Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [43]
When Melissa came out of the stall and headed back to the lockers, she stopped short. Seated on the bench was a woman with her back to Melissa, a towel hung loosely around her. What she saw was the perfect asymmetry of a moment, one shoulder blade poking out, the other in, as the woman twisted, paused in her moment of dressing. Her shoulders were wide and the muscles that ran down her back produced long gullies on either side of her spine. A blinding flush started in the recesses of Melissa’s hard, flat abdomen and spread out like a kerosene-fed fire across her breasts, straight up the highway of her neck and pooled in her cheeks. Something had skipped her brain entirely and she felt, for the first time in her young life, a full out blast of lust.
The woman turned her head to the right, so that Melissa could see the profile. Melissa felt another competing rush, this time of loathing and fear. It was Rocky.
Why is she everywhere that’s mine, why does she have to follow me around? Melissa ducked back around the corner, back to the stalls where she stayed with her pounding heart until she heard locker 266 slam shut.
Would anyone be able to tell what she was thinking, that she had been overwhelmed, caught in midair, breathless? The image of what she had to do came immediately and unbidden. No matter what, she was not eating anything tonight when she got home. She would simply tell her mother that she was sick. That would eliminate any dinnertime petitions to eat, or have soup, or please have something.
The thought of food, even not having food, had started the surge of her digestive juices, and she felt the cleansing burn of hunger, which she hoped would last all night and like the self-cleaning oven that worked by extreme temperatures would, with surgical exactness, cleanse her of such terrifying emotions.
She wanted something really awful to happen to Rocky. Maybe she would get bit by a rabid animal, lightning would strike her, or maybe her propane stove would blow up. No, not that. Melissa didn’t want anything bad to happen to Lloyd. She had moments of relief when she was with the dog.
She felt her world begin to split open with Rocky’s dead-aim stare, the way she looked through Melissa’s sweatpants and jacket and hooded sweatshirt. Everything was fine until Rocky got here.
Now Rocky had invaded her secret place. If she could figure out when Rocky was going to come to the club, she could avoid her. But Melissa had a schedule that was perfect. Everything had been perfect, even the way that she showered, grabbed a Diet Coke and an apple on the way out, carried the apple while she was exiting and took two big bites, one while she opened the door from the women’s locker room, chew and swallow, and one bite while she passed the front desk. When she got outside, she could spit the second bite out. Save the rest of the apple for the ferry ride home. Make sure to bring both the Diet Coke bottle and the apple core home, drop them both noticeably on the counter in a way that her mother couldn’t miss. The Diet Coke made the charade believable; her mother never would have believed a non-diet drink.
She was going to make sure that she went to her father’s house this weekend. She needed to become invisible and there was no better place to do that. When she was at her father’s house on the mainland, every other weekend for sure and every weekend if she wanted, he simply didn’t notice. She didn’t have to work as hard with him to keep up the pretense of eating.
Her father had his own body-fat ratio measured and asked her if she wanted to also. “Runners don’t need to carry extra fat around,” he said. Of course he meant