Wintergirls (17 page)

Authors: Laurie Halse Anderson

Tags: #Psychopathology, #Anorexia nervosa, #Social Issues, #Young Adult Fiction, #Psychology, #Stepfamilies, #Health & Daily Living, #Juvenile Fiction, #Diseases; Illnesses & Injuries, #Fiction, #Family & Relationships, #death, #Guilt, #Best Friends, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Young women, #Friendship, #Eating Disorders, #Death & Dying, #Adolescence

BOOK: Wintergirls

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I leave a message for Elijah every day for two weeks.

I say I found the junkyard, but he doesn’t call back. I bet he figured out what a mess I am, which is bad because I need him to tell me more about Cassie’s last day. It might help me figure out how to make her go away.

She hasn’t gone away. If anything, being buried has made her stronger and angrier.

Cassie opens her Pandora’s box every night and hitches a ride to my room. She doesn’t watch from the shadows anymore. She attacks. Once the sleeping pill straps my arms and legs down to the mattress, she opens my skull and rips out the wiring. She screams holes in my brain and pukes blood down my throat.

It’s easier to skip the sleeping pill, wait until Dad and Jennifer are both snoring, and spend three or four hours on the stair-stepper. When I finally crawl into bed, my pillow smells like burnt sugar and cloves and ginger.

I am 098.00.

I am 097.00.

I sharpen Nanna Marrigan’s pretty knife and hide it under my mattress, just in case. I am 096.50.

Some nights I don’t sleep at all. After working out, I knit, stitch by stitch, music on my headphones, rocking back and forth. It started as a scarf last year, but then it grew wings when I wasn’t paying attention and demanded to be called a shawl, which I did, and then, when it was buried in the basket, it multiplied and turned into a blanket of a hundred colors and a thousand stories. I don’t use yarn from a store. I buy old sweaters from consignment shops, the older the better, and unravel them. There are countries of women in this scarf/shawl/blanket. Soon it will be big enough to keep me warm.

My mouth and tongue and belly have begun to plot against me. I doze off in my room and
bam!
I’m standing in front of the refrigerator, door open, hand reaching for the cream cheese. Or the butter. Or the leftover lasagna.

“Take a bite,” the white light inside the refrigerator tells me. “A tablespoon, a teaspoon. Heat up a plate of lasagna, slow, at forty percent power in the microwave, and then pop it in the oven, top rack, at four-hundred degrees until the cheese bubbles and the edges brown.

Sit down with Jennifer’s silver-plated fork and the bone-handled knife and carve off one square inch. Take a pill to slow down time—you’re going to want to enjoy this.

Fill your mouth with melting cheese and sausage and tomato sauce—summer fresh/short skirt/dancing tomato sauce—and a slab of pasta as thick as your tongue.

Swallow. Light up the stars in your brain, electrify your body, buckle on your smile, and everybody will love you again.”

If I thought I could stop after one bite, two at the most, I would. But I am 096.00, close to dangerland. One bite of lasagna would cause a revolution. One bite, ten bites, the whole tray would pour down my throat. And then I’d eat Oreos. And then I’d eat vanilla ice cream.

And Bluberridazzlepops, the rest of the box. And then, just before I exploded, my stomach ripping open and all the food falling into my body cavity, blood flooding me, then I’d have to go to the secret box in my closet and take out the laxatives and die of humiliation in the bathroom.

I take out the pickle jar. One spear, kosher dill = 5.

Kora and Pluto follow me upstairs. I check the secret box—emergency laxatives and diuretics— just in case.

I haven’t used it in months. It’s a good thing I checked, because the supplies are low. Must remember that.

When I lay down on my bed, the cats hop up. They curl into my hollow places and purr so deeply it echoes in my bones.