Wintergirls Read online

  “Emma, look at me.” How did Jennifer’s voice sneak into my throat? “Why don’t you want me to get out of the car?”

  She kicks the gravel. Tiny stones bounce up and ding the paint on my door.

  “Coach asked me if it was true you had cancer.” She kicks again. “’Cause he heard you were in the hospital and . . . you know. I said yes.” Whistles blow on the field. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I understand. Don’t worry about it.”

  The ball slips out of her hands and rolls toward the field. “You’re not mad at me?”

  “I can never be mad at you, silly.”

  She finally looks up. “Thanks, Lia.”

  “And you’re right, I have a ton of homework.” I start the engine. “My teachers will love you for making me deal with it. See you later?”

  She smiles. “Okay. I think there are some chips left, if you’re hungry.”

  I roll up the window.

  I wish I had cancer.

  I will burn in hell for that, but it’s true.

  008.00

  The air at the gas station is heavy with diesel and the smell of rancid deep-fryer fat from the McDonald’s next door. Five days ago I weighed 101.30 pounds. I had to eat at Thanksgiving (vultures all around the table), but since then it’s been mostly water and rice cakes.I stick three pieces of gum in my mouth, throw out Emma’s potato chips, and fill the tank. I am disgusting.

  ... The first time they admitted me, I was black and blue and purple and red because I passed out and hit the car in front of us while Cassie screamed and the steering wheel exploded. This body weighed 093.00 pounds.

  My roommate atNew Seasons was a long, withered zucchini who cried in bed and let the snot run down the sides of her face. Everybody on the staff was whale-sized and sweaty. The nurse who handed out meds was so fat her skin was stretched tight. If she moved too fast, it would rip open and her yellow stuffing would spill out, ruining her Disney World sweatshirt.

  I bit the days off in rows, corn kernels that popped in my mouth and wedged between my teeth. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Again. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Again.

  I was a good girl because I didn’t poke holes in my skin (scars noted) or write depressing poetry (journals checked while we were in session) and I ate and ate. They stuffed me like a pink little piggy ready for market. They killed me with mushy apples and pasta worms and little cakes that marched out of the oven and lay down to be frosted. I bit, chewed, swallowed day after day and lied, lied, lied. (Who wants to recover? It took me years to get that tiny. I wasn’t sick; I was strong.) But staying strong would keep me locked up. The only way out was to shove in food until I waddled.

  I hawked up crap from the back of my throat about feelings and issues and my thighs. The docs nodded and gave me stickers for my honesty. Four weeks later, the gates opened.Dr. Marrigan drove meto her house and we pretended none of it ever happened, except for the meal plans and the rules and the appointments and the scales and the hurricane of my mother’s disappointment.

  Cassie understood. She listened to everything that happened and she told me I was brave. . . .

  I pull into the garage, brain dripping with gasoline fumes. I don’t remember driving home. One of these days I’m going to walk into the house and the news guy on TV will be reporting a hit-and-run that just happened downtown. The camera will show blood and broken glass on the sidewalk. A reporter will interview a sobbing woman who saw the accident in front of the department store on Bartlett Street. I’ll have a funny taste in my mouth because I’ll be holding a shopping bag from that store in my hand. I will run back to the garage and find the dead body of a woman stuck in my windshield, blood everywhere.

  This kind of thing can happen.

  I get out and check the whole car—check the doors, hood, bumpers, lights, front grill, and trunk to make sure I didn’t get into an accident without noticing. No broken lights or dented doors. No dead ladies in the windshield. Not today.

  009.00

  I head straight for the refrigerator and pull out the leftover Thanksgiving stuffing.

  . . . When I was a real girl, Thanksgiving was at Nanna Marrigan’s house in Maine, or Grandma Overbrook’s in Boston. At Nanna’s we ate oyster stuffing. At Grandma’s it was chestnut and sausage. Nanna liked her pumpkin pie on a cinnamon-pecan crust. Grandma’s pies had to be mincemeat because that’s what her grandmother did. The tables were crowded with tall people reaching for bowls of food and talking too loud; cousins and great-uncles and friends from far away. The smell of gravy and onions made my parents forget to fight, the taste of cranberries reminded them how to laugh. My grandmothers were going to live forever, and Thanksgiving would always be lace tablecloths, thin china, and heavy silver that I stood on a stool to polish.

  They died.

  Last week’s Thanksgiving was artificially sweetened, enriched with tense preservatives, and wrapped in plastic. Dad’s sisters don’t come anymore because it’s too far. Jennifer’s family goes to her brother’s because he has more bedrooms.Dr. Marrigan probably ate at her desk, or took a symbolic scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy in the hospital cafeteria.)

  We were us four, plus two of my father’s grad students. One was a vegan; she ate three helpings of yams and most of the pumpkin bread that she brought. The guy was from Los Angeles. He said he was fasting because Thanksgiving honors the genocide of America’s native peoples. After they left, Emma asked Dad why the fasting guy came at all. Dad said he was sucking up to get a letter of recommendation. Jennifer said she hoped he choked on it.

  I dump some of Jennifer’s stuffing on a plate, drop a couple spoonfuls on the floor for the cats, then squish ketchup on top and heat it in the microwave long enough for the ketchup to splatter all over. I leave the microwave door hanging open so the smell pollutes the kitchen.

  Check the clock. Ten minutes.

  I dab a little ketchup at the corners of my mouth, scrape the entire mess into the garbage disposal, turn on the hot water, and flick the switch. While the disposal is running, I try to detour my mind—recite the Constitution, list the presidents in order, remember the names of the seven dwarfs—I can’t stop thinking that

  she called me.

  I close the microwave. Carry the dirty plate and fork to the family room, where I put them on an end table.

  Seven minutes.

  I really do have to eat.

  she called me thirty-three times.

  One large rice cake = 35. Top it with one teaspoon of spicy mustard and you add 5. Two teaspoons = 10. Rice cakes with hot sauce are better. You eat and are punished in the same bite. Jennifer doesn’t buy hot sauce anymore. Two rice cakes, four teaspoons of mustard = 90.

  I wish I was a puker. I try and try and try, but I can’t do it. The smell freaks me out and my throat closes and I just can’t.

  1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.

  20.21.22.23.24.25.26.27.28.29.30.31.32.33.

  Jennifer comes home and asks me to put my plate in the dishwasher and clean up the mess I made in the microwave. I apologize and do what she asks while she struggles to open a slippery bottle of cold Chardonnay. When I’m halfway up the stairs, Emma bursts through the front door, soccer uniform dirty, cheeks red.

  “I almost scored a goal!” she shouts.

  “Awesome,” I say.

  “You want to kick the ball with me now?”

  Too many ropes pulling me down into the ground. “I can’t, Emmakins. I’m buried. Besides, it’s already dark. Tomorrow, okay?”

  The edges of her smile crumble. I pull myself up the rest of the stairs.

  Close the door. Close the door.

  My knitting basket is one of the few things I bothered to unpack when I moved here. I sit on the edge of my bed and dig into it, past the never-ending scarf/blanket project, past mateless needles and woolly balls of orange and brown and red, to the magic bottle of blush-colored Emergency Only pills. Cassie got them for me,
but she wouldn’t say where they came from. I take one, only one.

  Plastic stars wait on the cold ceiling, watching the light switch, nervous, ready for the dark and their cue to glow. This girl has Physics homework. This girl has a paper on genocide to write and last week’s Trig problems, and a makeup quiz about literary devices in some stupid story.

  This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

  When Dad comes home, the microwave heats his supper. More wine is poured. Jennifer tells Emma that it’s past her bedtime. I turn page after quiet page, but I’ve stopped seeing the letters, stopped understanding the words.

  His footsteps on the stairs.

  I arrange my face in the middle of the book, my hair spread like seaweed floating in the current of the story that sweeps me under and away to sleep. I drape a loose hand over the edge of the bed.

  No, better not. I pull the hand back in.

  His footsteps in the hall. Door opens.

  “Lia?”

  Lia is not available. Please leave a message when you hear the beep.

  she called me thirty-three times.

  “Lia? Are you awake?”

  Jennifer uses the cranky-Mommy voice to tell Emma “for the last time get up those stairs.” Emma’s answer is too quiet to be heard.

  Dad sits on the edge of my bed. He brushes the hair off my face, leans forward, and kisses my forehead. He smells like leftovers and wine.

  “Lia?”

  Go away. Lia needs to sleep for one hundred years in a locked glass box. The people who know where the key is hidden will die and she’ll finally get some rest.

  He lifts my head and slides the book out from under it. I open one eye a slit and watch through the spiky lashes. He marks my place by bending a corner of the page, then reads the stuff on the back. Above his collar, the skin jumps, the blood rushing to feed his giant brain.

  My father is a history professor, the Great and Powerful Expert about the American Revolution. He’s won a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and a job consulting on a cable news show. The White House invites him for dinner so often that he owns a tuxedo. He has played squash with two vice presidents and a secretary of defense. He knows how we became who we are today and where we should go from here. My teachers tell me I should feel lucky to have a father like this. Maybe if I didn’t hate history, I would.

  “Lia? I know you’re awake. We need to talk.”

  I stop breathing.

  “I’m sorry about Cassie, honey.”

  The glass around me crackles. Cassie called me before she died. She called and called and called and waited for me to pick up.

  1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.

  20.21.22.23.24.25.26.27.28.29.30.31.32.33.

  My father smoothes my hair again. “Thank God you’re safe.”

  Fracture lines etch the surface of the glass box as if a body fell from the sky and landed on it. He doesn’t hear the impact, can’t smell the blood.

  He takes a deep breath and pats my shoulder hidden under the comforter. “We’ll talk later,” he lies.

  We never talk. We just pretend to think about talking, and we mention from time to time that one of these days, we really should sit down and talk. It’ll never happen.

  The bed creaks as he stands. He turns off the light on the nightstand and crosses the room in the dim glow of the plastic galaxy glued overhead. The snick of the tongue of the catch finding its place in the door frame releases me.

  I roll to face the wall. Shards of glass race for my heart because Cassie is dead and cold. She died in the Gateway Motel and it is my fault. Not the magazines or the Web sites, or the knife-tongue girls in the locker room, or the neck-sucking boys on the back porch. Not her coaches or directors or counselors or the inventors of size 0 and 00. Not even her mother or her father. i didn’t answer.

  010.00

  . . .When I was a real girl, my best friend was named Cassandra Jane Parrish. She moved in the winter of third grade. I sat with my chin on the windowsill and stared across the street as they unloaded the moving van. A guy carried out a kid-sized bike and a pink plastic dollhouse. I crossed my fingers. Our development was still raw, mostly unfinished skeleton houses and freezing pits of mud. I was dying for somebody my age to play with.

  My babysitter walked me and a pot of coffee across to meet the new people. The house was exactly like ours only flipped backwards, with the same smell of new paint and clean carpets. The mom, Mrs. Parrish, looked old enough to be a grandmother. She had blue eyes that stayed wide open all the time, like she was surprised by everything she saw. The babysitter introduced me and explained about my parents and their million-hour-a-week jobs. Mrs. Parrish called upstairs to her daughter. Cassandra Jane shouted back that she was never coming out of her room.

  “Go on up, dear,” Mrs. Parrish said to me. “I know she wants a friend.”

  Cassie was unpacking a box of paperbacks. When she stood up, she was a head taller than me with long blonde hair that curlicued down her back. At first she wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t even look me in the eye, but she let me hold her mouse, Pinky. His beating heart vibrated against my fingertips.

  Her room was the same size and shape as mine, but filled with different stuff: a canopy bed fringed with lace curtains, the dollhouse marked with black crayon scribbles, a tall, skinny mirror that stood by itself in the corner, and a bookcase that didn’t look big enough to hold all those boxes of books. She showed me her antique dolls and plastic horse collection, and best of all, a real treasure chest that had rubies and gold and a piece of green sea-glass born in the heart of a volcano.

  I told her that sea-glass came from the ocean.

  “This is different,” she said. “It’s ‘see-glass,’ like seeing with your eyes. If you look through it when the stars line up right, you can see your future.”

  “Oh,” I said, reaching for it.

  “But not today.” She put the see-glass away and locked the treasure chest. I saw where she hid the key.

  We sat down with a box between us and started unpacking. As I handed her book after book, we compared favorite series and authors and then movies and TV shows and music that we pretended to listen to, even though it was way too old for us. When Mrs. Parrish and my babysitter came in, Cassie put her arm around my shoulder.

  “It’s fate,” she told her mom. “We were meant to be friends.”

  Mrs. Parrish smiled. “I told you things would be fine here.”

  Cassie’s dad was our new principal, hired from upstate after the old one had a stroke. Her mom became our Girl Scout troop leader and the volunteer who chaperoned field trips and sewed costumes for the school play. She invited my mother over for cards and scrapbooking parties and book club meetings, but Mom was too busy transplanting hearts. Mr. Parrish didn’t play squash; my dad didn’t golf, so that was that.

  Cassie was a little moody, but I got used to it. I slept over at her house almost every weekend, but she never slept at mine. She wouldn’t talk about her sleepwalking or the temper tantrums that exploded when her mother nagged her or her father made her do her chores over again.

  Once I heard her mother talking to my babysitter about something bad that had happened in their old neighborhood, something with a boy. I asked Cassie about it. She said I was trying to hurt her feelings and she hated me and we weren’t friends anymore. I sat on my front steps, reading A Wrinkle in Time and gnawing on the end of my ponytail, until she came back an hour later, like nothing had happened, and asked me to ride bikes with her.

  Every afternoon in the summer we’d crawl into my tree house to read armloads of books filled with great quests and dangerous adventures. I made swords out of branches, sharpening the tips with a steak knife stolen from the kitchen. Cassie picked poisonous
berries and cut a rose from her mother’s garden. We smeared the berries on our faces and pricked our fingers on a thorn. We swore sacred oaths to be strong and to save the planet and to be friends forever.

  She taught me how to play solitaire. I taught her how to play hearts.

  In the spring of fifth grade, the boob fairy arrived with her wand and smacked Cassie wicked hard. She became the first girl in our class to really need a bra. The boys stared and snickered. The glittering girls, the ones with split tongues and pinchy fingers, whispered. I was secretly glad for my skinny chest and undershirts.

  The boys tried out their dirty words and crude comments on her for weeks. Cassie pretended she didn’t hear them, but I knew. Things boiled over in the lunch line on a Friday. Thatcher Greyson snapped the back of Cassie’s bra so hard everybody heard it. She whirled around, pushed him to the ground, jumped on him, and started pounding. By the time the aides pulled her off, he had a black eye and a bloody nose.

  Thatcher went to the nurse. Cassie was sent to Mr. Parrish’s office because he was the principal and her dad at the same time. He yelled at her so loud you could hear it in the hall, and then he sent her and Thatcher home for the day. The rest of us spent the afternoon writing essays about tolerance and kindness. This pissed off the glittering girls, who said it was all her fault.

  On Monday, the girls declared that Cassie was a dyke lesbo and threw her out of the tribe. I didn’t know what a dyke lesbo was, but it did not sound good. I chewed on the eraser end of my pencil and didn’t talk to Cassie all day. She sat alone at lunch on Tuesday. Played alone at recess. Instead of taking the bus, she drove home with her mom.