Shrink to Fit (10 page)

Leah stopped short. “Who has?”

The coach set the phone into the cradle and looked at Leah, her deep blue eyes troubled and sad. “Shazan Ali and her family. She collapsed in the locker room just now. The paramedics said she's had a heart attack.”

A Mighty Heart
148 lbs

Leah
rode with Coach Richards to the East Sonoma Hospital's emergency room without asking for permission. After following the coach into her SUV, Leah climbed into the passenger's side. Not a word was spoken between the two as tires peeled out of the parking lot.

The ride to the hospital was agonizing because of the rush-hour L.A. traffic and the sunken feeling in Leah's stomach. This was her fault. She had known something was wrong this morning when she saw the empty pill bottle. She should have said something to someone. She should have talked to Shazan and insisted she sit the game out. She should have done something.

Shazan was the only one who really understood what Leah was going through. Shazan was the only one who supported her. Leah couldn't lose her now.

Leah realized she was crying when the coach silently handed her a package of Kleenex.

“Coach—”

“You need to stay strong right now and not fall apart in front of her parents.” The coach made a severe turn into the hospital's driveway.

Leah was out of the car before it was in Park.

“Shazan Ali's room, please.” Leah was panting by the time she located the receptionist's desk. Why hospitals were so difficult to navigate was beyond her. When people were desperate to see their loved ones, a labyrinth wasn't the kind of obstacle they wanted to deal with.

The receptionist popped her gum and blinked at Leah, her puzzled look indicating that she did not understand the question.

“Look, Jiffy,” Leah said, reading her name tag. “She's my friend. She was brought in for having a…she had a heart attack. I need to know where she is.”

“One sec.” Jiffy clicked on her keyboard and traced her acrylic fingernail along the computer's ancient monitor. “Ah. Good.”

Leah waited expectantly for an answer. Instead, Jiffy opened up the latest issue of
Star
magazine. “Please have a seat and I'll call you when something changes.”

“Hello? Shazan Ali? Room?”

“A seat, please.” Jiffy gestured toward the seating area.

“Can you just tell me her room number? I won't sneak in. I swear.” Leah drummed her fingers on the counter. She would definitely sneak past this redheaded bimbo the first chance she got.

“Please have a seat.” Jiffy seemed to be reciting from the hospital receptionists' guidebook. “And we will call you if anything changes.”

“Listen, you little minimum-wage-earning—”

“Leah, come on.” Coach dragged Leah away before she could lunge over the counter and strangle the receptionist. “Getting thrown out of here won't help Shazan.”

Leah settled down into an orange plastic chair and shifted this way and that. “I can't deal with this. I'm going to go look for her.”

She stood up, stretched and faked toward the bathroom. “Too much water.” She smiled sweetly at Jiffy. The second the receptionist looked down at her desk, Leah dashed past the desk.

“Hey!”

Leah didn't look back.

“Get back here! I'm calling security!”

Whatever. She'd been thrown out of more respectable establishments than this stupid hospital.

“Hospital security, call on line one. Security—” the loudspeaker announced.

Ugh, she hated hospitals. The stark, white walls, everyone walking around looking somber. The plasticky Jell-O smell. Leah paraded down the central hallway, but all the rooms were dark and full of machinery.

“Looking for Shazan?”

Leah whirled around.

Bill Collins. Shazan's ex-boyfriend. The reason she was here today.

“Why are you here?”

Bill ignored the question. “She was in the O.R. She's in room 202. Upstairs.”

Leah hesitated. It felt like a betrayal to Shazan to accept this creep's help.

“Come on. I'll take you.”

Grateful despite her annoyance, Leah followed him into the elevator. “She's going to be okay,” Bill said. “She's young, strong. She'll be fine. She has to be.”

“Do they, uh, know what happened?”

“It was those pills.” Bill punched floor two in the elevator keypad. “She took, like, ten of them. They said she overdosed on them and that stopped her heart. I told her to stop taking them. I told her…” His voice seemed to fade.

Leah scowled. “Yeah, you also broke up with her.”

“She had a real problem with those pills. She was obsessed with her weight. Every time I took her to dinner she would ask the waiter for the number of calories in her food. Then she would eat two bites and say she was full. It was nuts.”

What was wrong with that? Leah frowned. First her father and now Bill. Leaving the women who loved them and tried to look their best for them.

Jackasses.

“I don't know what her problem was. She was absolutely perfect. She didn't need to lose any weight.”

“You guys are really something,” Leah muttered mostly to herself. “You want girls who are skinny little twigs but get pissed when they try to watch their weight.”

“I loved her the way she was.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I don't know why I'm having this conversation with you. You're probably her supplier.” Bill punched the keypad again as if that would hurry the crawling elevator to the second floor.

“Hey.” Leah turned and slammed him by the shoulders easily into the elevator wall, her anger taking over her good sense. “I had nothing to do with this. She wanted to look good in her Snow Ball dress. She wanted to look good for you!”

“Get off me!”

Leah released him as the elevator door opened.

“Crazy bitch…” she heard him mumble as the elevator door closed with him inside.

Leah ran down the hall and realized she was crying again. Why hadn't she said something to Shazan? If she had only said or done something this morning, none of them would be here today.

Room 202.

Leah stood outside the closed door, hand on the doorknob. Her mom and dad would be in there. Worried Pakistani parents who would want to know how this had happened to their beautiful, talented young daughter. And Leah had no answer.

She peeked in through the window. Shazan was lying in the bed, folded white sheet all the way up to her chin. Her eyes were closed and she wasn't moving. Her usually animated face was pasty white. Shazan's mother, head covered with a hijab, sat at Shazan's feet with her head bowed.

Leah couldn't go in. She should, but she couldn't. She turned and rushed back down to the first floor. Not now. Not while Shazan looked…like that.

Jiffy gave her a dirty look.

Leah gave her one back.

“Hey,” Jay called from the seating area. “There you are. Did you see her?”

“What are you doing here?” Leah accepted his hug and watched over his shoulder as the coach got up to talk to Jiffy once again.

“I came to get you.”

The words should have filled Leah with happiness, but the shock of seeing Shazan lying so still and silent in the bed had taken over her senses. “She's so…I didn't go in. Her boyfr—ex, ah, Bill is here, too. Somewhere.”

“Let's get you home.” Jay didn't release her from his grip. “You don't look too good. I heard about the game.”

Leah pulled away. “I want to stay. I want to be here when she wakes up.”

“That could be a while.” Coach retook her seat next to Jay and picked up
Time
magazine. “Jiffy over there said she's had surgery. It'll take a while for the anesthesia to wear off. Another few hours before anyone can see her.”

Leah hesitated. The disinfectant smell of the hospital was giving her a headache and she felt useless just sitting around. Maybe some time with Jay would clear her head.

“Come on.” Jay sensed she was weakening. “Let's get some dinner and we'll come back.”

Dinner. Ha. The thought of food made her want to puke.

Leah let him lead her by the hand to his Mustang. “We have to be back in an hour, okay?”

Jay drove. Leah didn't care where or how fast.

“What happened?”

“She's been stressed lately. About everything,” Leah lied. She didn't want to reveal her friend's secret. Those damn pills. How could Shazan have taken so many? How could she have been so stupid? Leah thought back to her own pill ingestion. How many had she been taking every day? Three? Four? Was she in dangerous territory, too?

Jay glanced sidelong at Leah. “That's it?”

Leah didn't answer.

The wait at Red Robin was only five minutes before Leah and Jay were seated in the sunny atrium by a bubbly teenager.

Leah gazed out at the busy parking lot of the strip mall. It was almost the holiday season. She'd almost forgotten about Thanksgiving the following week.

“I'll have a mushroom-Swiss melt.” Jay folded his menu. “And a vanilla malt.”

Leah glanced up at the waitress. “Um. The same, I guess.” Her stomach was an empty hollow and she couldn't even think of food.

“So tell me what happened at the game.”

Leah folded her hands, crisscrossing her fingers over each other. Funny, today her hands looked like a stranger's. Long, slim…almost bony.

“We got a call that Shazan had passed out in the locker room. The paramedics said she'd had a heart attack,” Leah said, her voice trembling. The numbness of the hospital was beginning to wear off and the reality of the situation was starting to set in. A seventeen-year-old had had a heart attack. Somehow being benched from the next basketball game seemed so small suddenly.

Jay took a sip of his water, his eyes not leaving Leah's. “How do you think this happened?”

“I don't know. I wish I did.” Leah avoided his eyes. “I just—”

The food arrived. Plates piled high with juicy burgers and mounds of extra-crispy french fries. Tiny cups of ranch and barbecue sauce decorated the sides of the dishes.

“Bill broke up with her this morning. I wonder if—” Leah absently reached over to Jay's plate and took a french fry. The warm, salty potato flavor exploded in her mouth.

What the hell was she doing?

She nearly spit out the remains of the french fry onto the plate, but noticed Jay was watching her closely. She forced herself to swallow.

“Swear to me you won't take those pills anymore.”

Leah blinked in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“I know about the pills. Jenn told me. Shazan bought them online from some Mexican Web site and she took, like, four a day. They sped up her heartbeat and burned calories. And did this to her. You know what I'm talking about.”

“I don't—”

“Leah, don't bullshit me. I watched you go from polishing off a double cheeseburger and finishing all the fries to picking at a salad for an hour.” Jay gave her a hard look. “You keep saying you're not hungry. Exactly what Shazan always says. You are not going to end up like her. I won't let you.”

“I'm not taking pills.” Leah stared at her still-full plate.
That
was true. She had finished off the last of them that morning. She'd been hoping to get more from Shazan after the game. And then this had happened.

“Swear?”

The silence went on much longer than Leah was comfortable with. She swallowed painfully. “Swear.”

“Good.” Jay picked up his fork. “Now let's finish dinner and go get a brownie sundae at Ben and Jerry's.”

Leah swallowed nervously. “I'm not really hungry.”

Jay raised an eyebrow.

“No, seriously.”

“You are eating every bite on that plate. I've seen you do it before and you can do it now.”

“Jay!”

“Just cut the crap. You have a problem. I think you might have an eating disorder.”

Another one. Her mother. Coach. Now her closest friend.

Leah rolled her eyes. “Look at me. Do I look like I have an eating disorder?”

Jay looked her up and down. “Yes.”

“What!”

“You've lost, what, sixty pounds in the past month and a half? That's insane.”

“I've been working out.”

“And not eating.”

“I eat enough.” Leah picked up her burger and took a tiny bite. The Swiss cheese seemed to melt away in her mouth. The perfect tinge of spicy horseradish. “See?”

“Keep going.”

After another bite, Leah started to feel nervous. She set the burger down. Jay didn't seem as though he was going to let up, and her napkin was out of reach so her bite-and-spit technique wasn't going to work.