Your dad sighs. “Be safe. And be home by eleven.”
“Eleven! It’s already nine-forty-five!”
“Your attitude, missy,” your mom reprimands.
“Good God,” you mutter under your breath. Then louder you say, “May I please have a little later?”
“Eleven-thirty.”
The doorbell rings.
“He’s here!” You turn to go.
“Eleven-thirty!” your dad reminds you.
“Bye!”
* * *
Ben’s waiting for you on the front step and he gives you a huge hug.
“I’m so glad our trip got cut short,” he says.
“Me too.”
You haven’t seen him since your date on Tuesday, the first time you kissed, and it’s all you’ve been thinking about—kissing him again.
You get into the car and he doesn’t ask where you want to go. You think you know what you both want to do so it’s no surprise that you end up at the playground down the street from your house. He parks the car and turns off the engine and the lights.
“Hi there,” he says, and moves closer to you.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for coming out tonight.”
“I totally wanted to see you.”
“Same.”
And then he is kissing you, and he pulls his fingers through your hair and his lips move across yours slowly, yet with purpose, and he’s whispering your name.
“What?” you ask.
“I like you,” he says so softly you can barely hear him. Then he says it again, a bit louder this time. “I really, really like you.”
You can’t hold back the smile you feel spreading across your face. “I really like you too.”
You kiss some more and then you pull away from each other to take a breath, and you both laugh.
“So how was camping?” you ask.
“It was okay. I’m glad it ended up being only one night though. My dad loves it so we go a couple times during the summer to make him happy.”
“I would hate camping,” you say. “I’ve never been.”
“You might not hate camping if you went with me.” He lifts his eyebrows.
“Why’s that?”
“Because we’d make it fun.”
“I don’t know. The thought of bears and snakes, and all that dirt. Sleeping on the ground. Not my thing.”
“Are you a princessy girl?”
“No way! Come on! You know I’m not. But just, ugh. Too much nature and outdoors with camping.”
“What about lakes?”
“Well, I happen to have met a great guy on a river once.”
“Oh really? What about that?”
“Just some guy. So maybe I’m partial to rivers,” you say.
“What if that great guy took you to a lake someday?”
“I’d consider it. As long as he cleared out all the snakes first.”
Ben intertwines his fingers through yours and laughs. “I’ll see what I can do about the lake snakes.” He traces paths along your palm with his fingers and it brings goose bumps to your skin. You want to kiss him some more.
“What were you doing tonight anyway?” he asks. “I didn’t take you away from anything important, did I?”
“Nope. Jae blew me off—we were going to go to the movies. I was sketching some stuff, not doing much of anything.”
“You’re really good at drawing, huh?”
“I pretty much love it. I wish I had more time for it.”
“You’ll show me your stuff sometime?”
“Of course,” you say.
“Cool. Maybe I’ll let you sketch me,” Ben says, and turns his lips up into a grin.
“You mean, maybe I’ll let you sit for a portrait sketch, because that’s how it works.” You laugh and kiss his nose playfully.
It’s a great night after all, and just a short while ago you had been in your room watching YouTube and drawing, but now you’re here, in Ben’s car, kissing and talking and laughing, and there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. He makes you happy. You think he brings out the best parts of you. You think you want this boy to stick around.
You hope he’ll stick around. You hope the monster won’t get in the way.
15
It’s Monday and you and Shayna have finished your one-on-one session and it’s time for group. There’s a spot open on the couch near a girl whom you met briefly last week but you don’t know if she’s nice or not, because you didn’t get a chance to know anyone. You still don’t want to be here. Well, it’s not like you don’t want to be here; you know you have to do something to figure out how to get rid of the monster and nothing has ever worked before, and you think this might be the only way to get him to leave.
But it’s stupid really, being here with these girls. Because you’re sure none of them can relate to you or what you’ve been through or this eating thing you have, this ARFID. You didn’t say anything at the first session, you just listened to them talk about their “relationships” with food. How much they love food, how they need food, how they are addicted to food. The bulimics anyway. Then there are the anorexics, who also love food but don’t love what food does to their bodies, so they reject the food and choose to starve themselves in order to waste away to practically nothing.
You decide that to get this process started, you’re going to have to share your feelings with them. Because isn’t that what group therapy is all about? So when it’s your turn to speak, you lift your head and clear your throat.
“I’m not like any of you,” you start, and every single one of them shifts in her seat. Their body language moves to defensive positions. Hailey, the worst of the bulimics, the one who binges on Oreos and pancakes, who hides candy bars in her sock drawer, who purges everything she puts into her mouth, says, “That’s bullshit. Your parents wouldn’t have brought you here if you weren’t exactly like us.” She crosses her arms over her chest and nods to the other girls, waiting for them to say something, anything to agree with her.
Shayna says, “Hailey, judgment-free. That sounds like an assumption to me.”
“I’m just stating the obvious,” Hailey responds snidely to Shayna.
When no one backs Hailey up, you speak again.
“Well, I have never, ever in my entire life looked forward to eating food. I have never in my life thought, ‘Oh, I cannot wait to have a piece of pizza or a burger,’ or, ‘I’m so excited to go out with friends for dinner.’ Now, there are times when I’m hungry, of course—we all have to eat to survive—but unless it’s one of my safe foods, I don’t care about food.” You search the eyes of every girl in the room. And you continue.
“And Shayna says that ARFID can stem from trauma in utero. My mom thought she miscarried me. That’s the trauma that probably started my whole disorder, as science-fiction as it sounds. You guys, from what I heard last week, have had traumatic experiences at older ages, like divorce or abuse, or something bad happening later. And that’s awful, and I’m so sorry that happened to you. But you used to be able to eat normally before you had your disorder. You used to sit down with your family and have a regular meal and talk about your day and be able to put stuff on your plate and chew and not think about what was in your mouth. But I never ate normally. I don’t know what it’s like to want to eat normally. I don’t know what it’s like to desire food. You guys, at one point, have desired food. Maybe you still do? I don’t.”
You’re mad and frustrated and also emotionally drained from admitting all of this and then one of the girls nods in agreement, and another girl gives you a thumbs-up. Shayna smiles big and bright and you look around the room, stunned. You totally called them out, and were not so nice about it, telling the girls that your stuff was more serious than their own problems, and that they didn’t understand what you were going through.
“Very, very good,” Shayna says. “Thank you for processing your feelings with us today. I know that was hard for you.”
&nbs
p; You can’t believe these girls aren’t pissed at you. They’re actually okay with what you said? This is what group therapy is all about?
What the hell is going on here?
16
Jae’s sitting on your bed next to you and the two of you are watching YouTube on your Mac. You’ve been hanging out for hours, streaming videos on makeup, hairstyles, and how to do your nails. You’ve also watched a couple of those stupid YouTube challenges, like how many food items you can put in a blender and drink without puking.
You hit Mute on the blender food challenge when the girls in the video start gagging while drinking a mixture of oysters, avocado, chicken wings, ketchup, soy sauce, milk, and Hershey’s syrup.
“How can you watch this video when you can’t even eat?” Jae asks.
If you think about it, even a blender challenge with milk and strawberries would put you into cardiac arrest. Those little seeds in the strawberries—you cannot even fathom. The monster won’t let you.
“No idea.” You close your Mac.
“Does Ben know yet?” she asks.
You know what Jae means and she’s trying to be helpful; she’s not interfering at all. So you tell her how you wanted to tell Ben about your food problems at putt-putt golf, but that it didn’t happen. “It wasn’t the right time,” you say.
“You should tell him,” Jae offers kindly. “You don’t want another Alex situation on your hands.”
“I know.” And while you appreciate the fact that Jae cares about you, you also want to change the subject. “Oh! Get this! Ben said he’ll watch The Fault in Our Stars with me sometime.”
“The Fault in Our Stars, really?” Jae asks.
“He says he wants to see it.”
“What guy wants to watch Fault in Our Stars?” Jae says.
“I know,” you say.
“Wow.”
You fall back onto your pillow. “Yeah, wow. Oh my God, kill me. I sound so basic,” you say.
“But seriously, is he just like, everything?” Jae asks.
“Pretty much,” you say.
Jae has never had a boyfriend, nothing serious, and you’re pretty sure it’s getting serious with you and Ben. You’re pretty sure you want it to be serious.
It’s just that Ben seems to get you, at least what you’ve shared of yourself. The times you’ve spent together, you’ve laughed and joked, and he understands your sense of humor and there’s never a lack of words—you pull from each other, like magnets, and there’s always something inside his head that you want to learn about, that he wants to share, that you want to know from him.
And the kissing, the kissing has just been … You can’t stop thinking about the kissing. It stops the frenzy you feel about life, but it also brings up a storm of, you don’t know what. It’s like a nice, beautiful storm. A storm where you want to sit outside and watch the clouds roll over the sky. The kind that you know will roll in and not cause any damage, just a pitter-pattering of rain to clean away the dirt, refresh everything, and then the skies will shine bright again. Kissing Ben is that kind of storm.
You’re both quiet for a while, then you open your Mac to turn on some music and Jae asks, “Do you think you’ll do it with him?”
“Oh my God! I don’t know.”
Because you don’t. You haven’t thought of that. Not yet. You’re only sixteen but Ben’s almost seventeen, and you know practically everyone does it by the time they’re your age. Sure, you’ve thought about sex, but you haven’t thought about actually doing that with Ben yet. You just know you want the first time to be with someone you love.
“I haven’t been seeing him for that long,” you say. “Do you think he’s done it before?”
“How would I know?” she asks.
“I don’t know. He’s friends with your cousin. He would know. Aren’t they like pretty good friends?”
“I guess.”
“And you’re really close to your cousin. You could text Braden and ask him.”
So Jae texts Braden, and you watch as the words fill her iPhone:
Hey cuz, is Ben a virgin?
You watch as the three little dots fill the space as Braden types his reply:
Bro code. Tell his gf I say hey.
On the one hand you’re bummed out because you didn’t get the info you wanted, but then you squeal a little when you see he calls you Ben’s girlfriend. This means Ben’s been talking about you to his friends.
“Shit,” Jae says.
“I know, right! I’m his girlfriend!”
* * *
The next night your parents plan to go out and Todd’s heading to some football party. You ask if Ben can come over to watch The Fault in Our Stars.
“I don’t like the idea of the two of you in the house alone,” your dad says.
Shayna has started discussing interpersonal skills in your one-on-one therapy and how to ask for what you want, so you try this new skill out on your dad. “You could stay home too then?” you suggest.
This is a first and it takes him by surprise. He doesn’t say anything right away and then you wonder if he’ll change his plans and actually stay home with you and Ben. The idea of the three of you watching The Fault in Our Stars has you thinking insane thoughts. You would rather eat a full chicken dinner than have to sit there with Ben and your dad watching the movie.
Finally, your dad wavers. “No funny stuff, Pea.”
Your mom comes out of her room wearing a nice dress and attaching a set of new dangling earrings to her ears. “What’s going on?” she asks.
“Pea wants to have Ben over while we’re out.”
“You sure that’s a good idea?” your mom asks.
You roll your eyes super-dramatically at your mom to convey your annoyance. But because you don’t want to make your parents angry, you don’t say what you really want to say to them, and instead, you simply say, “Seriously, we’re just going to watch a movie.” And then you tell your mom she looks nice. Because she does.
They leave and Ben comes over. Right away he kisses you. Your back is against the front door and he keeps kissing you, pressing his body against yours. Your mind is all over the place—the kissing is amazing and it’s all you want to do with him the whole night. His hands are in your hair. You used to wear it up in a hair tie because it’s so thick and unruly that it can be hard to manage, but since Ben, well, since Ben you’ve been wearing it down. Because there is nothing, nothing like having a boy, particularly a boy who looks and smells and kisses like Ben, take his hands and pull his fingers through your hair while he is kissing your lips. And there is nothing, and you mean nothing, like having a boy like Ben move his lips to your ear and kiss you right below the earlobe and then whisper to you, “Hey.”
It’s one word, and it really has no meaning, but it’s everything.
It is everything.
When you’re with Ben, everything is perfect.
You pull away and you are not quite nose to nose because he’s so tall, but you look up at him and you whisper back, “Hey.”
17
You’ve already seen The Fault in Our Stars and you’ve read the book twice. You saw the movie in the theater with Jae and you clung to each other and bawled your eyes out. Now though, you’re curled up on the family room couch with Ben, and the end scene with Hazel Grace has just played.
It’s the first time he’s seen the movie.
“Well, that was a buzz kill,” he says.
“What do you mean? Why?” you ask.
“Come on, her boyfriend died.”
“Yeah, but it’s the most beautiful movie ever,” you say. “Don’t you get it?”
“Not really.”
You thought he would understand. Now you have to explain it to him.
“It’s perfect. Don’t you see? We already know from the beginning that Hazel Grace is going to die. And it’s awesome that Augustus dies!”
“You’re weird.” He kisses your nose.
“But don’t you get it?
”
He shakes his head.
“She has terminal cancer. We all know it’s going to happen. And then she meets Augustus, and she gets to experience love with him on earth, but he dies before her, so he’s going to be there waiting for her when she dies. For all we know, Hazel Grace could die the next day!”
“Like I said,” Ben says, “you’re weird.”
“Maybe you and I should go find John Green and ask him to tell us what actually happens to Hazel Grace? Even though I already know the answer.”
“Do you have any ice cream?” Ben asks.
You click the TV off and uncurl your legs from underneath you. Ice cream sounds good. Ben follows you into the kitchen and you dig through the freezer and find your mom’s stash of Ben & Jerry’s.
“Do you want Cake Batter or Peanut Butter Fudge?”
“Peanut Butter Fudge,” he says.
You pull both pints out and grab some spoons and hand him the peanut butter ice cream. When he opens it up he shows you its contents.
“Uh, what happened to the fudge core?” he asks. There is a hole dug right through to the bottom where the gooey middle is supposed to be.
“Guess my mom was having a bad day. It happens a lot.”
You settle onto the kitchen counter and start eating the Cake Batter ice cream. He sits on the stool in front of you and digs into what’s left of his pint like it’s the best thing he’s ever tasted. Then his gaze meets yours.
“Heard you and Jae texted Braden last night.”
Your eyes go wide and you turn your head to avoid looking at him.
“What are you talking about?” you finally say, making eye contact.
“You know what I’m talking about.” He takes another bite of the ice cream and twists the spoon in his mouth. You do know what he’s getting at but all you can think of is how freaking sexy he looks while he eats ice cream.
“Well…” you say.
“Is there something you wanted to know about me?” He smirks.
“Jae brought it up,” you admit.
“Jae brought what up?” You realize now he’s teasing you and you relax. He puts the ice cream down and stands up from the stool. He places his hands on your knees. They’re cold from when he held the ice cream but they feel nice.
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