Paperweight (8 page)

Ashley's voice: “I feel like maybe . . . your mom just couldn't admit to herself what was going on with you. Maybe it was just, like, too hard for her.” Her voice is pinched.

I force myself to look at the food again. It's even uglier now than it was before: the ice cream misshapen in the carton, the chip bag concave and shimmering with grease. At the end of the line, an unmarked brown bag. I peer inside. The smell alone is enough to make me sick.

Fried chicken.

Shrink did this on purpose. She wants to keep sending me back to that day on the porch and she doesn't get that it hurts exactly the same every time I remember. I am filled with spitting rage.

“But it's like, she's my
mother
,” Jenna says. “Mothers are supposed to take care of their kids, no matter what.”

Some other voice at the table snorts. “
Supposed
to.”

I sweep a plastic fork from the counter and stab the first piece of chicken in the bag. I fling it on the plate, already feeling the hot grease soaking through and staining my palms. If she wants to hurt me like this, fine. I don't care enough to stop her.

“Good, Stevie,” Shrink approves quietly. “You're really challenging yourself.”

I turn away from her. There's an empty seat between Jenna and Ashley, and I squeeze between them. I dump my plate on the table and wipe my palms on my jeans, leaving dark swipes on my thighs. The fat burrows between the denim fibers.

“So let's try a second bite.” Ms. Dalton circles the table. Slowly, like a shark. “Again, lift a bite from your plate. Notice
the smell. Does it smell salty, or sweet? What spices have been used to season the food?”

I drive the fork into the chicken flesh and rip a piece from the bone. I won't breathe it in. If I breathe it in, I'll break down and consume it all.

“Now place the bite on your tongue and hold it there for just a moment,” Ms. Dalton instructs. “What tastes arise for you?”

I stare at the speared meat. Purse my lips together to contain the scream.

“Give it a try, Stevie,” Shrink prods quietly behind me. “You're doing great.” There is a scream inside of me, building. Rattling my insides. I stuff it down with the chicken. When I cram the bite into my mouth, my stomach heaves, and I am back on the porch at the house on Broad. My mother has left me.

That night, it just happened naturally. I was sitting on the porch swing full of chicken and tea, and my belly kept twisting into itself and I couldn't sit still. I made it to the edge of the porch just in time. I folded over the railing and emptied myself into the earth.

Shrink pipes up behind me. “Girls, notice that you can take a bite—that you can experience this food—without overdoing it, and without dissociating; meaning that you can stay fully present in this moment.”

The air on the porch was heavy enough to crush me.

“We're so very proud of you guys for trying this,” Ms. Dalton adds. “The strength in this room is palpable.”

There is still fried animal on my tongue. I swallow it and the scream. The meat lodges in my throat and for a second I think it will stay there. Maybe it will stop my breath. Maybe the food
will actually kill me. But my body takes over and swallows again. I can feel the weighty flesh worming its way down to my gut. My stomach coils, desperate to reject it.

I whisper, “Excuse me. I need some air,” and I shove back my chair and run outside. Shrink thinks I can do this, but she's wrong. My body won't allow it. I stumble around the side of the house. Next to the stucco wall, I bow my head and my body gives it up; I don't even have to ask. I feel the familiar click, the moment when my body knows everything is going to be okay. When I'm done I kick fiery dirt over pale meat and I think,
It's like riding a bike
. Which is weird because I never learned to ride a bike. Josh crashed his and broke his arm when he was seven and I was six, and that was that.

I come around the corner, rubbing the damp from my eyes and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Finally, my insides are quiet.

“Oh.” Suddenly Ashley is standing there, wobbly and gray in the too-bright sun. “I . . . um . . . wanted to check on you. I told Anna I'd come so she could stay with the group.” Her lower lip twitches.

“Okay.”

“Stevie.” She whispers it.

I should feel something. A real girl would feel something. Scared she'll rat me out to Shrink, or pissed at her pudgy-lipped disappointment.

“Tell on me if you want.” I can't even look at her.

“What?” I can hear her pout getting deeper. “Stevie, what are you—”

“Anna. Tell her if you want. I really don't care.”

“Are you being serious right now? I was just—I wanted to see if you were okay. I want to help!”

“I'm okay. Okay?” I snap at my feet. “And I don't need your help.”

“Yeah. Okay. 'Cause you're doing such an awesome job on your own.” She stomps back into the house, letting the door slam behind her.

Thursday, July 10, 9:45 p.m.

I avoid Ashley for the rest of the day, but it doesn't matter. I can feel her disappointment clinging to me, a sticky residue that won't come clean, like dirty salt water baked into my skin. It's not that I care what she thinks. It's that she had the balls to act upset—sad, even—that I'd purged. Like she pities me. A Yellow Girl! Pitying me! I should pity her. All afternoon and through dinner and snack, I am a live wire, ready to blaze at the slightest spark. I need a drink. I need to get wasted with Eden, to forget the way only we know how, together.

When the nurses release us to the cottages at the end of the night, I take my time gathering Josh's sweatshirt and my journal and the handout on mindful eating Shrink brought me after group. I slip my meds into the pocket of my jeans and I wait
until the villa empties. The building feels strange like this, with no sick girls to give it purpose. The nurses talk and laugh a little louder without the patients here. Their life sounds make my skin squirm.

“Stevie, my friend! Anything I can do to help?” The nice male nurse (Jeff, right? Jeff.) looks up from his chart and smiles. Jeff the Nice Male Nurse is always smiling. “Need to talk to someone? I can call a therapist if you'd like.”

“Nah. Thanks, though, Jeff. Night.” I clutch my sweatshirt to my chest and get out of there fast, before he can say more nice things.

I stand in the yard until Cottage Three goes dark. Then I make my way up the hill and lean against the cold stucco. Eden's letter feels weighty in my pocket, keeping me grounded. After a few more minutes, I sneak inside. Ashley's almost-snores seep beneath the bedroom door.

I creep to my side of the room, peel off my jeans and leave them in a pile on the floor. I pull Josh's sweatshirt over my head and slide between the sheets, then flick the switch on my clip lamp and run my fingertips over the bumpy pen strokes that make my name. They are warm.

Eden's drawn a crude lightning bolt on the back flap and colored it in with neon green ink. I smile. She would never draw a heart, or scrawl
Miss you!
like everyone else on the planet.

I peel the flap so slowly. When I was little, my mother had our Christmas gifts wrapped professionally, with fat wired gold ribbon and glittery sprigs of silver holly that left fairy-dust trails in the living room until March. The unwrapping was always the
saddest part. The promise of what was inside was always better than the actual gift.

Inside the envelope, the letter is folded around a picture. A real picture, printed with sharp corners and a glossy finish. My stomach gets twisty when I see it: Eden and me, arms slung around each other in her kitchen. Grinning and red-faced, like fucked-up idiots. I have no idea when we took this.

Finally, the letter. Her handwriting is nothing like it should be; it's boxy and small, contained.

Hey, girl.

Got your message the other day. Your cell's going straight to voice mail, so I had to look up the place on my phone. Hope fat camp is everything you dreamed it would be. (Too soon?) This place sucks without you, so you'd better get your ass back here soon. It's totally dead in summer, you know? You know. Mostly I'm just hanging with the boys at night and taking this Intro to Anthro course during the day. It's decent; a gen ed requirement, plus I figured it would help me write characters better, to understand groups of people on a different level. The professor is a total fox, which never hurts. He thinks I don't see him checking me out during his slide shows of tribal women with their tits hanging out. Please.

Listen. About what you texted before you left. I know you didn't mean it. You were pissed off about having to leave and everything. I get it. But the thing is, sometimes I think you're right. I think maybe what happened that night was partly because of me. I mean, we both know I didn't kill him. But still . . . we never really talked about it, you know? Maybe when you get back, we can.

Either way, I just wanted to say that we're good, even after everything you said. When you get back I'm taking you out for a drink. Or six. Whatever you need. Just tell me. I'll take care of you, like you deserve. You know I will.

E

P.S. Write me back, bitch. I know you have nothing better to do in there.

I read the letter so many times. She's talking to me like nothing's changed, like I'm not even in this place. I'm not sure if I love her for this, or hate her for it. She has a way of doing that to me: dizzying me until I don't know which way is up. It was always that way between us, from the first seminar to the night before Dad sent me here. If only I had gotten my bearings sooner. If only I had stood firm and told her
no. No. We can't do this.
If I'd had the power to refuse her, Josh would still be alive.

“I can't stay,” I told Eden after our second seminar. We bobbed in the rocking chairs on the porch of the Stacks while the other students filtered onto the street and headed to Milo's or the Royale or the organic co-op down the block. When Drew banged through the door, his gaze slid sticky between Eden and me. “My brother would kill me.” I didn't want to bail on Josh, but I hated being home. The house on Broad was too dark, too quiet. Even with Josh and Dad and me there, the windows and doors bulged with emptiness, ready to blow.

“You didn't say anything about a brother last week.” Eden slid a cigarette between her Pepto-pink lips and propped her feet on
the porch railing. She tilted her head toward me and lifted an eyebrow, like,
This okay?
I nodded.

“Josh,” I said. “We play Scrabble every Wednesday night. And I already missed last week.” I flicked at the grayed edge of the bandage over my mother's face. The ink had ached all week.

“God, that's adorable.” She lit the cigarette, looking like a print ad for Cool in her ripped jean cutoffs and low black tank that showed off the pink lace of her bra. Her hair was gathered carelessly on top of her head. “Tell him it's for class. I need your help with this piece I'm working on, anyway.”

I closed my eyes. It was a zillion degrees outside, and I was woozy from the heat. Beads of sweat formed at my hairline and under my bra. I straightened up and pressed my knees together. The tops of my thighs smashed together and stuck there.
Stupid bitch loser
, I thought.
If you hadn't binged last week . . .

In my back pocket, my cell buzzed.

“My brother,” I told her, and rocked myself to standing. I had to grip the railing to stay upright. Maybe I'd done something right this week after all.

“I'll be upstairs when you're done,” she said, like I'd already given in. She waved me away with a chrome wisp of smoke.

“Hello?” I hurried down the steps to the street. I thought about running the steps while we talked, but he'd hear me. “Hey.”

“Hey, Sass. You okay? You sound—”

“Yeah. I'm good. What's up?” I paced.

“I just wanted to see if you wanted to grab dinner before we play,” he said. “Milo's, maybe?”

“Oh.” I froze. “I . . . Actually? Some of us are staying late to
finish up peer edits. So I'm staying at the Stacks. And, uh, we'll get food after.” Sweat poured down the greasy slope of my nose, landing salty on my upper lip.

His silence on the other end was heavy. Finally, he said, “Yeah. Okay. Just make sure you eat something, Sass. And if you're not too late, we can still play.”

“Yeah. Okay. Later.” I held the End button long enough for the screen to go dark.

Upstairs, Eden had already ordered drinks and littered the table with her seminar notebooks. The bar was starting to fill, and I let the clinking beer mugs and townie chatter relax me.

“So I'm writing these song lyrics for my friends, these guys Nic and Reid.” She slid a purple pen between her perfect teeth. “They're in a halfway decent band, and they're playing the Pit this weekend.”

I sat across from her and rolled my glass against the back of my neck before I took a sip. “Josh and I do the Pit together every year.” The Pit was short for PeachPitPalooza, an annual local music festival and our town's only cultural event, if local stoner garage bands counted as culture.

“If you want, you guys can come with me this year. The boys got me tickets to all the good acts.”

“Is one of them, like, your boyfriend or something?” I opened my throat and let my drink slide down. It was better that way.

She laughed and waved over a bartender. “Hell no. It's just, I hang out with guys most of the time. Girls can be such bitches.”

“Yeah,” I said, even though I'd never understood girls and had
no room to talk on the subject. As a kid I'd spent most of my lunchtimes and recesses watching girl clusters from afar, from the back table in the cafeteria where I read alone, or the edge of the playground. Other girls seemed to know when to laugh or how to toss their hair so it seemed like an afterthought. But no matter how long I studied them, I never understood. It felt like they were playing a game and no one had bothered to tell me the rules. It wasn't that the other girls had been mean to me, exactly. They just never seemed to know I was there. In high school, nothing had changed.

“Hey, babe,” Eden said when the bartender neared our table. He was young, with a beard and a shiny wedding ring that was either cheap or brand-new. I watched Eden's eyes catch on it. “Another round for my girl Stevie here? And I'll want one in a second.”

My girl Stevie.
I smiled into the bottom of my glass. It felt good to be someone's something.

“You got it, Eden.” The guy headed back to the bar without even looking at me. That was the thing I'd noticed about Eden—everybody knew her name, and she knew no one's. She picked her own names for other people:
doll
and
honey
and
babe
and
sugar
and other candied words she used when she couldn't be bothered.

“So I'm stuck on the bridge—total writer's block.” She slid down in her seat, and our knees touched. Neither of us moved. Her skin was warm and the perfect kind of slick. “The song's about this girl—from the point of view of a guy—and he's telling her that she doesn't have to be ashamed of her past or her flaws or whatever. That he loves her no matter what.”

“Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,” I blurted.

Her head snapped up. “That's like—”

“It's Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” I said quickly. “I didn't make it up or anything. “It's from a poem. I swirled my fingertip over the rim of my glass. “
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive. Half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow
—” I stared up at the ceiling. “I forget the rest.”

“Oh my god, that's incredible,” she said. She looked at me as if the words were mine. “Hold on.” She slid out of the booth and back in again on my side. “It's hard to hear you over there.”

Now it was our thighs and hips fused together, and I squirmed because my legs were goose-bumped and thick, and she must have been able to tell.

The bartender brought new drinks, and I drank mine fast.

“Another?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Got it.”

I should have stopped then. I was the perfect kind of drunk: Eden's face was soft and my body felt good and loose and nothing seemed particularly important. But I was greedy and wanted more. So I reached for Eden's drink and took a sip, and she let me.

“I like, relate to that poem,” I said. My words were thick. “I feel like that's why my mom left. Because there was something wrong with me or she couldn't stand to be around me or something.” I didn't mean to say it. But the booze made things that were true a little easier to say.

“Yeah,” she said. “Sometimes I look at my parents and their effing perfect marriage and I think the same thing. Like, I must seem so messed up to them.”

The room dipped, and I leaned closer to her.

“But here's the thing.” She turned toward me, her eyes blazing, living green. “People like you and me? We're
real.
So, okay, that means flawed or whatever. But wouldn't you rather be real and flawed, then some synthetic perfect girl who never really
lived
?”

I was close enough to breathe her in, to consume her sweet, smoky breath. I wanted to believe her more than anything.

“Yes,” I said, to make it true. “Yes.”

“That's why I dig you, you know?” she whispered, like we—just the two of us—were a secret the rest of the world could never hear. “You, baby girl, are
real
. I can tell. And if your own mother never saw that?” She ripped the bandage from my arm without taking her gaze from me. It burned. “Then fuck. Her.”

I copied the movements of her lips like a child, forming the words on my own. “Fuck her.” I wished my mother could see me, drunk and whispering close with this mystery of a girl.

“That's right.” She slipped one hand around the back of my neck and leaned even closer. We breathed each other in. I wanted everything about her—wanted to exist exactly as she did, wild and unapologetic, giving the world the finger.

“Here you go. Two more.”

I jumped when the bartender set down our drinks with a deliberate thud; my body flooded with shame for all the things I wanted.

Looking back now, I realize just how stupid I was then: I had
no idea that I was already losing myself in her. Disappearing into her wide electric eyes and philosophical musings and open mouth. Of course I couldn't see it. She drew me in slowly, and by the time I realized how dangerous she could be, it was too late.