by Liane Shaw
“Oh, yes. It looks delicious. But I’m trying to cut down,” I said, trying not to look at my hips when I said it.
“Well, then, good for you! I wish I had your willpower!” Mrs. Gerig beamed at me and then looked around the table to make sure everyone had been served before she proceeded to down a giant piece of the calorie fest along with everyone else … everyone else but me.
As I lay in the totally comfortable bunk bed that night below Annie and thought about the day, I didn’t think of the fun we had. All I could think about was Mrs. Gerig’s comment. Why did she think it was good for me to cut out dessert? Did she think I was fat, too? But then again, she had also complimented me. It was nice to have someone wish they were more like me. Restless and unable to sleep, I snuck out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom down the hall.
I closed the door quietly and turned on the light. The bathroom had only a toilet and a small cabinet with an even smaller mirror over top. I could only see my face in the mirror, which wasn’t what I wanted. I climbed awkwardly onto the edge of the cabinet, praying that I wouldn’t break it, and balanced on my knees, trying to see my body. All I managed to do was fall off the cabinet and make a big noise, so I gave up and went to bed.
“What happened?” Annie asked in a sleepy voice. “I thought I heard a crash.”
“Oh, I just dropped something. It’s OK. Go back to sleep.” I lay down and closed my eyes, wondering why I had just lied to my very best friend.
April 4
I saw him again. Just for a second or two, but it was definitely him. He has that white blond hair some people have, kind of curly. I couldn’t see much else but he seemed kind of cute from a distance. He walked right past my door and stopped on the other side of the hall, looking in here. I even got up and went over to make an effort talk to him but he was gone before I got there. He must be a patient. Visitors don’t come to this part of the building. We have to go downstairs and see them in this nice little room where everything is so pleasant and perfect that you would think we were at some upscale university instead of a pseudo-guesthouse for messed-up dieters.
I didn’t really think that guys did the whole anorexia/bulimia thing. But I’m pretty sure everyone is here for the same reason. Oh, that’s what they call it, by the way. Anorexia nervosa. Supposedly I have it. Sounds like an Italian opera singer. I can’t even sing! We learned about it in health class and I read about it on the Internet back in the good old days when I could still communicate with the outside world. Half the celebrities out there supposedly have it too. I can’t believe they think I have some loony-tune disease just because I don’t want to be fat! I am not starving myself. I don’t have some big emotional issue here. But try telling that to the dumb-ass doctors and so-called counselors. Now they’ve decided I have “bulimic” tendencies too because I got rid of the stupid protein shake and was dumb enough to get caught. They think there’s something wrong with getting rid of something that’s going to harm your body. They think I’m self-destructive. I think it’s practical. I think it means I care about my body. I think I’m self-constructive.
I wonder if he’ll talk to me?
chapter 6
After the chalet trip I got kind of into the whole routine of cutting out food and showing off my willpower. I got used to going without desserts and snacks pretty quickly, and I liked the way it felt. I started reading about diets in magazines. It wasn’t hard to find information. Every single magazine in existence that had a female on the cover seemed to headline fifteen different ways to lose ten pounds. There was an ad on every second page that made great promises to help anyone lose any amount of weight they wanted to. Pop-up ads invaded the Internet every few seconds advertising all of the same things. You could definitely tell that the people in the “after” pictures were a lot happier than the fat slobs in the “before” pictures.
I started cutting out other stuff and counting calories. My family didn’t really seem to notice much so I kept on doing it. Breakfast and lunch were always fly-by meals and supper was a family deal where everyone was always talking and serving themselves. No one paid much attention to what anyone else was eating. My parents were pretty into the whole good nutrition bit and there wasn’t too much junk food floating around our house anyway, so it wasn’t really all that hard to cut back. By the summer I could tell that something was changing. My clothes seemed a little looser and I had to buy a belt to hold up the jean shorts that had fit me the year before. It was kind of a cool feeling and I started trying to figure out ways to lose more weight faster.
Annie and I didn’t usually spend the summers together. She had this big family cottage out west and all of her relatives spent most of the summer there. It’s kind of interesting, actually. Annie’s great-great-grandparents on her dad’s side came here from Japan and settled on the west coast years and years ago. During the Second World War, her great-grandparents and two of her grandparents were put in one of those internment camps. I never knew about it until we were studying it in history and Annie told me the story. It made it all so real and so sad. Her grandmother came to school one time when she was here on a visit and talked to the class. She didn’t really remember much because she was so little when she was there, but she had some of her family’s memories mixed in with her own and the stories were amazing. I couldn’t believe how strong they all were and how they went on with their lives and kept on building their family in this country after all that happened.
My family is pretty small so I could never really understand how Annie could stand spending the whole summer out at some cottage with no phone or TV or any of the other essentials, like a computer. I have my mom and dad and Steve. That’s pretty much it. My mom’s parents live about a five-hour drive away. We see them on holidays and stuff but don’t visit all that much. A weekend here or there. I can’t tell for sure, but I don’t think my mom and my grandma are exactly close. They’re polite to each other and everything but they seem kind of tense when they’re together. My grandpa is pretty quiet and seems almost shy. Steve and I have always really liked being with him when we do visit. He’s just kind of gentle. Grandma can be a lot louder and likes to tell us what to do even though she hardly sees us. My mom gets annoyed with her and then she tells my mother what to do. That doesn’t tend to go over very well. My dad’s parents both passed away. His dad died when he was just a little kid and his mom died when I was little. Sad. I have an uncle on my dad’s side who has a couple kids. I’ve only met them a few times. They seem pretty nice but I don’t really feel like they are family or anything. Polite strangers, mostly. My mom has a sister who doesn’t have any kids.
I have Steve. There seems to be a two-kid pattern here. He’s kind of a typical big brother. He can be a total pain in the backside when he wants to be, the champion of teasing and making my life miserable, and then he can turn around and be totally nice and supportive when I need someone to help me or protect me from things that go bump in the night. Nice when he needs to be and a total pain when he wants to be. I kind of hope he has some kids some day in the distant future so I have nieces and nephews. It might be fun to have a bigger family someday. I don’t know if I’ll ever have kids. So far, the whole romance department is pretty lacking.
Annie has more relatives than I can count. She said there are always lots of cousins around in the summer and they really liked spending time together, swimming and hiking and doing other activities that she seemed excited about but seemed less than thrilling to me, unless of course they came with a weekend at a cool chalet. I try to imagine being surrounded by piles of people who are all related to me, doing all sorts of outdoorsy things, but it just doesn’t compute for me at all.
Then again, Annie thought that my summer plans were pretty boring too, only she was always too polite to actually say so. I usually spend part of my summer hanging around doing nothing in particular except practicing the piano and trying to stay out of my mother’s way so she won’t find things for me to do. Sometimes I go out
to Ruth’s place and try out farm life for a day or two. She has a couple of horses that she spends lots of time with in the summer and she has tried to teach me to ride a few times. I decided I was better on a bike. My bike listens to me and doesn’t have teeth. Alyssa does a lot of traveling in the summer. She still has lots of relatives in Europe that her mom takes her to see. I offered to go and keep her company a couple of times, but no one took me up on it. Devon did the sports camp thing most years when she was little, and she’s now training to be a counselor so she can actually make some money. So, amusing myself in the summer has always been a challenge, except when I went to camp.
Yes, I said camp. I know that sounds kind of weird from someone who just dismissed the idea of hanging out at a cottage swimming and hiking, but my camp wasn’t exactly what you think of when you talk about camp. My dad always called camp my home away from home, only better. It was pretty nice. We slept in cabins with actual mattresses on the beds. There was a lounge for older campers where you could watch TV at night and even a computer that you could go on if you signed up for some time. The food was totally awesome and everyone pigged out the whole time they were there. The older campers, like me, pretty much did whatever they wanted. We could swim and hike if we wanted to. We could also just hang out and do nothing in particular if we wanted to. That’s what we usually chose. My mom and dad would have completely freaked if they had known that their hard-earned cash was being spent on me finding a different place to hang out, doing the same stuff I did at home. I’m pretty sure they thought I was learning all about survival training and knot tying and other terribly important life skills.
There was a group of girls who went to camp with me most years. We had known each other since we were about ten and always managed to book the same three weeks even though we never actually talked to each other during the year. We were summer friends, I guess.
I had expected that summer after grade nine to be the same as any other. I figured my summer friends would all be there just like every other year and that I’d have a great time and come home to my real life.
It didn’t work out that way. Somehow, the girls I usually spent the summer with ended up at camp during a different session than me and I ended up standing in a strange cabin surrounded by even stranger girls. I could feel that sick feeling in my stomach that I always get when something goes wrong and I can’t do anything to fix it. Kind of like how I felt right after my kindergarten teacher found the worms, only worse. The girls strutting around the cabin were not only strangers to me, they were obviously friends to each other. They didn’t even look at me. They just picked their bunks and pinned up pictures of their perfect-looking boyfriends. They all seemed to be wearing designer clothes that fit them like they were made for them. They looked sophisticated and sure of themselves, everything I wasn’t. I felt like a drab little caterpillar in a room full of high-class butterflies. Every one of those girls weighed about three pounds and most of that was perfect, shimmering hair in every lustrous shade that you’ve ever seen on TV.
I never mentioned my hair, did I? That’s because it really isn’t worth mentioning most of the time. I have curly brown hair. Annie calls me a brunette, which sounds nice, but my hair is really just plain old brown, kind of like garden soil. Earthy, I guess. Some people tell me that curly hair is a good thing. My mom keeps reminding me that people spend a lot of money trying to get their hair as curly as mine. It was nice of her to say so, but it wasn’t really true. When you get your hair permed, the curls are all perfect and stay just right all of the time. When you have naturally curly hair, the curls do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. My hair was more often frizz than curl and I tried everything I could to get it to go straight. Everything I tried worked for about three minutes and then my hair pouffed right back up.
Anyway, back to the summer of the alien invasion. The first few days were basically awful. I didn’t think I was going to survive the three weeks but I didn’t want to give in and call home like some kind of baby-faced first-year camper. I wandered around by myself most of the time, avoiding the other girls as much as I could. The only time I had to be with them was at meals and at night. Nighttime was the worst, because they all stayed up half the night talking to each other and pretending I wasn’t there, while I put my dragon pillow over my face and pretended I wasn’t there.
Mealtimes were pretty bad also. I could see all of them staring at me, judging everything I put in my mouth and wondering how someone like me could eat at all. So, I started playing a game with myself. I would look at all the food and figure out what had the least calories. I had bought myself one of those little calorie-counter books before I came to camp. You know the kind. They’re these little pocketbook things with lists of food items inside and the number of calories in each one. It was pretty interesting reading. I was shocked at some of the junk I’d been eating. No wonder the doctor of doom had told me to watch it. Anyway, I had tried to memorize as many of the everyday type foods as I could, like one slice of white bread has 110 calories. So I would look at the table full of food and try to eat as few calories as I could without going totally hungry. It was kind of fun in a way, because it was my game and no one knew anything about it. Well, not at first, anyway.
About four days into that first week of horror, someone actually spoke to me.
“You don’t eat much, do you?” she asked, looking at my plate. It was hamburger night and the table was covered with plates of burgers and fries. I had some lettuce and tomato slices on my plate and one hamburger patty without the bun. I wasn’t sure about the hamburger’s calorie content so I was only eating half. I was so startled to be noticed that at first I didn’t say anything.
“You can talk, can’t you?” Someone else was talking to me. That was more conversation than I had had all week. I wasn’t sure if I could remember how to talk.
“Of course I can talk!” I said, brilliantly.
“So, what’s with the rabbit food?” someone else asked. I looked up to find six pairs of perfectly made-up eyes on me and my plate. I didn’t know what to say. They already thought I was a total loser. Maybe I should tell them I had an ulcer or something. Right. That would make me popular. Tell everyone I have a middle-aged man’s disease.
Would I make matters any worse by telling the truth? Could matters be any worse?
“I’m, well, just, um, trying to, you know, cut down.” I nodded at my own wisdom, looking at my plate as if it held the answers to all of the great questions of life. Wilted lettuce and faded tomato slices stared back at me silently. No answers there.
“Cool. I’m Keisha by the way.” I looked up, stunned. She actually sounded sincere. She smiled at me. I smiled back.
“Maddie,” I said.
“So, are you on a diet?” Keisha asked. The other girls looked interested. I thought about her question for a second before answering. I hadn’t really thought about it in that exact way before. Was I on a diet? Did that make me sound cooler or more like a loser? I thought of all of the magazines and how excited they seemed to be when someone famous went on a diet.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I answered, my powers of conversation obviously fascinating all of them.
“Good for you,” one of the other girls sighed. (I later learned her name was Savannah.) “I keep on trying to start one but it’s just so hard.” She patted her completely flat stomach and sighed again.
“Oh, I know. It’s, like, you want to lose weight but you just can’t give up the food. One day, I’m going to look like my mother and then I’ll just want to die!” Keisha put her hand to her chest dramatically. Everyone laughed, including me, even though I thought it was a little rude talking about your mother that way.
And that was it. For the rest of camp, I kind of belonged. I didn’t really have much in common with them, but we talked about food a lot and they all read my calorie-counter book with me. A couple of them even tried keeping track for a couple of days. They showed me how to do my makeup
and Savannah managed to straighten my hair and keep it that way for more than three minutes. Annie wouldn’t have recognized me with my blue eye shadow and flowing locks! Devon would have split a gut laughing, but Alyssa would have totally approved. I would have fit right in with the beautiful people in Europe.
I found it easier and easier to keep track of the calories. Everyone seemed so impressed with me, that I was determined to do an even better job of the whole diet thing for the rest of camp. It was kind of hungry going at first, but I got used to it. By the middle of camp, I was down to less than nine hundred calories a day. Not bad at all.
Parents’ Day was always about halfway through the session. Not everyone had parents show up, but mine always did. Even though I was at the relatively grown-up age of almost fifteen, they arrived on cue that year as well. They always sprang me from camp for the afternoon and took me to a nearby motel where we ate real restaurant food and swam in the chlorinated pool.
“So, what will it be first, food or chlorine?” my dad asked when I climbed into the car.
“Oh, we already had lunch, so I’m not hungry. I’d like a swim, though.” I looked out the window as I answered. We hadn’t really had lunch and I was actually hungry, but I couldn’t face the whole lunch-at-a-restaurant routine. My dad always figured that the camp starved us and he insisted on ordering chocolate milkshakes and cheeseburgers. There was no way I was going to risk eating that much food all at once. The milk-shake alone would blow the calorie count for the day.
I changed quickly into my black “slimming” suit when we got to our room. Like all hotel rooms, this one seemed to have a mirror on every wall and I stopped for a minute to look at myself when I came out of the bathroom. The suit definitely looked different. The straps kept coming down off my shoulders and there was a saggy look to the material that I hadn’t noticed before. I stood at the mirror looking at myself from all angles. I put my hand on my belly to see if it was getting smaller. I looked a little closer. Well, maybe it looked a little smaller, but not much. That suit really wasn’t all that slimming after all. I still looked pretty chubby. Maybe I should try for eight hundred calories a day.