Reasons to Be Happy (6 page)

“I thought this was a serious film,” Aunt Izzy had said when she heard it was about vampires.

“It is,” Mom said, sounding like she was defending Dad.

Mom had been lying in bed, and Aunt Izzy was painting Mom’s toenails bright scarlet. Izzy started telling stories from when she and Mom were kids. My grandparents had passed away when I was really little, so I loved those stories about Mom’s childhood, because there weren’t many sources for me to get them from, and I was hungry for every single detail about my mother I could get. I think that’s the day it finally hit me that I was going to lose her, that she really, truly was going to die and I wouldn’t have her anymore. As Aunt Izzy and Mom told stories, I sat cross-legged on the floor in the bedroom, trying to soak up every word.

“I’ve always loved vampires,” Mom said. I’d never known that. I loved vampires too. “When I was young,” she said, “I wanted to
be
a vampire.” She turned her bald head to me and smiled. “I read
Dracula
and
Salem’s Lot
. I read every book and story I could find with vampires in it. I used to leave my window open at night, and I’d take out the screen, hoping a vampire would come in my window and make me a vampire too.”

“No vampires ever came,” Aunt Izzy said, her nose close to Mom’s toes. “But one night a possum came in through that window and your grandma was pretty darn mad at your mom.”

I giggled. “What happened?”

Aunt Izzy grinned as she kept polishing. “This possum was sitting on the couch, hissing at everyone in the morning. All three of our worthless dogs were cowering by the front door.”

“How’d you get it out?”

“Your grandma chased it off, whacking it with a broom,” Aunt Izzy said, laughing. “And after that, she’d check your mom’s windows every night.”

“Why did you want to be a vampire?” I asked her.

Aunt Izzy lifted her head from Mom’s toes. “You are amazing,” she said to me. “Do you know I never once asked that question? Even after the possum. I never stopped to ask
why
.”

“Hmm,” my mom murmured. She ran a hand over her patchy head, tucking her nonexistent hair behind her ear. “I wanted to live forever,” she whispered.

I stopped breathing. Her words ached inside me like I’d pressed on a bruise.

“There are so many things I want to do and see, and even back then I worried I’d run out of time,” Mom said. “If I were immortal, I’d have forever to explore and try everything I wanted.”

I’d fought really hard not to cry.

Aunt Izzy had cried, though, her tears dripping down onto Mom’s new red toenails.

“You certainly didn’t want to live forever,” Mom said, in a joking tone, trying to make Aunt Izzy laugh. “There I was, trying to attain immortal life, and you seemed determined to speed yours to a hasty end.”

Aunt Izzy smiled, kind of sad. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Mom lifted a foot and tried to wipe a tear that hung from the corner of Aunt Izzy’s mouth with her toe. Her polish wasn’t dry, though, and she’d left a red streak, like blood.

I thought about that conversation now. No way did I want to live forever. I didn’t even want to live
right
now
. It would be cool to be a vampire, though, because if your life sucked as bad as mine did (ha ha, no pun intended), you could just walk out to meet the sunshine and end it all.

I pulled the bag of Ho Hos back to me.

I skimmed the article about my dad. All the usual stuff about his movie credits. All the usual stuff about Aunt Izzy’s first documentary winning an Academy Award, the usual stuff about Dad drinking too much, getting arrested before I was born. I got sick of reading the same thing over and over again. I always liked to see if there was anything about me or Mom.

Sure enough, there it was, how he met Mom on the set of their first movie together. How she inspired him to stop drinking. How when she got pregnant (Me! That was me!), he went to rehab because he didn’t want to mess anything up with me.

But then…the article talked about Mom’s cancer. There was a picture of Mom looking all skinny with her big alien eyes and fuzzy head. It made the baloney go cold again.

So did the pictures from her funeral. I knew paparazzi followed Dad all over the place, but they’d been at the
funeral?
No way. There were two pictures with me in them, with my swelled up cheeks, punched eyes, and dark teeth. Great. Photographic evidence that beautiful Annabeth Anderson and gorgeous Caleb Carlisle’s daughter was a huge, fat, hideous beast. I hated the photographers. I thought about that day; it’d been horrible enough without them. I didn’t want to know that someone else was there. It felt like someone seeing something really private, like they’d spied on me in the bathroom.

“So,” Dad said, there in the kitchen, “are you going to talk to me about the stealing?”

“I said I was sorry!” I tried to scream. My throat felt scalded. The tears spilled over in my eyes. I tossed the magazine down on the counter. It landed face down in some lime juice.

Dad turned the magazine over. That little photo of his face was all wet. Some lime pulp stuck to the corner of his left eye.

He wiped his own photo with his fingertips. He looked down at his picture and said, “Listen, your spring break is coming up. You think you’d like to go out to Ohio? Stay with your aunt?”

“You just want to get rid of me! You hate me! You think I’m fat and ugly!”

Dad
closed
his
eyes!
I couldn’t believe it. He shut his eyes like I was annoying him.

Fine. While he had his eyes closed, I grabbed that Ho Hos bag and ran up the stairs. I shut my door, then moved the desk in front of it. Dad couldn’t stop me now. Nobody could. If Mom came back, I might be normal. If she hadn’t known this horrible thing about me, maybe she wouldn’t have died. If Dad quit drinking and everything was like it used to be, I could stop this.

But I knew there was no stopping me now. My stalker of a Secret Remedy was in control.

I unzipped my jeans and yanked out the packet of lunch meat. I clawed at it, ripping it finally with my teeth. I pulled three slices out of the pack, wadded them in a ball and shoved it in my mouth.
Slow
down, slow down
, I warned myself, terrified of how I nearly choked one night, how I had to do the Heimlich on my chair after my eyes filled up with black dots. That panicked me so bad I swore I’d never do it again. That was two days before. I’d done it twice since then. Once already that morning, before Dad finally emerged from his room.

My eyes watered as I pictured myself in my cafeteria job: hiding in the corner of the school kitchen, standing over the trash can, shoveling other people’s leftovers into my mouth: bitten-into pizza crusts, tater tots, the corn and lima beans everyone left behind. I guzzled the remains of milkshakes, I licked plates clean of mashed potatoes, I scraped the pretzel cheese off the wax paper with my teeth. I devoured the fries no one else ate—the gray ones, the burnt ones, the weird tiny withered ones. I stood there in my hairnet and ate their trash like some dog.

I pulled another wad of baloney from the packet with my teeth. Saltiness registered on my tongue but by that point it was mostly texture, motion. Another slice shoved in. The packet had juice, water from the meat that I slurped off the plastic. I pulled out the candy bar, soft and mushy. I ripped it open and gnawed it off the wrapper, chewing baloney and chocolate together in my mouth. Then, the rest of the Ho Hos. A rhythm of

rip open,

shove in,

chew,

swallow,

rip open,

shove in,

chew,

swallow,

rip open,

shove in,

chew,

swallow.

I chugged half the bottle of water, then crawled to my drawer, my secret stash. What this drawer held could be the end, all I had. I’d eaten everything I’d stolen from our kitchen freezer earlier, all those Tupperware containers of peanut chicken, coconut soup, and pasta salads that the cleaning lady had packed up and put away after the funeral. All the boxes of fancy soups, rolls of crackers, and jars of pesto I’d snuck from our pathetic cupboards. The mustard, the maple syrup, the chocolate sauce. I knew I should ration, but I knew I wouldn’t. Once a binge began, I would eat every last scrap. I opened the drawer and devoured a loaf of bread, a pack of pudding cups, a box of oatmeal cream pies.

Finally, it happened.

Like a motor coming on, like a switch. The trance. I closed my eyes. I didn’t need to see. I didn’t taste. I didn’t feel texture.

I
didn’t feel anything.

• • •

The knocking jerked me out of my stupor. Laila’s voice at my door, barricaded by my desk. “Hannah? Dinner’s ready.”

I panted. Tears leaked down my face.

I ran my tongue around my mouth, then cleared my throat. “I-I’m not hungry.”

“Are you okay, hon?” she asked. “Your dad said you argued.”

“I’m fine,” I croaked. “Thanks. I-I’m just not hungry. I feel kind of sick.”

“You let me know if you need anything. I hope you’ll come down later.”

After a moment, I called, “Laila?” but she didn’t answer. She’d gone away.
Good
.

My stomach groaned, bloated and miserable, with all those Ho Hos, baloney slices, and cupcakes sloshing around.
Cupcakes
.

The
blue
icing!

I’d better hurry. I gathered the empty bread bag, the pudding cups, all the wrappers and shoved them under the bed.

I made sure the room looked fine, and only then did I move my desk. This was the scariest part. If I got caught now, I wouldn’t be able to finish.

I opened the door slowly. Voices drifted up from downstairs. Good. A sound buffer.

My pulse throbbed in my swollen fingertips as I tiptoed to the bathroom and locked the door.

I turned on the faucet just a little more than a trickle, so it made a noise if you were right outside the door, but not so you could hear it downstairs. From the cupboard under the sink I pulled out the box of tampons. I unwrapped one and put the pink wrapper on top of the pile of Kleenex in the wastebasket, shoving the unused tampon in my pocket. Mom and Dad had thought the toilet at home was clogged because I flushed tampons, so after that, I tried to always leave them as an excuse. I lifted the toilet lid, then the seat. It smelled, just faintly, of bleach.

I leaned over. I slipped my right two fingers into my mouth to touch the back of my throat.

The surge happened fast, but it happened long. I dreaded those seconds of suspension, those seconds where I couldn’t breathe. But those horrible, eyes-bugged-out-throat-burning seconds had to happen to get to the release.

The release was this great rush, like when you’re really scared of something, but then you find out it’s okay, and that zippy feeling tingles in your fingers and ears, behind your knees, on top of your skull, and you feel alive and happy like you might laugh for a long time.

I gasped in breath and put a hand on the wall so I didn’t fall down. No blue in the toilet. I didn’t think so. Not this early. I couldn’t flush yet. I only got so many flushes before people got suspicious. I’d never done this with Dad sober and with company in the house.

The tingles tickled my neck and scalp. Once I’d caught my breath, I bent over and tapped the back of my throat again. I kept my eyes open as I vomited. I needed to see the colors.

After round two, I leaned against the wall. Still no blue. I closed my eyes. The zippy feeling was good, but left me wobbly.

I counted to twenty, whispering the numbers, moving my tingling lips and thick tongue, then stood and vomited again. There it was—traces of bright blue floating in the slosh.

A fourth time—only hints of blue—and then I flushed.

When I stood, sparkling lights danced all over the bathroom walls. I blinked hard to bring the toilet back into focus. The water rose high, scaring me, then went down, fast and strong.

I kept blinking, but the room blurred wavy, the walls and floor melting together. I knelt, not sure I could keep standing, and leaned my forehead against the toilet seat.

I closed my eyes and savored the tingling, the shivers like giggles, reminding me of the runner’s high I used to get. But worrying kept me from really flying.

I’d eaten all my secret stash. Dad would never let me out of his sight in a grocery store again. I’d already been written up for arriving to my after-lunch class flushed and watery-eyed. If they thought I was on drugs it wouldn’t be too long before they’d start checking on me in the bathroom. I couldn’t find where Dad was hiding his cash anymore. He was shipping me off to Aunt Izzy who was not clueless and knew my entire bag of tricks. What would I
do?

My nose ran. I sniffed, but it didn’t stop. When I opened my eyes, I watched dark beads of blood slide down the white porcelain bowl, leaving tainted trails behind.

I had no reasons to be happy.

Dad and I hardly spoke to each other. After six in the evening, he wouldn’t remember if we’d had a conversation anyway, so there didn’t seem much point. He didn’t
act
drunk; it’s not like he fell down or slurred his speech, but he’d just sit and stare, tears in his eyes.

I spent a lot of time going through my mom’s closet, taking the things that smelled the most like her lemon meringue lotion—a pink cashmere hoodie, a thin white nightgown, her pillowcase. I slept with these items. Sometimes, when I felt the SR tugging on me, I could talk myself out of it by inhaling her lemon scent.

Sometimes.

On nights I couldn’t sleep, I’d shut off our alarm system and stand among my cities in the moonlight. I hadn’t finished the last city for my mother. I hadn’t gotten thin so she could see me beautiful just once before she died.

Aunt Izzy had reminded us of Mom’s favorite saying when she gave the eulogy. Pretty is as pretty does.

I was a big, fat failure for my gorgeous mother.

After two weeks, I went back to school.

I walked into the building barely functional, feeling like I glowed neon. The expectation of being stared at made me long to crawl into a locker and hide. That new expectation added to the burden of being on guard for the B-Squad and gauging their reaction to me. Was I still “in”? Was I being released yet? I was so tense, my neck spasmed.

“What is
that?
” the familiar, poisonous voice hissed in my ear. “What is she
wearing?
”

I turned to Brooke, who looked past me down the hall at Kelly, a girl from our class Brooke didn’t deem fashionable enough; Kelly wore a cute vintage dress with a puffy skirt, along with a pair of black high-tops.

Those were Brooke’s first words to me after I returned from my mother’s death and funeral.
What
is
that?
As if she were looking at rotten food on the sidewalk.

Kelly turned toward Brooke’s voice, then flushed red. When Kelly walked away, the B-Squad collapsed into gales of laughter.

“Eww!” Brittany said, shaking her hands the way somebody might if they had bugs on them. “That was
so
gross! Did she like make that dress herself?”

“How could you go out looking like that?” Bebe asked.

“Does she
own
a mirror?” Brooke said.

The piano music flowed over my anxious body like a hot shower. I’d
missed
the piano music. I wanted to listen to something beautiful. Not this nasty noise.

I walked around the corner into the lounge, the B-Squad following me.

Jasper saw me and stopped playing. “Hey, Hannah,” he said. “How are you doing?”

His voice, his words, rolled over me just like his music. “I’m okay. Thanks. For asking.”

The B-Squad stared.

Jasper stood up. “I’m so sorry. About your mom.” That yellow slice in his eye shimmered.

“Thank you,” I whispered. My eyes burned, and I knew I was going to cry again. I turned away from the girls and ducked into a bathroom.
Maybe
they’d follow me, comfort me, and apologize for not asking how I was.

They didn’t.

I wasn’t surprised.

• • •

In health class, Mrs. DeTello hugged me. “Good to have you back. How are you?”

I’m a train wreck
, I wanted to tell her.
I’m out of control and it scares me. My dad is unraveling. Please help me.

But I just nodded and whispered, “I’m okay.”

DeTello told us about a major project we’d be starting after Spring Break. She was telling us early so we could start it “percolating in our brains.” We were all going to have to complete a “Make a Difference” Project, where we created some kind of service project to make a difference in our world. She stressed that there were many different kinds of “worlds”: “You could interpret the word to mean your immediate family,” she said, “or your neighborhood, or the school, this community, the city, some other city, the nation, another nation. Think outside the box and come up with a project that means something to
you
personally.”

This assignment wrapped me in that lead blanket again, just like in the counselor’s office.
Make
a
difference? Who,
me
? Right. Like that’s gonna happen.

• • •

Later, I got called out of science to go down to the principal’s office. Suarez offered me condolences, assured me the teachers would be understanding if I struggled a bit, and let me know I didn’t have to work in the cafeteria anymore.

I panicked.

No, that’s an understatement. I actually had a meltdown right there in her office. I
had
to work in the cafeteria! What would I do without it? I
begged
her to let me still do it. Suarez must’ve thought I was crazy. I tried to convince her I couldn’t stand for anything else to change right now. I got her to agree, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I got summoned to the counselor again soon.

I
needed
the lunch duty. That’s what was keeping me alive.

Jasper and the kitchen staff gave me a card they’d all signed. Pam and the others all wrote really sweet, real things. I got teary-eyed again, but it made me feel
good
. In the kitchen, with those people, was the only place I felt human.

• • •

In geography, we watched a video about the diamond mines in Sierra Leone. There were all these kids with missing arms or ears or eyes. Rebels had hacked them off with machetes to “send a message.”

I closed my eyes. I thought of Aunt Izzy and her documentary. I knew she’d interviewed orphans in Sierra Leone.
Aunt
Izzy. Aunt Izzy. You’ve got to save me.

• • •

I lay in bed breathing my mother’s pink cardigan, seething at my dad “sleeping” on the couch, and actually thought,
if
I
were
missing
an
arm
or
an
eye, no one would expect anything from me.
If I’d shown up at school with some kind of handicap, the B-Squad would never have given me the time of day. I might still be the authentic Hannah.