Skinny

  “I might visit Duane in jail,” Sheena said.

  “Your ex?”

  “Nah. This other guy.”

  “You know a lot of people in jail.”

  “I’d say I know a lot of people who are down on their luck. Not everyone’s got a charmed life, you know.”

  “Sheena, I do know that.”

  “Sometimes I’m not sure about you.”

  “I think you think I’m wealthy or something.”

  Sheena pushed her lips together and examined me. “Do you have two parents?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “My dad died.”

  “When?”

  “Last summer.”

  “So until then, you had two parents? You grew up with two parents?”

  “I did.”

  “And your dad had a job?”

  “Of course.”

  Sheena leaned forward and splashed water onto her thighs. “Then you’re spoiled.”

  “How so? Before I got here, I was bartending. At a fish place. I constantly smelled like fish.”

  “Bartenders have rich parents. Bartenders are trying to be movie stars. You don’t see bartenders in jail. Kids in group homes don’t grow up to be bartenders. If you were really poor, you’d work for the city. You’d work for minimum wage. Like Duane. Duane couldn’t catch a break. Now he’s been in jail for a year. Year and a half. He writes me letters with a pen. On lined paper. He wants me to send him pictures of me in my underwear.”

  “Oh! Be careful, Sheena.”

  “Gray, you’re such a prude,” Sheena said, pulling her Jackie O sunglasses from the top of her head to cover her eyes. I tried to think of people I knew in jail. Having no friends in jail made me feel provincial.

  “I’m taking a day off tomorrow,” Sheena said. “Lewis told me I could. Since I work so hard on the evening activities.”

  Sheena had come up with most of the evening activities: the Cross-Dresser Beauty Pageant, Casino Night, Carnival Night, the night we piled into a bus to go to the movie theater in Melrose, each camper armed with a small ziplock bag of air-popped popcorn. Lewis had named Sheena the director of activities and begun paying her an extra two hundred dollars a week.

  “Sheena and I have business plans,” I’d heard him say, slinging an arm around her shoulder.

  Sheena had recently told me, “When summer’s over, me and Lewis are going to start a Meals-on-Wheels type of program for foster families. That’s my dream. I grew up in two foster families. Why are you looking at me like that? Not everyone’s royalty, Gray. Not everyone lives in New York City. Not everyone gets to go to cocktail parties in the Empire State Building. Not everyone gets to climb the Statue of Liberty and kiss her torch, or whatever y’all do up there. I grew up eating the kind of food you give people if you want them to gain ten pounds a day. That’s how I got fat. Me and Lewis are going to have this healthy food delivery service. For foster families, so that the kids don’t have to eat like shit just because their foster families are poor and fat.”

  “That’s a brilliant idea.”

  “We’re going to call it Mealz for Realz. With two Zs. Lewis has cash,” she’d said, rubbing her thumb against the pads of her fingers.

  Now she said, “I can go see Duane. Bang him at the jail. That’s kind of hot.”

  “It is?”

  “It’s that or pick up some stranger at Walmart. Some Melrose dude. And they don’t have teeth. They have diseased gums.”

  More than half of the summer now eaten away, no one wanted to think about food anymore. Camp food was not worth discussing. We were resigned to it. Home wasn’t worth discussing, either. Home was somewhere we had lived long ago. All that was worth acknowledging was that we were blessedly diminished. Layers of us had shed. So when a breeze came, when someone accidentally bumped into us, when a person’s hand reached out, it was closer to us, to our genitals, to our hearts, than any contact or almost-contact had been in a very long time.

  “Whitney and Pudge are fucking,” Sheena whispered.

  “Lewis told me that fat men can’t get it up.”

  Sheena tapped her sunglasses down her nose to scrutinize me. “Lewis can’t get it up. Lewis is, like, old. Pudge is eighteen.”

  “No, the point of his story was that he, against all odds, has always been virile.”

  “I met his wife. She was here the other day. She’s deaf.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean what do I mean? She’s deaf. You’d have to be, to marry Lewis. But she reads lips. I tried talking really fast and she still understood me. Spider would have loved it. She would have finally had a reason to speak sign language.” Sheena looked at me. “He shouldn’t have told you that . . . about how he’s so . . . what was the word you used?”

  “Virile?”

  “About how virile he is.” Sheena leaned back on her elbows and lifted her face to the sun. The sun shifted to accommodate her. “Considering what people are saying about him.”

  “What are people saying?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Sheena, no one tells me anything.”

  She sat up again and drew an imaginary zipper across her lips. She rubbed her elbow, then bent forward and dipped her arms into the water. “The pavement’s hot.” She scooted off the lip of the pool with a splash and swam past Eden and Harriet. I watched Eden’s eyes follow as Sheena swam the length underwater, then emerged like a breaching dolphin to join Miss, who immediately offered her the kickboard.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Mikey was pulling the magic trick of men with cheating girlfriends—shifting suddenly from clueless to clairvoyant. This was a man who never remembered our anniversary; never guessed when I wanted to be left alone, strewn with confetti, or admired from a distance. He never guessed when I wanted him to say, “Please tell me what I can do for you.” Once, he thrust a bouquet of roses at me and said, “They’re yesterday’s roses! Bodega guy gave ’em to me cheap as hell.”

  But now that my eyes were locked on Bennett, Mikey could see me perfectly through the six hundred miles between us.

  “I’ll come for the weekend,” he told me on the phone. “I’ll get a hotel room. I’ll see you at night. Whatever it takes. I’m sick of you being gone. Something about this feels really . . .”

  “There’s no time,” I told him. “I get a couple of hours to myself every other night. It’s not worth it. I’ll see you when I get back. It won’t be long.”

  “I’ll borrow my parents’ car. I’ll drive down, give you a kiss, and turn right back around. I just need to see your face. I just want to touch you. This is unnatural. This life I’m living. Telling jokes to strangers, coming home to an empty apartment. Too much alone time. This is how men become creepy. Soon I’ll be one of those guys who plays that computer game. You know that computer game?”

  “Which one?”

  “Where you pretend to have a second life?”

  I was sitting on my bed, trying to decide what to wear to dinner—my jeans that folded down twice over my hips or my faded pink sundress that now fit me like a sack. “I do know it.”

  Mikey sighed static into the phone. “I miss you, baby.”

  Bennett liked me in dresses. I would wear the sack sundress with nothing underneath, and tell him so.

  “The summer will be over soon,” I told Mikey.

  “I would even watch you sleep. Can’t I drive down and watch you sleep?”

  “Wow,” I said, laughing. “You are getting creepy.” But Mikey had always liked to watch me sleep. Sometimes I woke up to the sight of his face above me, his eyes misty, his hair tousled. Bennett would never have watched me sleep. He was barely interested in watching me when I was awake.

  “Gray, I just . . .”

  “What?”

  “I just love you.”

  “Mikey,” I said, “I love you, too.” But the words felt st
ale in my mouth, like old crackers.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Sometime during the fifth week of camp, I adjusted to camp life as if to a scorching hot tub. Now I couldn’t imagine climbing out, could only imagine remaining inside it, weightless and torpid. Until the weigh-in. Whitney showed a nine-pound weight loss. Miss had dropped seven pounds. So had Kimmy, who had lost only half a pound at the fourth-week weigh-in.

  “Something is off,” I heard Lewis tell Nurse. “Something is weird.” But he was rocking on his heels, his spine straighter than usual, as if he’d been carrying the girls’ extra pounds around all summer.

  “This makes me uncomfortable,” I told Lewis.

  “What?”

  “It seems like a thing to pay attention to.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “So much loss.”

  “Thank the Lord I’m not married to you,” Lewis said.

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You with all your hang-ups. Your feelings about things. Whoever marries you has his work cut out.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Can’t you just go with the flow? Quit rocking the canoe? Bend like a reed?”

  “No. I guess I can’t.”

  “Don’t worry,” Lewis said. “I won’t tell Bennett.”

  At the end of brunch, I was sitting across from Eden, the rest of the girls having finished and disbanded. My eyes were fastened to the thick black braid draped over Eden’s shoulder, and to her face that looked, every day, more and more like our father’s, as if her weight loss were chiseling away the other half of her DNA.

  She was pushing her turkey sausage links and salad around with her fork, making the links mushy with fat-free Italian dressing. “Everyone except me is losing, like, millions of pounds,” she said.

  “You’ve lost a lot,” I said.

  She looked up at me and squinted one eye, the way my father had whenever he thought I was being illogical, my arguments marked by emotional rhetoric, exaggerations, and convenient guesses. “Think things through,” he always told me, tapping his forehead with the knuckle of his index finger. “Don’t just speak because you feel like it. Don’t let your emotions rule you. Don’t ever give men reason to discredit you.”

  “At least I’m not puking to lose weight,” Eden said.

  I cocked my head at her. “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing.” She pushed her tray away and looked out the window. The cafeteria was nearly empty, except for a couple of the younger girls who were standing in front of the television on the Dance Dance Revolution mats, shoes kicked off, watching the screen to follow the footwork prompts.

  Holy hell, did we all love Dance Dance Revolution. The whole camp. Even Nurse. Even the new kitchen ladies (who were more or less replicas of the old kitchen ladies). We loved to dance the way the kids did in 1980s movies after they broke free from the confines of one institution or another.

  “The whole world thinks I like Alex,” Eden said, “and I so don’t. He’s a dork.”

  “Alex? He’s . . . nice.”

  I’d once seen Alex smiling at me from across the cafeteria, and then mouthing something to me, so I had smiled back and cupped a hand around my ear, only to realize he was talking to himself.

  “Do you know what happened to him at his school?” Eden asked.

  “The website thing?”

  “See?” she said. “Dork.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s a dork. He was a victim.”

  “But if he was cool, that wouldn’t have happened. That’s not the kind of thing that happens to cool kids.”

  She looked out the window. I followed her gaze. Whitney and Kimmy were teaching one of the younger girls how to do a cartwheel. The girl kept throwing herself forward so her hands hit the grass, but she couldn’t get her legs up in the air.

  “Why would anyone think I like him?” Eden said. “Not that I care. I don’t care what anyone thinks of me.”

  “Good.”

  Eden swung her legs over the bench one at a time. She stood and lifted her tray from the table. “I’m just saying,” she said. “Some people care so much, they puke up everything they eat. They think if they eat, they’ll never be skinny, and that if they’re not skinny, people won’t like them.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Like what? I would never puke up my food on purpose! I don’t even want to be skinny. Boys don’t like skinny girls. Boys like thick girls. Girls with ass.” Eden looked around. No one was watching us. She lowered her voice anyway. “I hate Sheena.”

  For a moment, I felt as if Eden had set a crown on my head. I beamed at her. And then I made myself stop. “Sheena’s just insecure.”

  “She’s a counselor!”

  “Counselors can be insecure.”

  “An insecure grown-up?”

  I laughed.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Sorry. She’s only nineteen, you know.”

  “But she’s supposed to be in charge! The other day during kickball, she got mad at me and scratched me.”

  My skin grew cold. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she grabbed me and dug her nails into my arm.” Eden looked down at her T-shirt sleeve.

  “On purpose?”

  “Yup.”

  “Eden, if that’s true, I have to . . .”

  “What?” Eden lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “What are you going to do? She would just be like, ‘No, I didn’t,’ and that would be the end of it. No offense, Gray, but she’s kind of more popular than you.”

  “I don’t care about popular.”

  “And by the way, she’s not insecure. She thinks she’s perfect.”

  “Everyone’s insecure.”

  “Except Sheena. And me. I’m not.”

  “Okay. So you’re not.”

  “Sheena was the one who put those bugs in my bed. She was the one who poisoned Spider’s food. She thought it was funny. She switched up Spider’s bread when Spider was in the bathroom. Ask Harriet. Harriet cried about it for, like, two days.”

  My stomach churned the way it had when Saul told me about Azalea. What was it about bad news? Why did it register as information I’d somehow already known? “Are you sure about all this?”

  “Gray. You are so clueless.”

  “Are you making yourself throw up?”

  Eden shook her hair out of her face. “The way I see it, if someone throws up the food someone made . . . that’s the same as taking an artist’s painting and tossing it in a fire.”

  “The kitchen ladies aren’t exactly artists.”

  Eden looked out the window again. I looked, too. The girl who had been attempting cartwheels was lying sprawled on the ground, snow-angeled. One of the other little girls was sprinkling grass on her face. It was starting to feel as though there was nothing left to do here. We’d done everything. Every day. Now people were engaging in the pastimes of the understimulated—grass sprinkling, cartwheeling, taking turns sitting in Pudge’s wheelchair and rolling down a hill.

  When Eden spoke a minute later, I couldn’t tell whether she was still addressing me. “I don’t care if people like me or not. I’m a free spirit. That’s what everyone back home calls me. A free spirit. I hate people,” she said. She stomped off toward the trash cans to scrape away her uneaten food.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Evening activity was a scavenger hunt of Sheena’s design. I stood with Lewis on the loop while the kids ran around, seeking clues. I told him, “Sheena was violent with Eden.”

  He was watching the kids. One of the younger boys was standing on Alex’s shoulders to get a view of the library roof. Lewis chuckled and pointed. “They’re loving this,” he said. “They’ll all call home and tell their parents how much fun they’re having here.”

  I doubted it. I had heard my campers on the phone with their parents. “Get me out of here,” they said. “Can’t you just come get me for a day?” Mos
t of the kids had not been forced to come to camp. They’d wanted to come. They were sick of being fat kids. They fantasized about returning to school in the fall, miraculously transformed. But that didn’t keep them from complaining.

  Lewis said, “The parents will tell their friends, ‘My kid’s having so much fun at camp, he doesn’t even notice he’s dieting.’ ”

  “I’m worried about this thing,” I told Lewis. “She scratched her.”

  “You and your melodrama.”

  “She dug her fingernails into Eden’s arm. Why would Eden lie? What if she tells her mother?”

  “What do you care about her mother?”

  “I don’t care about her mother.”

  “Worry about Eden.”

  “Lewis! I am worried about Eden. What if another kid calls home about it? What if the lawsuits start piling up? You could lose the camp.”

  He looked at me. “Kids exaggerate, Gray. You haven’t figured that out yet? I’ve been working at camps since the eighties. Sheena wouldn’t do something like that. Look at her.” Lewis pointed toward the library again, toward a cluster of kids on their hands and knees in the grass, crawling, searching. Sheena was carrying one of the youngest girls on her back. Another one was holding Sheena’s hand, looking up at her adoringly. “The kids are in love with her. She really connects with them. Aside from me, she’s the one they turn to. I’m like a father type of figure to them. But Sheena’s like an aunt. She’s like this aunt I used to have who always had butterscotch candies in her purse. Every time I saw her, I would paw through her purse for those candies. Auntie Bee. I loved my auntie Bee.”

  “That’s how people win the affection of dogs,” I said. “They stuff treats in their pockets.”