Skinny

  Eden laughed again, but she wasn’t smiling. She scratched her head. “You’re . . . kidding?”

  I saw us together in a shiny booth. I would buy her a Happy Meal. I wanted my sister to be happy.

  But she didn’t look unhappy. She looked puzzled, shrinking away from me.

  How could I have spent the summer assuming that Eden would come to me? I had done nothing to win her affection. And now I expected her to jump out of bed and follow me out of camp? I had spent nearly four years working in sales, pushing comedy club tickets on strangers who had had no intention of buying comedy club tickets. After dismantling my business, after losing my taste for sales, I’d had to wonder if I’d wasted my time.

  Now I saw that I hadn’t. It was useful to know how to sell things.

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s late. I’m probably going to head into Falling Rock by myself.”

  “For what?”

  “There’s this new restaurant. I read a review of it today. Some hotshot young chef who turned down all these New York City restaurants to open some kind of comfort food joint in Falling Rock.”

  “Which chef?” Eden closed her magazine.

  “I don’t know. I skimmed the review. I never retain that kind of information. I don’t know much about chefs. Wish I did, though.”

  “What do you want to know? I know a lot.”

  “It’s supposed to be one of the best new restaurants in the country. Affordable comfort food with a southern flare.”

  Eden pulled her legs out from under the top sheet and swung them over the side of the bed. “You think it’s still open?”

  “I called earlier. It is.”

  “And . . . you’d take me?”

  “You want to come?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Hmm. All right. You’ve worked so hard all summer. Why not?”

  “You could get fired,” Eden said. “Like Sheena.”

  “Eden,” I said. “I can think of nothing that worries me less.”

  I wondered if Eden would ask me about the seat belt extender. But she didn’t, because what was truly distracting was the clutter—my life, which filled up the car.

  “Is this, like, everything you own?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “What about your furniture?”

  “Our furniture is all crap from the Salvation Army and Craigslist. I could throw it away. It’s not like it’s really mine.”

  “Whose is it?”

  “I just mean that nothing’s really anyone’s.” I was stopped at the end of the dirt road that led from camp to the highway, signaling right, waiting to merge.

  “You’re weird,” Eden said.

  I started up the highway toward Falling Rock. I had twenty minutes, at most, to say my piece. Twenty minutes before Eden would realize that the restaurant I’d told her about didn’t exist.

  “I like knowing I can fit everything I own into my car,” I said.

  Eden scooted closer to her door and leaned her head on her window. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I like feeling . . . light.”

  “I feel light.”

  “Do you?”

  “Lighter.”

  “You are lighter.”

  “Yeah, but the second I get home, I’m going to this bakery by my house where I worked last summer. They taught me how to bake all this stuff. Baklava. Cannolis. I got to use the pastry bag for filling. You know what I’m talking about? That plastic bag thing with the metal tip?” She turned toward me slightly. “I’m going to the bakery to get, like, one of everything.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I can’t wait. Not that I want to be a pastry chef. Pastry chefs are the losers of the culinary world.”

  “Don’t you want to keep your weight off?”

  Eden shifted in her seat, making herself comfortable. “I don’t know. It’s not like it will matter.”

  “Won’t it?”

  “I don’t believe it works. Weight loss. People want to lose weight so badly. People want to be thin. And they’re not. Our country’s getting fatter and fatter. Did you know that? So whatever we’re all doing isn’t working. I mean, right? If there was a solution, everyone would be skinny.”

  “We have to try.”

  “Why?” Eden asked. “I’ve tried before. I’ve eaten nothing but salad. I’ve done that. It doesn’t work. Not in the end. My mom gets all these dumb magazines. There are women who go on these weight-loss plans that sound like lies. Same crap in every issue. Like, ‘I started lifting weights three times a week and walking instead of using the escalator. I started adding spinach to my diet. And now look at me! I’m thin!’ ”

  “And it’s not that easy, is it?”

  “Maybe for some people. Not for me . . . My ears are popping.”

  “Hold your nose and blow.”

  “Can’t that burst your eardrums?”

  “They’re just eardrums,” I said, smiling. I twisted the radio dial until I found something worth listening to. Lester Young. One of my father’s favorites. “Maybe fat camps work,” I said. “Maybe you guys will all go home and feel motivated and keep losing weight. Maybe the answer is to get at you while you’re young.”

  “I’m not that young.”

  “Well . . . maybe the youngest kids will benefit?”

  “Or maybe we’ll all gain it back and our parents will make us come here again next summer. It could go on forever.”

  “Do you like jazz?”

  “How should I know?”

  “You should,” I said. “You should like Lester Young. He’s in your blood.”

  Eden was resting against her window, her feet bare on the glove compartment. Her toes were tapping out the rhythm. I could practically see our father slinging one arm around each of us, crushing us into him, saying, “My girls, my girls.”

  Eden was sucking the gold star on her necklace.

  “Who gave you that necklace?” I asked. I swallowed hard and gripped the wheel more tightly.

  Eden let the star fall from her mouth. “A woman from one of my cooking classes. She got it in Israel.”

  “Is she . . . Jewish?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So . . . she brought you . . .”

  “I used to really like stars,” Eden said. “I used to draw them on everything. I used to wear stars a lot, too. I was obsessed with stars.”

  “Stars?”

  “It was stupid. I don’t know.”

  “The star of David, you mean?”

  “This one time, I made little loaves of star-shaped sour-dough bread and brought them to my cooking class. And then this woman went to Israel and brought me this.” She lifted the charm from her chest to see it. “Everyone thinks I’m Jewish because of it.”

  “You have a Jewish name.”

  “It’s not really a Jewish name.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It’s really gross how I got my name.” She let the charm drop.

  “It was the garden,” I said. “It was the most perfect place in the world before Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. And then they became self-conscious about their bodies. And—”

  “Yes, Gray, thank you. I know the story of Adam and Eve.”

  “I hate that story,” I said. “I hate that they had to go and do that. They’re responsible for everyone’s body image issues.”

  “I was conceived in a town in Minnesota called Eden Prairie. My parents were on a vacation. I think they were skiing. Can you ski in Minnesota?”

  “Maybe they were cross-country skiing.”

  “Do you know what that means?”

  “What what means?”

  “Conceived?”

  I took a deep breath. I opened my mouth. I said, “Eden, I have something to—”

  And that was when I lost control.

  I lost control of my father’s car three thousand feet above Peach River Gorge. It was as if an invisible hand—a heavy, desperate, determined hand—yanked the wheel away from me.


  It was an old car, yes. And I was told that I hit a rock that flattened the tire, that started the chain of awful events. But I don’t know. I know what I felt. I would know my father anywhere.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  I intentionally omitted something. Of all the parts of my story I would rather not remember, this part ranks fairly high. It’s the part that happened between the time Bennett woke me up and the time I went to the canteen to watch the end of Bugsy Malone.

  When I stepped outside the dorm, alone, the rain was holding, but the night was wet, as if it had been crying. I meant to go straight to the canteen, to join the group, to chat mindlessly with Mia, as if everything were normal. But I couldn’t stop feeling the aloneness beading up on my skin like sweat.

  I saw the cabin behind the cafeteria where Lewis had been staying all summer. His car—something blue with tinted windows—was parked in front of it, still and dark. I walked to the car and touched the hood. I walked up the two stone steps to the screen door of his cabin. Behind the screen, the main door was opened wide, so I went inside and turned on the light.

  I saw his computer set up on a desk. A shirt had been tossed over it. More clothes had been tossed over the desk chair. And more on the couch, and even more on the floor, but his messiness wasn’t what struck me: Strewn around the linoleum were ten or twelve large white pizza boxes. Some were flung open, showcasing grease stains, crumbs, and crumpled napkins. Hershey Kisses wrappers were sprinkled around the floor like currency. I saw a white paper McDonald’s bag, a half-eaten bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, an empty box of Milk Duds, and by Lewis’s computer where the mouse should have been, a Twinkie, unwrapped, as if he’d been about to eat it when the cops came knocking.

  In addition to the mess, there was a stench. Dirty laundry. Old garbage. Sour milk.

  I turned out the light and backed over the threshold. I sat on the stoop and looked at the black sky. It was beautiful here in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was quiet and lush. Slow and calm. But beauty made me skittish. As soon as it peaked, it began to fade. A forehead wrinkling. A photograph yellowing. Muscles melting to fat.

  When I was growing up, my family—my parents, my father’s brothers, my cousins—used to rent log cabins in New Hampshire for a week in the summertime. At night, we would sit outside under blankets and watch the shooting stars. Someone always had to say, “This is so pretty.” Sometimes I was the one to say it, but I always knew it would have been better if no one said it.

  I stood and wiped off the back of my shorts. I meant to go to the canteen then. I really did. But I listened to the cicadas and wished I could hush them—the squeaky taunt of their transience. And I walked straight to the cafeteria. I won’t say “as if in a hypnotic state.” I won’t say “as if someone were holding the back of my neck, pushing me toward it.” I know how the Ouija board works. I know that nothing is magic.

  I walked through the cafeteria to the kitchen. I turned on the light and lifted the part of the tray rails that would allow me behind the food line.

  I remembered the tour Lewis had given us on the first day. And I remembered his theatrical warning. I went to the walk-in refrigerator and opened the door, stepped through the heavy plastic strips that hung from the top of the door frame, and felt the cold air on my skin like relief.

  I filled my arms with food.

  And then I began to eat.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  I woke up feeling as if I had only one eye, and knew immediately that I was in a hospital because rails confined my mattress, white curtains hung on either side of me, and a red box-shaped metal receptacle stood in front of the bed. And then I remembered an ambulance, a low voice saying, “I can’t get a vein.” Had that happened? When had that happened? I looked at my arms. There were no tubes taped to them, no needles piercing them.

  I closed my eyes, remembering what I’d done in the kitchen at camp. I remembered the 100-calorie packs of mini chocolate chip cookies. How many packages had I eaten? Ten? Fifteen? I remembered the leftover sugar-free pudding, remembered polishing off the mixing bowl of it. And then the cereals, straight from their single-serving boxes. And then . . .

  My left eye throbbed. When I opened my eyes, a woman in pink scrubs with a stethoscope slung around her neck was leaning over me, inspecting something on my face.

  “How we doing?”

  We.

  And then I remembered. “Is Eden okay?” I grabbed the metal rails and tried to slide into a sitting position, but the strength had been vacuumed from my arms. “The girl in my car. Eden Bellham. The girl in the passenger seat.”

  The nurse stood up straight. “You let us do our job and you do yours. Your job is to rest . . . Honey, don’t sit up. Whew boy, did you hit your head. You took some glass in the face, too, but we got it all. You in pain?”

  I thought about it. I felt a heavy pain I couldn’t locate. I remembered Mikey.

  “Yes.”

  “Figured you must be.”

  “Wait—”

  “Honey, there’s nothing in all of creation that you need to worry about at this moment.” She bent over a tray on a shelf beside the bed. Then she took my arm. “This’ll hardly hurt.”

  “No shots!” I said. “Pain makes me crazy.”

  And then darkness.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  The next time I woke up, I could tell it was daytime, but I couldn’t see a window, couldn’t locate the source of the sunlight. On a table by the bed, a glass vase bloomed yellow roses. Bennett was standing beside me. I looked at him and wished I could fold up into the wall like a Murphy bed, as if his seeing me in a hospital bed were more personal than the times he’d seen me naked.

  “What day is it?”

  “Saturday.”

  “What time is it?”

  He looked at his watch. “Noon.” He was dressed in a button-down shirt. Khaki pants. A brown leather belt. As if he were off to a stuffy Sunday brunch. He was incognito. No one would recognize him as the assistant director of a weight-loss camp. It occurred to me for the millionth time that I didn’t know Bennett Milton.

  “Did I lose an eye?”

  “You’ve got a patch over one.” He touched it gingerly. “But you’re going to be as good as new. You just got a little roughed up.”

  I pulled the blanket tight around me.

  “Bet you weren’t expecting me to meet your mom anytime soon. I told her, ‘Mrs. Lachmann, it’s so nice to meet you. I’m the old man who’s been banging your daughter.’ ”

  I rubbed my eye and almost smiled. And then I sat up. “You’re kidding, right? My mom’s not here.”

  “In the waiting room.”

  “No. How long have I . . . Where’s Eden?”

  “She’ll wake up soon. Everyone’s saying so. You both hit your heads pretty hard, but everyone’s going to be just fine. I’ll tell you what’s not fine is your car.”

  “It’s not my car.”

  “Well, whose is it?”

  I saw my father then, his coffee and doughnut between us on the console.

  “What were you doing? Where were you headed?”

  I closed my eyes over the heat of tears. “Is Eden’s mother here?”

  “Yup.”

  I laid back to rest on the pillow and opened my eyes. “What’s going on at camp?”

  “Yeah. About that.” Bennett’s eyes were bloodshot.

  “You look exhausted.”

  “Don’t you worry about me, Angeline.”

  “What’s the latest?”

  “Hell of a mess. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  I reached for Bennett’s face. He bent down a little so I could touch him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What for? I’m just glad you’re alive. I’m glad you hit a guardrail instead of falling into the gorge.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I went to where you crashed. You could be graveyard dead.”

  I pulled the blanket tight around my body.


  “You sure had a lot of stuff in your car. I brought it all to the post office. It’s on the way to your mom’s house.”

  “You did that for me?”

  Bennett took one step away from the bed.

  I sighed. “I’ll pay you back.”

  “You don’t owe me a thing.” Bennett studied me for a minute. “How about this?” he said. “Here’s how you can pay me back. If I’m ever in New York, you can show me around town. Deal?” He stuck out his hand for me to shake.

  I remembered the last time we’d shaken hands, when I’d agreed to a summer of fun. I knew enough to recognize defeat. I knew what an ending looked like.

  I took his hand. I held it in my palm. I wanted to tell him this was his loss, which would be proportionate to my gain. But I didn’t really believe that. Loss was never so tidy.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  My mother, her hair a mess, fiddled with one of her pearl earrings. “You’re so thin,” she said, her voice trembling.

  “I’m thin in a good way.”

  “We all think thin is so good.”

  I remembered her from years before, weighing broccoli on a scale, trying on a light yellow bikini every morning before getting dressed.

  “I’ve been at weight-loss camp all summer. I’m in the best shape of my life. If you saw me without cuts all over my face—do I have cuts all over my face?—if you saw me in workout clothes or in a bathing suit, you’d tell me I look great.”

  “Are you losing your hair?” She sat at the foot of my bed and held my toes through the faded blue blanket. “You could have told me.” She pulled a tissue from her purse and blew her nose. But despite the crying, she looked stronger than she had the last time I’d seen her. There was more color in her face. She filled out her jeans. She looked like a person on the mend.

  “Told you?” I tried to rearrange my hair over the bald spot. “What could you have done?”

  “I mean, you could have told me why you were coming here for the summer.”

  I studied her. “What exactly do you mean?”