Paperweight (2 page)

Friday, July 4, 2:01
P.M.

“IT'S Stevie,” I say, after Cotton Candy has made her exit but before the shrink can get it wrong. I stay pressed against the door for support—and the promise of a quick escape.

“Stevie. I'm Anna. I'll be your individual therapist during your stay here.” Shrink smiles warmly but stays put in her red armchair. She is folding a glossy yellow paper square with rapid, sure movements until it starts to take shape. She doesn't try to shake my hand or—maybe there
is
a higher power—hug me. “Officially, we won't start until tomorrow, but I heard you were getting in and wanted to say hi.” She places the half-folded paper sculpture on the side table next to her.

I nod. Her reward for Not Touching.

“Why don't you take a seat?” She gestures toward the turquoise
love seat facing her chair. On it are two round saffron pillows stitched with tiny brown beads.

I consider not moving. It wouldn't be fair to dangle obedience, then yank it away. But I'm so unbearably tired, so heavy, that I shrug and collapse on the soft cushions. At the moment of impact, I imagine I'm just like any other girl, crashing on the couch after school. I even let my fantasy self have a snack. Ice cream. No. Sugary cereal, the kind my mother always said would give me cancer.

“The first week can feel a bit overwhelming as you become oriented to treatment and the schedule here,” Shrink says. She wears loose, ripped blue jeans and a white tank top. A moss-colored cardigan obscures an enviably carved collarbone, but her thighs and ass are soft. Her feet are bare save for a turquoise toe ring. Strawberry waves are piled in a chaotic bun on top of her head. There is a peace sign tattooed on the inside of her right wrist, so we all know she does hot yoga and donates to Planned Parenthood. “Every morning with breakfast, you'll receive a printed schedule that tells you where to be, when. We build some time to relax and reflect into each day. Free time, essentially, though you'll need to stay in the villa or on the lawn.”

“So, not free, then.” I regret opening my mouth. I can't let her get to me.

“During the first week, you'll meet with everyone on your treatment team: me, your physician, your psychiatrist, and your dietician,” she continues unfazed, tucking her feet beneath her. “There will be a lot of paperwork, and some computer testing, as well as some medical tests. This is all to give us a better understanding of your needs while you're here.”

Not that I'll be here long. The Anniversary is twenty-seven days from now, exactly. If I make it that long. With any luck, I'll be gone by then. Disappeared, just like my mother before me.

“Once all that is taken care of,” Shrink continues, “we'll get you into a more regular routine. You and I will have sessions three times a week, and you'll have group therapy twice each week.”

It seems like it is time for me to shrug again.

“It's a lot to take in, I know.” When she smiles, I notice that her two front teeth overlap slightly at the bottom. “You can always ask if you have questions. Any questions right now?”

I shake my head.

“Okay.” She tilts her head slightly and nods. “So, you must be exhausted.”

No way she's a PhD with a line like that. I scan the wall to my right for any sign of a diploma, but there isn't any, probably to make me feel like she's just this girl I know and we're hanging out in her room, flipping through magazines and chatting, like,
“Would bangs look good on me? Be honest.”

And then,
“So . . . sometimes I lock myself in my bathroom and stick my toothbrush down my throat. Is that totally weird? Be honest.”

I slide my right hand across my stomach and count the ribs on the left side. Once, twice, three times. They're not as sharp as yesterday. I have to get out of here. This was such a mistake. I told Dad this was a mistake.

The shrink lifts a folder from the table next to her and scans its contents. “From your intake paperwork, it looks like you didn't have much time to prepare for . . . this. You had about a day to get ready?” The table is painted like a chessboard. On it is
one of those Zen fountains. It's loud and kind of erratic, like an elephant with prostate problems trying to pee.

“Wrong.” Now the right side. Once, twice, three times. I can hardly feel them beneath the softness. “Eight hours.”

“Wow.” She leans toward me. “And can you tell me a little bit about how that went? What got you here?”

“My dad got worried, I guess. So he called. I can't—I don't know.” It's not a lie. I really don't know how I got here. I run my middle finger down the center of my right thigh. I can feel the scar through the fabric of my jeans, withered and hard.

“Take me through what you can remember. From your point of view, not Dad's.”
Dad's
, she says. Like he's our dad, both of ours. Like our histories are the same.

“I never said I couldn't remember.” But she fixes me with a look and I know she's not giving up until I give her something. “I got home last night . . . this morning . . . and he was waiting on the couch. This love seat. Watching TV.”

“And what time was this?”

“I don't know. Three, four. Whatever time they play reruns of
Dick Van Dyke
.”

“You'd been out?”

“With Eden. My . . . this girl Eden. She drove me home.” I dig my fingernails into one of the yellow pillows. Speaking Eden's name fills my mouth with liquid rage. But she's all I have left, so I gulp it down.

When I'd gotten home, Dad was smoking in his undershirt and jeans. His mouth was open, but no sound escaped. Maybe it was the booze, but suddenly Josh was in the room with us.

“He's scared,” Josh translated. “He didn't know where you were. He never knows where you are anymore.”

“Can he tell I'm drunk?” I giggled. “Drunkity-drunk-drunk?”

“He's not a moron, Stevie.” I could feel Josh's exhaustion. “You never give him enough credit. You never give anybody enough credit.”

“Ohhh, Rooobbbb!”
Mary Tyler Moore whined on the screen.

“Listen,” I said. “Maybe you can hold the pep talk for another day? I've got a lot on my plate. There's an anniversary coming up, you know.”

“No shit.”

“I'm preparing the sacrifice,” I explained solemnly. Then, suddenly racked with laughter, I took a step toward Dad and a wailing Mary Tyler Moore. And everything went dark.

When I don't say any more, Shrink reaches for a plastic Dasani bottle at her feet. “Dad mentioned you'd passed out soon after you got home. Hit your forehead on the edge of the coffee table.” She unscrews the cap and takes a sip.

I point to the purple Italy above my eye.
Exhibit A, signorina.

“Losing consciousness . . . Was that due to your anorexia? Being malnourished? Or had you been drinking as well?”

“Both.” I bite the inside of my cheek, but I don't think it hides the smile. The urge to bolt has passed, and now I just want to close my eyes and slide into the word, soak in it until my skin's all pruney.
Anorexia
. Yes. Yes. It's like she's seeing me for the very first time.

“And does that happen a lot?”

“What?” I ask, wanting her to say it again.
Call me by my name.
“The drinking, or the passing out?”

“Both. Either.” Her outline is getting blurry around the edges, dipping from side to side.

“Sometimes.”

“And so . . . you get home, you pass out, and when you come to, what do you remember?”

“Um . . .” I close my eyes. “Pretzels or peanuts?” This part I remember: a woman with spidery lashes and orange foundation leaning over my seat with a porcelain smile and a Southern drawl.
Prayt-sels or peenuts, huun?

“The next thing you remember is being on the plane from Atlanta.”

“I didn't have any,” I say quickly.

“Any . . .”

“Pretzels or peanuts. I didn't have any.” The very thought makes my insides squirm. Again I count the ribs. This time, they are nearly indistinguishable.

“I see.” Shrink leans forward a little. “Mind if I ask what you're thinking right now?”

My eyes snap open, and suddenly I see the world with stunning clarity.

“I'm thinking I don't need to be here.” Deprivation has made me sharp, like a hawk. I know what needs to happen. I'll call Eden tonight, get her to send me a plane ticket. She'll be pissed after the text I sent before my plane took off this morning, but I'll tell her I was still drunk. Didn't mean it. Just one call, and she'll save me. Cell phones aren't allowed here, but I ducked into the bathroom when I got off the plane and stuffed my phone in my bra, along with a few twenties I swiped from Dad's wallet.

“You don't believe you're sick enough to be here,” she says.
“So if you had to put a number, one to ten, on your motivation to seek treatment, what do you think that number would be? Ten being fully motivated.”

Oh, I'm motivated. I'm motivated to do everything I need to do before the Anniversary. If she thinks she's going to stop me with hugs and head nods, she's the crazy one.

“So who would I talk to about signing myself out of this place? Like, tonight?”

Her lips part like she's going to say something. Then she closes her mouth for a second. The peeing elephant in the room is getting hard to ignore.

“I can certainly understand that finding yourself in a treatment center across the country would be overwhelming. Especially since you haven't had time to prepare.”

“I'm not overwhelmed,” I say tightly. My patience is thinning. Ha! Thinning. “I just don't belong here.”

She nods. “I know you feel that way. But, Stevie—” She locks her gaze with mine. I hadn't noticed the color of her eyes before. They're a kind of turquoise, almost identical to the couch.

“Stevie,” she says again. “Let me assure you that you do, in fact, need to be here. You are incredibly malnourished. If you don't get intensive treatment right now, you are going to die. My guess is that you may even want to die.”

Finally, we understand each other.

“So for now, I'll want you to live enough for the both of us. Maybe you could want that too, eventually.”

What I
want
is to get back on schedule. Ticktock.

“So . . . signing myself out?”

She clasps her hands together in her lap. “Since you're
seventeen, you won't be able to check yourself out. Dad would have to do that. And he's made it clear that he wants you to be here for the full sixty days. Longer, if necessary.”

My body caves like she's just knocked the wind out of me.

She's saying something else now, something about “recovery with a capital
R
.” She's probably telling me that this could be the first day of the rest of my life. That's what Dad told me on the way to the airport.

Sixty days. Her schedule is . . . inconvenient. Doesn't she know that the Anniversary is only twenty-seven days away? I've planned this day with exquisite attention to detail. Choreographed my every move—with more than a few missteps, I know—for nearly a year.

I will find a way out of here
, I tell myself. I'll call Eden, get her to buy me a ticket. Hitch a ride to the airport. Whatever I have to do to make it home in time to die. I will not betray Josh again. I will not take a single breath on the one-year anniversary of the night I killed my brother.

Friday, July 4, 8:56
P.M.

THE first hours are marked by snacks and meals I refuse, the untouched calories etched in my consciousness like complex equations. I've done the math and know approximately how much weight I'll have to lose before my heart flutters to its silent stop. Death is not an exact science, which is irritating for those of us who appreciate precision.

During dinner and again at evening snack, I am seated at a table in the villa with the other girls from Cottage Three. There are three of them, their names spoken earlier over plates of food and sweaty pitchers of iced tea. Names I will never learn. Why should I? I won't be here long. Eden will figure something out.

One of the girls is a wispy-haired brunette who eats too quickly and who has too much flesh to be an anorectic. The other is more
of a threat: a hunched blonde with a clear feeding tube that snakes from her right nostril and hooks over her ear. Her shoulder blades jut out; her bones sharp like exquisite carved marble. The third is the least worthy: a chunky girl with flushed cheeks and a mass of unrestrained white-blond curls. Not strong enough to obey the demands of hunger, she seems desperate to follow the rules here.

There are so many rules, I couldn't remember them all if I wanted to. Slow down, don't eat too fast, hurry up, don't eat too slow. No wearing sweatshirts with pockets at the table, sleeves must be pulled up to the elbows during mealtime. No food talk, no faces or noises at the food. One salt per meal, no more. Two peppers per meal, no more. No cutting food into tiny pieces. Three meals per day, three snacks per day. If meals are refused, supplement is offered. If supplement is refused, it's charted in the maroon binders on the shelves at the nurses' station.

Evening snack is ending. Frothy, anxious chatter swirls around me as the others squeeze empty yogurt containers and shred cellophane wrappers, waiting to be released. The villa's doors and the door to the one restroom won't be unlocked until the staff is sure the patients have digested every calorie.

I steal a loving glance at the red plastic hospital bracelet hanging from my wrist. Stroke it.

DESLISLE, STEPHANIE (STEVIE)

DOA: 7/4

COTTAGE THREE

I have learned that red is the color of power. Red is for the girls who aren't progressing in the program, the girls who haven't
gained weight. Yellow is for the girls who are losing ground. They've gained some of the weight their treatment team has recommended.

And green . . . green is for the defeated. The girls who tattoo the recovery symbol on one another's palms in glittery ink, the girls who swear up and down that they won't allow their issues to weigh them down. I pity the Green Girls.

“It's Stevie, right?” a voice says. Reluctantly, I look up.

The other girls have cleared their snack trays, leaving me alone with the thick blond girl. She swipes the clean inner lip of her individual peanut butter container with a wide index finger. Everything about her screams
bulimic
.

“Stevie. Yeah.” I eye the girl's wrist. Her plastic is yellow. It catches the light with her every move.

“How are you so far? The first couple days can be rough, I know.”

I blink, wondering what she wants from me.

She presses on. “I'm super excited to have a roomie. Seriously, I've been by myself since this girl Jill left, and I'm, like, dying. Teagan and Cate”—she whips her head around and lowers her voice—“they're in the other room in Cottage Three. They're super cool and everything, but they're kind of young and they seem like they have their own thing going, you know?”

I almost laugh.
Roomie.
Like it's summer camp. I focus on the cool plastic of my cell phone, pressed reassuringly against my chest. When they weighed me and hooked me up to the EKG machine like a lab rat, I tucked the phone in the soft folds of my jeans, beneath the pile of my clothes on the floor.

“Look—” I stop just short of using her name, even though there are so many to choose from.
Bulimic. Worthless. Waste.

“Ashlee.”

Perfect. She looks like the kind who spells her name with a double
e
at the end. The kind who just barely made it onto the cheerleading squad at school, on unspoken probation for the dimples in her thighs. Ash! Lee!

Before I can tell her that she's wasting her time, a male nurse claps his hands together. “Okay, girls. Nine o'clock. The cottages should be unlocked now. Have a good night.”

“Finally.” Curly Blonde shoves back her chair and ditches her trash. I follow her outside and into the yard. The icy-cold desert air surprises me. “It was getting claustrophobic in there.”

She leads me around the side of the villa and nudges me up a steep, gravelly hill. “Come on. This way.”

I hear the rhythmic heave of her step beside me, blending with the thump of my heart as we ascend the hill. Cottage Three sits at the peak. There's a small porch in the back with two rocking chairs.

“So where are you from?” she asks.

“Outside Atlanta.”

“Cool. I'm from Dallas.” She sucks in greedily, already out of breath. “What do your parents do?”

Parents.
Plural.

The gravel under my flip-flops crunches beneath my weight, an echo of a familiar sound—the crinkling of the foil-wrapped truffles my mother used to keep in an etched glass dish on her desk at work. Even as a little girl, I knew better than to take the candy from that dish. There were six truffles there, always six.
Chocolate was for clients only, against the rules for little girls like me. So much was against the rules.

I was almost never allowed to go to work with my mother. A law firm was no place for a child, she told me. I begged every summer. The office was cool and polished and still—everything she was, and everything I wanted to be. On my eighth birthday, she gave in. I packed a tote bag and followed her to a high-rise in downtown Atlanta, all steel and glass perfection. I passed the hours pretending that the glossy mahogany conference table was a ship or a cabin, making forts of dusty books from the used bookstore a few blocks from our house. Anna Karenina and Holden Caulfield and Jo March formed walls of protection around me, and I crouched behind them, breathing in their musty smell while my mother sat behind a desk, bathed in the white light of her computer screen. She wore a crisp collared shirt. She had a long, thin dancer's body and cherry lips that never faded.

She was the only female partner in her firm. Around her, people who mattered whispered words like
Washington
and
judgeship
. She had Promise. I asked her once if it made her proud, the way people talked. Promise was like a precious stone, she told me: hypnotizing, but after a while the weight of it could sink you.

“Mom?” I frowned at the open book in my lap. Flaubert. In her life before law, my mother had majored in French lit. She had promised me that one day we would travel to France, just the two of us. She would show me everything: where she attended classes at Université Paris-Sorbonne, the apartment
she rented in the Latin Quarter, the café where she finished editing her thesis.

“Mmm?” Her voice sounded from the other side of the fort.

“Does Madame Bovary love Berthe?”

“Berthe is her daughter, my love. All mothers love their little girls.”

“But it doesn't seem like she loves her.”

“Well, she's not a happy woman, Madame Bovary.”

“But can't Berthe make her happy, Mom?” I felt a tightening in my throat.

“No, sweetness. Children can't make their parents happy. It's not their job.”

There was so much I wanted to ask, but we were interrupted. She had a partners' meeting. I stayed alone in my fort as long as I could. But I was weak, even then. I snuck into her desk drawer and reached for the bag of chocolates hidden at the back. The bag was nearly full; she'd never count the truffles in the bag, right? I unwrapped the crinkled foil and crammed the soft milk chocolate spheres in my mouth. With my knees drawn to my chest and my head bowed slightly, I fit beneath her desk. There, folded into myself, a word came to me:
comfort
.

We reach the villa and Curly Blonde thrusts her hip against the door. “Door sticks sometimes, so you have to mess with it a little.”

The cottage is tiny, lined with painted cement block walls and a thin, grayish-blue carpet stretched over cement floors. There is a room on each side of the hallway; another door at the end of the hall must lead to the bathroom.

“We're in here.” CB bounds into the room on the right and flips a light switch.

The room is sparse, with two beds covered in faded navy quilts. A long, shallow closet borders one side of the room. A sliding glass door looks over the darkness.

Her bed is on the other side of the room, and her space looks like what I always imagined a girls' college dorm room to look like: black-and-white pictures of friends and colorful construction paper cards with
Ashley
(
Oh
, I think,
that spelling doesn't seem right
) written in obese bubble letters plastered to the blue sticky board over her bed. A few self-help books are stacked next to the digital alarm clock on the built-in shelf. A small stuffed dog, blue bear, and one-eared rabbit sit dutifully on the other side of the clock.

On my side, a black suitcase sits at attention at the foot of the bed.

“They unpacked for you.” CB kicks off her dirty, Sharpie-decorated Keds. “They have to do a luggage check.” She heaves her body onto the bed.

“Are you serious? What for?” My breath is shallow.
Stop.
I will not allow myself to be more than mildly irritated. All of this—the girl, the threadbare carpet, the cement walls—is temporary. I just have to wait until Eden gets me out of here.

“You know, the usual. Razors. Laxatives. Food.”

I cross the room and throw open the closet door. A few articles of clothing hang limply from the wooden rod.

“Where the hell are my clothes?” I paw through two pairs of jeans, the oversized sweatshirt that still smells like Josh if I close my eyes, three long-sleeved henleys, and my Braves T-shirt. My
running shoes are strewn at an angle on the floor, and I right them carefully, suddenly enraged.

“They probably took some of your stuff. You can't have anything that's too tight or short. Nothing with spaghetti straps, either.”

“This is bullshit.” I jerk Josh's sweatshirt from a bent wire hanger and pull it over my head.

“I know it sucks, but it's not a bad idea. It would be super triggering for me to see all these skinny girls in tiny little tops and stuff. Wouldn't it suck for you?”

My body goes hot. Of
course
it wouldn't be like that for me. I
am
one of the skinny girls! Has she not noticed? Does she not see me?

“I want my stuff back.” This is Dad's fault. My skin feels hot, then cold again, and the room goes fuzzy. My fingertips find my chest, to count the bones. I feel the cell phone in my bra.

“Trust me, it really sucks at first, but—”

“I'm going out.”

She's saying something about bed checks, but I slam the door against her words. I don't take another breath until I'm safely outside. The cold air stings my lungs. I can hear voices in the dark, girls giggling outside the villa, but no one is close enough to see. I unearth the phone and power it on.

Eden answers at the last second. In the background is the obnoxious foamy swell of frat-boy alkies and clinking glasses. I know exactly where she is.

“Heyyyy, girl! Craptown USA misses you! What's going on?” she screeches. If she's mad at me, she's too drunk to remember.

I play along, because she's drunk. And playing along when she's drunk is my specialty.

“The food sucks.” Not that I would know. I press my back against the exterior of the cottage and let my weight drag me down. “Listen. I can't talk long. I just—do you think maybe you could go over to my house and talk to my dad? He won't listen to me, but maybe if somebody else tells him this isn't a good—”

“Jaaaaaason!” Her drunken laughter makes a buzzing sound in my ear.

“It's Jaden, baby. Jaden.” A deep, gravelly voice. He breathes into the phone. “Hello? Who's this?”

“Excellent news,” I inform Jaden. “She's a horny drunk.”

I hang up. Only two bars left on the tiny battery icon in the top left corner, and I forgot to stash the charger.