Reasons to Be Happy (9 page)

Eight days later, sitting in our hotel room as the sun rose on my first morning in Ghana, I dug my sequined purple notebook from my duffel bag.

I flipped through a few pages. Reasons to be happy? Please. More like reasons to be terrified:

1. My father doesn’t want me around

2. My father is going to end up in jail

3. I have no real friends

4. I’m never going to get well

5. I’m in a third world country half a planet away from everything I know

6. I’ll never be able to finish all the schoolwork I’m missing

7. I’ll flunk and have to repeat my eighth grade year

8. That won’t matter because I’ll end up weighing five hundred pounds and won’t be able to fit on the plane to go home

I
am
really, truly
in Africa
!

What
am
I
doing
here?

We’d arrived the night before. As we started to descend in Accra—Ghana’s capital—it had just begun to get dark and the sky was red. For real red. Red like Chinese lanterns. Underneath all that red was a glittering coastline of lights. Like any other city in the world.

Stepping off the plane was total sensory overload that made it hard to breathe. What I
could
breathe had a distinct odor: meat cooking, sweat, animal musk, and a smoky aroma of something on the edge of burning. Mix all those ingredients with hot, humid, oily temperatures and you’ll understand why the first whiff of Africa made me woozy.

We met Ben, our guide and driver. He’s a big man with a lullaby voice. I attached myself to him like super glue, practically holding his hand.

When we stepped outside the airport, I saw men and woman dressed in modern trendy clothes, men and women in tribal dress, and everything in between. Of course, by that point, we’d been traveling for twenty-four hours. I was an overtired, overwhelmed, scaredy-cat zombie. When we got to the hotel, I practically passed out.

After waking, I looked across our hotel room; Aunt Izzy was still asleep, curled on her side, her back to me. I tried to be quiet as I sat cross-legged on my bed with my purple book and contemplated my list. I thought about putting
Not
bingeing
for
three
days
, but the list wasn’t like that. It’s only for things that
always
make me happy, not too specific to any certain time in my life.

I could’ve listed
Not
having
to
go
back
to
school
too. I didn’t have to face the B-Squad and all their judgment about my dad, my fat butt, and my loserdom for a good long time. I had tons of homework to do while I was gone, though. I’d been freaked out when I’d seen the pile of stuff and instructions from my teachers. I knew Aunt Izzy had told my teachers what was going on with me—
all
of it, not just the Dad crisis. I could tell by the cheesy notes they wrote me. DeTello wrote me this great note, though, and said she only wanted me to do my Make a Difference Project, “Because I know Hannah Carlisle has a lot to offer the world.” Hmm.

I could’ve also put
Starting
therapy
on my list, but I wanted the list to stand on its own. Aunt Izzy got me an appointment in Yellow Springs with this woman Giulia Florio. Her first name is pronounced Julia but it’s spelled that gorgeous Italian way. She’s freakishly tall, but stunning, with his huge beaky nose that makes her look exotic, and crazy hair with wild messy curls.

I liked her.

That surprised me. I went prepared to hate her. I’d hoped that maybe there’d be some magic cure, something Giulia would do or say to “fix” me right away. I’d been shocked that she’d hardly even mentioned bulimia the first couple of times. (I had gone eight days in a row. That was “highly unusual” my aunt and Giulia both told me, but since we were leaving the country, “these were extenuating circumstances.”)

For the first few appointments, I actually felt guilty knowing how much they cost, when all Dr. Giulia did was talk about things I liked to do and asked about things I thought I was good at. We drank chai and chatted about my cities and running. We talked a
lot
about my mom and dad, but it wasn’t until the fourth visit that she brought up bulimia at all.

At first, I didn’t even know she was getting to the bulimia. She stood up and said, “Humor me a moment, okay? We’re going to do a little experiment. Could you crawl under my desk please?”

I was like
What?
but she was smiling. “It’s kind of a game. Just go with it.”

So I got on my hands and knees and stuck my head and shoulders in the nook where her legs usually went. “Okay,” I said. “Am I looking for something?”

“No,” her voice floated down to me. “But try to actually fit in there, all right?”

“Uh, okay.” I had my doubts, but I jammed myself in. I had to hug my knees to my chest and keep my head sideways on my knees. There was no way to relax.

Then, to make it more bizarre, Dr. Giulia said, “Excellent. Now I’m going to try to fit my chair in place, okay?”

Was
she
nuts?
There
was
no
way!
The chair pressed against me. A cramp started in my hamstring. My neck ached.

“Comfortable?” she called.

“Uh…no. Not at all.” I wasn’t laughing anymore. It was obvious I didn’t fit.

She pulled the chair away and crouched down to look at me. “Really?” she said. She asked it sincerely too. “You don’t like this?”

“No. Can I come out now?”

“Of course you can.” She gave me a hand up.

As we stood there, looking down at the space, she said, “That’s the prison you made for yourself with bulimia. Trying to fit yourself into a space that’s too small.”

I looked at the nook under her desk, then up at her face. I felt dizzy.

“But the most important thing is, you admitted you wanted to come out.”

Okay, okay, cheesy, I know, but it actually made me get teary-eyed.

“Your life has become reduced to this.” She gestured to that tiny hole I’d crammed myself in. “You define yourself this way. Remember how you told me you hated it when your mom became a ‘sick person’? How she became to everyone ‘a woman with cancer’ instead of interesting, talented Annabeth, your mom? Well, the same thing has happened to you, but you’re doing it to yourself. Your world has gotten so small with all you’ve given up to do this.”

She had Aunt Izzy and I make a pact of total honesty before we left the country. I couldn’t lie or hide a binge if one happened. Or, rather,
when
one happened. She assured me they
would
happen, and that I was to “treat myself with compassion” when they did. My binges, she said, were “a substitute for confronting painful feelings,” just like my dad’s drinking. Both my dad and I had to work to find healthier ways to deal.

Deal with
what
I wanted to know. Why was life so hard for me? Why was I such a baby? I didn’t know, but in our pact of honesty, I promised to let Aunt Izzy know when I wanted to binge and she would help divert me. I was supposed to go do something else really active, like run. I couldn’t imagine being able to divert a binge once one took hold of me—it felt like being possessed—but I said I was ready to try. Heck, I’d do just about anything to get rid of the DRH.

What’s DRH? My Disgusting, Repulsive Habit. No more SR, because it’s no longer secret,
and
it’s not a remedy for anything.

So, sure, I’d try to divert a binge.

Fortunately for me, Ghana turned out to be quite the diversion.

• • •

Once Aunt Izzy woke up, it was nothing but
go
go
go
. She and her crew had already been over here five different times, beginning three years ago. That day, they were visiting an orphanage in Kumasi to do some follow-up. We weren’t going to spend a lot of time in Kumasi; the heart of the documentary was a group of orphans in a smaller village called Tafi Atome (pronounced like Taffy Ah-TOE-may).

Aunt Izzy’s crew was small on this trip. She had a bigger team back home for editing and production, but here, she’d brought just three other people and they had the weirdest collection of names. Pearl Hays was her main assistant and a camera person. Just like her name, everything about her was round and pale. Wide in the hips, well-endowed in the boob department, with a natural sway when she walked, she wore her almost-white blond hair in a thick braid down her back. She was a big woman, fat by L.A. standards, but she knew how to dress for her size, and she never apologized. She could laugh louder than anyone I’d ever met.

Dimple Singh—is that the coolest name or what?—was a skinny Indian woman who did sound production. Everything about her was straight and flat compared to Pearl. She kept her hair cut short, which made her dark eyes stand out even more.

The cinematographer was the only man on the trip and won the prize for the absolute best name. Kick McKew was originally from West Virginia. His funny expressions and his soft hill accent always made me grin—like, when we stepped out of the compound of our hotel, lugging equipment to Ben’s van, Kick said, “Whew. It’s hotter than the hinges of hell.”

He was right. The heavy air pulled on my limbs as I moved through it.

Once in the van, crawling through snarled, chaotic traffic, Kick announced, “Well, we’re off like a herd of turtles.”

I glued myself to the van windows, leaving nose prints I’m sure.

Women (and some men) carried outrageous things on their
heads
—loads of firewood, flats of sunglasses, a tall stack of pillows, metal tubs piled with plastic bags of water (that the entire team and Ben made of point of telling me
never
to drink). These people talked, walked, and gestured without their loads ever losing balance.

Traffic careened along, sometimes five vehicles competed with each other across what looked like three lanes, with plenty of bicycles and motor scooters whizzing between them too.

At every intersection people walked between the rows of cars selling maps, toothbrushes, dried plantain chips, peanuts, pastries, and cassettes.

The heat wrapped itself around me, giving me the woozy sensation of an out-of-body experience. The smells were so intense, the sun so piercingly bright, the sounds so jarring.

A girl my age rapped on the side of the van, thrusting her open hand through my window. “Please. Please,” she said. The entire right side of her head was blistered from a burn, with actual bubbles in the skin. Her right eye was gone, the lid pulled taut so that only a small slit of emptiness showed above her stark cheekbone.

Thank God I was sitting down, because my legs went totally weak. I felt all my joints and limbs just disconnect from my body, like the slightest breeze (not that there was much chance of one of those!) would detach them and they’d blow away.

The van began to pull forward. “Wait!” I cried, digging in my pockets. I handed the girl a fistful of the bright, fake-looking money I’d exchanged at the airport the night before.

“Whoa, Hannah, that’s a lot,” Kick said.

But I placed the money in the girl’s hands. Her skin was remarkably cool in this heat.

“
Medasi, medasi,
” she chanted as we pulled away.
Thank
you.

“You okay?” Aunt Izzy asked me, looking back from her shotgun seat next to Ben.

I nodded, but the image of the girl’s face was permanently seared on my brain.

• • •

We finally got out of Accra, heading north for Kumasi, farther into Ghana, farther from my life. I didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing, getting farther from my life. My life was pretty sucky, but at least I
knew
it. Every single thing I laid my eyes on here was strange and unfamiliar to me.

A young girl walked with a wooden tray of shiny red tomatoes balanced perfectly on her head. I wondered if she had friends she trusted. Did she wonder
Am
I
pretty
enough? Thin enough?

• • •

In Kumasi, people surrounded our van like my parents were on board. It had been a while since I’d experienced this kind of fanfare, and it had never before been directed at
me
. Little kids ran up to touch me then ran away. Everyone called out “
Obruni!
” to us: “
Obruni
, hello!”

Obruni
means white person. I’m not sure what language it is, since there isn’t one official language in Ghana. Even a little boy in his mother’s arms cried out the greeting like a kid might say, “Santa Claus!” It was kind of funny, but also incredibly weird. I mean, I can’t imagine calling out, “Hello, black person!” when I saw one at home.

While Aunt Izzy and her team unloaded equipment onto the sidewalk at the orphanage, children tugged on me, asked me my name, wanted me to take their pictures, wanted to touch my skin and hair. When someone patted my butt, I wheeled around, but it was just a little boy, maybe five years old. He then patted his own butt as if he was trying to see if I felt like he did. Thick heavy traffic crawled past us, everyone looking to see what the commotion was.