Skinny

  “Why did you do it?”

  “Are you seriously going running?”

  “Planning on it.”

  “You’re crazy.” Eden leaned back against the wall, pulling her knees up to her chin and her T-shirt over her knees, the silk-screened apple stretching and growing like something important. “We were wasted,” she said. “We were drinking forties. Do you know what forties are? I barely even remember anything,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her cheek on her knees.

  I thought of my father telling me when I was much younger than Eden, “Boys think about nothing but sex.”

  I had contemplated his claim for days. I had watched the boys in my class—carving drawings into their desks, eating lunch from orange trays, running wind sprints in shin guards— and I had decided that my father couldn’t possibly be correct, that boys could not live the lives of boys with the array of activities that entailed, and all the while be solely focused on a thing they’d never done.

  “If boys only think about sex,” I’d finally said to him, “then why don’t they just have sex all the time?”

  My father threw his head back and laughed—I was always waiting for that laugh—his mouth flung open, his fillings gleaming, the laugh that seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, his digestive system maybe, making his belly shake inside his shirt, the laugh I still hear in crowds and in laugh tracks. He suspended my chin on the tips of his fingers, as if my head were a thing for display. “If you remember nothing else in life, remember this: If you give boys what they want, they’ll never give you what you want.”

  Had I gotten through high school without doling out blow jobs only because of my father’s love? Or was it because I hadn’t been fat, hadn’t felt compelled to provide sexual favors in exchange for male attention?

  “Eden,” I said. “Just so you know, everyone makes mistakes.”

  “Sunday school teacher!”

  “But listen. I mean this. Sometimes, you’ll think one event is the most important thing that could possibly happen in your whole life. But it never is.”

  “Something has to be.”

  “But you won’t know what it is until the very end of your life. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying I can do anything I want and it won’t matter.”

  “Kind of.” I bit my thumbnail and thought of my father choosing my college major, and then of his fingers flipping through his record collection, extracting a cardboard square with a sigh. “No. That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “Where were you coming from just now?” Eden asked.

  The skin around her eyes was puffy, her irises as brown as puddles; I would have liked to splash around in them.

  But I had time. I did. I had more than half the summer.

  I sighed. “Do I have to tell you?”

  Eden shrugged inside the bubble of her T-shirt. “Now I know your secret and you know mine.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  After Lights Out a few nights later, I sat across from Sheena on her bed as she dragged the bristles of a nail polish brush across my big toenail. “When is he going to stop pretending this is a real camp?”

  She meant Lewis, who wanted us to choose a camper to win an award. “ ‘Kindest Camper Award,’ ” he had told the counselors after dinner, “which is better than ‘Most Improved’ or ‘Most Valuable’ because it highlights what’s truly important. Tomorrow we will have Awards Night. And then a slideshow. Pudge and I have been working on a soundtrack, and we’ve come up with the perfect songs. They’re both carefree and wistful. Everything from hip-hop to the Eagles. It’s sure to make everyone cry. Or at least the girls. They’ll tell their parents about the lifelong bonds they’re forming at my camp, and then their parents will want to send them back here next summer. And the next. It’s all about retention. I’m a businessman. But what sets me apart is that I also care about the kids.”

  “Real camps are at camps,” Sheena said, “not at boarding schools. Real camps have lakes.” She scraped stray polish from my cuticle.

  I kept glancing at Sheena’s window. The branches of a tree outside ticked gently against the pane. And through the branches, the seductive smile of the moon. I could see Bennett’s face on it, like a president on a coin. As a child, I’d seen my father’s. He’d once told me he was the man in there.

  “Let’s give Eden an award,” I said.

  “I’d like to give Eden a muzzle.” Sheena grabbed my knees. “Can you tell I’ve lost weight?”

  I looked at her. She looked freshly showered. At Camp Carolina, at all times, everyone was either freshly showered or unspeakably filthy. We showered three times a day. We watched our hair go dry and brittle from sun and too many showers. Our flip-flops made squishing sounds when we walked. We twisted towels over our heads like soft ice cream.

  Sheena’s thick wet hair was caught up in a high copper bun. She wore a strapless pink terry-cloth dress with a Velcro fastening near her armpit. Some of the fat had vanished from her wide white arms.

  “I keep telling you,” I said. “You look fantastic.”

  She had tucked a towel under my feet and was wiping the excess polish on it.

  “How much?”

  “Twenty-one pounds. I want to lose forty more. At least.”

  “Wow. Twenty-one pounds. Everyone will notice.”

  “He’ll notice.” Sheena waved her hand over my right foot, then filled her lungs with air and blew on the wet polish.

  “Who, your ex?”

  Sheena’s walls were covered in glossy photographs, solo shots of Sheena—Sheena in a polka-dot teddy, Sheena posed like a baseball player at bat (but with no bat), Sheena on a worn couch, Sheena fully clothed on the closed lid of a toilet, Sheena wearing a cowboy hat and holding a bag of groceries.

  “Yeah. He’ll probably still be in jail.”

  “Jail?”

  “Soon as he gets out, though, I’ll find him. By then, I’ll have lost everything.” She bit her lower lip, her teeth fitting neatly into the grooves of her scar. “Can we give Miss the award?”

  “She’s not kind. She just has good hair. I think she put those bugs in Eden’s bed.”

  “Nah.”

  “I do.”

  “Eden had those bugs coming to her.” Sheena looked at the bristles of the wand, stuck her tongue out, and licked the polish off. She swallowed. “I’ve always wanted to know what that tastes like.”

  “What did it taste like?”

  “Earwax.” Sheena began polishing the big toenail on my left foot. “I get so hungry here, I want to eat nail polish. Sticks. Rocks. Dirt.”

  “Why is your ex-boyfriend in jail?”

  “Because he’s a fuckup.”

  “The abusive guy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that why he’s in jail?”

  Sheena looked up at me and smiled. Then her smile faded like a Polaroid in reverse. “You’re staring at my scar,” she said, touching it.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “People have been staring at it all my life. You think I don’t notice?”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “If you must know, my biological father almost killed me. I’ve had twelve surgeries. It’s still not perfect. And it gave me a lisp.”

  “You don’t lisp.”

  “I sort of do,” she lisped. She tasted the nail polish again, and then bunched her fingers together at her mouth, kissing her fingertips like an Italian chef. “Magnifique!” she said. “Try it sometime. When you recover from your anorexia.”

  “When I what?”

  Sheena scaled my arm with her eyes. “It’s delicious to eat something that’s not supposed to be food.” She paused, and then said, “He poured boiling water over my head.”

  “Good God. Your boyfriend?”

  “My dad. My biological father.”

  My chest compressed like an accordion. Why had I been so angry with my father? He’d never burned me, or scarred me, or rai
sed me to be a person who taste-tested cosmetics.

  “Do you . . . remember it?”

  Sheena elongated her tongue to touch the tip of her nose, then retracted it in a wet pink flash. “People have stared at me since I was a kid. So I stared back. Now I see everything. There’s hardly anything I don’t notice.” She scraped more polish from under one of my toenails, scratching the skin so hard, I gasped.

  The room was stuffy, practically airless. I gathered my hair into my hands and pulled it into a ponytail. “Why don’t we give an award to Spider?”

  “Spider?”

  “She’s got those allergies. I just feel bad for her.”

  “Spider is gross.”

  “You don’t think she’s funny?”

  “How about Whitney? Whitney’s kind. Whitney gave Miss her Jell-O today at lunch.”

  “That’s against the rules,” I said.

  “She broke the rules in order to be kind. That’s true kindness.”

  I thought of Bennett in his bed, the hard lines of his body. “Whatever you want,” I said. “I really don’t care.”

  Sheena used tweezers to pluck a hair from my toe.

  “Ow.”

  “How’s Mikey?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Same as always.”

  When I called Mikey, I pumped him with questions that made him talk and talk; steroid questions that infused his talking with energy, and then I’d end the call so fast (“Shit! Gotta run!”), he had no chance to come down from the high and tell me that he loved me. Now I pictured our apartment, and then pictured it empty of furniture—the standing Kmart lamp with the three-piece stem, the chest of drawers that was missing a drawer, the full-length mirror with the Big Apple Comedy Club sticker. Gone, gone, and gone.

  “So no more Bennett?”

  I touched the place on my toe where the hair had been. It felt hot with loss.

  “You know,” Sheena said. “I lied to you about something.” She polished my last toenail and blew on it. “When we first met. Me and you shouldn’t lie to each other, since we’re friends. Right?”

  I pressed my toe harder.

  “I didn’t leave my boyfriend because he was abusive,” Sheena said. “I helped the cops bust him for drugs.”

  I searched Sheena’s eyes for her pupils. They were invisible, seamlessly incorporated into her irises.

  “So he’s in jail. And now he’s like, ‘Fuck you,’ ‘Never speak to me again,’ ‘Everyone’s against me,’ blah blah blah. That man has a temper like a red-tail boa.”

  The stubble on my legs rose to attention. Sheena yanked the towel from under my feet.

  “He wasn’t dealing or anything, but they thought he was. He was just a pothead. They made an example of him.”

  “And . . . you helped?”

  “Sure. I made a hundred bucks.” Sheena waved her hand over my toes and glanced at me.

  My heart was chopping in my chest, a bonus cardio workout. I looked at my toenails. The red was darker than it looked in the bottle. It looked like blood. Why had I told Sheena about Bennett? Didn’t I know this about secrets: that to give them away was to relinquish control to the person who received them? What had I been thinking, granting Sheena power? This summer was far too crucial to wreck by giving up power.

  But I was in good company. Everyone told Sheena everything. She was the lenient gatekeeper of all camp gossip. We liked to hand her secrets like jewels, then kneel at her feet while she donned them and basked in their sparkle.

  “I did love him,” Sheena said. “I’ve never loved anyone like that. And I know I never will again.”

  I stood, keeping my toes spread as I pressed my feet into my flip-flops.

  When I turned toward the door, Sheena grabbed my wrist. “Here.” She was holding the nail polish bottle out to me, her fingers wrapped so tightly around me, I could feel my flustered pulse. “Taste it. It’s good.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s toxic.”

  Sheena studied the bottle. “Are you saying you just let me poison myself?”

  I yanked my arm away from her and backed toward her door. “You didn’t eat much of it,” I said. “Not enough to do damage. You know . . . I really don’t care who gets the award. You can pick.”

  “Figured.”

  “I trust you,” I said, slipping out into the hallway, closing her door, running from Sheena who knew one of my secrets, who charged one hundred dollars for her betrayal services. I ran into the night and the moon followed.

  When I got to Bennett’s, I burst in without knocking and found his room dark and filled with music, his body a bump under his top sheet.

  “What’s up, Angeline?” His voice was sleepy and far away.

  I crawled on top of him.

  “Hey,” he said, chuckling in slow motion.

  “Bennett.” I wanted to unzip my skin and let my insides fall out. It made no sense. He was not a proper receptacle for my refuse. He would jump out of the way, let it all splash to the floor at his feet. And yet. This was the man I kept choosing.

  I pulled my shorts off, my underwear, my shirt.

  “Give me a minute,” Bennett said. “I gotta wake up. Slow down.”

  “Please just . . .”

  “What?” he said.

  I slid my arms around his arms, under his body. I hugged him with all of my muscles. He was a floating log in the sea. I clung even as he warped. “Tell me something,” I whispered into his ear.

  “Like what?”

  “Something that will make me feel better.”

  “But I don’t know why you’re feeling bad.” He tapped my arm, signaling me to move. I clung more tightly, wrapping my legs around his legs. “You want some vodka? I picked up some of those red plastic Solo cups from Walmart. Those things remind me of college keg parties.”

  I stayed as still as I could, fusing our heartbeats until I couldn’t distinguish them.

  “Come on, Angeline. You trying to kill me?” He loosened my arms and lifted me off him, cast me aside, and stood.

  “You’re trying to kill me,” I said.

  “Now why would you say something like that?” he said, but he wasn’t really asking. His voice was far away. He turned on the lamp by the bed. “You know this song?” He was naked and perfect in lamp light. He was an Olympian.

  “Everyone knows this song.”

  It was Fleetwood Mac. Bennett sang along. He extracted vodka and a bag of ice from the freezer of his mini fridge and then banged the bag on his leg. The ice fell apart against the rocks of his thigh.

  “Do you know that Stevie Nicks used to work as a waitress so Lindsey Buckingham could play music?” I propped myself on one elbow.

  “God, I was in love with Stevie Nicks back in the day.”

  I covered my body with the top sheet. “She hated waitressing, but she loved to picture him lying on his floor, playing his guitar, getting more and more brilliant. She just wanted him to be as brilliant as possible.”

  Bennett brought two cups to bed and slid in next to me, handing me one, sucking condensation off his knuckle. “That right?”

  The crowd cheered. Stevie Nicks thanked them in her sexy, raspy voice.

  I took a long drink. The vodka was bitter and cheap-tasting and cold. The summer was half gone. “I don’t want to go home,” I said.

  “You don’t have to leave for another month.”

  “A month is nothing.”

  “Why are you thinking about it?” Bennett leaned his head back against the wall, resting his cup on the plane of his abdominal muscles. “You think too damn much.”

  “I think between twelve thousand and fifty thousand thoughts a day. Same as everyone.”

  Bennett laughed.

  “Spider told me that.”

  I took another sip and began to feel better. The summer wouldn’t end without my consent. Bennett and I would continue our routine. Eden and I would merge in an elegant, organic fashion. Sheena would keep on being Sheena, eating nail polish, teaching the same yoga
postures day after day.

  “Just tell me something good,” I said, leaning my head on Bennett’s shoulder and closing my eyes.

  I love you. I tried to send him the message, to make him think that he’d thought of it, the words looping from my brain to his brain, from his mouth to my brain, and so on, forever. Let me take you out of your life and insert you into mine. I was so close to his tattoo, the red heart, another woman’s name.

  Bennett yawned. “It’s all good, Angeline. Stop worrying about nothing all the time.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  By the fourth weigh-in, Eden had lost sixteen pounds. Harriet had lost thirty-two. Pudge, who had deserted his wheelchair, evolving on fast-forward into a bipedal human, had lost thirty-six. I had lost seventeen. Every week, every single person at camp had lost at least one pound. Until now. Whitney had gained back two. Miss had gained back three.

  “Someone must have smuggled candy in,” Lewis said when he pulled me aside at Sunday brunch. “Have you been monitoring your campers?”

  “Monitoring them?”

  “How closely have you been watching?”

  “I watch them!” I said, glancing away from Lewis, toward Bennett at the table on the stage—he was stretching his arm, pulling it across his chest. I glanced toward my group’s table where Spider was singing a Japanese song, her arm slung around Harriet’s neck. Harriet sat as straight and still as a stake. “But I can’t catch everything. Maybe someone sent a care package?”

  “We open every package.”

  “Maybe a parent cut the head off a teddy bear, stuffed candy inside, and sewed the head back on.”

  “This is a nightmare,” Lewis said. “I can’t have campers gaining weight. Staying the same from one week to the next, okay. People plateau. It happens. But gaining? What a mess. If they tell their parents . . .” He pulled his glasses off by one stem and massaged his forehead with the pads of his fingers.

  “What?” I said, my heart speeding up. “What would happen if they told their parents?”

  I knew the answer. The parents would enter by force, severing the summer with a guillotine blade, rescuing their children from the weight-loss camp that served candy and had no lifeguard and lacked a certified therapist.