by Ryan Schow
The sleep of the dead.
3
My face is smashed in a cool puddle of my own drool. An incessant banging coming from somewhere nearby stirs me from my coma. Down the hallway? No, closer. My face won’t wake up, my eyes are too crusty to open. I feel compelled to move, but I might as well weigh a ton for how tight last night’s sleep is hanging on. What in God’s name is wrong with me? My legs weigh a ton, and my limbs refuse to cooperate. Through sheer force of will power and the intense desire to stop the banging, I drag myself out of bed and track down the source of the noise: someone’s pounding on my door. I want to hold my head and scream for them to stop. I’m delirious with need. The need for silence. For more sleep.
I open the door and one of the non-triplets is standing there, her eyes wide at the sight of me. She quickly shoves herself into the room and shuts the door.
“My God, Savannah, put some clothes on when you answer the door!” She looks taken aback. Georgia? Bridget? She’s right, I don’t have any clothes on. Holy crap. I must have taken them off last night! Oh well, I’m too exhausted to care right now. All I want to do is lay down and return to that sweet, sweet sleep. So much so that modesty barely registers as a consideration. I step backwards, two steps, then plop down on the floor next to my couch. I practically fall against it, bruising my tailbone in the process.
“Which one are you?” I ask. My voice is a slur. My vision is running, tipping sideways. I’m closing my eyes, certain this is all I need to do to escape. To slip effortlessly into that dark nothingness that held me in such peace, in that space of bliss and release and timelessness.
“Georgia. What did you take?”
“Pills,” I mumble, pointing a three hundred pound finger at the nightstand where the bottle sits open, spilled on its side.
“How many?”
“Don’t remember. Four. Or five. My God, the pain—”
“Damn. Alright, we need to get you into the shower.”
Already my eyes are closed, the weight of my body slipping away.
“No,” I slur. “Sleep.”
Georgia wrestles me into the bathroom, starts the shower and hoists me in. I’m not so incoherent that I can’t marvel at how such a little thing like her possesses the strength to man-handle a wildebeest like me. Eyes closed, body like a corpse, I hear mumbling coming from my mouth. The water is cool, too cold. My eyelids flutter open, get water in them, slam closed. Gracelessly I duck out of the stream of water, into the air where it’s not quite chilly, but close. Because my legs are giving out, I slide down the side of the shower. Georgia reaches in the shower to grab me, but it’s like trying to stand a whale on its tail. The wet skin of my big butt slaps the cold porcelain of the tub. Georgia tells me to get up, but I can’t. Soon I’m shivering.
“I’m…so…cold,” I say. My voice is grumbled irritation. I want to hurt someone, to hide, to fade from reality.
Georgia kneels down, slaps my face. Twice, hard. My eyes startle open, some of the slur is gone. “What the hell was that for?”
“How many pills did you take?” she demands. Her face is serious. Not so “happy to see you” anymore. That nurturing side of her has turned violent.
“Already said,” I say, slumping back over. “Five. Maybe six.”
“Six? Oh, that’s bad. Stand up.” She slips off her shoes and socks and gets in the shower, sliding her arms under my armpits. “Get up,” she says, struggling to lift me. “Help me.” I manage to stand up without falling over. She puts me under the water, which is now hot, then gets out and hands me her cup of coffee.
“Drink,” she says. “You need the caffeine.”
I drink and it’s good. A few minutes pass and the fog begins to lift. With every passing moment, my thoughts feel less scattered, clearer. In fact, I have become fully alert to the fact that my disgusting body is unclothed and exposed. I cross my arms over my ugly breasts. My drooping fat covers everything else. When you’re a pig girl like me, your privates feel obscene. At least, that’s how I feel.
“You’re looking much better,” she says after a few minutes.
“Dr. Gerhard gave me a shot to help with my social anxiety disorder, but last night…the pain…it was murderous. My skin was literally on fire.”
I tremble at the memory. In my mind the horror of last night unfolds and it feels like I survived the worst nightmare ever. Except it was real. There’s no way I’m taking another shot like that! Then another thought jumps into my mind, an awful revelation that I just did the unthinkable: I told Georgia about the shot.
About Gerhard.
Oh, no…
4
The whole day I struggle to stay awake. My body is sluggish, thoroughly unresponsive. I feel much heavier than the one hundred and sixty-plus pounds I so nervously plopped on the scale yesterday, and this has me tits deep in depression. Even more lethargic. I feel so useless it’s like I’m trudging through my classes and school as one of the undead. No one says anything nice to me. Not even Brayden who tells me in Branding and Media Relations I look like twenty pounds of shit stuffed into a ten pound bag. Julie and Cameron say some horrible things, too, but I could care less. All I do is blink. And stare. Maybe I even drool at one point, or maybe not. Today I’m channeling the emptiness of Nurse Arabelle, so who really knows anymore? What matters is everything hurts, maybe from yesterday’s PE, or maybe this is Gerhard’s shot. Either way, when it’s time for lunch, I lay my head down on the table and fall asleep in record time.
From the deep miasma of my lunchtime slumber come the distant sounds of my friends, their voices interrupting my sleep with bits and pieces of conversation concerning how many pills I took last night. Something in me thinks to worry, that they know about my pills. Then one of them—Bridget, I think—says, “Is she going to be okay?” Then sweet blackness. The cocoon. My thirteenth floor penthouse in heaven.
Finally someone shakes me awake and, looking around, my mouth says something incoherent. I try standing before I’m ready. Georgia’s telling me it’s time for class.
My fourth period teacher, Professor Rhonimus, asks me what’s wrong. I tell him food poisoning. I tell him my dedication to school supersedes my desire to be at home in bed, which actually sounds good. Only it comes out clunky, unrehearsed. Before fifth period PE even starts, Miss Hunnicut sees me and says she’s sending me to see nurse Arabelle.
“Hunnicut,” I say, delirious, “I bet the names they called you in high school were horrendous.”
She says, “Everyone liked me in high school.” There’s not a single hair on her head out of place, but she has a faint line of un-waxed hair on her upper lip I consider mentioning. “I’m concerned about you, Savannah.”
I’m like, “Yeah, me too.”
I drag myself out of the gymnasium, outside into the sunshine, over to the courtyard that will probably become my favorite place on campus. The fountain, the fresh air, all the tropical looking plants—this is exactly what I need. Better than therapy. Meandering down the sidewalks looking for a place to rest, I arrive at Arabelle’s and Gerhard’s office sooner than expected. Perhaps my perception of time and distance is skewed. I should have seen Gerhard earlier, but all day long my brain has been like mud pie: thick, spongy and unceremoniously useless.
I pull Gerhard’s office door open and see nurse Arabelle sitting behind the receptionist counter perusing a medical journal. She glances up at me. Me, the bush pig, huffing and puffing and unable to blow anything down. Her amethyst eyes sparkle. The word hypnotic comes to mind. She tilts her head just so, and I’m thinking of the tin man in The Wizard of Oz: empty inside; no heart, all hollow. I walk up to her, drop my backpack on the floor without a care. My iPad and iPhone are in there somewhere, but whatever. I blow out the biggest breath. If my stuff breaks, whoopdie-freaking-do. I need rest.
“I want your eyes more than I want my next breath,” I say, then I nearly pass out from the exhaustion of stringing more than four words together.
“You
need to see Dr. Gerhard.”
“Yup.”
“I get him.”
I lay down on the carpet, using my backpack as a pillow. The floor smells clean. Out loud, to Nurse Arabelle, I say, “I’ll just be right here.”
Sometime later nurse Arabelle is touching my shoulder, shaking it, saying my name. My eyes work themselves open. I huff out a groan that practically deflates me. Hands slide under my back, under my two knees and I’m thinking Arabelle Diederich might have been in the iron man competition before getting a sex change, a personality removal and a job as a nurse. My eyes slide open and it’s Dr. Gerhard and suddenly I’m thinking how dumb I was to assume Nurse Arabelle could lift me. She’s a twig. Too busy being Russian to care about a big fat super-fattie like me.
I’m being lowered into a chair, arranged in place so I don’t fall off and hurt myself. Gerhard says, “Open your eyes.” Something goes in my mouth, a pill. Almost automatic, I take the glass of water being handed to me and swallow it down. I still haven’t opened my eyes.
“How many pills did you take last night?” he asks.
“Four, or five. I don’t know. Maybe six. I was on fire, my skin, and I was crying and vomiting and I had the craps like you wouldn’t believe.” My voice is returning. The grogginess fading. Even my own thoughts seem easier to organize and formulate. When my eyes finally open, the lids no longer weigh so much.
I see Gerhard for the first time today without blinking or slurring and he looks upset. He says, “Two pills were all you needed.”
“I know that now.”
He says, “We’re dealing with an exact science and taking more or less than the exact dosage I give you can alter your results dramatically.” He exhales heartily, straightens his already straight hair, tightens his already tight tie. “The pill you took will even you out for now, but do not deviate from our schedule or your correct dosage from this point forward.”
His tone is clipped, sharp, which would normally have me tearing up, but I don’t want to cry and somehow this feels strange. Like thinking you have to pee, but sitting on the toilet and not even managing a squirt. For heaven’s sake, I cry at everything! That’s when I see the needle on the custom stand and everything in me wants to run for my life. I start to stand. Gerhard stands with me.
“Time for your shot.”
“No,” I whisper. It sounds like a plea.
“Just remember, two pills when the pain becomes unbearable.”
“I can’t do it again. My skin. And everything else. The vomiting, the sweating.” I take a deep breath, get sideswiped by another memory, nearly fall apart. I fall back into my seat. “There was something in my”—what’s the technical term for poop?—“excrement that looked like a seal fetus, but spongy-looking enough to squish between my fingers. Or maybe I puked that up. I don’t remember.”
“That’s normal.”
“What is it?”
“It’s your body purging itself of toxins. You will probably see more of this substance tonight, and in the morning, from both your small and the large intestine. Don’t be alarmed. Be happy.”
“Happy?” Do happy people sweat like I was sweating last night? No. No they don’t!
“When they cut open Elvis Pressley’s colon doing his autopsy, he had forty pounds of this grey material, called mucoid plaque, cemented along his colon lining. Except his wasn’t squishy or like licorice. The consistency was more like a truck tire.”
“Ew.”
“Yes,” he says, looking at me with long eyes. “Time for the shot.”
“Please, is there another way?”
He picks up the phone, hits a number and says, “Nurse Arabelle, will you please join us?”
“Calling in the robot?” my sarcastic mouth says.
The door opens and Nurse Arabelle walks in, the shell of her face unsmiling. I wonder if she has a boyfriend she kisses at night. Or if she kisses the doctor.
“Come with me,” she says.
Anywhere is better than here, next to that shot, that pink stuff.
She says, “Take off clothes please. Put on paper robe.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.” I do it, turning my back for privacy. When I turn around, she says, “Step on scale.” It’s one of those old school scales with sliding weights. She moves the weights around, finds the balance and to my complete and utter surprise, I weigh one hundred and fifty six pounds.
Massive freaking weight loss! Wait a minute…
“Is this right?”
“Yes,” says the queen of one-word answers.
Smiling inside, I walk back into Gerhard’s office and say, “Okay, I’m ready for my shot.”
It hurts like hell, but the smile I’m restraining won’t be held back for long. One hundred fifty six pounds! After the shot, when the joy wears off, I realize tonight will probably be another night of hell.
Around nine o’clock, it begins. By nine-thirty I know tonight will be far worse than last night.
5
The pain starts in my ear where I tried to saw if off with a serrated kitchen knife a few years back. Apparently the wrong mixture of prescription drugs will turn you into Van Gogh, the painter who tried to cut off his own ear. He was tortured. I was tortured. Now, the horror of that awful day comes roaring back as needle points of pain intensify in that same ear, along that same line of scar tissue. I try not to scratch. Holy shitballs, I don’t want to scratch it! The memory of last night’s itching and how it became a wildfire that spread throughout my entire body mortifies me. How it went from a little itch one minute to a nuclear fire the next is an experience I refuse to relive. It happens anyway. Just a little itch, a little scratch. Then my ear is blazing hot and I can’t stop going at it. My fingernails keep coming back with blood on them.
I want to cry. Why can’t I cry? Instead I sit in silence, chewing on the pain, thinking I want the pills, but not the mega-hangover that came with them. Stalling, trying my damnest not to touch my fiery ear, I log onto SocioSphere and Facebook and look at pictures of my friends back home. Well, my one friend. I leave a post for Netty, telling her I love and miss her. It’s all I can take not to tear at my ear, to scream. My jaw aches from the clenching.
Netty doesn’t comment back, but it’s nine o’clock and I think The Vampire Diaries is on so I guess maybe I’ll check back later.
Scrolling through her posts I see she commented on Jacob Brantley’s page, who commented on my mysterious disappearance and followed up by calling me a bloated chicken head. Okay, this hurts. No, it’s devastating. If he wasn’t the most beautiful boy in school it would hurt less, but he is, and it doesn’t. Netty used enough colorful language on him to stun a New York cabbie. He writes that she should go back to hell. She writes: DINKY WINKY, and then she follows with a smiley face. I want to laugh at Netty’s comment. I really do.
The fire ants are marching again. Small torches, just a few of them. Then more. More ants, bigger torches. Marching harder. Itching. Now I know I’m going to cry. I look at the bottle of pills, then back to Facebook, praying the distraction will hold off the pain a bit longer. I look at the non-triplets’ pages, scroll through their posts and comments, then find something crass written by Julie Sanderson.
Typical.
Practically manic, gritting my teeth so hard, I click to her profile page only to find she has been posting about me. The things I read are horrible.
My skin is a four-alarm fire, a scorched heat infecting my muscles. It’s spreading to the center of my bones, making me feel slicked with sweat. The heat gives way to the kind of pain you can no longer chew on, or contain. A moan escapes me. Half of me—the shaking, now psychotic part of me—she wants to punch Julie in her stupid face. I want to find her and claw her beautiful freaking eyes out. That festering scab. How can she be so cruel?
Reading her posts, seeing her use words like sloth and disgusting and genetically inferior, I realize Julie won’t go away. She will never stop tormenting me. What she
’s looking for is a fight. Stewing in sweat and misery, my last nerve rubbed raw with her posts, I want to push back, to hurt her, but the truth is I don’t know how and this makes me feel more helpless than ever. Even too helpless to stop reading the things she’s posting. I see Cameron commented on a separate post. I click to her page, but I have to be friends with her to read her stuff and I’m not, so I go back to Julie’s post. Scrolling down, I see another post from Cameron with my name in it. It reads: WHO’S UGLIER THAN SUNSHINE CRANSTON AND LAURA DOWNEY PUT TOGETHER?
Theresa Prichard commented first. She wrote: NOT MANY PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, BUT SAVANNAH VAN DUYN FOR SURE. AND HER DAD. HE’S TOO UGLY TO STOMACH, BUT AT LEAST HE HAS A HOT WIFE, SO MAYBE IT’S JUST SAVANNAH.
A couple other girls chime in, too, dropping names of what I assume are other ugly girls. My name keeps coming up over and over again until Julie Sanderson finally writes: IF WE’RE TALKING ABOUT THE UGLIEST THING IN THE HUMAN RACE, I’D SAY NO ONE; IF WE INCLUDE BARNYARD ANIMALS AND JUNKYARD DOGS, THEN I’D AGREE WITH THERESA. SAVANNAH VAN DUYN FOR SURE! TALK ABOUT REVOLTING! DID YOU SEE THOSE THIGHS?! THOSE FAT JIGGLY ARMS?! THEY LOOK LIKE BALD TURKEYS SOAKED TOO LONG IN SEWER WATER. JUST THINKING ABOUT IT MAKES MY STOMACH CHURN!
The fire ants become molten lava. I pull off my clothes and sit there in my big-girl undies and sweat-stained bra just cooking. My own private luau. The one where I’m the pig and everyone can eat me. Inside, emotionally, I go from enraged to crying in no time flat. All these people hate me for the way I look. Isn’t there more to life than looks? They don’t even care who I am. Well screw them! Good God, I’m now officially sweating from every single pore.