132

132.
Sunny looked at the number and puffed out a breath of relief. Not bad. Not great, not ideal, not perfect—but better than expected. A good starting place.
The mirror reflected her one hundred and thirty-two sideways, silently showed where it resided in clumps of flesh smoothly molded together so the whole effect almost worked. Her fingers watched themselves tug and press at her skin; they let go hopefully but sagged with the rest of gravity a millisecond later.
"Almost," she said to her mirror self, which blinked at her from its mirror bathroom prison. "Almost."
Almost was an old friend of hers, one she never really liked but one she put up with because it never went away. All her life, it had made her almost pretty, almost smart, almost funny, almost worth more.
Almost skinny.
"You're a fuckin' twig, kid," Manda said at least once a week, usually over plates of Student Union ravioli, reddish orange brown slop that looked and smelled and felt like vomit on her fork.
"Tiny," Rob said every time he hugged her, every time his freckled arms wrapped around her waist and lifted her soles a few inches off the ground, laughingly protesting. "My tiny girl."
They pleased her, these assesments from her friends—she pulled close the delicate whispers in which they wrapped her—but she was pleased as an actor praised for a believable performance. For a minute, she would become what they expected to see.
But then the curtain came down; Manda would rattle the empty ice left in her glass, Rob would place her on the floor carefully and step back, and she would be her almost self again.
The numbers, though, were real. Digital red lighting up dark dusty plastic, cramped peeling bathroom with soft pink rug and cold green toliet, naked in fluorecent truth. She took flinching comfort in that sort of honesty.
She pulled her clothes onto her almost frame, absently flicking hair out of the way. (Her hair, thick and long and golden, was why everyone use to call her Sunny—she thought the curtains that hung down on either side of her part looked more like undulating waves of wheat, although she had never seen wheat, but she liked Sunny and anyway nobody at college called her that, which made homesickness hitch a little more every time Mama or Dad said it.)
Opening the door, Sunny let the real world filter in by wedges before she went to work.
***
132.
"Okay," she said, letting her eyebrow quirk down but yanking it right back up. "It's okay."
No big deal—no big deal, because it had only been five days and muscle weighed more than fat and she ate like a starved colt rescued from the glue factory line and these things took time and blah blah blah—
She still had it all; it just shifted until it got more comfortable.
Sitting naked on the closed toliet, toliet top rug tickling her bare ass, Sunny listened to her thighs stretch and her knees bend and her calves bunch up in cautious collaboration. They hated the gym.
"Damn, I'm out of shape," Manda said whenever they scurried late to their early classes. She drew in breaths like a ragged cloth between her teeth.
Beside her, Sunny would wince in rhythm to her back pack's slaps and vow to throw their alarm's snooze button out their third floor window. She hated to run, hated how it squeezed a cramped thin layer of sweat over the day.
Now, at home and alone with her one hundred and thrity-two, she ran anyway.
Jogging machine number four, the middle in a line banished to the gym's basement, had a hitch somewhere up in its works so her right foot always clicked on the off beat, something to count and latch on to as she watched her progress blip down through green time and pull the knit stitches of her muscles together into something tighter, more streamline, more connected and flowing with itself. She thought about Howard Hughes running his hands across rivets on a plane wing and demanding them smoothed down flush, to cut down on wind resistence.
To make it lighter.
Okay—she wasn't there yet, okay. Her back side jerked up and down in abrupt tight arcs and her face flapped around the edges when she moved at a brisk clip, but it was a start, right?
The numbers didn't blink at her.
She didn't want to care. She wanted to bash in the smug numbers until they shut up, wanted to bask in the pure holy sweat that drenched her in bodily righteousness after a burst of healthy pain and be done with it.
But she couldn't.
Closing her eyes, Sunny matched her feet to the scale's top and eased all of her upright again.
Persistance proved futile as she discovered she hadn't lost a pound in three minutes.
"Shit," she aid, and felt like it for the rest of the day.
***
132.
An inarticulate surge ripped through her throat, bounced off her tonsils and lips and teeth and the bathroom tiles, chipped mosaics she watched explode as her rage focussed enough to pick up the scale and dash it against the floor again and again and again until it was completely dead.
Almost wasn't good enough, had never been enough; almost was too kind a fate for the stupid, ugly, useless thing—
Sunny blinked the red out of her eyes and saw the truth lying wholly intact around her. She read it displayed on the scale she hadn't really shattered, felt it close around her in the bathroom she hadn't really destroyed, saw it on the reflected body that still hadn't lost a pound.
Damn.
Seventy-two hours. She hadn't let anything in any shape of solid caress her tongue and slide down her throat for seventy-two hours.
"The first twenny-four are the worst," Rob said. "We did this weekend fast thing for—church—and the first day I'd've klled for a peanut but after that you just don't care anymore."
These days Rob only mentioned church when it had given him a rare bit of secular wisedom, so Sunny and Manda gave his cheasnuts their proper respect, filing them away for appropriate times that almost always came.
Her first twenty-four hours passed in a plodding blur of empty stomach searching its corners for forgotten crumbs, growling louder with each disappointment. Sunny was so busy not eating she did nothing except drink and piss diet soda, which jittered along her nerve endings until four in the morning.
Clattering through empty cans towards the shower the next day, Sunny put a hand to her stomach and, amazed, felt peace. It had pulled shut like a drawstring bag, empty but quiet about the whole thing.
A welcome charge of determination shot through her, and she had almost skipped to the scale.
But nothing had changed. Nothing had gone away.
In her white skivvies, Sunny burst from the bathroom and streaked through the silence hanging like gauze through the rest of the empty house. Everyone was away—Mama at the hospital and Dad at the bank, Manda and Rob tucked away in seperate states for the summer—and all Sunny knew in that moment was the refridgerator, glowing pale yellow in the morning heat.
"Fuck this!" she screamed to the scale, which didn't seem to care. "Fuck you!"
Her eyes and hands and mouth worked independently of each other, spotting and organizing and consuming with the efficieny of a calibrated factory. It didn't shut down until it had been fully compensated and Sunny felt miserable throughout her core.
Staggering backwards into a counter, her hand brushed a blue plastic beacon of Oreos, pristinely sealed and waiting.
She licked her lips and tasted dusty black chocolate pasted together with cream—or peanut butter—the last time it had been peanut butter, because that was Manda's favorite, and it had been the two of them, the TV, and Oreos consumed in blind fistfulls, chased with queso dip, an entire bag of tortilla chips, and the last scrapes of salsa—
Remembering cloying thick sweetness draped in liquid cheese and dotted in guacamole, her stomach gave a heaving lurch towards her upstairs exit. Sunny barely made it to the toliet to watch her entire self hurdle down the drain.
Spent, Sunny draped limply across the floor. She had almost made it.
The scaled looked at her in disgusted expectancy, waiting to make her surrender official. Too sick to argue, Sunny propped herself up on the flat black judgement box. "Happy now?"
131.
She looked again—two, three, four more times, and allowed a small smile to tug up her lips.
Hope—it was almost there.1

THE END2