I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had anything besides fruits and vegetables. Maybe I could switch out that day for the next one on the diet. Thursday could be my fasting day and maybe a gyro wouldn’t count because Chris and I never ate at a food court. Only in his car or on the swings of the abandoned park or at the picnic table behind the convenience store.
“Theo?”
I pinched myself again when Phil said my name. Harder, to make sure I wasn’t cheating myself. But everything started to get fuzzy. The sounds from the food court grew louder, like they were living inside me, and Phil’s voice got smaller. I was dizzy and warm. My whole body, then the warmth rushed to the tips of my ears. My ears were on fire. I think Phil touched my arm then, kind of shook me to make sure I was okay, but I was too far gone.
I kept staring at the rotating meat and I had to think of something to keep my mind off of how delicious it would taste, so I pictured a lamb impaled on the spit instead. White and fluffy and adorable with big, long-lashed eyes, but still my stomach moaned, so I imagined the man behind the counter slaughtering the lamb with a sharp, shiny butcher knife and I hit the floor when I saw blood.
Phil ratted me out.
Not that night. Not right away. After I’d finished convincing the mall employees that I was simply exhausted from the heat, that all I’d needed was water and a few minutes to sit down, I had to work on Phil. I pleaded with him to not tell his mother. I talked him into a matinee of the new Wes Anderson, told him that the air-conditioning would make me feel better.
I don’t think either of us knew anything about the movie by the time it ended. Phil spent as much time looking at me as he did the screen, and I was sucking hard on ice chips, pretending I hadn’t just scared the shit out of everyone—myself, most of all. I’d been really weak on the new diet, but it was working. I’d already lost two pounds, so I’d powered through it. But fainting? I’d never fainted in my life.
Luckily no one I knew had been around. A miracle in itself, possible only because Ashland Hills doesn’t have a proper mall and we had to go to the next town over. But what if it happened again? That’s not something I could explain away. If anyone else found out I’d fainted, they’d surely connect the two and take me to a doctor and everything I’d worked so hard for would be ruined.
As soon as the credits began rolling and the lights came on, I’d turned to Phil and clutched his arm in a death grip.
“You can’t tell.”
“Jesus, Theo. That hurts.” He’d yanked his arm out of my hand. Then, “What are you talking about?”
“You know . . . What happened today.” I dug my fingers into the plush armrest instead.
“Theo—”
“You can’t tell, Phil. It was an honest mistake. I forgot to eat breakfast and it’s a thousand degrees outside and it was a mistake, okay?”
“You already said that.” His eyes narrowed as he looked at me and toyed with the sleeve of his vintage Jethro Tull T-shirt. His love for old British rock bands was unrivaled at the time.
“Because you have to believe me.”
“How do you forget to eat?” Phil frowned so deeply at me then that if his mother had been there she would have warned him that his face might stay that way.
“Phil, please. If you tell my parents they’ll get pissed and we’ll have to have another meeting with Marisa.” I squeezed the armrest to hide how badly my fingers were shaking.
“Another meeting?”
Shit shit shit.
If I’d been paying better attention the next evening, I would have realized Phil had every intention of telling. He came over for dinner and he was overly polite, even with me. Like always, he helped my father with the dishes while Mom and I wiped down the dining room table. And I was stupid not to suspect anything while they were alone together. Or when Phil looked into my eyes a bit too long before he stepped out the front door. He was trying to tell me right then and there that he was sorry for what he had done.
I was too tired to notice. I was too fucking tired of everything. Of pretending to eat, and pretending to be okay with the fact that my friend was still missing and my boyfriend had left me. Of pinching myself till I left plum-colored bruises. I was tired of pretending that I was as strong as the girls on the pro-ana boards: StikPrincess and Dyin2BThinnn and PaperGurl. None of them ever talked about fainting. None of them were sitting there in the second week of their rainbow diet nibbling on a chicken kebab because they were too tired and too dumb to figure a way out of the meal. Thursday was my red day. My dinner was supposed to be half a red pepper, not half a red pepper with fattening meat attached to either side. Or was Thursday orange? I was too tired to get up and check my computer.
It didn’t matter. The damage was already done.
My parents didn’t know what else to do with me. I hadn’t ever been in any real trouble up until then. I was a solid B student, fully dedicated to ballet, and more than capable of taking care of myself in the hours they couldn’t be with me. When they realized how little they’d actually seen me eat in the past couple of months and how worried Marisa and Phil were, they freaked out and sent me away while they tried to figure out where they went wrong.
Because they’d talked to me about Donovan. A lot. They made sure I knew that the case wasn’t closed just because he hadn’t turned up yet. They asked how I was feeling. Constantly. And if they thought I was spending too much time alone, Phil would magically show up at the door, asking if I wanted to go to the pool or see a movie or come over for lunch.
Maybe if I were a better person I would have told them about Chris. But every time I wanted to pick up a pen to confess it all in a letter or tell them in one of the two phone calls I was allowed each week at Juniper Hill, I stopped. I backtracked. I remembered what Chris said, that no one would understand what we had. That we hadn’t known each other very long but our love was irreplaceable and true. He said what we had was special and if anyone else found out they’d try to ruin it for us.
I had seen the look on Donovan’s face when he found us behind the store. I believed Chris. Even after he left me without saying goodbye, I believed him.
Phil wrote me letters. One for each week I was in Wisconsin. The old-fashioned kind, with paper and an envelope. I never wrote him back.
But I read every single note. They didn’t say anything important. He spent the first three apologizing and explaining how worried he’d been, how he didn’t think he had any other choice. The next few were about his summer and those letters are evidence that Phil is a hell of a lot more boring when I’m not around.
I kept them all. In a box at the back of my closet with the articles about Donovan. My parents were especially sneaky back then, and the newspapers would go missing in our house almost as soon as they landed on the front doorstep. But I could still use a computer, so I printed them out and paper-clipped them together under the only thing I have from Chris: a dried daisy.
He’d get them from the store. They were two-day-old flowers, discounted to almost nothing. I didn’t care. We’d be driving out to the park, and when I turned my head to look out the window, a single daisy would appear on my lap. I looked past the curling petals and drying stems because two-day-old flowers were still beautiful in their own way. They were extra-beautiful to me, because no one had ever given me flowers besides my father.