I’m not fat. I was never really fat. I’m just not that thin. But about six months ago, I started dieting. Over the years, I’d gotten good at disguising my fat bits with the right outfits—I had skinny legs but a bulge around my stomach, so I could stick with tight jeans or leggings or short shorts paired with long flowy tops. It had served me well, for the most part.
But it wouldn’t work if I took my clothes off. And for the first time, it seemed like maybe someone might want to take my clothes off. And I wanted to look good. With my clothes off, that is. Even if I’d barely been so much as kissed before.
I never really understood why I was kissed so rarely. I went to the right parties and knew the right guys. I wasn’t the prettiest (or obviously, the skinniest) girl, but there were plenty of girls who were less pretty—I know that’s subjective, but I wasn’t ugly anyhow—and even heavier—that’s not subjective, that’s math—who’d been kissed more than I had.
Finally, I decided it was probably a chemical thing. Like maybe those other girls gave off more pheromones than I did. Or maybe they were just more approachable—maybe guys were less intimidated by other girls because they weren’t as pretty or thin. By which logic the super-pretty-fit girls would never get kissed, but I told myself that guys were willing to get shot down if it meant a chance at that level of hotness. Whereas I was somewhere in between—not pretty enough to be worth the risk and not plain enough to be a sure thing.
Ugh, guys are such pigs.
Anyway. I don’t throw up, like, every night. And I never throw up during the day—never at school and never in a public restroom, because, gross. I do it in my own house, in the bathroom on the second floor next to my bedroom, and I always clean up afterward: flush the toilet, scrape away any detritus, wash my hands, brush my teeth. I haven’t even lost that much weight since I started doing it. It’s really just so I can go to bed most nights with a relatively flat (that is, empty) stomach. I know they say you don’t sleep well when you’re hungry, but I sleep better that way. When I’m hungry, that ache in my belly makes me believe I can actually feel my body metabolizing what’s left inside. (I never succeed in throwing up every last bit that I’ve eaten.) It feels like it’s hard at work. It feels good.
Throwing up does not feel good. The other day, I visited an online support group for recovering bulimics—I wasn’t really sure if I was hoping to find advice that would help me stop throwing up, or tips from experts that would make throwing up easier. I felt like a total imposter just browsing through the website. Anyway, some of the girls talked about how much they missed throwing up. Like the actual physical act of it. They talked about it in practically fetishistic—is that a word?—terms: the sensation of their fingers in their mouth, their teeth rubbing the backs of their knuckles, the feeling of satisfaction when the food began to rise up through their bellies, the comforting scent of vomit.
I thought: You’ve got to be kidding me. You can’t imagine how much I wish I didn’t have to throw up. How much I wish I could just starve myself and be done with it. Or better yet, go back in time and be born one of those girls who can eat whatever she wants without gaining an ounce because it seems to me that one of life’s great injustices is that some girls can eat what they want and still look great naked while the rest of us can’t.
Isn’t that what every girl—and probably every guy too—wants? I mean, I know we’re not supposed to care, we’re supposed to work out and watch what we eat to be healthy, not to be thin, but come on. That’s another one of those things you have to pretend about, like how you have to pretend you don’t know if you’re pretty, which is a ridiculous thing to have to be modest about, when you think about it, since it’s not like you had anything to do with what you look like; it’s just luck, a trick of genetics, a trick of timing. Girls who’re considered unattractive now might have been the ideal in the nineteenth century, after all.
Anyway. So I throw up sometimes. Not enough to qualify as a real bulimic. An imposter, like I said.
I almost missed throwing up tonight because Mom wanted to linger after dinner, talk about what was going on at school. Apparently, all the parents know by now. I sat there quietly—engaging would’ve only prolonged the conversation and with each second that ticked by, more food was getting metabolized, which meant there’d be that much less left for me to vomit.
I finally ended the conversation by standing up and announcing, “Mike Parker’s just an asshole. He had us all fooled, but there’s no point in trying to make sense of it. Only an asshole would hit his girlfriend.”
I walked away without adding what I was thinking, which was: No self-respecting girl would stay with a guy who hit her. I don’t care how many times he apologizes or promises not to do it again or tells you he loves you. I may spend thirty minutes (twenty, fifteen, five—it varies) on my knees each night worshipping the porcelain god, so I’m not exactly an expert in self-respect, but even I know that.
Ten
The Girlfriend
One of the few nice things about my parents having had a particularly contentious divorce is that they never want to talk to each other. Instead, they expect me to be the go-between.
Tell your mother…
Tell your father…
Your next visit…
Your last report card…
Actually, it isn’t usually a nice thing. But now that there’s something Mom knows that Dad doesn’t know and I’ve decided I want to keep it that way, I’m newly grateful for their mutual animosity.
If my father knew about Mike, he might ask me why I didn’t go to the police. I can practically hear his voice: It’s not a principal’s job to deal with a criminal act.
Then again, in the movies, principals are always breaking up fights between kids in the cafeteria, the gymnasium, the parking lot. Cut to the next scene and a couple of boys are on the bench outside the office; one has a bloody nose and the other a black eye. So maybe, it’s exactly the sort of thing principals are used to.
Except maybe the principal gets involved because those sorts of incidents happened on the school grounds. That wouldn’t apply here. Mike never hit me at school.
And in those situations, it’s both kids fighting—I mean, maybe one of them started it and the other reacted—but me, I never fought back. Maybe I should have, but what would the point have been? Mike is nearly a foot taller than I am. He’s an athlete. He can wrap his fingers around my upper arm like a very tight bracelet.
Plus, in those movie situations, it’s usually two boys. Sometimes it’s girls, but I’ve never seen a movie where it’s a boy versus a girl. Unless the characters had superpowers or something.
My dad met Mike back when we were just friends, before the divorce, and Mike made enough of an impression that Dad remembered Mike when I said we were together. Not that I was all that excited to tell Dad I had a boyfriend, but he asked me over the phone once a couple months ago when we’d run out of things to talk about (grades, the weather, Mom’s messiness) and there was an awkward silence: “What else is going on with you? Any beaux?” he said, like I was a Southern belle or something, and this was the 1930s, not the twenty-first century.