Saving Meghan(9)
CHAPTER 4
MEGHAN
I could see it in my father’s eyes.
It’s not disappointment, though that’s there, the letdown because he doesn’t have a perfect fifteen-year-old daughter (soon to be sixteen) who is perfectly healthy. I could almost live with that. I knew he missed the rough-and-tumble kid I used to be, a real scrapper.
I’m a soccer player, a battler for the ball. I shove. I push. I elbow and trip my way to that ball—my ball, mine! Knock me down, and I pick myself up by the shin guards, dust myself off, and get back at it again. I’ve always been the girl who could dress up pretty, but who also loved to get muddy, and that’s what I think my dad loved most about me. For a while, before everything changed, I was Daddy’s special girl, his spunky daughter. I was tough, a never-say-never, game-on, up-for-anything kind of daughter.
I was like him—a fighter.
When my dad started his home renovation business, all he had was a dream and a lot of determination to see him through the lean times. He’d built his business from the ground up, pushed to make a better life for himself and for us. More than anybody, more than Mom, he understood that you couldn’t win every time. Sometimes you got beat. That’s why whenever I got beat on the field, nobody was more supportive, more encouraging, than my father. He got that for every peak there’d be a valley. So the look I caught in my father’s eyes wasn’t disappointment, but something else, something far, far more hurtful.
I could tell by the way he looked at me with sadness and sympathy that he’d do anything and everything to make me well again. But there was a deep sense of loss in that look, too. He was sure he’d lost me to her—to my mom. He feared she’d taken over, planted ideas in my head.
They’re so funny, my parents. They thought a closed door was the same as having cotton balls stuffed in my ears. They had no idea how loud they are when they start fighting over me; how their voices rise slowly until hushed talk becomes loud talk. I’ve heard them arguing about the doctors, all the tests I’ve done and specialists I’ve seen, my mom’s obsession with her Facebook group, all of it. He sees that Facebook group as just more people filling her head (and by extension, mine) with nonsense.
Did my dad notice how Mom worked the doctors? Did he see how she gathered personal details about their lives like a squirrel collecting acorns for winter and used them to gain favors? I did. Lord, if it weren’t so sad, it would make me laugh. But the outright flirting, well, that’s the hardest to take. I’ve seen her with some doctors, touching their arms, cocking her head to the side, looking at them like they were the most incredible, smartest, most amazing people on the planet. My mom is gorgeous, so it’s not hard to see how they can fall for her routine. I just can’t believe my dad doesn’t notice—or more likely he doesn’t care.
Maybe there really is something wrong with me. Maybe I do have some strange sickness, maybe a parasite lurking in my bloodstream, living off me, vampire-like. Granted, it’s not nearly so romantic as the vampire from Twilight, but that would be just my luck. Instead of landing the handsome and mysterious Edward Cullen, I’d get some wiggly worm swimming in my veins. But after all the doctors and tests, if there were some wormy thing inside me, it would have been found by now. So, sorry, that’s not it. Test after test, doctor after doctor, it was always the same story: We don’t know what’s the trouble with Meghan.
The only thing obvious was that I was getting sicker and losing weight I couldn’t afford to give up. It’s not like I weighed a ton to begin with. I’m barely a hundred pounds, which puts me in the rare 5 percent range on the doctor’s height and weight chart. But despite what my father thought, I don’t have an eating disorder.
His browser history was like a window into his worries. I’m not purging every meal, or counting how many ribs I can see in the morning, or popping diuretics the way my mom does her Xanax. I’m just small-boned to begin with. (Yeah, I know that’s not a real thing, but people understand what I mean when I say it.) Put more simply, I’m naturally thin, but that doesn’t mean I’m naturally weak. A lot of girls misjudge me on the soccer field as some prissy, fragile thing, but their opinions quickly change after the first shoulder-to-shoulder hit. That’s when they see I’m no pushover. I’m no weakling. I’m not someone they should take lightly.
But that was the girl from before. Now I don’t even play soccer.
Dad drove his Mercedes home in that pukey way, with lots of quick stops and fast accelerations to show his annoyance. It was no surprise to me that Mom and Dad weren’t speaking to each other. The whoosh of the wipers was the only soundtrack as they beat away a light rain. I thought of that look in my father’s eyes, the one I caught in the rearview mirror, and it made me want to cry. I wanted so badly for him to look at me with pity, or sadness, or worry, or fear, or something other than what I knew he was thinking.
It was dark out when we arrived home. Once again, I hadn’t seen the day become night, because I was trapped in a windowless space (not even a room) in the ER. On the surface, our home looks like the kind of nauseating Facebook posts that adults use to make their friends and neighbors feel inadequate. I’ve seen the crap my mom Likes online: gorgeous families all aglow in a dreamy sunset, or perched on manicured lawns in front of a hotel impersonating a house.