Not Otherwise Specified (10 page)

It kind of works as an answer.

“Okay then,” I say. “So what's your dream?”

“I want to be a biologist. Or a basketball player. I want to be a basketball player who does biology on the side.”

“Obviously, because that's the one of the two that makes the more reasonable career.”

“Obviously.”

“Looking at schools?”

“I don't really have the grades right now, is the thing. I'm thinking I'm going to stay here and do community college
for a while, and then we'll see what happens. Maybe I'll pull myself up by my bootstraps and everyone will be inspired and just give me things.”

“That's the dream, right?”

“I think so.”

I'm enjoying this. I haven't had a good conversation with a boy in a long time, and yeah, maybe this is a little on the bantery side of things, but it's nice, we're not bored, we're smiling at each other, and, yeah, he's really cute. I don't think anything's going to come of this, though, and I really, really hope that doesn't mess things up with James and Bianca. The thing is that I don't know anything about biology and he doesn't know anything about . . . I don't know, there's got to be something I care about. Lesbians. I don't know.

Okay, the thing is that he just said the words “turned off,” and I dried up like an old frog.

Someone kicks my chair leg, hard, as she walks by, and I turn around and yep, that's Clara, some sophomore. Awesome. Now it—and I don't know what
it
is, but it's enough to make me squirm down to my stomach—is happening outside of school too. I guess I'm surprised it took this long. Small school, small town.

I guess some of me is surprised that it happened at all, and doesn't that just suck.

“You okay?” Mason says, and I can tell that he saw me jump but didn't see the kick.

“Fine. You're really okay with staying in Nebraska?”

“Ugh, did I really give that impression?”

“Community college, not gunning for Brentwood . . .”

“Hey, neither are you, you're just gunning for
anywhere but here
.”

“Yeah, fair.”

“Look,” he says. “At the end of the day, there's people who are staying and people who are going, and trust me, I know a fair number of each, and neither of us has a drop of
staying
in our damn blood.”

I wonder which Bianca is. I know which Rachel is. I know which Danielle was. “I guess I'm pretty transparent,” I say.

“Eh. I like you.”

“So, what if we don't get out? What if we're these people made to get out and we
don't
?”

“We explode or become alcoholics. How's your food?”

How's your food.

People don't ask me this. People count out my calories to make sure I'm eating. My mom watches me pour my six ounces of whole milk with every meal. My sister counts cookies to make sure two are missing. My mom stops herself in the middle of commenting on everything I eat—
are you really—what? Nothing, dear!

But no one asks me how my food
is
. I mean, it's delicious, this is a nice place, whatever. But now I'm staring down at it and I can't even figure out what it is. I can't taste it anymore. I can't remember it.
I can't even make out the shapes of it. It's transmogrified itself into
FOOD
. It's like what they ate in
The Sims
. It's a plate of
FOOD
.

I'm eating
FOOD
.

I'm sitting here eating it.

Shit.

This was a mistake. The date. Not eating. Eating. Letting him know my history. Letting him think I'm over it. Ordering this. Ordering anything. This was a mistake.

God, what the hell is wrong with me. It's just a
question
. What the hell am I going to do if anyone ever comments on my actual weight? I've gained a shit-ton in the past few months, am I really telling myself that no one important is ever going to mention that? That no one's
noticed
? I go to a freaking all-girls school, how long is it going to be before someone says something and fragile little Etta just breaks into fragile damn pieces? How long do I have to do this before I figure out that being this shatterable thing
isn't fucking cute
?

They've all noticed. They've all been looking at me and thinking I'm enormous and whispering to each other not to say anything.

The people in this restaurant are looking at me.

They're counting my calories.

Not in a good way.

I take a deep breath, feel it fill me, fill me all the way up. Set my fork down.

“It's good,” I say. “Thank you.”

“Course. So did you and Bianca talk about what you're going to sing . . . ?” And I have no idea what the rest of the conversation is about.

•  •  •

By the time he drops me off he's figured out that something's up. He asked me a few times and I blew him off, and people have a couple of different reactions to that, I've learned in my charming history of blowing people off, and he's one of the ones who get pissed. I like that better than self-deprecating and depressed, like Ben, so there's that.

Which isn't to say I don't feel shitty about this.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “It's not you.”

“I must have said something.”

“No, seriously. I just get all up in my head about stuff.”

He unlocks my door. “You think too much.”

“What?”

“That's, like, my diagnosis. You think too much.”

He kisses me and walks me to my door and I'm inside before I figure out what it was about that that really bothered me—I can't get a freaking doctor to diagnose me, and I go out on one date with a guy and
he thinks he can
?

I'm upstairs, breathing hard, on my phone.

“Rachel. It's me.”

Goddamn it.

“It's Etta, I need to talk to someone. It rang before it
went to voice mail, I know your phone's on, Ray. . . .”

Goddamn it.

“Can we just, can we put whatever this is on hold, I just . . . I r-really need someone to talk to, I just completely zombied my way through a whole”—
date
—“conversation because someone asked me a totally normal-person question and I think I'm slipping hard and I need you, okay—” And goddamn if Kristina hears me I'm so completely screwed and she's going to cry herself to sleep again, I need to be
fine
for her (I need to be a good role model, need to be perfectskinnyGod
no
), and I cannot call Bianca with this, I cannot call skinny little I-win-at-eating-disorders Bianca because Bianca never would have
ordered FOOD
what was I thinking shit shit shit.

“Rachel, please . . .”

Nothing.

I hang up. Call again. Nothing.

Okay. Okay. Okay.

I don't know what else to do, so I call Bianca, and trust me, I hate myself for it, I really do, because she does not need this dumped on her, I haven't seen her eat a damn bite since she had that salad over a week ago, and obviously she's had something since then, everyone eats, I remember that finding out that even real anorexics have to eat
something
was this horrible epiphany when I was eleven, like finding out fairies weren't real, so she must have eaten something but I don't have any
proof and I guess I'm believing in fairies again, whatever, but I can't put this on her. I really just can't. So why the hell am I calling her.

Stay classy, Etta.

“Hello?”

It's not Bianca.

I cling to that, to the fact that somehow fate has saved Bianca from this shit, before I even process that this is not the person I wanted to call and now I'm about to cry on the phone to who knows who.

“Etta? Hey hey hey what's wrong?” It's enough words for me to recognize the voice.

“J-James?”

“Hey, yeah.”

“Where's Bianca, is she okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, she's fine. She's stranded at the kitchen table right now, I'm waiting up here.”

“What?”

“My parents won't let her get up until she finishes a hamburger. She's been there a few hours.”

“God.”

“I was with her for a while but eventually she wanted me to leave. So . . . here I am.”

“My family doesn't think I'm sick.” That's not fair, really. I don't know what Kristina thinks. We really, really don't talk about it.

But I have to say something right now, and apparently that something is ascribing issues to myself like I just got mad at Mason for doing to me. God, I really do think too much. I didn't disagree with
that
.

James says, “Yeah, ours didn't think so for a long time either.”

“Can she eat it?”

He's quiet for too long. It's like the pause when one reporter switches to another and there's that delay when you wait for the second one to realize that it's their turn. Now back to you, James.

“No,” he says. “I don't think she can.”

And . . . I know I don't look like it. I'm really aware that I don't look like it. And I know it's not the case now, and that I'm doing, comparatively, really really well. But for some reason that's making me think now that I was never mentally where she is, and I so was. In July the Dykes got me an ice cream cake for my birthday and they knew it would be hard for me, they weren't stupid, but they cut me this tiny slice and put it in front of me and said
it's your birthday, Etta, you can give yourself a break on your birthday, right?
and it was mint chocolate chip and it looked so good and I wanted it so much and that was the thing, I
wanted
it. It wasn't a matter of not wanting to eat anymore. It wasn't a matter of pretending I wasn't hungry. I couldn't do it. I put a bit into my mouth and it melted and it tasted so good and I spit it out. I couldn't do it.
I couldn't swallow. I stared at that piece-minus-one-bite until it was brown and green sludge.

Just because I could eat it now, just because Bianca is still there, I feel like I never was.

It's the opposite of when you're there, when you're entrenched in it, and you exaggerate to yourself how deep in it you are, how sick you are, when you tell yourself you have the best little eating disorder in the world because it's the only thing that keeps you from ripping out your skin to pull out your bones and weigh them. And then you're out of it and you think,
I must have been imagining it, I couldn't have been that bad, if I were really that bad then someone would have stopped me.

Someone would have sat me down and made me eat and
worried
about me. They wouldn't have been pissed because I was wasting their damn ice cream cake.

And that's it. I'm crying.

“Hey hey hey, all right.” James's voice is deeper, suddenly, gentler. “All right, Etta. We're all right.”

“I'm sorry. Please don't tell her I called. Shit.”

“Slow down. Tell me what happened.”

“I was on a freaking . . . date, a
dinner
date, with Mason, and then he just . . . he mentioned the food and—”

“Did he say something?”

“He didn't do anything wrong, it was so normal and stupid and . . .”

“And you're upset.”

“I don't know what I think gives me any right to be around normal people.”

“You're not that weird, Etta.”

“No, I think I'm pretty weird.”

“Why?”

Why.

Huh.

“Because I'm gay. Sort of. Um. Not. Half of me is gay.”

“That's really not going to win you any weird points with me.”

“Because I'm messed up about food.”

“Have you seen who I live with?”

“Because all my friends hate me?”

“You're really grasping at straws, here.”

“Uh. Broken home? Racial minority? Short?” I'm obviously screwing around now (and calming down, this is working) but there is an answer here, there is
something
. There is something really fundamentally wrong with me, something that's keeping me from connecting with people the way that I'm supposed to. It's like all this stuff I try to fix about myself, all of these problems that I say I have, are just me trying to represent, trying to
justify
this weird broken part of me that nobody else is seeing. “There's something
bad
in me,” I say. “There's something about me that's clearly just . . .”

“Why?” he says. “Why's it clear?”

“Because if I were normal, I would feel bad about this shit
that I do and the way that I hurt people and I would be actually upset about what people at school are doing to me but, but I'm
not
. I would feel bad about the fact that I lost all of my friends, but I don't, I don't feel
anything
. I don't
feel
anything. And at least when I wasn't eating I felt
hungry.
 . . .”

“Until you didn't,” James says. “Until you didn't feel anything.”

“I don't know.”

“Etta. Honey. This recovery thing, this is new still.”

“There's something wrong with me.”

“Etta.”

“Normal people can't put themselves through what I did and just
be okay
. I'm supposed to still be suffering. I'm not supposed to be able to get better because that means it was
never that bad
.”

“No, it doesn't. It means that you're the most self-motivated, self-sufficient person I've ever even heard of. You're a . . . well, you're a really good influence for my little sister, I'll tell you that.”