Bleed (10 page)

And then she walks right out of it.

S
ATURDAY
, A
UGUST
12, 3:00
P.M
.

I hate my house. I hate everyone inside of it. I even hate the color—apple pie-filling brown, with globs of dirt stuck to the bottom shingles. I’ m standing at the front door, but I don’t want to go in. And I’ve already spent a whole hour at the library. I wish Maria had let me stay at her house, at least until after my mom went off to aerobics class. I don’t know why she didn’t. I don’t know why she made me sneak out her bedroom window and hide in the bushes. Or why she touched herself on her privates when she changed her clothes. She told me not to peek, but I did. And I almost wish I didn’t.

My mom’s car is parked in the driveway, so I know she’s home. Maybe I’ll just stay out here and play with my Game Boy, beat Dracula, free his prisoner, and become Sadie-istic, Supreme Vampire Huntress once and for all.

Except I’m hungry.

I turn the knob and push the door open. “Sadie,” Mom says, coming out of the washroom. “Hi, sweetie-dee. I was just thinking about you.” There’s an unopened box of Nutty Buddies sitting on top of the heaping basket of clean laundry she’s carrying. “Come on upstairs. Ginger and Nina have some friends over. We were just about to have a snack.”

Is she really going to let me have one of those Nutty Buddies?

I follow her up the stairs and into the kitchen, glad she hasn’t noticed that the sign she put on my shirt isn’t there anymore.

Ginger, my bossy fourteen-year-old sister, stands in the middle of the kitchen floor showing her friend Cheryl how to do a proper plié. Ginger’s wearing a dark, shiny red bathing suit that makes her look like a giant Fruit Roll-Up come to life. The snack key dangles from a long silver chain around her neck.

“A straighter back,” Mom says. She slides the laundry basket onto the table and puts one hand on Ginger’s bony shoulder and the other at the bottom of her spine. She guides Ginger down into the perfect plié, not even thinking about the Nutty Buddies just sitting there on top of the warm pile of laundry, probably melting at this very second.

Nina, my nine-year-old sister, sits at the kitchen table with her best friend, Douglas. They’re playing Go Fish. “Hi, Sadie,” she says, pairing up a couple of sevens.

“You’ve got a purple juice smile across your mouth,” I say.

She shrugs and takes another sip of her Kool-Aid.

“Very nice,” Mom says to Ginger. Ginger is able to plié down until her hair almost hits the floor. Her legs are long and tan. Almost as tall as my whole body. I wonder if my legs will be like that in three years, too.

But I don’t look anything like my sisters. My hair is dark brown. Theirs is blond. They have blue eyes. My eyes are brown. They’re both tall and skinny—even Nina is almost as tall as me. I need to lose sixteen pounds. Their skin is tan this summer. Mine is pasty white. They both like ballet. I have achilles tendonitis—which basically means that I pulled some muscles at the back of my heel—and so I can’t do sports or dancing, and I have a doctor’s note saying I can’t do gym class. If the tendon tears completely, then Mom says I’ll have to have surgery or my ankle and foot will kill even more.

I have one other sister, Kendra, who looks a little like me, but she decided not to come back from college this summer. When she came home last summer, Mom made her go to Weight Busters with us, complaining that she had gained the “freshman fifteen” from too much pizza and beer. Kendra is skinnier than me, but not as skinny as Ginger and Nina. I’m mad at Kendra for not coming home, even though I probably wouldn’t have either. I can’t wait till I go off to college and never have to come back.

“How about that snack?” Mom asks. She starts to open up the box of Nutty Buddies, but then stops and looks at me. “What happened to your sign?”

Ginger starts laughing. She clutches around her hollow stomach like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard. Cheryl starts laughing, too, and soon they can’t even stand still. “You girls are so silly,” Mom says, shaking her head.

They’re laughing because of the sign.
The
sign. The one my mom pins to my shirt whenever I gain weight, or whenever I’m going out without her and she knows there’s gonna be food. Or sometimes when I’ve eaten something I shouldn’t. Or like today, when I have to go weigh in later. My mom says it’s for my own good, that beauty is pain, and that someday I’ll thank her. And then on comes the sign—just a normal piece of notebook paper that she’s written on in big cursive letters:
PLEASE DO NOT FEED SADIE
.

I know I could take the sign off, and sometimes I do. But sometimes I forget it’s even there. And sometimes I don’t care if people see it.

Mom says the sign could be a lot worse. She says that when she was a teenager and trying to lose weight for the prom, she and her mother joined this weight-loss club that made members wear a pig nose, stand in the middle of a circle of people, and oink a bunch of times whenever they weighed in and had gained more than half a pound. I guess she’s right. I guess that would be a lot worse.

“The sign fell off at Maria’s,” I say, plucking at my eyelashes, pulling out a three-lash fan.

“Why were you at Maria’s?”

“She let me use her nail polish.”

Mom looks at my Baby-Got-the-True-Blues fingernail shade and frowns. “Why is a seventeen-year-old hanging around with an eleven-year-old? You told me you were going to the park for arts and crafts.”

“I was going to, but then I saw Maria.”

Ginger and Cheryl are still laughing at me. Cheryl puffs out her cheeks, fat-girl style, and this makes Ginger laugh so loud and hard that her perfectly straight back slides down the wall and she collapses to the floor, holding her hand between her legs so she doesn’t pee. Mom looks over at them. “Ginger, keep it up and Cheryl will have to go home and you’ll have to go to your room.” Then she turns back to look at me. “Did you have anything to eat?”

I shake my head.

“Well, let’s have us a little snack and we’ll talk about this later.”

I nod and look at Nina. She smiles at me and scores another card from Douglas to make a pair of kings. I hope she wins. I like her so much more than Ginger.

Mom busts open the side of the Nutty Buddy box with her thumb. She gives one cone to Douglas first. “There you go, sweetie,” she says. One to Nina, one to Cheryl, and one to Ginger. Then she closes up the box and stuffs it in the freezer.

Mom puts her arm around my shoulder. “Now what do you say, you and me have our own snack?” She kisses the top of my head, and I want to cry so bad that my forehead hurts. I nod and look away, stare at the wallpaper, the stripes of pears and oranges and bananas, because I don’t want anyone to see.

I look at the inside of the fridge, where Mom is pointing. “How about some nice carrot sticks? I bought some fresh yesterday at the farmer’s market. And I have some yummy no-fat veggie dip.”

“Okay,” I say, hearing my own voice crackle.

She takes the package of carrots out, along with the container of dip. Ginger peels the paper off the cone part of her Nutty Buddy. She takes a bite and the cone is all chewy. I can see it in her mouth. I love it all chewy like that.

Mom arranges
our
snack on a Tupperware platter she bought from Maria’s mother. She places the dip in the center and arranges the carrot sticks around it like sun rays. “Now, doesn’t that look pretty?” She holds it out for everyone to look at.

No one says anything.

Me and Mom go out on the sunporch to eat, while Ginger and Cheryl move into the living room for more ballet, and Nina and Douglas keep playing cards. The sunporch is pretty new. It has a big yellow umbrella with pink flowers and matching cushiony lounge chairs. Me and Mom sit at the table, and she starts reading her book. It’s a new one. The cover shows a man and a woman on horseback with their hair blowing, and mountains in the background. I wish we had that kind of breeze out here. It’s so hot.

“You know, Sadie,” Mom begins, “don’t think I don’t notice when Ginger isn’t so nice to you. I’ll speak to her later. I just didn’t want to embarrass her in front of her friend. They’re just silly girls. You’ll be giggly like that one day, too. Everything will be funny.”

“I don’t think I’ll ever be like Ginger.”

“Ginger’s metabolism is different than yours is. She lucked out. You didn’t. I didn’t. She got your father’s genes. So did Nina. You weren’t as lucky and got mine. So, like me, you just need to watch it, that’s all.”

“You look pretty to me.”

“Thank you, sweetie. But Mom’s gotta work very hard to look good. You know how hard I work. And I
still
need to lose at least ten pounds.”

“I need to lose sixteen.”

Mom smiles at me like she knows and feels bad about it. She leans forward and her dark wavy hair hangs into the dip. “Can you keep a secret?”

I nod.

“You’ll be the lucky one in the end. I have friends who were like Ginger. They could eat whatever they wanted to growing up. They didn’t have to count calories or carbs or fat grams. But then one day, poof, their metabolism slowed and they still kept on eating the same way, and now they’re heavier than me.
Much
heavier. You and I
know
how to diet.”

“You think one day Ginger will be fat?”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t be surprised if her metabolism hasn’t already started to slow. I’ve noticed her thighs are getting a bit heavy. If she doesn’t watch it, she’ll be joining us at Weight Busters, just like Kendra last summer. Remember?”

The thought of Ginger at one of our Weight Busters meetings makes me smile. I picture a fat Ginger stepping barefoot onto the scale, the seams of her Fruit Roll-Up bathing suit stretched, flab bulging out all over. But then Mom pops my fantasy bubble, “You know you have to weigh in tonight,” she says.

How could I not know? She’s reminded me like, a KAGILLION times.

“Stop picking at those pretty lashes, honey,” she says. “You’re not gonna have any left.” Mom reaches over to grab a carrot, dunks it in the chunky white dip, and then stuffs it into her mouth. She smiles at me between chews, and I almost feel better.

Except I don’t want to eat carrots. But I’m so hungry I’ll eat almost anything. I take one from the sun ray arrangement, and now it looks like a white face with wild orange hair that sticks out straight. I think about telling her this but change my mind when she turns a page in her book. I drop my carrot into the dip, push it down with my finger, and then spoon it back up. It’s completely covered and so are my fingers. I try a bite. It tastes like crunch, cold nothing. I leave the rest in my napkin.

I want a real snack.

I get up from the table and go back inside. Nina’s still in the kitchen with Douglas. I could pretend to go into the freezer for some ice for a drink and take a Nutty Buddy instead, but I’m too afraid Nina will see and tell on me. Plus, it’s kind of hard to hide an ice-cream cone in a tennis outfit with just Tinker Bells all over it, no big pockets or anything.

Ginger’s just around the corner, in the living room. I know
she
would tell. She’s showing Cheryl her frappés now. Cheryl looks so bored. She’s sitting on the ottoman, but she looks like she might fall asleep. I look at Ginger’s thighs. Mom’s right, they are getting kind of round. I smile, then start to laugh.

“What?” Ginger says, when she sees me spying on her.

“Nothing.” I laugh.

“Well, then leave us alone. Go bother Nina.”

“Guess what I did today,” I say.

“I don’t care what you did.”

“O-kay-ay,”
I sing.
“If you don’t want to know what I did at Ma-ri-a’s
…”

Ginger smacks her foot back down on the floor, making the china in the hutch tremble. “I don’t care what you did. I don’t know why you hang around with that freak. I don’t know
why
Mom lets you.”

“She’s my friend.”

“You don’t have friends.”

“Neither do you!” I shout.

“Who do you think
this
is?” She points at Cheryl. “LEAVE US ALONE. GO BOTHER NINA!”

I feel my cheeks get hot. Cheryl is staring at me. They both are, waiting for me to turn around and leave so they can talk about me. Cheryl copies my sister by putting her hands on her hips. I hate Cheryl, too.

“Mom says you have fat thighs, FAT-SO!” I shout. Then I walk past them and down the hall as fast as I can. I slam my bedroom door shut and belly flop onto my bed.

I hate Ginger! I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!

I take the Game Boy out of my skirt pocket and continue where I left off, in one of the castle’s corridors, just about to use a clock and create a fire-whipping spell that would bring those vile dragon zombies to my mercy. I hate those evil dragon zombies!

Five minutes later, there’s a knock on my door. “Sadie?” Mom comes in. “I’m taking Ginger, Nina, and their friends to the beach. Do you want to come, sweetie? Put on your suit. We’ll take a quick swim.”

“I don’t know,” I say, collecting an action card. “My foot is kind of hurting me.”