I: 783,1371
The ancient man beside me in the library wore a black leather jacket. He sat before a black computer screen, one of the ones meant for referencing the catalog, stinking of cigarettes. Reading glasses dangled at the very edge of his hooked nose, through which pale eyes scanned one enormous book. A pale hand scratched writing in a second book with the voracity of a starved man.
The first book was printed in the smallest font size I’d ever seen, words blurring into horizontal lines across footlong pages. Still, it was impossibly thick, wider than a dictionary and marked with indents along its edge the size of a child’s thumbprints.
The second was thinner, though not by much, its edges dirtied and smoothed with use. The place the man held open was near its end, the page coated in loopy handwriting, black and blue and red ink crammed and smudging into each other.
I stole glances at his furious reading and writing as I searched the library catalog on my side’s computer, but I couldn’t read what the small-print book said, nor could I make out any of what he was writing. His hand never ceased motion, and his eyes didn’t either. I sat, fidgeted with the computer’s mouse, and searched nonsense terms in the database for fifteen minutes, waiting for one of the two—the eyes or the hand—to give in, but neither ever did.
Watching him dialed up my heartbeat, set my foot jiggling like a wind-up soldier. He
was so wholly absorbed in his tasks he seemed as though he might drop dead were he to stop one of them. I was acutely aware of the clock ticking on the wall behind me, the woman tapping a pencil on the other side of the computer station, and the uneven beat of my heart, but the man seemed aware of nothing except his text, his work, his words.
Fifteen more minutes passed. I knew the old man wouldn’t notice if every person in the library dropped to the ground and started screaming, much less if I stopped searching the database, but I couldn’t stop stealing looks, and guilt would begin seeping up through the floor and into my bones if I stared at him openly, so I—
“Let me know if you’d like more room.”
I flinched. His eyes were suddenly turned on me, boring into me like drills, bursting through my skull and straight into my brain. He spoke softly, though, in a voice like a lapping tide.
“No worries,” I said.
And that was it. He began turning back to his enormous books, and I to my useless list, but my heart lurched toward him like it was on a short leash, so I stopped and asked: “If you don’t mind telling me, what are you writing about?”
He set his pen down. Flexed fingers with skin like paper crumpled and smoothed out
again. Like he’d been waiting for me to ask, and suddenly I was embarrassed, heat flooding my neck.
“I’ve just started leading a new church,” he said. “I want to understand my faith better, and so I’m finding words from the scripture that mean something to me in this.” He hefted the bottom book, the one with the tiny print. “It’s a dictionary of every word in the Bible. I find it here.” He pointed to a word on the page the book was opened to. “And then I flip to the back for the original Hebrew. You know, like in the Old Testament.”
I knew egregiously little about the Bible, but I nodded.
It seemed like the right choice because he nodded back. “Yes. I want to know the words better. That’s the first thing you do when you’re learning a new language; you don’t know a word, you go and look it up in the dictionary. Understanding. It’s everything.”
I nodded again. The quiet then was just a moment too long for me to stay silent, but I felt as though the man was encased in a spell, something I might shatter if I breathed too hard. I
couldn’t make myself speak.
“Once I find the definitions, I write notes on them in here.” Finally. He gestured to the thinner book with the scrawled writing. “Anything I think about the word, the passage, any part of the scripture. It’s all done wonders for my, my understanding, you see.”
His eyes turned on me again, suddenly expectant, hesitant. “That’s a great method,” I said. “I’m glad you’ve found it.”
He hmph-ed proudly. “Five years, I’ve been doing this. It’s a commitment, but it’s everything to me.”
Everything to me. How could two books mean five years to someone?
I stood. My chair scraped too loud against the plastic tile. “Thank you,” I said. He nodded again, eyes already returned to the page.
II: 32
I first met Mickey, trash saver extraordinaire, through my embarrassing hippie grandma.
My grandma’s white minivan, crystals swinging from the front mirror, swerved into a parking spot in front of Mickey’s house beside an oak tree swaddled in multicolored yarn, its roots
clawing out onto the sidewalk.
“Tree hugging,” my grandma said when she noticed me staring, as if that explained anything at all.
The purple house behind the oak was old, but in a vintage way, and crowded with stuff.
Brightly colored scraps of tied-together fabric scalloped along the underside of the porch’s roof.
Bits of tinted glass jingled against Mickey’s windows, a scrawny cat swatting at them hard enough to make me wonder if they would scratch the windows. A Little Free Library squatted next to the walkway, brushing my leg as I passed through.
We stopped on the porch, in front of the shock-blue door. “Mickey’s expecting us,” my grandma said. “She doesn’t believe in knocking. Too disruptive.”
My grandma had met Mickey through the ‘time-trading community,’ as my grandma liked to call it, in our city. She’d done Mickey’s laundry, since Mickey couldn’t personally own a machine that wasted so much water, and in exchange, Mickey had mended a pile of tie-dye scarves my grandmother’s chihuahua had torn holes in.
Good for them, my mother had said. I didn’t tell her I thought it was ridiculous.
Mickey blew open the door approximately four and a half minutes later, curly dark hair wild about her shoulders, yoga pants dragging like a slug trail on the floor. Her face broadened with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.
“Come in, come in! And you must be the lovely granddaughter. Here, sit down,” she said, ushering us to a lumpy pink couch, curls bouncing frantically.
Walking inside felt and tasted like entering a cloud of incense. I slouched in one corner of the couch, my grandma straight-postured and smiling in the other. It couldn’t be stuffed with whatever usually filled couches; I felt like I was sitting on plastic. Probably was. Mickey was already flying around the room, sliding a Japanese tea tray onto the glass coffee table, wiping down the countertops of the open-concept kitchen, and rearranging a vase of wildflowers on her fireplace mantle.
“I don’t actually use the fireplace,” she assured us, leaning on her toes to reach the flowers. Her voice was high and tense, though, like a violin string near snapping. It cracked on the middle syllable of fireplace. “I wouldn’t dream of emitting that much carbon.”
My grandma patted my knee.
When Mickey finally settled, I felt the way I imagined frontiersmen might have when the Dust Bowl did. I reached for a cup of tea.
“The set’s Japanese,” Mickey said brightly, tensely again, leaning forward in her armchair. “Have you had Japanese green before?”
“It’s her favorite,” my grandma said before I could answer.
“Oh, I’m so glad. So, so glad. You told me you wanted me to talk to your granddaughter about my waste output?”
“Yes,” I said before my grandma could answer. “I’m doing a project about the environment. We’re supposed to interview someone—”
“I would be happy to! Honored, really.”
“Great,” I said, puffing out a breath.
My grandma patted my knee.
“I started reducing my waste four years ago, when I watched a documentary about the Pacific Garbage Patch. Do you know what that is? It’s a hunk of trash the size of Texas floating in the ocean. The documentary had photos of the seagulls and the fish near it, and they just looked so sad, I couldn’t stand it.”
She gestured wildly with her hands as she spoke. I didn’t tell her I knew what the Pacific Garbage Patch was already. I couldn’t speak; I felt again as though Mickey was under a desperate curse, and if one word crossed my lips, it would place irrevocable doubt in her mind that perhaps her obsession with only producing exactly three pounds of trash each year was not as all-important as she had allowed it to become. Her speech rose and fell more, elaborating all the ways she recycled and composted and traded her way out of producing trash.
“I only shop at a local zero-waste grocery store. And the couch you’re sitting on? When it needed new cushions, I sewed them myself and stuffed them with plastic bags. I had to take donations for them, since I didn’t have enough. Can you believe that?” Her smile lunged at me, desperate with outstretched fingers.
“I didn’t notice at all,” I lied.
III: 7003
When I began starving myself, I didn’t want to be thin.
I already was lean in seventh grade; my hair was straight and shiny, my clothes new, my nails clean and polished. I just wanted to be more. Thinner, prettier, smarter. Higher test scores, fewer calories, more clothes, lower weight. Scores higher, body smaller. Perfected, trimmed.
Once the algorithms caught on, it was easy. I found an app that didn’t have any age or
calorie minimums; I found social media accounts that posted photos of bone-starved girls, and I decided I should want to look like them.
So I tracked everything I ate when I could, and when I couldn’t, I memorized it to track later. One apple, ninety-five calories. One cup strawberries, fifty-four. A bowl of rice, one and one-half cups fresh-cooked, three hundred and nine. I convinced myself I wanted to look like those girls on the Internet.
I got good at it. Nearly as good as I was at taking tests. My jeans started hanging off my hips, so I learned how to sew. My mother started noticing how cold I was, so I ordered a heated blanket for delivery, blaming it on the AC my stepfather kept sub-zero.
A girl in the student council told me, one day, that she wished her waist looked like mine. “Thank you,” I said. She was younger than me, shorter and sweeter, and the confession clogged something hot and sticky in my throat. I focused on the poster I was painting on my desk, kept my eyes on the blood red letters on blank white. Not on her.
She doesn’t know what it cost me to look like this, said the dark inside me, the knotted place that starved for more hunger, more pain. She doesn’t want this. She’s not strong, like I am. She couldn’t handle the cost.
On ‘good days,’ I ate fewer than five hundred calories. A single egg for breakfast, fried in a nonstick pan without oil, a cup of strawberries and a low-calorie snack for lunch, and whatever on the menu was smallest at dinner. Soup, often. The cold solidified in my bones, no longer a temporary thing. It, the phrase I’m just tired, and the hunger were my constant companions, solitary and gnawing on each other inside me.
Eventually, I stopped caring about the way my body looked. The social media pages didn’t mean anything, not anymore; I already looked like those girls. They were no longer aspirational, and then, the numbers became all that mattered. Ever smaller, ever dwindling, shaving closer and closer to the bone.
I stopped feeling the hunger. I stopped feeling most things. My grades never wavered, but I stopped going out with my friends, reading for fun, and singing in the shower. I stopped having over-500 days, and my life became a straight line like a dead man’s EKG; one long, mournful beep.
I snapped on the fourth of November.
My dad’s house was cold at night—not the AC cold of my mom’s house, but the real cold of a place without a heater—and I had only the IKEA duvet I’d bought when I was nine, after the divorce. My sister breathed deeply in her bunk above mine—in two three four, out two three four, I tried to mimic it but I couldn’t—and I was so scared that my stomach’s groans of pain would wake her, or that my violent shivering would shake the bunks enough to rouse her. My eyes were open wide like those of a scared animal, staring unseeing at the underside of my sister’s bunk, her mattress bruise-colored in the low light.
All I wanted was one. My friend had sold us Girl Scout cookies, and I’d asked her for a box of the ones she told me everyone hated; the new s’mores flavor. Just one. It was the one time in the past year I’d bought food without reading its calorie label, and I’d spent a week thinking about what they might taste like. I’d already worked them into my calorie limit, estimating eighty calories each. Thin Mints were only forty-four each, so I figured I was being generous. All I’d needed was for my friend to deliver them.
She did. I’d checked the label, first thing. One hundred and forty calories each.
My heart had sunken straight through me, thudding onto the floor.
That was a week ago. While I laid under my IKEA duvet under my sister’s bunk, trying to clench my stomach muscles hard enough to keep it from growling, the s’mores cookies had been waiting, sealed, in my dad’s pantry drawer for a week.
Just one. But it was impossible. I’d been thinking about it the entire week, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cross five hundred calories, and I couldn’t go back, couldn’t let all the pounds crumble into nothing in my hands. It couldn’t all be for nothing.
Just one.
My stomach growled, loud. My sister tossed above me and I froze, daring not to move. I pressed a hand to my neck. The fingers were foreign and ice-cold.
“This is ridiculous,” I whispered aloud to the underside of the mattress.
And suddenly the words were real, and the app and the calorie counts and the weekly weight differences and changing goalposts were…less.
Their power was mine again. They were nothing, and they had never been anything, and I was being absolutely, unforgivably ridiculous. I was supposed to be smart. How could I have been so stupid? Smart girls didn’t starve themselves; that was something for the bimbos of old high school movies, the insecure girlfriends and vain popular cliques.
What was I doing?
Before I could change my mind, I pulled off the IKEA covers and eased out of bed. I pulled the bedroom door open swiftly to keep it from creaking and padded down the hall into the kitchen.
The house looked different so late; the moon’s yellow gaze blurred through the windows, diffusing into the deep-blue which coated the table, chairs, floor, and kitchen cabinets in a thick layer. Being the only source of noise unsettled me. I felt too clumsy, too loud, too much beside the cool quiet of the night, but I didn’t let myself slow. If I did, I’d go back to bed and starve myself for another year.
I opened the cabinet, pulled out the drawer, and retrieved the cookie package. Don’t think about it. Just keep going. Opened it with scissors, threw out the extra plastic. Brought the sleeve of cookies to the table. Sat down, removed one cookie, placed it on a paper napkin, and stared at it.
I pinched it between two fingers. Started to raise it. Set it back down, released it. Graham cracker dust stayed, grainy on my fingertips.
I took a shallow breath. Grabbed the cookie again, closed my eyes, put it in my mouth, and bit down.
Chewed.
Swallowed.
A gulp of water.
A moment, a heartbeat.
The cookie settled in my stomach and I smiled, big enough to feel like my face was splitting in two, alone in my kitchen at eleven forty-eight on a Friday, because the s’mores cookie tasted just as much like cardboard as everyone else had told me it did.
Outside, distantly, rain began to tap on the roof. Inside, I let go of a breath I’d held for years.
1 Number of words in the King James Authorized Bible.
2 Pounds of trash Mickey Alversalli produces annually.
3 Number of calories per day I allocated myself between ages thirteen and fourteen, for an estimated weight loss of 1.5 lbs/week.
