Wintergirls (18 page)

I chew the cookie in the driver’s seat, the car still safely in PARK. This cookie has no calories. It is not food.

It is fuel—gas and oil so the engine doesn’t seize. I choke down a quarter of it and shift into DRIVE.

The guy behind the pharmacy counter says they’re backed up because of the stomach bug going around and Emma’s medicine will take another ten or fifteen minutes. The store has so many Christmas decorations, there is barely room left for the body wash and cough drops.

The music is playing a little too loud. Somehow they’ve figured out how to pipe in the smell of gingerbread cookies, too.

I can’t find the laxatives and diuretics. They’ve moved everything. Aisle 4 is Santa’s Toyland. Aisle 3 has a snowdrift on the floor. A real snowdrift.

I look around. Tired people are wandering in search of hemorrhoid cream and painkillers and mouthwash.

Two ladies scuff right through the snow, sending puffs of it into the air without noticing. When it falls, it doesn’t melt. Kind of expensive advertising for a drugstore, but people have been saying that Amoskeag is the new Boston. I guess this is what they’re talking about.

Cassie enters Aisle 3. The dead Cassie.

“Hey,” she says. “Bottom shelf. That’s where you’ll find them.”

She’s wearing a gray ski jacket over her blue dress and has her hair slicked back into a wet ponytail, like she just stepped out of a shower. The smell of ginger and cloves and burnt sugar is thick.

“Aren’t you proud of me for figuring this out, how to follow you?” Her voice buzzes like dying flies are trapped in her throat.

I bend down to the bottom shelf. She’s right. I grab two boxes of diuretics and three of laxatives. Any second now, she’ll disappear because she’s a hallucination.

I stand up. She is so close to me, I could smell her breath, if she were breathing.

“Go away,” I whisper.

“Are you kidding me?” She kicks at the snow and it fills the aisle, screening out the rest of the store and muffling the blaring carols. The snowflakes hang in the air, not rising, not falling.

“You don’t belong here,” I say. “Go back.”

She frowns, confused. “But I want to hang out. It took a lot of work to figure out how to do this, you know. It’s not like it’s easy to go back and forth.”

I cover my ears. “Stop it.”

The night hauntings make sense. I’m tired then, drugged up, and have no sugar in my blood. But in Aisle 3 of Binney’s Drugs? Jennifer must have slipped something into that cookie. She’s trying to make me psych-ward crazy so she can get rid of me.

Cassie leans against the shelf. “You should pick up some bleach. You need it to clean up after the moldy banana in the purse at the back of your closet. It’s disgusting.”

“You’re not here. I’m not talking to you.”

She tilts her head. “You really mean it, don’t you? You don’t believe you’re seeing me.”

I try to walk past her, but my boots are frozen in the drifting snow.

“What do I have to do to make you believe?” she asks.

“Aren’t you supposed to be in heaven or something?”

“That’s a little complicated.”

“You’re a figment of my imagination, or a hallucination caused by my meds or that damn cookie. You do not exist.”

Her eyes flicker, like a light switch is turned off, then on again. “That really hurts my feelings.”

“My sister needs her medicine. I have to go.”

The light shifts and she fades a little. I can see the outline of the shelves behind her.

She puts her mouth up to my ear. “You’re almost there, buddy. Stay strong.”

I can’t move. I can’t run.

“I know how bad you feel. Trapped,” she says. “It gets better, I promise. So much better.”

She looks like she used to when she was begging me to go to the park with her so she couldn’t accidentally on purpose run into the latest guy she had a crush on. I should close my eyes until she vanishes. I don’t.

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

She wipes a snowflake off my cheek. “You’re not dead, but you’re not alive, either. You’re a wintergirl, Lia-Lia, caught in between the worlds. You’re a ghost with a beating heart. Soon you’ll cross the border and be with me.

I’m so stoked. I miss you wicked.”

I pull back, try to shake the cobwebs out of my head.

“What is wrong with you? Don’t you care about what happened?”

She frowns.

“Don’t you care that your parents have gone off the deep end? You shouldn’t have done it. You should have asked for help.”

The snow rushes toward her and spins in a whirlwind that reaches up through the ceiling.

“I tried.” The flames in her eyes burn my cheeks. “You didn’t answer the phone.”

It didn’t happen. I didn’t see her. Everything is fine.

Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine.

I take the medicine home to Emma, eat a cup of tomato soup made with water (82) and pretend to finish my homework. While the two of them watch a movie, I run scalding water into the bathtub, strip, and get in.

The merry-go-round is spinning too fast. I want to get off. I want to close my eyes, or just blink. I want to choose what I see and what I don’t see. The crap we put up with when we’re awake every day—school, house, house, mall, world—is bad enough. Shouldn’t I at least get a break when I’m asleep? Or, if I’m doomed to be haunted by ghosts, shouldn’t they only work at night, and dissolve when hit by sunlight?

I lift my arm out of the water. It’s a log. Put it back under and it blows up even bigger. People see the log and call it a twig. They yell at me because I can’t see what they see. Nobody can explain to me why my eyes work different than theirs. Nobody can make it stop.

The merry-go-round spins again. To get off this thing I think I have to scream. But I can’t. My bone corset is laced so tight, I can barely breathe.

When Cassie creeps into my bed that night and curls her hands around my throat, she doesn’t bring up what did not happen at the drugstore. Neither do I.

My heart clangs like a fire bell all night long.

The show must go on.

There is no way a kid with a fractured ulna and radius can play the violin in the Park Street Elementary School Winter Holiday Concert, so the band director is rigging up a metal triangle that Emma can ting at the right moment. She’s also in charge of the sleigh bells during “Jingle Bells.” She spends all of Thursday night practicing.

I leave school early (cramps—ha) and spend Friday afternoon baking, because Emma signed her mother up to bring something to the Holiday Bake Sale, and Jennifer went out and bought cheap cookies with tacky red-and-green icing. I make gingerbread girls, each with a pink cast on her arm, and a loaf of Nanna Marrigan’s date-nut bread. The measuring spoons want to stick sugar and butter and molasses into my mouth. I pretend I am allergic to the ingredients. One taste and my lips and tongue will swell up and I will choke to death.

I use the leftover gingerbread bits to make a voodoo cookie, a sturdy girl with yellow-red hair, a blue dress, and a black hole for a mouth. After she cools, I lay her on the cutting board and smash her with the rolling pin until she is a pile of gingerdust.

When Emma comes home from tutoring, she smells the cookies and shrieks so loud the rest of the needles fall off the Christmas tree. She throws her arm and her cast around me and squeezes, almost fracturing my ribs. I let her paint my fingernails the same color as hers so we can be twins.

Jennifer is a little stunned by the cookies. Emma reminds her that she signed up to work the bake sale and I offer to take her place, which surprises her even more.

We only have time for turkey sandwiches (230) before we have to leave for the concert.

Park Street Elementary School smells exactly the same as it did when I went there: warm sweaty bodies, cheap spaghetti sauce, Magic Markers, and paper. There is a tribute to Cassie on the bulletin board in the front hall. The picture was taken a couple of years ago, before the puking burnt out her salivary glands and they swelled up into walnut-sized lumps at the back of her jaw. Seeing it makes my heart pound, but I keep walking, turn right at the library, left at the end of the hall. The picture really is there, I didn’t make it up, it’s not a ghostly vision. Her dad is the principal here and her mom runs everything else. It makes sense to erect a shrine.

Emma skips off to the backstage area to line up.

“You sure you don’t want to come in and listen?” Jennifer asks me. “We could switch at intermission.”

And sit with six hundred overheated parents all armed with video cameras? “No, really, you go ahead.

Stay for the whole thing.”

She hugs me, squeezing tight enough to make my ribs groan. It happened so quick I didn’t see it coming. She lets go, grabs my face in both hands and kisses my nose.

“You can be so sweet sometimes, you know that? I owe you huge.” She leans close and whispers, “I can’t stand those women. They make me scream.”

“No problem,” I say, trying not to stagger under the weight of her kiss.

There are four cafeteria tables set up in the back hall for the bake sale. The tables are crowded with plates of cookies with ten kinds of chocolate chip, including wheat-, dairy-,and egg-free. The moms at this school watch way too many cooking shows. There are truffle brownies, cinnamon wafers, peppermint fudge. Someone baked cupcakes in bizarre flavors: pomegranate, green tea, cranberry, pistachio, and guava. (The cupcakes come with labels listing the ingredients for the allergic.) On the last table, near the cash box, are two buckets filled with chocolate-dipped pretzels rolled in jimmies, and three perfectly made gingerbread houses that are up for silent auction. One has stained-glass windows made out of melted candy.

The moms I’ll be working with are shoving cookies into their mouths and letting the crumbs collect on their sweaters.

“Want some fudge?” they ask, staring at my collarbones. “Try the seven-layer bars. They’re to die for.”

I would love a seven-layer bar. I would love to pick up a piece of fudge, gossip about the latest episode of whatever, bite the fudge, laugh, chew it because it tastes good and it feels good in my mouth, and swallow and have my tummy glow with fudginess. But they are not for me.

“No, thank you,” I say.

“Look at how skinny you are!” they shriek. “You don’t have to worry, not like us!” They slap their thighs, wiggle their butts, pinch their bellies. “Take a piece. Take two!”

A hand above twitches my puppet strings. The corners of my mouth turn up and I bat my eyelashes, shrug my shoulders a little. “I had a huge dinner,” I say. “I’ll have something later.”

A wave of hungry people interrupts us and we sell, sell, sell. At one point I see Mrs. Parrish, dressed as Mrs.

Claus, drifting through the crowd. Her wig droops to one side. A group of little kids rush up to her and wave, asking her to tell Santa they’ve been very good this year. She walks by without noticing them, heading straight for the bake-sale table. I hide behind a gingerbread house until she’s gone.

When the concert starts, I tell the fat moms to go listen to their kids, I’ll guard the food and the cash box.

This stuff doesn’t tempt me. It makes me queasy; that’s how strong I am.

The moms give me a hundred chances to change my mind (“No, I’m sure, really, you guys go ahead, honest, really”), then they hustle toward the auditorium armed with emergency brownies in case of an unexpected blood-sugar crash.

I sit behind the mountain of individually wrapped marshmallow treats. The band is playing either “Silent Night” or “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” I scan up and down the hall. Cassie has not popped up, not yet. There’s no snow in sight. It does smell like gingerbread, but that’s because of the bake sale. I don’t think she’s coming, not with her face stapled to the bulletin board like a WANTED

poster, not with her parents here. They’d see her, too, I know it. All hell would break loose. She wouldn’t dare.

I take out my knitting, hold the needles tightly, and loop the yarn. Knit, knit, purl. Knit, knit, purl. The yarn is damp from the sweat on my hands. Knit, purl, knit. No.

I back up and undo the stitches. Knit, knit, purl.

My traitor fingers want that fudge. No, they don’t.

They want a seven-layer bar and some weird muffins and those pretzels. No, they do not. They want to squish the marshmallows and stuff them into my mouth. They will not.

The knitting sinks into my lap. The needles are too heavy, the yarn spun from iron. The cartilage in my fingers and knees and elbows is thinning. Hungryhungry battles starvestarve back and forth across the battlefield of my mind.

Everything hurts.

A door opens and closes and blows the smell of ginger and cloves and burnt sugar into my face and hair.

So far today, I am 412 calories. I’ll burn that and a couple hundred more if I can find the energy to climb on the stair-stepper. I could eat half a cupcake (150), or a quarter (75). I could scrape off the frosting and just nibble at the cake.

I shouldn’t. I can’t. I don’t deserve it. I’m a fat load and I disgust myself. I take up too much space already. I am an ugly, nasty hypocrite. I am trouble. I am a waste.

I want to go to sleep and not wake up, but I don’t want to die. I want to eat like a normal person eats, but I need to see my bones or I will hate myself even more and I might cut out my heart or take every pill that was ever made.

I take the cupcake guaranteed to taste the worst: pomegranate. It has pink frosting and red seeds on top.

I lick off the seeds and bite. They explode in my mouth, wet-red tang, not like a berry, not like an apple, but dark-er, close to wine. I could eat a handful of these seeds, or six handfuls, or I could pour a bucket of them into me.

No, I couldn’t. I just eat six seeds: 1.2.3.4.5.6. They feel warm going down my throat, not scary.

I hear a door open, but I can’t see it. The puppet strings of this body are cut and I can’t feel these hands, or stop them from peeling the paper wrapper off the cupcake and shoving it in me. This mouth chews and swallows and hurry because here comes another and another until all the red-seeded cupcakes are gone. Every. Single.