Skin and Bones Read online

  The contents of the bag may have looked like dried oregano, but even a guy who’d led a pathetically sheltered life knew better than that. Lard took out a packet of Zig-Zags and brushed it off. He smoothed out the thin sheet of paper.

  Bones watched while Lard pinched and sprinkled the dried stuff with precision. He licked a seam, rolled it easily, and twisted the ends.

  “Are you crazy? Smoking that up here?”

  Lard struck a match in reply. He lit up, inhaling. The tip glowed red. A seed popped, hitting his T-shirt, burning a tiny hole. So those weren’t dots of Worcestershire sauce on his shirt after all. He held the joint out to Bones.

  “That stuff’s bad for your health,” Bones said. “It gives you the munchies.”

  “Pot is one of your basic greens,” Lard said, exhaling smoke. “It has all kinds of nutrients, even omega fatty acids. Pot, my friend, is part of the fucking food pyramid.”

  Lard snuffed the burning tip, put what was left in the bag, and offered up a mint. “Sugar-free.”

  They worked their way back through the maze of junk—barely reaching the door when it flew open. A beanpole guy with mushroom cap ears emerged in chef clothes—white shirt with two rows of black buttons and the same type of pinstripe pants Lard wore. Suddenly he was in front of them, sniffing the air. Lard threw his arms around the guy like he’d been reunited with his long lost dad. “Gumbo!”

  “Have you been smoking? I told you, if you get caught—”

  “This is Bones,” Lard said quickly. “In case you can’t tell, he’s anorexic.”

  “Pure?” Gumbo turned to study him. “Or purge?”

  “Look at his teeth.”

  Bones smiled, offering proof in enamel.

  “And no scars on his knuckles—I checked.”

  “Have they given you a job yet?” he asked Bones.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “I could use some help in the dayroom,” Gumbo said. “Setting up tables and chairs for meals, then breaking them down afterward. I can talk to Dr. Chu if you’re interested.”

  It sounded like calorie burning to Bones. “Sure, thanks.”

  With little time left before lunch, Bones decided to work in his journal. He wished he could delete the memory of that fateful day in the department store with the insensitive sales clerk.

  He flashed on the first time he’d worn his new Huskies to school. He’d been walking through the cafeteria when his plate of custard slipped off the tray. He’d knelt in the stiff knees to wipe up the mess when cross-eyed Valerie Willendorf shrieked, “Jack’s eating off the floor!”

  At first the room was quiet, in fact the space had never been so quiet, unless the principal was on duty. Then the kids fell all over each other laughing.

  “Get the dork a fork!” Valerie again.

  The rest of the year, anytime something spilled—watercolor in art class or slime during a science project—some jerk called out for Jack to lick it up. He’d heard, Hey, Jack, suck it up countless times. He only wished he’d had the guts to defend himself, gotten in their faces, and given it right back to them.

  Bones went to the dayroom hoping the pain of homework would be lessened if Eve occupied the couch. He’d just sat down, disappointed not to see her, when Unibrow rounded the corner, pushing a wheelchair occupied by a slight girl, his jowls flushed under the strain.

  The girl was connected to an IV line that ran from a clear bag on a pole clamped to the chair’s back. She wore a low cut black leotard over thin black tights. Leg warmers ran from her ankles to the top of perfectly straight thighs. Her eyes were downcast, their color a mystery.

  Bones tried to look away. But. Could. Not.

  She was as thin as a hummingbird feather and just as translucent. So frail. So incredibly delicate. He drank in the sight.

  The girl looked up and saw him staring. Her eyes were raw almonds, her freckles fine as sifted cinnamon.

  Lard sauntered in, breaking the spell. “Hey there, Alice,” he said. “I’ve been wondering when you’d show up. I’d ask how you’ve been, but that seems obvious.”

  She smiled in a way that commanded the room. “I’ve missed you too, you big tub of lard.”

  Just as suddenly, she was gone, wheeled down the hall. Bones stared at the space, swept away by perfection. He wondered where Unibrow was taking her. And when she’d be back.

  7

  The next two days passed in a blur of agonizing meals, painfully boring therapy sessions, and inane writing assignments. Bones couldn’t shake the vision of Alice in the tight-fitting leotard and tights, like a thin layer of extra sexy skin. He sat alone in the dayroom with his journal, wondering if she’d been real.

  The girl who’d been crying in therapy strolled in. Tamara? Tasha? No. Bones remembered her name was Teresa. Her makeup looked like it had been cried off. She wore a turquoise T-shirt, which she kept tugging over her voluminous butt.

  Bones tried to think of something nice to say to make up for all the mean things he’d thought about her. Truth was he’d started judging fat people long before he’d started trying to lose weight. Twisted logic, for sure.

  He tried to put himself in Teresa’s place, imagining how hard it’d be to squeeze into the hospital’s stall shower, how horrible it would be to see all that flabby flesh in the mirror. But the images required her being naked so he shrugged them off.

  Teresa picked up the TV remote and folded her overly stuffed self into an easy chair. She clashed with its sickly yellow and brown stripes. “Hardly anyone talks about shame,” she suggested, noting his journal. “Or remorse. Dr. Chu would wet himself if you wrote about that.”

  Teresa surfed the channels, finally settling on a reality show about disgustingly fat people who were looking for someone to share their life with. “The guy on the left used to have a twin brother,” she said. “But he ate him.”

  Bones laughed.

  She smiled at him and he smiled back.

  Teresa studied her reflection in the TV’s dim screen, fiddling with the safety pin in her eyebrow. It looked dull.

  She reminded Bones of a fat girl he met in a group therapy meeting a year ago. She’d been so depressed about her weight she’d quietly swallowed pills, chasing them down with Kaopectate to keep from throwing up. Her brother found her and called 911. Afterward she wore a hand-painted T-shirt to meetings to show she was learning to accept her body, More to Love.

  Bones set up folding chairs and tables for dinner before going back to his room, where he was horrified to see Lard eating cottage cheese (one-half cup, 90 calories) from the carton. Even the smell grossed him out.

  “Sharing a room with another person is hard enough!” Bones rushed to open the window. “But a person bringing food into my personal space is not okay! And I’m lactose intolerant!”

  “You can’t be allergic to smells.”

  Bones heard the empty container hit the trashcan behind him. “Tell that to the twenty-three million people with hay fever.”

  “Trying to appear tragic in an eating disorder ward is redundant.”

  When Bones leaned out the window he saw a string of twine tied to a nail below the sill. A bag of Cheese Doodles (7 ounce bag, 975 calories, 99% fat) hung from a clip on the end. Definitely contraband.

  “It could be worse, man,” Lard said. “You could have a roommate who pukes in his pillow case. “Come on, it’s time for dinner.”

  Bones felt shaky, unsteady at the thought of more food. The weight of regularly scheduled meals was so hard, and he hated other people deciding what he could and could not eat. The dayroom smelled like the burnt microwave burritos his sister bought at 7-Eleven. That and shattered hopes.

  Lard pushed by him. “Let’s sit with Eve.”

  To shake off impending doom, Bones noted that this was the first time he’d ever been invited to the popular table. Lard smoothed his hair self-consciously and chose a chair next to Eve. She wore shorts, an impressively tight T-shirt, and the type of running shoes that caused serious
wallet-cramping.

  Bones sat across from her.

  Teresa joined them. “Chu man gave me an extra ten minutes on the treadmill. What a killer.”

  That was the best news Bones had heard since checking in. “There’s a gym in the hospital?”

  “Physical therapy,” Lard said. “But you won’t start on a program until your weight’s stable.”

  “That means he’s going to force calories down you,” Eve said with obvious disgust. “I could loan you a bra for weigh-in. Stuff it with something heavy so the scales show a gain. Then maybe he won’t raise your calories so much.”

  “Why tell him that?” asked Teresa. “Look at him, he’s thin as a toothpick.”

  “I am looking at him.” Eve smiled. “He’s perfect the way he is.”

  Lard leaned back dejected, as if everything he’d learned in life was dissolving before his eyes.

  Bones sat there equally uncomfortable. There was nothing worse than having someone talk about you behind your back in front of your face. In the awkward silence that followed, Bones put on his gloves, letting the rubber snap his wrists. Eve looked at him sympathetically. “I feel your pain.”

  Another table filled up. Unibrow came in. His mustache bristled when he set down their trays, but he didn’t say anything. He never did. Sometimes, if it weren’t for his fingers gripping a mop handle or dinner trays, you wouldn’t know he was alive.

  Bones closed his eyes against the smell of decaying flesh on his plate—fear and despair for both the diner and the about-to-be dined. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the room. He was dying inside, slipping into the outer edge of a bottomless chasm. Any rush about being at the “in” table had taken leave.

  “They only gave you eight peas?” Lard eyed Bones’s plate. “I could mainline those.”

  “It’s not that I’m paranoid,” Bones said, mashing the peas into his chicken. “But I’m pretty sure the peas have been talking about me behind my back.”

  Lard snorted.

  Eve changed positions and two bumps strained against her T-shirt. She called Nancy over. “Can I have a saltshaker and some lemon wedges?”

  Nancy came back with silverware, saltshakers, and lemon wedges.

  Eve drenched her food in salt.

  Bones did the same. It was the only thing that made food remotely palatable.

  Then Eve squeezed lemon juice (1 calorie) into her water. “Lemon is a natural diuretic.” She was so smooth, so smart.

  Bones gagged down his dinner, then stormed the bathroom, flung off his clothes, and climbed on the overturned trashcan. He stared into the mirror, shrinking back. Flab, a vile four-letter word. Not part of the plan!

  His strategy was to use the shower like a sauna, cranking the handle full-force to the left. His skin burned but it wasn’t hot enough. Water should be boiling to melt fat. The stupid hospital probably controlled the thermostat.

  Bones thought he heard his sister’s voice, in the distance and fading fast. I hope you get better in there.

  8

  Lard stuck his head in the doorway. “Hang in there, man.” Bones slumped on the toilet lid, a towel tied around his waist. “They’re going to turn me into a raging Vomitus Interruptus,” he said. “I love my white teeth!”

  “No, man. You done good.”

  “Why don’t I believe you!”

  “No pain, no gain.”

  “I’ll never make it another day,” Bones said. “Not without knowing exactly how many layers of fat I’m putting on.”

  Lard shook his head. “I give up.”

  Bones stayed in the bathroom until he was so cold he had to get dressed.

  Sometime after nine thirty he and Lard settled onto their prospective concrete slabs of beds. Lard was into Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats: A Year of Deliciously Different Dinners. Bones flipped through a Weight Watchers article, “Weight Loss Dos and Don’ts.”

  The biscuit from dinner felt like a depth charge in his stomach. “How long have you known Alice?” he asked.

  “We hung out last summer,” Lard said. “Her parents check her in, she puts on a few pounds, almost looks normal. I mean normal for her, but then she goes home and bakes laxative brownies. I love her like a sister, man, but I sure don’t understand her.”

  “Does she have a boyf—” Bones couldn’t get the word out.

  “It figures you’d like her skinny ass.” Lard snorted. “Better take a cold shower because you won’t see her for a while. Not until she’s stable enough to be taken off the IV. Then you’ll see her plenty. She likes the roof.”

  “But does she—”

  “I don’t think she has a boyfriend, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Bones let himself be overwhelmed by the kind of desire he’d only seen in movies and wondered if couples really did have sex while feeding each other Lean Cuisine—lying entwined afterward, making up poetry only they could understand. He wanted to stretch out beside Alice, count her freckles, play connect the dots with his tongue.

  “…unless you count George,” Lard said.

  “George?”

  “A guy we hung out with last summer.”

  “In the program?” Bones asked.

  Lard nodded. “I still can’t figure out how he smuggled beer in here. But you don’t have to worry about him. Alice was always making fun of his man boobs.”

  Bones dropped to the floor beside his bed, ignoring the dizziness in his sixth set of push-ups. He pictured Alice—the profile of her head and nose, the sexy curve of her neck. Just then Dr. Chu’s leather loafers walked across the floor toward him.

  “What have we here?” he asked in a tone that meant trouble.

  “Bones is looking for a screw,” Lard offered up quickly.

  “It fell out of the frame of my glasses.”

  “Here it is.” Bones held up two pinched fingers and nothing else.

  Dr. Chu acted like he bought it. “How’re you doing?” he asked. “The first few days are the toughest.”

  From here, Dr. Chu’s face looked too small for his head, like his creator had run out of clay. Bones wondered what Dr. Chu would say if he told him the truth. That he’d entered the program as a pristine specimen of anorexia nervosa—but was in immediate danger of becoming a person who throws up out the window.

  “I’m okay,” Bones said.

  “People who vomit don’t lose weight in the long run,” Dr. Chu said, as if reading his mind. “Bodies adjust when they think they’re being starved.”

  Lard slammed the cover of his cookbook. “Can’t we talk about something else, like ever?”

  Dr. Chu smiled again. He seemed to have a smile for every occasion, like a rack of greeting cards. “Gentlemen, lights out was ten minutes ago. Good night and sleep tight.”

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Bones said after he left.

  “Yeah, man, they flippin’ hurt when they bite.” Lard got up and slapped off the light switch. Between the door being ajar and lights from the parking lot streaming in through the window, the room wasn’t all that dark. Bones watched Lard’s hulking mass move through the room.

  Bones slipped under the covers tossing from one cramped position to another. The sheets were too stiff and too uncomfortable for his unstable state of mind. The mattress was hard as the floor. He felt like someone had stuck pushpins in his spine.

  He finally got up and stumbled to the bathroom where he peed with taurine force. The color had lightened from Root Beer to Afternoon Lift, the herbal tea his mom drank when winding down after board meetings. Sure the last five days had been hell, but they had to have been hell for his family too. Bones knew no one at his house was sleeping.

  Bones went back to bed. With the lights out the racket in the corridor seemed louder. He recognized Nancy’s voice and a deep male voice. Then he heard a weird noise. EE—UUU—RRRR—ACK! It sounded like someone was throwing up. No, more like someone was knocking down a brick wall with vomit. “Lard? Did you hear that?”

  Lard grumbl
ed irritably. “What do you think?”

  “Who do you think it is?”

  “Who cares?”

  Bones didn’t really care, though he guessed it was Elsie. “What room will they put Alice in?”

  “Her parents pay for a private room,” Lard said. “The one next to us is empty.”

  Bones liked the sound of that.

  “But that’s just a guess, man.”

  “You’ll think this is a little weird, but you know what I thought when I saw her? I imagined us in our very own tenth floor apartment. No elevator. Medicine balls instead of chairs. A futon, silk sheets.”

  “I can picture it, man. A living room furnished with weights, his and hers stationary bikes, a treadmill with a high-torque motor, electronic programming, and heart-rate monitor. Jog to fitness in the comfort of your own home!”

  “And forget about a stove or refrigerator. We’ll just have a wheelbarrow filled with my go-to M&M’s. Digital scales strewn across the carpet, stepping stones of accomplishment.”

  Lard snorted. “Your bathroom will be stocked with over-the-counter laxatives. Liquids, tablets, wafers, gums, chocolate, herbal. Powders that dissolve instantly in water.”

  Bones laughed then turned serious. “Eve told me she’s leaving.”

  “Yep.”

  “You don’t sound very upset.”

  “I hope she never comes back,” Lard said simply. “If that means she’s getting better.”

  “It has to mean that, right? Otherwise why would she be going home?”

  “She’s over twenty-one, man,” Lard said. “She can check out anytime she wants—”

  “But she can never leave.”

  “Very funny.”

  Even though Bones had just met Eve, he knew he’d miss her.

  Lard made a noise and Bones figured he was about to impart additional words of wisdom when the walls began to shake in a cacophony of snores. Bones sat up, felt under his pillow for his flashlight, and aimed the light on a blank page in his journal, thinking about his family and everything he’d put them through.