Holding Up the Universe(14)

NOW




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The girl’s name is Iris Engelbrecht. These are the things I’ve learned in the past five minutes: She’s been heavy since birth, thanks to a double whammy of hypothyroidism and something called Cushing’s syndrome. Her parents are divorced, she has two older sisters, and everyone in her family is overweight.

“You need to tell the principal.”

Iris shakes her head. “No.”

We are back inside the school, just the two of us. I’m trying to lead us toward the main hall, toward where the principal’s office is, but Iris is dragging her feet.

“I’ll go with you.”

“I don’t want to make it worse.”

“What makes it worse is Dave Kaminski thinking he can do that to you.”

“I’m not like you.” And what she means is I’m not brave like you.

“Then I’ll just go.” I walk away from her.

“Don’t.” She catches up to me. “I mean, thanks for chasing after him, but I want the whole thing to go away, and it’s not going away if I tell. It does the opposite of going away. It gets so big I have to look at it all the time, and I don’t want to. It’s the first day of the school year.” And again I can hear what she isn’t saying: I don’t want this thing to follow me the whole year, even if I’ve got every right to kick his teeth in.

My counselor, Rachel Mendes, meets me at the park. For two of the past three years, I’ve seen her every day. Back when I was in the hospital, she was the first person, other than my dad, who spoke to me like I was a regular girl. Later she became my tutor and also my caregiver, the one who stayed with me while my dad went to work. Now she’s my best friend and we meet here once a week.

She says, “What happened?”

“Boys. Idiots. People.”

There used to be a zoo in the heart of the park, but it was shut down in 1986 after the bear tried to eat a man’s arm. All that’s left of it is this wide stone bench, which used to be part of the bear’s habitat. We sit on that and look out toward the golf course, and I’m fuming so much I’m worried the top of my head is going to blast right off.

“This boy did a cruel thing, and the person he did it to doesn’t want to speak up.”

“Is the person in danger?”

“No. The boy probably thought what he did was harmless, but he shouldn’t have done it and he shouldn’t get away with it.”

“We can’t fight another person’s battles, no matter how much we want to.”

But we can chase the bastards who terrorize them down the street. I think how much simpler life was when I couldn’t leave the house. It was just Supernatural reruns all day long, reading, reading, reading, and spying on the neighbor boys from my window.

“How’s the anxiety?”

“I’m mad, but I’m breathing.”

“How’s the eating?”

“I didn’t stress-eat, but the day’s not over.” And there’s an entire school year left to experience. Even though I’ve spent almost three years eating nutritiously and boringly without a hiccup, Rachel and my doctors are worried I might end up spiraling into some wild, bottomless binge because I’m so deprived. What they don’t understand is it wasn’t about the food. Food was never part of the Why. Not directly, at least.

“Here’s the worst thing of it,” I say. “You know how far I’ve come and I know how far I’ve come, but everyone else just sees me for how large I am or where I was years ago, not who I am now.”

“You’ll show them. If anyone can, it’s you.”

Suddenly, I can’t sit on this bench any longer. This happens sometimes—after all those months of being motionless, I still get overcome with the need to move my body.

I say, “Let’s twirl.”

And this is what I love most about Rachel. She just gets right up and starts twirling, no questions asked, no fear of what anyone else might think.

Christmas Eve. I’m four. My grandmother gives Mom and me these giant matching Christmas skirts—one in green, one in red. They’re ugly, but they twirl, and so we wear them straight through New Year’s, twirling all the way. Long after I outgrew the skirt, we twirled for birthdays, Mother’s Day, anything worth celebrating.

Rachel and I spin till we’re dizzy and then fall back down onto the bench. I sneak-check my pulse without her seeing because there’s good breathless and bad breathless. I wait until I feel my pulse go steady, till I know I’m safe, and I say, “Do you know what happened to the bear? The one that was here?”

I can’t blame him for trying to take someone’s arm off. I mean, the man reached into his cage, and that cage was all the bear had in the world.

“The news report said they sent him over to Cincinnati for socialization.”

“What do you really think happened?”

“I think they shot him.”





On the wall above me, my great-great-something-grandfather stares at me from out of a giant frame, stern and wild-eyed. The stories paint him as a saintly man who lived to carve toys. If they’re to be believed, he was a kind of selfless Indiana Santa Claus. But in his photo, he is one scary old son of a bitch.