reading a book by lamplight.
>
  “What time is it?” I croak out.

  He startles. “Hey, you’re awake.”

  He gets out of the chair and comes over to smooth my hair back from my forehead. Even with the fuzziness in my brain, I know that doesn’t seem right. Rat’s never touched me like that before. It confuses me. I move away from his touch and punch the button in my hand.

  “It’s about eight. You’ve been sleeping for a while now.” His voice trails off as his eyes meet mine. I blink once — twice — trying to clear my vision. He looks worried, which is a strange look for Rat. “Your dad and Charlotte just went to get something to eat in the cafeteria. They won’t be gone long. Are you in any pain?”

  “I don’t think so.” His question reminds me to push the button in my hand again. Probably way too soon, but time is hazy right now and I’m scared.

  “The doctor came by earlier. He said every thing went great.”

  “Good,” I say. “When can I go home?”

  “Probably tomorrow.”

  “Are you okay?” I ask, because I’ve never seen that look on his face before. Something between unsure and scared.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I guess I was just a little worried. It all seemed so rational, until it actually happened. And it was you.”

  My forehead creases in bewilderment. “But I’m going to be all right.” I can’t believe I’m trying to make him feel better. Aren’t I supposed to be the patient here?

  “I made something for you while I was waiting for you to come back to Recovery.” He unfolds a piece of paper and holds it over the bed rail so I can see. I lick my cracked lips and try to focus on what he’s holding out to me. It’s an intricate pencil drawing of a tiny pumpkin. The vine and leaves twist and turn across the page with incredible, almost scientific, detail.