Holding Up the Universe(6)

I manage to say, “What’s your favorite thing about Indiana?”

“That I get to go home one day.”

He laughs, so I laugh, and then two girls walk in and their eyes go immediately to me. One of them whispers something to the other, and they take the seats in front of us. There’s something familiar about these girls, but I can’t place them. Maybe I knew them before. My skin prickles and I have that horror movie feeling again. I look up at the ceiling as if a piano is about to fall on my head. Because I know it’s going to come from somewhere. It always does.

I tell myself to give Mick a chance, give these girls a chance, give this day a chance, give myself a chance most of all. The way I see it, I’ve lost my mom, eaten myself nearly to death, been cut out of my house while the whole country watched, endured exercise regimes and diets and the nation’s disappointment, and I’ve received hate mail from total strangers.

It is disgusting that anyone would ever let themselves get so large, and it is disgusting that your father wouldn’t do anything about it. I hope you survive this and get straight with God. There are people starving in the world and it is shameful that you would eat so much when others don’t have enough.

So I ask you, What can high school do to me that hasn’t already been done?





With a minute to spare, we roll into the parking lot, into the last empty space in the first row of cars. Marcus drops his phone, and when he sits up again, it’s as if he’s a brand-new person. Like that, the Etch A Sketch in my brain is cleared, and I have to start over, adding up the parts:

Shaggy hair + pointy chin + eight-foot-long giraffe legs = Marcus.

The Land Rover’s barely in park before he’s out the door and calling to people. I want to say Wait for me. Don’t make me go out there by myself. I want to grab hold of his arm and hold on so I don’t lose him. Instead, I keep my eyes on him, not blinking because that will make him disappear. And then he morphs into the crowd, moving toward school like one of the herd.

The animal kingdom has crazy names for animal groups. A zeal of zebras. A murder of crows. An unkindness of ravens. And, my favorite, an embarrassment of pandas. What would this group be called? A horror of students? A nightmare of teens? Just for fun, I scan the faces going by, looking for my brother. But it’s like trying to choose your favorite polar bear out of an aurora of them.

I sit for thirty seconds, enjoying the solitude: 30. 29. 28. 27 …

This is it for the day until I’m home again. In this thirty seconds, I let myself think all the things I won’t let myself think for the next eight hours. The song always starts the same way.

I have a fucked-up brain.…





Twenty minutes into class, no one is staring at me. Our teacher, Mrs. Belk, is talking and so far I’m able to keep up. Mick is whispering clever commentary just for my benefit, which makes him either my new best chum or my future boyfriend, or possibly the boy who will sex the rest of this weight right off me.

You belong here as much as anyone. No one knows who you are. No one cares. You’ve got this, girl. Don’t get ahead of yourself, but I think you’ve got this.

And then I laugh at one of the things Mick says and something goes flying out of my nose and lands on his textbook.

Mrs. Belk says, “Settle, please.” And keeps on talking.

I superglue my eyes to her, but I can still see Mick in my peripheral vision. I’m not sure he notices the thing I shot at him, and I don’t dare look. Please don’t see it.

He goes right on whispering as if nothing happened, as if the world is not about to end, but now I only want to close my eyes and die. This is not the foot I want to start on. This is not what I envisioned for myself when I was lying awake last night imagining my grand reentrance into teenage society.

Maybe he’ll think this is some weird American tradition. Like, some bizarre custom we have for welcoming foreigners to our country.

I spend the rest of the class period focusing hard on what Mrs. Belk is saying, my eyes on the front of the room.

When the bell rings, the two familiar-looking girls turn around and stare at me, and I see that they are Caroline Lushamp and Kendra Wu, girls I’ve known since first grade. After I was rescued from my house, they were interviewed by the press, referred to as “close friends of the troubled teen.” The last time I saw them in person, Caroline was a homely eleven-year-old who wore the same Harry Potter scarf every day, no matter how hot it was. Her other distinguishing factors were that she’d moved to Amos from Washington, DC, when she was in kindergarten, and she was self-conscious over her feet, which had these very long toes that curled like a parrot’s. The thing I remember about Kendra is that she wrote Percy Jackson fan fiction on her jeans and cried every single day over anything—boys, homework, rain.

Caroline, of course, is now eight feet tall and beautiful enough to be a shampoo model. She wears a skirt and a tight little jacket, like she goes to private school. Kendra—whose smile appears to be tattooed on—is dressed all in black, and is just pretty enough that she could hostess at the Applebee’s on the good side of town.

Caroline says to me, “I’ve seen you before.”

“I get that all the time.”

She stares, and I know she’s trying to place me.

“I’ll help you out. Everyone gets me confused with Jennifer Lawrence, but we’re not even related.”