Butter (26 page)

“I am to understand this was no accident?”

I shrugged and felt my face grow hot.

“And you made me a guilty party.” He pounded his knee with his fist. He really was pissed. “You were planning this when you asked me whether food could kill you, yes?”

I nodded. I felt small and ashamed.

“I could have told you much worse. I could have given you information that—well, you might not be here.” There was a hiccup in his voice, and I realized he was trying to control an emotion much bigger than anger.

“Doc, I'm sor—”

“No.” He held up a hand. “I imagine you will have many apologies to make over the next few days. Save mine and give your lady two. I only want you to promise you will not put me in such a position again.”

I promised, and Doc Bean and I moved on to easier topics. He said I was in good hands with the hospital doctors and that he would see me when it was time for follow-up care. Mom
sat with us for a while, and I dozed off while they talked about medical charts and blood glucose levels and other boring things.

But I couldn't rest for long. As soon as Bean left, my aunt and uncle came by and repeated all the same questions everyone had been asking me about how I was feeling. Finally, I got it—people weren't really asking how I felt physically, they were asking about my mental state. Once I realized that, I simply said I felt tired, which was honest on both counts.

My parents were there in the background all day, but I'd barely said two words to them. Mom chatted with everyone who showed up like she was hosting a party, and Dad stayed silent as usual. Well, maybe not completely “as usual.” Normally, Dad avoided even looking at me; he pretended I didn't exist. But as visitors came and went, I sneaked glances at the window seat where Dad had taken roost. Every time I looked, his eyes were trained directly on me.

He stared so intently, I was sure that, for once, Dad had something to say. So when Mom walked Uncle Luis and Aunt Cindy out, I looked at Dad and braced myself for a lecture, a fight, a demand for answers—anything. I was a little disappointed when he said simply, “How are you feeling?”

“Dad, you've been listening to me tell people how I feel all day.”

“Tired.” He tipped his mouth in a crooked smile. “Tired of telling people how you feel, maybe.”

A half-laugh escaped the side of my mouth. “Exactly.”

Dad got up and came to the side of my bed. “Well, you don't have to say it any more tonight. It's about time we let you get some rest.” He put a hand on my arm and opened his mouth as
if to say something else, but he only gave my arm a squeeze and wished me good night. His touch felt like a hug, and the good night sounded like “I love you.”

I smiled. “Night, Dad.”

Mom returned to the room and said good night too, only she didn't say it to me. She gave Dad a farewell kiss on the cheek, then went about pushing two chairs together and covering them with blankets in a makeshift bed. The speed at which she worked told me she'd been going through the same motions every night.

I exchanged a look with Dad, who took the lead.

“Honey, maybe you should sleep at home tonight, in a real bed.”

Mom moved to protest, but flinched. Her hand shot up to massage a spasm in her neck.

“Dad, take her home,” I said.

He put a hand on Mom's back and guided her toward the door. “You go home. I'll stay tonight.”

“Both of you go home.” The friendly nurse bustled into my room. She made a show of looking them both up and down. “You're a mess, the pair of you. Besides, he's no baby.” She jerked a thumb in my direction, and I thought I saw a quick wink as she looked my way.

Finally, Mom relented. She turned to the nurse. “Will you be—”

“I'm here for another hour.” The nurse took a seat in one of Mom's chairs and propped her feet up on the other. “And there's a real good girl on the night shift. You go on home.”

My head swiveled from Mom walking out the door to the
nurse settling in at my bedside. Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I hadn't been alone all day. Mom, Dad, visitors, nurses—my room had been crowded since I woke up. I was never alone because I
couldn't
be alone.

“Suicide watch?” I asked the nurse.

She gave a swift nod. “You got it, sugar.”

“Morning gym sessions are required, and diet is strictly regulated.”

Someone was whispering in my room, interrupting my sleep.

The voice went on, still hushed. It was Mom. “They assess your needs prior to the semester and create a food and exercise plan that starts the day you arrive.”

“Sounds strict,” Dad said.

I heard a shuffle of papers and the sound of Dad muttering to himself. Then he said out loud, “Impressive stats for the graduates.”

“Very,” Mom agreed. “The educational value alone is worth the price of admission.”

The institute.
I was wide awake now. I held perfectly still and listened.

“And his diet and fitness routine are included with the tuition?” Dad asked.

“Except for food. That depends on whether you board.”

“Fine, I'll go!” I threw back my covers and sat up in bed. The sudden movement caused my head to spin.

“Baby, you startled me,” Mom said, her hand at her heart. “I'm sorry if we woke you.”

“I'll go,” I repeated. “You're right. I'm a crackpot, and I belong at the institute.” I was shaking, and my voice sounded shrill. What was I saying?

“You are
not
a crackpot,” Dad said, his voice as calm as mine was panicked.

“Well, I'm somethin', right? I really fucked up.”

“Language!” Mom warned.

I took a deep breath and clasped my hands in my lap to keep them steady. “What I'm saying is: I get it. I did something crazy. I don't blame you now if you want to send me away.”

“Send you away? What are you talking about?” The shock in my mom's voice was so complete, I didn't know how to respond. I had been trying to stay calm and in control, but now I just felt confused.

“Well, to the institute …”

“You told him he would go there alone?” Dad asked Mom.

“We didn't talk about it. I just assumed …”

“Assumed what?” I demanded. “What's going on?”

Mom looked at me in earnest. “Baby, I would never send you off to Chicago all alone. And I wouldn't have you staying in some dorm without parental supervision. That's a privilege you'll have to wait for college to experience, I'm afraid.”

“I don't understand. Where would I live?”

“With us, of course. A lot of your dad's clients do business in Chicago, and it would only be for a year—”

“We would move? All of us?”

“We're not forcing you,” Dad said. “We're just gathering information.”

It had never occurred to me I might not go to the institute alone. Tucker's mom went with him; why hadn't I considered the possibility my parents would go too?
Because I couldn't imagine Dad giving up his life here for me, and I couldn't imagine Mom going anywhere without Dad.
Now, here they were, talking about dropping everything to pick up their lives and move across the country with me—
for
me. As much as I feared the institute, the idea that my parents would be willing to come along made me feel … important, like I mattered to Dad and wasn't a lost cause for Mom.

“Do you think I should go?” I laid the question out there honestly. I wanted to know what they thought, whether they believed it was my only option.

Mom bit her lip, and Dad placed a hand on her arm and answered for both of them. “That's up to you,” he said. “Your mother—
we
—want you to at least think about it. But it's your choice. We would never force you to do anything you don't want to do.”

“Of course not,” Mom said quickly.

Fortunately, I didn't have to decide right then, because a new doctor arrived and ushered Mom and Dad out. This doctor didn't look like the others. She wore a suit instead of a lab coat and a stern gaze instead of a comforting smile. The only
things doctorly about her were the badge around her neck and my medical chart in her hand.

She introduced herself as a psychiatrist and explained, in what sounded like a memorized speech, that all attempted suicides had to submit to a psych consult before discharge. I found it irritating to be called an “attempted suicide” instead of a patient, but I just shrugged and let her get on with it.

“You have a lot of admirers,” she said.

I looked around the room at the flowers and records and other assorted gifts. “Yeah, I guess I do.”

“No, I mean on your website.” Her expression did not change.

I picked at the blanket on my bed. “I still have a website?”

“Actually, I believe your mother shut it down, but she printed several pages first.” The psych lady pulled a pile of papers from a folder beneath my medical chart.

“What for? My scrapbook?”

She didn't even blink. “Did you know people can get into trouble for bullying someone into doing something dangerous, even over the Internet?”

“I wasn't bullied,” I said.

She shuffled a few pages and read aloud.

“ ‘Only a guy with an ass as fat as yours could eat all that in one sitting.' ‘This guy is full of shit. You can't eat yourself to death.' ‘You're so stupid for trying this, I hope you do die—' ”

“Okay,” I said. “Some kids are jerks, but most of the comments are nice—or at least they aren't mean or whatever.”

She kept reading. “ ‘If this douche actually goes through with this, I'll eat a stick of butter myself. I know him, and he's way too big of a pussy to—' ”

“I got it,” I snapped.

“This one goes on to call you a beast-monster and a Sasquatch—”

“I know.”

“It says, ‘Watch Butter embarrass himself to death by not showing—' ”

“I know what it says, okay? I've read them all.” I crossed my arms and looked away. Why wasn't she reading any of the positive comments?

Because there aren't any.

I frowned, trying hard to remember something kind anyone had said. But the only comments that came to mind weren't so much nice as morbidly encouraging—a perverse kind of fan mail. They weren't taking my side, they were egging me on. I couldn't see it before, because all that mattered was that they commented at all. Every note, good or bad, was an uptick in my popularity points. I didn't need them to care about me; I just needed them to pay attention. I had set the bar too low—aiming for admiration instead of genuine affection. I knew now that I deserved more.

Psych lady finally tucked the papers away. “Bullying can take a lot of forms. Sometimes it looks like encouragement.”

“It's not their fault,” I said.

“Whose fault is it?”

“That I'm in the hospital? Well, mine obviously. That's what
I'm supposed to say, right? It's all me. It's nobody's fault but my own.” I held up my hands in surrender.

She stared at me for a second then made a note on a pad of paper. “There are no right or wrong answers here,” she said as she scribbled.

But it
was
the right answer. I'd spent an awful lot of time blaming other people for my problems. Mom and Dad and DNA made me fat; Tucker got skinny and left me in the dust; Anna's idea of the perfect guy forced me to lie. But when it came down to making a decision between life and death, it was my own mistakes that had pushed me over the edge.
I
shut people out,
I
got greedy for attention, and
I
told the lies that backed me into a corner. In the end, I was my own biggest disappointment.

That had led me to make the biggest mistake of all. But I'd survived that mistake. The penance was complete humiliation, but the payoff was this second chance—a big cosmic do-over, and I wasn't going to screw it up this time. That much I was sure of.

Psych lady asked me a few more “no right or wrong” questions that sounded suspiciously like they indeed had correct answers that would get you the “not crazy” stamp on your file.

Finally she clicked her pen closed. “Just one more question.” She looked right into my eyes. “How much do you weigh?”

I gaped at her. Nobody
ever
asked me how much I weighed—not even doctors and nurses. They just put me on the scale and wrote down the numbers. It was a given that people didn't ask someone my size for a weight. Besides, anyone who looked at me could see the answer was plain.
Weight? Too much.

But I knew I had to answer. If I said anything evasive, I'd probably get some checkmark in the crazy column.

“423 pounds,” I said automatically. “No, wait—409. Maybe a little less now.”

The doctor looked down at my medical chart and back up at me. “372.”

“What?”

“You weigh 372 pounds.”

I shook my head. “No, that's wrong. I was 409 at my last weigh-in.”

“They weighed you here, while you were in a coma. It can be done.”

“But that's—that's like fifty pounds since Thanksgiving. And—” I took a second to do the math. “That's thirty-seven pounds in just the last three and a half weeks.”

“You're lucky.” The doctor smiled for the first time. “Most of us
gain
weight around the holidays.”

I barely registered the rest of what the psych lady had to say—something about self-perception versus reality and positivity and mumbo-jumbo-blah-blah-head-shrink stuff. I could only focus on one thought. I weighed 372 pounds.
No wonder I dropped a belt notch.
I wished I had that belt right then. I wanted to strap it on, right over my hospital gown, and never take it off. I wanted to just keep cinching it down, notch by notch, until I needed a smaller belt. Then I wanted to keep going. At the rate of about forty pounds per month, I could be downright skinny by summer.