Savage Delight (7 page)

It takes six hours for the girl to decide to change herself.

It takes three years for his voice to stop ringing in her ears every time she walks out the door. And even then, it doesn’t fade. It still hasn’t.

Two weeks from the day in the shower, she stops eating. The girl loses five pounds. Then three more. A month later she’s ten pounds lighter. She puts on layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts and runs in the eighty degree Florida summer for hours. Aunt Beth thinks she’s at Gina’s house sleeping over when in reality she’s on the side of the road behind a hibiscus bush, passed out from heat exhaustion. When the sun sets and it cools down, she wakes up and starts running again. She runs because she can’t stand the thought of who she was a step behind. One step. A new Isis. Another step. A newer Isis. She recreates and leaves herself behind over and over because she can’t stand any of them – because she can’t stand the girl who thought the boy who destroyed her could be her everything. He was the only one in the world who looked at her like she was human, treated her like she was more than a sack of too-much skin. She rarely eats, and if she does it’s only in front of Aunt Beth, to convince her she’s alright. But Aunt Beth is smarter than she lets on. One day, she and Isis talk, and it’s the sort of talk aunts are supposed to give – boy talk. I remember her every word as clear as day, and that reflects straight into the dream.

 “You haven’t been eating much, Isis.” Aunt Beth, with her gentle smile and bright red hair held back by a head scarf, treats me every bit like her daughter. I was the kid she could never have.

“I’m not hungry,” I say lamely. And then my stomach gurgles and my charade is thrown headfirst over a cliff. Aunt Beth sighs.

“It’s about that Will kid, isn’t it?”

My stomach goes from gurgly to vomity. I flinch. But that flinch is important. It’s the first flinch I made when I heard his name. The first of hundreds.

“Did you two break up?” She asks softly. I shrug like it doesn’t matter but it does, it does, it’s the only thing that matters -

“I didn’t break up with him. He broke up with me. I sort of just broke down. You know how it goes.”

“Oh.” She puts her arm around my shoulder. “I do know how it goes.”

There’s a massive silence. The ocean laps just a half-mile away from our tiny, kitschy beach shack. The suns slants through the window, throwing turquoise and emerald shadows around the kitchen as it passes through a collection of seaglass on the sill.   

“Whenever someone would break up with me,” she starts. “I’d sit myself down and make a list.”

“Of what?
Ways to kill yourself?”

“No. I’d make a list of traits my dream man would have. And by the end of it, I’d always feel better.”

“That sounds stupid.”

“Of course it’s stupid. That’s the point. It’s supposed to make you laugh with all its stupid!”

I knit my lips together. Aunt Beth nudges me.

“Well? Go on. Describe your dream man.”

I mull it over for an agonizing few seconds.

“I want him to know the alphabet backwards, and fast. He’ll make perfect cinnamon sugar doughnuts. He can jump rope a million times in a row. He’ll have bright green eyes and be left-handed and be a master of the obscure lost art of ocarina playing.”

“He sounds impossible.”

“That’s the point!” I insist. “He’s my dream man, right? So, if my dream man is someone who can never really exist, then he can’t hurt me. He can’t come up and make me fall in love and smash my heart.”

“Oh, Isis.”
Aunt Beth pats my knee. “You don’t have to think like that. Not everyone is out to hurt you.”

“He’ll be really kind.” I smile down at my hands. “He’ll call me the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. Those things are even more impossible. So. So there. That’s him. And he doesn’t exist and he never will. So I’m safe.”

The dream shifts. The kitchen table disappears. Aunt Beth disappears. And then it’s suddenly four months later. Four months of passing out and stumbling through classes on nothing more than a piece of bread and celery. I didn’t need food. The word
ugly
reverberating through my head sustained me better than any calorie could.

By the time Aunt Beth notices, everyone else is noticing.

Jealous, Gina disappears to Costa Rica for one weekend and comes back fifteen pounds lighter. But no one notices. Not when Isis Blake goes from two hundred pounds to one twenty in the span of six months. Nameless notices. And now, instead of ignoring me, he laughs with his friends whenever I walk by. Smirks. Scoffs. He thinks I did it for him.

I did
(n’t).

I never get the chance to work up the courage to get angry at him. I feel it brewing in my stomach, like still-warm embers of resentment. But then my mother arrives. I walk in the house one day to see Aunt Beth and Mom drinking tea and discussing my future. I get a say, of course. And I say I want to leave. Ohio is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere no one knows me is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere that isn’t where Nameless is.  

It’s my dream, but it’s more like my life. It’s not quite
true
to life – the colors are too bright and the faces wobble. But it’s exactly what happened.

I wake up to the white-washed hospital room. I wake up realizing I ran away like a little coward.

I haven’t changed at all.

I’m safe. My counter is safe. Three years, twenty five weeks, six days. I am still safe.

But I haven’t changed
at all
.

Isis Blake of Northplains, Ohio, is the same fat, cowardly fourteen-year-old girl curled up in the shower. Just a little older. A little lighter. And a little stupider.

It’s
dark – probably the middle of the night. I get out of the hospital bed and pull my jacket on. Stepping outside in Ohio in the winter is like suicide without all the flashy brain bits, but I’m doing it anyway. I can’t stand this tiny room. It’s trying to suffocate me with all the beeps and smiling posters of kids getting shot up with flu vaccines. Who smiles when they see a five inch needle? Sociopaths, that’s who.

I promised Naomi I wouldn’t use the window to sneak into the kids ward. But last time I checked a hall is not a window and there is a hall that goes right by the kids’ ward. I just never use it because it’s near Sophia’s room, and that’s the one place Naomi would think to look for me if she found me missing from my bed. I pile pillows under the blankets of my cot, reach under it and grab four leftover jello cups I’d been hoarding under the mattress, and ease out the door. The hallways are quiet. I readjust the jello cups by stuffing them into my bra. I take a moment to admire my considerable multicolored breasts and feel a single tear spring to my eye. Beautiful.

But back to business.
I’ve got some gelatin to shove down the throats of several grubs. I just need to make it around the corner, and I’ll –

I hiss and flatten myself against the wall. A group of interns pass, all carrying coffees. I quell the urge to become fleetingly radical. I definitely want to slide across the floor behind them on my slippers like James Bond, silent and suave, but I also want to see the kids no matter what. Too much is riding on this. So like a lame super normal spy I tiptoe behind them. And pirouette.  

And that’s when I hear it. It sounds like a dying cat far off, but as I get closer and closer to the kids’ ward, I realize it’s a person. Someone is screaming like they’re being ripped apart. In the empty hallway it’s eerie, and I start to consider maybe my life has turned into a horror movie and a girl with long black hair will hiking up my phone bill as she calls to tell me I’ll die in seven days, but then there’s the shuffling of feet behind me, and I duck behind a gurney. Naomi, with a few other nurses, charge towards the scream with winded urgency.     

“Who forgot to up her cc’s?” One of the nurses asks.

“No one forgot, Fenwall said to ignore the change entirely,” Naomi pants. “But someone was supposed to give her Paxtal instead. Trisha?”

“It wasn’t me!” Trisha insists. The first nurse sighs.

“Jesus Trisha, not again –”

“Do you know how hard it is to get her to take them? When she’s like that?” Trisha hisses.

“Did you call him at least?”

“Of course!
He’s the only one who can calm her down –”

They run past, out of my earshot. They must be talking about another Sophia. The Soapy I know always listens to nurses. They love her. She’d definitely never refuse to take her pills.

I inch closer to the door the screaming is coming from. The nurses closed it, but you can hear it through the walls.

“Why does she get to go?” The scream reverberates. “Why does she get to go and I don’t? I want to leave! Let me go! Let me go! Get your hands off me, you filthy bitch!”

I recognize that voice. Sophia. But that can’t be right. Sophia wouldn’t sound so harsh, so feral –

“I hate her, I hate you all! I fucking hate you! Get away from me! Leave me alone!”

The words are all wrong. I slowly peer around the corner and into a tiny slit of window unprotected by the curtain. I can’t see much, but I see Sophia’s legs flailing on the bed as the nurses try to restrain her. I see Naomi walk by with a syringe in her hand. Sophia fights, the bed shuddering as she beats her legs harder. And then her feet move slower. Her screaming becomes softer, hoarse shouts I can barely hear anymore through the glass.

“Please,” Sophia sobs. “Please. I want Tallie back. Please, just give me Tallie back.”

One of the nurses starts towards the door. I pull back, around the corner. As much as the curiosity is burning me up inside, I can’t hang around much longer, or I’ll be in deeper shit than the elephant keeper at a circus. I take the stairs to the kids’ ward without looking back. The commotion Sophia made was the perfect cover – the guard isn’t even at the door. The sleeping room is lined with beds; stickers and colorful sponge art pressed onto each headboard. Toys and books stack on the ground, and the gently beeping monitors glow in the darkness.

James is the first to notice I’ve come in. He sits up and whispers groggily.

“Isis? Is that you?”

“Yeah,” I hiss. “Hey.”

He points at my chest, his bald head shining in the faint lights of the monitor. “Why are you jiggling?”

“I’ve always been this stacked.”

James rolls his eyes. I laugh and I shove a jello cup at him. He rips the top off, slurping it down in one gulp. I inch over to Mira’s bed and carefully place her jello cup on her forehead. She sleepily opens her eyes and groans.

“Isisssss.
It’s cold.”

“Hurry up and eat it, then.”

They eagerly stuff sugar down their throats, and I clear mine trying to find the words to say goodbye.

“Listen,” I say. “I’m getting out of here tomorrow.”

“You’re leaving?” Mira sniffs.

“Yeah.
I got better.” I smile. “Just like you will.”

“I won’t.”

“You will. You will and don’t you dare let me catch you saying you won’t.”

“Will you come back to see us?”

“Is the sky mildly blue? Duh I will!” I give him a noogie. “Also, toys. I’m gonna bring some cool new ones for your birthday, and James’ birthday, and Martin Luther King’s birthday, and my own birthday, because frankly these dinky little hand me downs do not suit your highness.”

Mira grins. A light flashes out in the hall and I duck behind her bed.

“The guard!”
I exclaim. “Shit. Take mushrooms. Shiitake mushrooms.”

“Shiitake,” James echoes. I bop his head.

“Hey! That’s a bad word.”

“But it’s a mushroom! Nothing’s wrong with mushrooms!”

“Haven’t you played Mario?
Everything
is wrong with mushrooms.”

“He’s coming this way to check,” Mira hisses at me. The guard’s so close I can hear the jangling of his keys.

“Okay, everyone calm down. Don’t panic. OhmygodwhatamIdoingwithmylife. Don’t panic!”

“We’re not!” They insist together.

“Right!
Okay!” I breathe out my nose and charge towards the window. I always have a harder time climbing down than up, but it’s the only place in the room to hide; every piece of furniture in here is kid-sized and too small. I open the window and leap over, clinging by my fingertips on the sill. My converse scrabble on the cement of the wall, the cold winter air nipping at my butt, which hangs fourteen feet above certain death, or at the very least a broken kneecap. The door to the ward creaks open into utter silence. The grubs are good at pretending to be asleep.

“Who left the window open?” I hear the guard murmur. My heart rockets into my throat. He strides over and I pray to whatever god is listening that he won’t see my fingers. I must be praying right for once! He doesn’t see my fingers at all! He just kindly closes the window and shoves them off the sill instead. My hands jump to the ledge on the outside, but it’s so tiny and slippery, and I fight, my hands aching -

All I can think about is how to fall elegantly so my dead body doesn’t look stupid, because I’ve seen a million crime shows and honestly existentialist panic is no reason to not try, in your last moments, to contort your body as you fall so you strike a dramatic pose. It’s your last pose ever! You have a moral obligation to make it fabulous! Or at the very least not-disgusting.

I could pose like Beyonce, but one thing is still for certain.

I’m going to die.

Which is a whole lot of very not good.

My last fingers slip off the ledge. And then there’s weight all at once on my wrist as someone grabs it. Whiplash rocks my body and hard cement collides with my belly, scrapes my elbows. I look up into icy blue eyes shaded by wild tawny hair.

“Y-You!”
I sputter.

Jack pulls me back up through the window, Mira and James on either side of him, wide-eyed and ecstatic.

“You almost died,” Mira whispers shakily.

“You were all like ‘WHOA’ and the guard was all like ‘BYE’ and Jack came in and was like ‘GRAB’!” James shrieks.

Jack straightens. I stand up on shaky legs and contemplate life and the refreshing fact I still have a life to contemplate at all. Jack freezes when our eyes meet, and turns on his heel abruptly. I run and put myself between him and the door. He stares at me and I stare at him, some unsaid pressure bearing down on my lungs. Adrenaline sears my veins, and a twisted pain tears through my chest. I can’t look away. He’s not even that good-looking. He just looks so…
sad
? And that sadness is condensed in an arrow that he’s shot right into me with his dumbo Antarctic eyes.