Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [42]
“Look at Melissa,” he intoned to the team. “She doesn’t have to huff and puff carrying around an extra ten pounds. Remember, picture yourself with a five-pound bag of sugar strapped to each shoulder. That’s what extra weight does to you. Good job, Melissa. I can see you kept training this summer.”
She figured at least four of the other girls went home that day and said they were too full to eat dinner. She could tell by the angry, frightened look in their eyes when the coach spoke. “Let them try,” she thought, “they still won’t catch me. I’m way ahead of them.”
If she could have felt guilty, she would have done so about the depth of the deception with her mother, who was not easily fooled. Her mother asked, just the other day, “Is this going to be a problem? Is food going to be the enemy?” Melissa had put on her most shocked and exasperated look and rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen the after-school specials and heard the lectures in health class. You just don’t know what it’s like to take running to the limit. All the runners look like this.” For added emphasis, Melissa put a hunk of cheese, an apple, and a PBJ sandwich in her book bag. On the ferry ride to the mainland school, she threw tiny bits of the sandwich to the seagulls that followed alongside, looking at Melissa with conspiratorial glances. She could hardly wait to throw the cheese into the trash barrel at school. She ate half the apple in history class and half at lunch, so that it appeared to everyone that she was constantly eating.
Chris was in her last class, Chemistry. She had known her since freshman year. Chris was gone for the last month of the freshman year. Everyone knew it was a suicide attempt. Then last year Chris was all GSA; Gay Straight Alliance Club. Melissa said to her, “Of course that doesn’t matter to me. Everybody’s the same to me.” But she worried that if she hung out with Chris, people would think she was gay, too. She just wanted to make sure that people knew she wasn’t gay.
Chris had talked the principal into announcing the GSA meetings over the morning radio station. It was like Chris had decided to become the most out lesbian on earth. Chris had changed in other ways, too. Melissa noticed that she had gained weight. Actually, she could tell exactly how much she had gained with perfect accuracy. Eight pounds. She knew what eight pounds looked like; hips, maybe as big as a size ten. Melissa knew she would never let that happen. Looking at Chris, she planned the 400 crunches she would do silently in her room that night with the lights out, with a towel folded in half beneath her so that she wouldn’t bruise her vertebrae into a line of vertical dots.
But here was the first big lie. The mere deceptions didn’t count. They were like playacting. But not telling her mother that she was going to the athletic club to work out was a lie. She had told her mother she was visiting a friend after school on Tuesday and Thursday, just for a while, walking around the Food Court in downtown Portland, a safe enough place. She knew her mother, and she knew that if she said she was working out any more that the careful balance she had constructed would collapse and questions would be asked in a more desperate way. Her mother was no fool and Melissa had the tiniest hint of regret about playing her for one.
She had her routine; go right to the Y after school on the days she didn’t have cross-country practice, reserve forty-five minutes on the elliptical, and thirty minutes on the Stair-Master. That’s all. Well, maybe a little run on the treadmill to shake it all out before working on the weights. Thirty minutes on the treadmill if there was no one else waiting. The time of day was right; no neighbors from the island came here, she had already checked for their names. Her mother’s teacher friends all rushed home to take care of their kids, so they weren’t even a possibility.
She walked into the women