The Art of Starving Read online

  Of the boys outside on the rusty benches before school started, of the boys in the halls, of the boys in my classrooms. The boys I desired; the boys I feared.

  In my tuna-befuddled state, I could no longer navigate safely, and at any moment an attack could come. Verbal or physical, there’s no real difference. Sticks and stones, etc.—anyone who’s ever had a human body knows that’s bullshit.

  I kind of prefer the physical. The fear of a physical assault is almost worse than the thing itself, so once I’ve actually had my head slammed into a locker or my arm turned into a punching bag, I don’t have to worry anymore about whether it’ll happen. It’s over. And plus, there’s something about a verbal assault, even from the crude and inarticulate toad-boys of Hudson High, that echoes for days inside my head. That invades my thoughts in quiet moments. That makes my heart hammer and my brain balk, like, What is the point of living when I am so clearly less than human?

  Suicidal ideation, folks. Keep moving—nothing to see here.

  The day passed at an excruciating pace. I heard every watch tick, felt the massive hands of the ugly 1950s clocks in every single classroom thud through my torpor like distant drumming. My lunch was skim milk, and even that felt so thick and gross. I drank it with tenth-grade biology echoing in my head, milk is an emulsion of fat globules suspended in a water-based fluid. Disgusting. So I threw it away half-full.

  By now you are perhaps thinking: wait, Matt, are you really so friendless? Surely you must have someone.

  And, yes, I do. Or rather, I did. I had Darryl Staffkey. Youngest son of a sprawling trailer-park family down the street from us; fellow comic-book-and-video-game-obsessed nerd. Hopeless as me. We spent every second of every summer together, mostly in my basement, moving between my PlayStation and my laptop. Arguing online, well into the night, over Who Would Win in increasingly absurd fictional character matchups.

  And in June, as soon as the school year ended, his father got laid off from the slaughterhouse, and his family packed up and moved to Canajoharie. Which is only an hour and a half away, but might as well be the planet Krypton.

  Because Darryl doesn’t call; Darryl doesn’t write. He doesn’t respond to my messages, which are sometimes very long and sometimes very short, beyond the occasional LOL or SMH. Once in a while he’ll Like a photo of mine. The bare minimum. He doesn’t want to be a total jerk who’s turned his back on his best friend.

  But I see his pictures. I know what’s going on. Darryl is different in his new town. He’s varsity now. Busy with baseball, parties, beer, girls.

  Darryl stopped being, well, him. People do that all the time. I’m not mad at him for abandoning me. More, I’m mad at him for abandoning himself.

  With Darryl gone, I had friends, sort of. I guess you’d call them acquaintances. People, mostly girls, who laugh at my jokes. Who I exchange notes with, in class. Whose jokes I laugh at. For whom I ceased to exist, as soon as we left the building. Which is fine. They ceased to exist for me, too.

  Somehow, I made it through the day without a major incident. Donnie Bell punched me in the side in math class; someone else coughed fairy behind me in the hall. It barely registered on the Grand Scale of High School Hate. Slowly, dimly, the tuna-fish dullness started to fade as my hunger returned.

  Then, late in the afternoon, I heard thunder clapping in the distance, and I knew I was in trouble. Ten minutes later it was a full-on downpour.

  Heavy rain meant I couldn’t walk home. Which meant the bus. Which meant waiting for the bus. Which meant standing in the packed lunchroom, watching buses pull up and depart, waiting thirty or forty minutes for mine to come.

  Ott at least did me the favor of not making me wait, sitting and trembling and wondering when the attack would come. As soon as I arrived at the cafeteria he crowed:

  “Holy shit, Bastien, did you see that?”

  “No, what?”

  “Matt was totally checking out your ass, dude.”

  “No way,” Bastien gasped, doing his best impression of a scandalized prude. Fear thickened in my stomach.

  “For real, dude! Are you going to let him get away with that?”

  They let it sink in, let me squirm. Bounced back and forth some pretty standard pieces of macho chest-thumping.

  In my mind I was Magneto, reaching out my arms to feel the steel skeleton of the cafeteria, lifting the whole thing into the air, smashing two metal tables together, into Ott, popping him like a pink grape. Or I was Ripley, standing with a machine-gun grenade launcher, staring down the Queen Alien, utterly unafraid.

  But really, I was afraid. And I stood there, in my fear. Let myself marinate. Felt it ooze through me. Fear cut the last threads of tuna-fish stupor. Fear was good.

  I don’t know where it came from, the sudden insight that saved me from that moment. My brain cast about blindly for a weapon, any weapon, to use against these boys. And found one.

  Hunger, I thought, remembering the almost-supernatural intuition that had helped me insult Ott the morning before.

  Focus on the sharp emptiness. Embrace it.

  I made eye contact with Ott. I stared. Hunger was an animal, crying out in my gut. It heightened my senses, and I felt the potential to push it further. I breathed in. I could smell him. Not just the stink of his overapplied deodorant or the reek of his three-days-in-a-row underpants. Him.

  He expects me to break, I realized. To run or to cry.

  If I did nothing, I could unnerve him.

  And then, under that, I noticed something else. Something in his eyes that couldn’t quite hold contact with mine.

  Just like Tariq.

  Which led me to Maya. Anger boosted the signal of my hunger, and I took one step closer to him.

  “Don’t take it personally, Ott,” I said. “I’m sure there’s somebody out there desperate enough to check out your ass.”

  He punched me. This wasn’t like before, when I’d insulted him too intelligently for him to pick up on it right away. This, he knew for the dig that it was. His fist flew out slow, and in the instant before he swung I seemed to see in his face the precise trajectory of the blow.

  I could have dodged. That’s how sharp the image was. I didn’t. Knuckle hit lip, hard, splitting it.

  The pain felt right. I laughed.

  I tasted blood. I spat it out, aiming right for his shoes. Even my aim was suddenly significantly better. Ott drew back his fist again, and Bastien grabbed it. Held his arm in place until Ott lowered it.

  “Bro,” he said, his voice managerial and used to being obeyed. “Let it go.”

  Throughout it all, Tariq’s attention had stayed riveted on his phone. I thought I saw something like a smile cross his face, but whether it was my blood or my insult of Ott that had amused him I couldn’t say.

  RULE #5

  Your body will have weird ways of showing you its hungers. Some are straightforward: food hunger starts in your stomach; sex hunger starts in your groin. Others are spooky, sneaking up on you from strange places. Like my hunger for my father—to know who he is, to meet him, to hear his voice even if it’s just on the phone. My hunger for my father starts in my arms.

  DAY: 2, CONTINUED . . .

  My father is on a lobster boat.

  My father, born a Jew, is a Buddhist.

  These are the two things I know about him for sure. The things my mother told me. I can infer other things—like, he is where my bright-red hair comes from, or he is not a very good person—but those two are what I know without a doubt.

  The lobster boat thing is what she said when we were little, and we asked why we didn’t have a dad. The other thing she told me six months ago, when I found a copy of The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac at the bottom of a closet. “That’s your father’s . . . it’s what converted him to Buddhism.”

  I also found a copy of The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Mom didn’t know anything about that one.

  I know not to ask about him. I know it’s a sore subject. I don’t know exactly why.
r />   It’s one of the many subjects Mom won’t talk about, like how she wouldn’t let Maya play me any of her punk-rock records because they have curse words. She thinks I’m a child who needs to be protected from the horrors of grown-ups, because she somehow forgot that the world of children has its own horrors. And that the world of teenagers holds the horrors of both.

  “Hey, honey,” she said, when she came home from work.

  “Hey,” I said, sitting at the kitchen table, studying the fake wood grain on the dark plastic paneling that covered every surface.

  She kissed the top of my head and barreled through to the refrigerator. I smelled the hog blood on her hands. I smelled the cigarettes-and-pig-stink of the slaughterhouse. I shut my eyes and breathed her in, my mom, this towering assassin, massive demon nightmare of every pig in three counties.

  The smiley-faced bunny rabbit on her sweater didn’t fool me. She was a terrifying force of nature.

  Hunger makes you stronger. Smarter.

  It gives you, like, a power. You know? An ability.

  I could see things now. Things I shouldn’t be able to. They’re dim, like lights through fog, but there. And soon I’d be able to see them clearly.

  My mother was good at secrets, but she wouldn’t be able to keep them from me for much longer.

  “What’s happening in your world?” she said, sitting down across from me, her heavy body settling into the chair like a weary king onto the throne.

  “Not a whole lot. How was work?”

  “Tough,” she said. “Quota’s up again.”

  “Do you know something?” I asked, quick before my courage could fail me. “About what happened to Maya? Something she told you but wouldn’t tell me?”

  Mom sighed, stood up, went to the coffeemaker. Stood there for a little while, wondering maybe whether she had the strength to make a pot. Then she sat back down. “No, honey.”

  “Why didn’t you call the cops? That’s what normally happens, on the TV shows, when a teenager runs away. What if . . .” I gulped down air before finishing the terrible, terrifying sentence— “what if she’s hurt? What if someone hurt her?”

  Mom frowned. “Life’s not a TV show. And your sister is going through a really tough patch. Getting the law involved could hurt her worse. I don’t think she’s doing drugs but, you know, lots of kids experiment. What if the cops catch up to her and end up arresting her? Then she has a record, then she might go to jail. I know too many people who . . .”

  She paused, let out a long breath.

  “Long as she calls in regular, and I know she’s not dead or in a coma, I’m going to give her a chance to figure this out for herself.”

  “But, why is she in a tough patch? Because of what?” Mom leaned her head back wearily. A sign of defeat, of stop talking about this. Before, she’d snap defensively if I implied maybe something terrible could happen to Maya. What did it mean that she wasn’t getting angry about it now? Did it mean she was taking the possibility more seriously? Or that she knew something I didn’t? I stared at her face, its pattern of lines, its pain, a secret I couldn’t unravel, a story in a language I didn’t speak. Slowly, wearily, she took her long brown hair out of its ponytail.

  I got up and went to the coffeemaker. I didn’t quite know what I was doing, but soon it was making a gurgly noise and steam was coming up from it, so I figured I had gotten the gist. Mom must have zoned out or dozed off during this, because when I set a mug of coffee down in front of her, she laughed out loud with surprise.

  “Thank you, honey,” she said, and grabbed my small hand with one of her giant ones. Then she grabbed it with the other. And held on.

  I looked around the kitchen. It was full of food. Fridge, cabinets, cupboard—all of it calling out to me. But I was stronger now. Strong enough to fight the hunger that made my head hurt. Especially now, when I could sense some kind of breakthrough was coming.

  “Your nails,” Mom said, holding up my hand, showing the ruined edges of my fingers.

  “It’s nothing.” But I didn’t pull my hand away.

  After a long time she said, “Dinner’ll be ready in a little while,” and her voice was different. Shaky. Fragile. I had never noticed anything fragile about my mother before. I kissed her forehead and fled.

  I took a tiny secret forbidden sip of her coffee on the way out. It wasn’t very good. My next pot would be better.

  On the way to my room, I stopped and stood outside Maya’s for a little while. Listening.

  I used to press my ear to the wall that separated our rooms, trying to hear the secret songs she played on her guitar, the music she wouldn’t share with me because it had curse words. The real reason, I knew, was because it was too personal. She always kept her headphones plugged into the amplifier so I couldn’t hear anything but the twanging of the struck strings. And now I didn’t even hear that.

  I opened the door. Went to her desk, pulled out one drawer.

  Memories of Maya screaming to stop spying you little turd flooded me, and I slammed it shut. My face flushed, and I fled.

  I was waiting for myself when I walked into my own room. I stood in the doorway, and also, across from me, I stood in the full-length mirror: eyes huge, chin too big, skin too hideous to describe—a fun-house freak sent to mock me. I opened my window and sat on my floor in front of that mirror. October wind rushed in like a lost dog, curled around my ankles.

  My hands gripped the radiator. My arms hurt.

  Lobster boat. Men who work lobster boats are strong. Their arms are thick with muscles and hair. Their chests are broad and mighty. They laugh loudly and drink whiskey. They get in fights. They enjoy watching football. My father belongs to that strange and foreign nation, the Country of Men, to which I have no membership.

  I draped my jeans over the full-length mirror, then hung a hoodie there, then covered it up with as many clothes as I could add without causing it to collapse.

  It had been a long time since I stared out the window and dreamed up elaborate stories starring my father. Watching the road and concentrating all my energy on magically conjuring him up. My knuckles white on the windowsill, my forehead scrunched to high hell with wanting. Listening for the sound of truck tires on gravel. Praying.

  I’m not that desperate stupid kid anymore.

  But still.

  I’ve read The Art of War. I’ve taken notes. I’ve learned a lot about how to fight and win.

  I’ve read The Dharma Bums three times. And I’ve been waiting patiently for the Hudson High School library’s lone other book by Jack Kerouac to be returned. On the Road, it’s called, and that sounds like my father, too.

  And I think I might be kind of considering converting—to Buddhism.

  RULE #6

  Every superhero, every Chosen One, goes through a painful and difficult process of Becoming. On this, all the relevant literature is in agreement. Ask any comic book aficionado, any movie buff. The heroes doubt themselves, even when confronted with irrefutable evidence. They’ve spent their whole lives listening to weak and powerless people who hate and fear anything that is different, who say that superhuman abilities simply don’t exist, and they believe it.

  The warrior studying the Art of Starving will pass through a period of pain and confusion. Doubt. Fear. This is normal. You are learning that a different set of rules applies to you.

  DAY: 3

  TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 500

  The walk to school was one thing. Cold morning, no wind—maybe the stink of the slaughterhouse was a little bit worse than normal, but not so bad that I stopped to wonder.

  As soon as I stepped foot inside Hudson High, though, I knew something was different.

  The place stunk. Like: way worse than normal. Mold and rotten meat seemed to fill the lockers; the seats in every classroom stunk of decades of ill-washed ass. Even from across the school I could smell the gym, an inanimate object brought to screaming life by dripping sweat and the grimy festering smell of fear. The cafeteria throbb
ed with waterlogged broccoli, clots of hamburger meat, dirty hairnets.

  First-period math class, I looked around the room in shock, to smell all the stinks these smiling catalog-model boys and girls carried around with them. Boys whose boxer shorts were walking atrocities. Girls reeking of cigarette smoke. I could tell who wore hand-me-downs; how many times they’d been handed down.

  A flood of smells everywhere I went, and I felt certain I would drown in it. Between classes, I ran for the bathroom, knowing I was about to puke, but the smell in there was so bad it stopped me at the door. The digested dinners of a hundred sallow boys. The pungent boutique of bottom-grade swamp-rot marijuana.

  Stumbling back to class, nose buried in the crook of my elbow, I almost collided with two girls, Regan and Jeanine, best friends since forever, and knew at once that Jeanine had been orally intimate with Regan’s boyfriend that very morning.

  Fear had me off-balance, made me desperate to know what the hell was going on, frantic for proof that either I was right, or that I was merely going insane. I had to test the validity of what my nose told me was true.

  “Oh, hey, Jeanine, didn’t see you on the bus this morning.”

  “No,” she said, panic surging through her, panic that had a smell like wet dog, “I got a ride.”

  “From who?” Regan asked, and that was all I needed to hear. I pretended to get a call on my cell, held it to my ear and said, “Hello?” as I hurried off, wailing inside. In that moment, insanity or delusion would have been so much easier to handle. Was this happening? Was I able to perceive things by . . . smelling them?

  “I want this to stop,” I whispered out loud.

  But no one was listening. No one could help me.

  RULE #7

  You are your nose.

  Smell is the sense most closely associated with memory. It’s the most evocative sense—the one that causes your brain to work the hardest. Scientists now believe that the nose can actually distinguish between over a trillion unique odors, making it vastly more sophisticated than any other sense organ.