“I know how you’ve been…” The dryness in my mouth stung. My voice had cracked into breath. “Interested.”
Roderick’s mouth opened just a little. His eyes were on me and a familiar expression flashed across his face. It was his sneer, subtler than normal, but recognizable all the same. “Georgia, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Horror came over me. I didn’t know what to think. He looked me in the eye. I struggled to keep speaking.
“Just … I mean about the attention.” I had to say more. “There’s been a lot of attention.”
“Oh.” The sneer was instantly gone. “You feel I’ve been…” He paused. “You’re saying there’s been pressure. Too much pressure.”
My stomach was contracting, caving in toward my spine. My stupidity banged like a second pulse. I had done everything wrong. He hadn’t understood. I looked down and made the sickening realization that I wanted to cry, that I was going to cry.
“Hey,” Roderick said. “Hey.” His voice was gentle.
He got up and pulled over the chair I had refused earlier. I took a step backward without looking up, let my body sink into it. The embarrassment was unbearable. I rubbed my hands over my cheeks, pushed my fingers into the recesses beneath my eyes as though pressure could stop the tears.
“Hey,” he said again. He leaned down a little, put his hand on my shoulder. “This can happen. The program is so intensive. Really. This is … I see this all the time.”
I swallowed a sob. His hand was all I could think about. He slid it down so that his fingers were on my upper arm and he squeezed through my blouse. Every increment of the squeeze brought him closer to me. He shifted his weight and the cuff of his shirt grazed my shoulder as he moved away. He went back to his chair, wheeled it toward me. We were almost knee to knee. I could feel his pant leg on my calf.
“Hey.” He ducked his head down, tried to get a glimpse of my face. “Everything all right in there?”
I sniffled, nodded.
“Good.”
He put his hand on my knee, patted it. Air snagged in my throat. He was touching me. What did that mean? Maybe I hadn’t screwed up. This time I wasn’t going to chicken out like a freak. I moved to the very edge of my chair. Just a foot separated our heads and I searched his expression for signs of alarm, but he seemed pleased that I was relaxing. So I moved in more, put my hand on top of his as my face lifted toward him. In a single motion, I placed my lips on his lips. It was the strangest second, blind mouths pushing against each other. I could feel resistance in his muscles, so I lifted his hand and put it on my boob. I held it there for a moment, training it to stay. I moved my lips and things got softer. We were kissing. The realization hit me like a slap and then I was falling backward. I felt the seat of my chair as it rolled away from me and my spine pounded as I hit the floor. The pain was the deep ache of bone. He stood over me, staring.
“Christ.” He ran his hand through his hair and his face shook. The anger in his eyes was terrifying. For a second I thought he might hit me, but he rolled his shoulders back, as though keeping the impulse lodged in his arm. Then he walked out of the room.
I didn’t move. Everything had been so fast. Had he pushed me away? It was impossible. I wasn’t thinking straight. He would come back and apologize.
My lower back hurt and I felt dizzy. Had my head hit the floor too? I picked myself up and tried to remember my plan. I took the photos from my back pocket, realized I’d forgotten a paper clip. It was important they didn’t get separated. Through my jean skirt, I pulled off my underwear and tights. I wrapped my underwear around the photos. The zebra pattern made a beautiful ring that held the paper in a coil, made it look like an ancient scroll. I opened the top drawer of his desk and placed it inside.
PART 2
FIFTEEN
I am standing alone on the sidewalk. I have read the sign a thousand times now but the fact of it is still abstract to me. SCHOOL CLOSED. It’s an idea that’s not quite convincing, like a smudge in the sky someone says is a galaxy. I look up and there’s an appropriately puffy cloud, white and organized, with storybook contours that don’t bleed into the blue. Sixty has joined a group of grade nines in front of the portico. Their conversation is a hum to me, a shapeless drone without words. I listen to this as something both dim and sharp pulls on the muscles in my chest. I force the feeling down, knowing how easily it could well up and find my eyes, spill out as tears.
Sixty looks over her shoulder and beckons me with her hand. I shake my head. I see the others behind her, Veronica and Anushka. They move their hands as they speak, their expressions earnest. Veronica crosses her arms over her parka and shakes her head with grown-up disapproval. Anushka bites her lip and nods. Do they suspect that I have something to do with it? The feeling in my chest is rising. It’s hot and spiteful but not something I can name. I shake away images, snapshots fragmented like jigsaw-puzzle pieces. My hand on Roderick’s thigh. The skin of his face up close. The back of his shirt as he left the room.
I feel warmth in my hand, a tug, and realize Sixty is standing beside me. Her shoulder rubs against mine and the closeness is saddening. I am still a million miles away.
“Chantal,” she whispers.
“What?”
“We have to find her. This is probably all her fault.”
She tells me the group of them have discussed it. Chantal is the root of this mess. Her parents must have sued the academy, and school would need to be canceled throughout the trial.
“It’s probably a regulation,” she says. “So that more girls don’t stop eating. Like, while the case is on.” Sixty nods. It’s a private nod, as though she’s considering her own assessment. “We need to find out.” She pauses for a moment, taps her foot on the concrete as she thinks. Then her face flushes with an idea. She reaches into her shoulder bag and pulls out her phone. “Call her.”
I hesitate. My stomach knots and I avoid her eye. I fight off another memory, the strangeness of Roderick’s lips on mine.
“It’s important,” Sixty adds. “She’s ruining things for everyone all over again.”
I take the phone and punch in the numbers quickly, as though the whole thing will be easier if I get it over with fast. It rings once, twice and there’s a voice I don’t recognize. I tell her who I am.
“Georgia?” the voice repeats as a question. “This is Chantal’s mom.”
I don’t like the way she says it and I worry instantly that she knows my name, has heard all about the eating schedule.
“Thanks for calling, Georgia. Chantal will appreciate it so much.”
“Oh.” I look at Sixty. “Great.”
“Will you be able to visit? I’m sure Chantal would love that.”
“Um … visit where?”
“Oh, I thought the school would have told you. We’re at the Hospital for Sick Kids.”
The knot of worry yanks hard enough to snap. “Why?”
“Chantal’s been admitted into the eating disorder clinic here. She’s quite sick, I’m afraid.”
I don’t know what to say. I fumble with the zipper of my ballet bag, but my fingers have gone clumsy. I mime a pen at Sixty and she pulls one out of the front pocket of her knapsack. She takes off her glove and offers me her palm. I bring the nib to the fleshiest part so that I don’t hurt her and take down the room number. I thank Chantal’s mother and hang up.
Sixty looks at her hand. “What’s that?”
“She’s in the hospital.”
Sixty’s eyes widen. “Let’s go.” She hooks her arm through mine and pulls me in the direction of Church Street.
We walk up Church, retracing the steps I’d taken only half an hour earlier on my way to school. I remember the feeling I’d had then, cold head and empty stomach, like the blood wouldn’t flow. I hadn’t eaten dinner or breakfast and my sleep had been a membrane of worry. I could only think of Roderick, of what I was going to do.
Now, if it’s possible, I feel worse. The squar
es of sidewalk are sinister. I see splotches of ancient gum like malignant moles and the background grayness is flat and mean. Sixty is speaking to me but my stomach twists. How sick could Chantal be? How angry is Roderick? I imagine the phone ringing in my kitchen. My mom is at the table, elbows planted on either side of the newspaper, but she gets up, drifts sleepily to the telephone nook. Roderick introduces himself and tells her I’ve done something horrible. She must come down to the academy at once. I see a pale fear wash over her expression, the baby quiver of her bottom lip. I scan the traffic for my mom’s white Toyota. It’s not in front of us so I stop dead in my tracks and turn around. It’s only a little after nine and the cars are bumper to bumper. Then I see it, the back of it, hugging the curb to turn right onto Alexander Street.
“What are you doing?” Sixty asks.
I drop my ballet bag and run toward the car. I’ll stop my mom before she gets to the academy. I catch a clear glimpse of the car’s rear just as it completes the turn and read the license plate. It’s all wrong. I stop, breathless. My pulse unwinds a notch. My eyes are hot and damp.
“Hey.” Sixty has picked up my ballet bag and met up with me. She clocks my tears but doesn’t question them, helps hoist the knapsack onto my back. She squeezes my hand. We resume our walk up Church Street.
We take the subway all the way to the hospital district at Queen’s Park. Sixty talks and I drift in and out of listening, like she’s a movie I’m not enjoying. My head feels heavy on the inside, a shimmering thickness I can’t clear. I look at the faces in front of me and only after several minutes do I realize I’m looking without seeing, that one is a woman with heavy eyeliner, one an old man with a cane. I try to compensate by focusing intently on the man’s features, noticing the fleshiness of his nose, the way his glasses magnify his eyes. But my brain swims elsewhere. Roderick’s eyes. I had waited in his office for an hour, thinking, or just hoping, he might return. I’d picked up his pen and poked it against his desk, rotated it from top to bottom, poked it against the desk again. I had opened his desk drawer and checked on my underwear. I had stared at the doorway till my heart felt like it was falling and my eyelids felt coated in lead.
Sixty pulls me up an escalator and onto the street. She tolerates my silence, probably thinks she understands it. We walk into the lobby of the hospital. Everything has the industrial sheen of the newly renovated, sharp edges and uncluttered spaces, pearly floors illuminated by skylights. We find the elevators and go up to the eighth floor. The nursing station is empty. We walk past it and turn down the first hallway, following the numbers to Chantal’s room. Sixty knocks on Chantal’s door and a voice tells us to come in.
We step into pale green curtains, turn right to avoid them. A woman is sitting at the far end of the room and she motions us toward her. I catch a glimpse of a sleeping girl as we pass between the wall and the drapes. She is so small. The lump of her body ends only a meter from her head and in the crook of her arm lies a doll with yellow hair and retractable eyelids. The girl’s head lolls sideways onto the pillow and I see the tube branching up into her nostrils, a mustache of glass. It scares me. What if Chantal has tubes too?
But Chantal is sitting upright. She greets Sixty and me with something close to a smile and her face has the look it normally does, like she’s hiding a rare secret. She doesn’t have much in the way of cheeks left; they sink into the cavities of her skull and her eyes glide above the way ice cream floats in soft drinks. Her arms are even stranger, tiny cylinders that look painted with blue threads. Sixty shoves into me intentionally, waits to meet my gaze. She’s trying to tell me she’s grossed out. I turn back to Chantal and wait to be appalled by the look of her. I scan her up and down and try to muster some disgust but instead have a thought that surprises me: Chantal doesn’t look that terrible. She’s underweight, sure, but when I picture her before, the bulge of tummy in her bodysuit, I realize something I can never tell anyone. She looks more like a ballerina now.
There’s an open book in her lap that she lifts from the spine to show me. It’s a collection of photos from the New York City Ballet.
“I rented movies, bought a convenience store out of magazines.” Her mom gestures to a pile of them on the windowsill. “But it’s got to be ballet.”
I pretend to find this amusing and move to the top of the bed, sit down beside Chantal. I look over at the DVDs. They’re all blockbuster stuff and the magazines are what I expected, Seventeen, Cosmo Girl, and Teen Vogue. I look down at the black-and-white image of a dancer in a penchée, her legs splitting into a perfect vertical line, and want to laugh at how clueless her mom is. Sixty stands beside the bed, fiddles with the movable table.
“Why don’t you tell your friends about how well your treatment’s going?”
“It’s going well,” Chantal says.
“The doctors think she’ll be better soon,” her mom adds.
Chantal catches my eye like she’s trying to tell me something. “Mostly better,” she corrects.
I look over at her mom, worried that she’s seen this. But her mom is straightening a vase of flowers under the TV.
“I’m going to pop downstairs for a moment. Do you girls want anything from the cafeteria?”
We say no thanks and Chantal’s mom grabs a tan-colored purse from the armchair beside her. I feel very awkward as soon as she’s left the room. Chantal keeps shooting looks at me and it feels like I’m dodging bullets. But Sixty isn’t paying attention. Her eyes move over Chantal’s body like she can’t make sense of it, doesn’t want to believe it’s real, the way a kid looks at a dead cat by the side of the road.
“Why did you do this to yourself?” Her voice is strange to me, whispery.
“Do what?” Chantal says.
“This.” Sixty gestures to Chantal’s body and her face gets choked with feeling.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You did.” Sixty shakes her head and there’s so much swirling in her eyes that I wonder if she’ll cry. “It’s not right. It’s terrible.”
“It’s no big deal,” Chantal says. “Right, Georgia?”
They both look at me now. I’ve never seen Sixty like this before, the panicked muddle of her face. I warn Chantal with my eyes, hope to god she’ll keep her mouth shut.
“She’ll get better,” I tell Sixty. “That’s why she’s here.”
Chantal blinks then gives me that look again, like we share a thousand terrible truths. I’m so relieved when her mom comes back into the room. She thanks us for coming and I hug Chantal to say goodbye. Her arms stay clasped around me longer than I want them to and I even jostle my shoulders a bit, try to shrug off her bones. I check to make sure Sixty hasn’t noticed, but her eyes are glued to the twiglike shapes under the blanket, what’s left of Chantal’s legs.
Outside the hospital on University Avenue, the sun makes gleaming marble of the statue in the middle of the road while cars curve around either side of it like they’re magnetically repelled. I stare at it, breathe in heaps of cool air. I want to find the exact spot where light waves start distorting the statue’s appearance, infecting the matte stone with particles that twinkle. Sixty is saying a lot of stuff about Chantal that I don’t want to hear.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I don’t feel well.”
The instant I say this, I feel worse. The gleaming particles fill my vision and I feel the blood leave my head. I hunch over football-style, hands on my thighs.
“Georgia?” Sixty’s hand is on my back, her voice distressed. “What’s wrong?”
For a second, I can’t answer. The particles swirl in mangled figure eights. I feel doomed to watch them or pass out. I close my eyes. Slowly, I straighten myself up, take a minute to let the air settle in my lungs. I tell Sixty I feel well enough to walk but that I want to go home. She takes my arm on our way to the subway, probably thinks I’m just upset about Chantal too.
When I get home, my mom is sitting at the kitchen table. There’s an open
book in front of her but she seems to be reading the silt in her coffee mug instead, staring into it as if it might tell the future. She looks up at me without surprise.
“Your school just called me.”
Blood saps from my face. “Who?”
“One of the secretaries. Didn’t catch her name.” She takes a sip of coffee and then looks back into the mug as though the image might have changed.
I move to the door that leads to the backyard, face the glass, and wait. If it’s coming, it’s coming now. I’m anticipating the awkward way she’ll bang her mug on the table, tell me we need to talk. What word will define what I’ve done?
“Are you friends with her?”
“Who?”
“This poor girl in your class.”
I’ve been holding my breath. I realize this as the air leaves me in a warm pant. I turn around. My mom’s eyes shine with worry.
“It sounds like your teacher was involved in it.” She shakes her head. “Terrible.”
I mutter a sound of agreement.
“You don’t worry about your weight, do you?”
The concern on her face is touching and ridiculous simultaneously. If only my weight were my problem. I shake my head.
“The secretary said your academics resume tomorrow,” she adds. “But ballet is canceled all week.”
I go up to my room and sit on my bed. I focus on the actual sitting, my folded legs in front of me, because that’s all I can do. When I stop concentrating on my body I see Roderick. It’s Friday night and he’s driving home in a panic. What is he thinking? I try to read his feelings on the image of his face. Is he mad or sorry or disgusted or upset? Each possibility scares me more than the one before and then they’re multiplying out of control. I flip onto my stomach and try to make it stop. I push my fist into the tender spot between my ribs. Something is wrong with me. I sit up again and think of my spine, my legs, but the nausea is back. I grab for the wastepaper basket and open my mouth to vomit. But the feeling has moved to my heart. It’s racing so fast it hurts. If it gets any worse, my body won’t handle it, can’t handle it. Stop, I whisper, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop. I want to cry but my eyes feel hard as golf balls. I put my head on the pillow and watch the ceiling. I try to breathe and breathe and breathe.
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