Fading Away

  I eyed my enchilada, maybe just a bit suspicious now.

  “Why? What could happen?”

  “Well…” she started, and got flustered. It was obvious that she didn’t have a clue. “Well, nothing good.”

  “For example.”

  “I don’t know. That’s the scariest part; nobody knows for sure what could happen. Maybe your uterus will drop out one day. Who knows?”

  “What happens to guys, then?” I asked.

  “I’m just saying, why take a chance,” she said, getting irritated. “Hey, if you wanna eat the junk, go ahead-- what do I care?”

  She tried hard to ignore me, then, but I caught her taking sneaky looks at me now and then.

  After she finished her salad, she started digging through her purse. She pulled out a small clear plastic pouch that was filled with different pills.

  I lunged across the table, trying to cover the tiny pouch with my hand before anybody could see it.

  She started at me, wide-eyed with shock.

  “What?” she said.

  “What are those?”

  “Vitamins,” she said. “What do they look like?”

  “They look like a whole mess of pills you shouldn’t be carrying around in school.”

  “They’re just vitamins,” she scoffed, shoving my hand away. “Nobody can say anything about my taking vitamins.”

  I looked around the lunchroom. Everybody was too busy eating or talking or playing with their cubes of green jello to notice Coralee. Really that was one of the good things about her: she was easily over-looked. She could probably strip naked and run up and down the lunch line and hardly anybody would realize what was happening.

  Still I couldn’t help being unnerved.

  “Look,” she said, and dug out a pill. “This is B-complex. It’s good for infections and your skin.” She set it on the tabletop and dug out another pill. “Vitamin C-- good for colds… Vitamin D-- good for bones….”

  “You got anything that’s good for insanity, because I think you need to pop a few of those. What that one there?” I asked, fascinated because one of the pills was incredibly large. “That humongous white,” I said, pointing at it.

  “Amino Acids,” she said.

  “You actually swallow that?”

  “Yeah, sure, it’ll make me feel better.”

  “Not if it gets caught in your throat, I won’t.”

  I watched in amazement, as she swallowed the pills one by one.

  “And those make you feel better?” I asked.

  “Well, not yet, but they will,” she said. “I’m still waiting for the accumulative effect. You wanna try some?” she asked eagerly, again digging to the bottom of her purse.

  “Uh, no,” I said.

  “It’s no problem. I always have extras.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. The point was that I never involved myself in any of Coralee’s interests, not after the last time. She’d been all enthused about hiking, and talked me into going with her once. It had seemed safe enough, but I ended up stepping in a gopher hole and breaking my ankle. Of course, it wasn’t really her fault, but I’d always taken the experience as a warning. “I just hate taking pills,” I lied, hoping she would accept the lame excuse.

  But she just ignored me, as usual, and slid a packet of vitamins at me.

  Before I could get her to take them back, she grabbed her lunch tray, muttered something about having to go somewhere before her next class, and left me sitting there, with a small extremely suspicious little baggie in front of me. I was forced to put it in my pocket before anybody noticed and I had to explain everything about how they were just vitamins, vitamins I had never wanted, and how my cousin Coralee was an incredible airhead who, for the most part, was harmless. I doubted that I could make it all sound very convincing.

  ************

  So, yeah, in the end, I took the vitamins. I was even a little proud that I somehow managed to swallow the ginormous amino acid pill without choking to death on it.

  The whole vitamin experience left me feeling rather stupid, though.

  I took the pills after I got home that day. I’d completely forget I had them in the pocket of my jeans, when I pulled them out, I almost threw them out. But I was afraid my parents might discover them, and end of thinking that one of their kids was a turning into a pill-popping degenerate. Also, I was somewhat curious. Would these things actually make me feel better? And how? I really didn’t think I needed them. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with the way I felt normally. Still I wondered.

  I figured it couldn’t do any harm, so I took them.

  And absolutely nothing happened.

  I waited for a while. I couldn’t say exactly what I expected, but I didn’t feel any different.

  So I did my homework, after which I paused for a long moment to try to detect some subtle change in my physical well-being. But nothing.

  For the rest of the day, until I finally went to bed, I stopped to assess myself, only to determine that everything was normal.

  I fell asleep feeling as stupid as I had ever felt in my life.

  ************

  The next day, Fate itself seemed to be conspiring with Coralee against me.

  I met her as I did every day outside the lunchroom.

  As we took our places at the end of the lunch line, I told her straight out, “Look, I don’t want to hear anything about vitamins today, okay?”

  “Why, what happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing-- unless you count me waking up in the middle of the night because I’m belching these nasty belches that smell like rotten eggs.”

  “That’s from the B-complex,” she said.

  “I don’t care what it’s from. Just-- just not a word about vitamins.”

  She seemed vaguely hurt, and nodded meekly.

  As we started to slide our lunch trays down the stainless steel bars before the lunch counter, Coralee said, “I read somewhere that certain imbalances can cause a person to be grumpy.”

  “Yeah,” I snarled, “and so can having an idiot for a cousin.”

  I peered through the glass of the counter to see what was being served today. We always had the choice of three entrees. The first large stainless steel tub in the steam table contained some kind of creamy chicken casserole dish that look a lot like vomit. The next tub…a creamy beef dish that looked like vomit. The third tub… charred pieces of some type of meat that actually made the stuff in the first two tubs look good.

  I paused for too long as I tried to figure with entrée looked the least gross, because somebody down the line started carping about the detail-- some hungry person who didn’t have a clue they were about to lose their appetite.

  “That’s all you have?” I asked the white-clad woman behind the counter.

  She shrugged and nodded as though she couldn’t care less.

  “Pass,” I mumbled, and continued down the line.

  “First sensible choice you’ve made,” Coralee said.

  “Shut up,” I told her, and grabbed a salad, a piece of corn bread, and a cube of green jello that probably would have bounced like a rubber ball if I dropped it.

  I sat across from her at our usual table, and ate my salad. Everything I looked up at her, she appeared satisfied, which I found very annoying.

  “Don’t say a word,” I warned her.

  “Hey, I didn’t say anything,” she said.

  “Keep it that way.”

  But in the end she couldn’t. “It’s not a bad thing, you know. Did you really wanna eat any of that-- stuff?”

  “What was it, anyway?” I had to ask.

  “It’s the end of the month. Probably whatever they had left over. No doubt saturated with MSG.”

  “Hey, you know, I checked on that,” I said. “The school district forbids the use of MSG in school meals.”

  “You think they know?” she asked. “You just don’t understand how the world works.”

  “Okay, tell m
e-- tell me how you think the world works.”

  “You really wanna know?”

  “You’re going to tell me anyway, no matter what I want. So, go ahead, get it over with.”

  “Well,” she said, and leaned forward as though about to tell me some dark secret. “The school district gives a contract to a company to provide all the meals. It’s all business. The district doesn’t have actual control over what goes into the food-- the company does.”

  “And they’re the ones breaking the rules, and putting MSG in all the meals?”

  “Sure, so everything tastes better,” Coralee said. “If everything tasted as bad as it looked, nobody would eat anything, and the company would lose its contract.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “It’s all common sense,” she said. “It’s all about money and cutting cost. Of course the food is going to be bad; the contract went to the lowest bidder.”

  For once I though Coralee might actually have a point.

  “Believe me,” she went on. “You’re better off with a salad. There’s no reason to put anything in salads, because nobody’s expecting anybody to like them anyway.”

  I thought I might be losing my mind, because what she was saying actually seemed to make sense to me.

  “Besides,” she said, in an off-hand way, “you could stand to lose a few pounds.”

  “Huh?” I wasn’t offended; I was genuinely surprised at her remark. My weight wasn’t something I thought about much.

  “I’m not saying your fat-- exactly,” she said. “But you’re not slim, either.”

  “‘Slim’ doesn’t run on my side of the family, if you haven’t noticed,” I said stiffly. Everyone in my immediate family was not slender. My older brother was stocky, my younger two sisters with chubby, and my parents were-- well, I had to admit they were downright fat. I always liked to think of myself as a little chucky, not horribly so, just an little extra weight that really didn’t matter; after all, guys still looked at me in an interested kind of way-- well, some guys, anyway.

  “How much do you weigh?” Coralee asked. She had always been pole thin.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I never weight myself.”

  She looked at me as though she couldn’t believe it. “Never?”

  “Mom threw out our scale. I get weighed at the doctor’s.”

  “The same doctor who probably told you it all runs in the family, and you can’t do anything about it.”

  “No, he never said that-- oh, he might have said that, too.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “He told me, maybe, if I drink more water.”

  “More water!” she snorted. “Just like a doctor. You know what doctors know about nutrition?”

  “No.”

  She made a circle with her thumb and finger. “That much-- zero, nada. They don’t even teach it in medical school. And, by the way, when a doctor says anything is because of genetics, that means he doesn’t know the real reason.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” she promised. “Doctors aren’t as smart as they lead everybody to believe. If they were, nobody would ever get sick. Why do you think they call it a ‘medical practice.’? Doctors practice medicine. They never perform medicine.”

  “Yeah,” I said with awe, realizing she was absolutely right.

  “How much do you think you weigh?”

  “One twenty…five…maybe.”

  “And you’re what?-- five foot three?” She shook her head. “Too much. And you have to fix that now. If you wait, it’ll just get worse. One day you’ll have to butter your hips to fit through doorways.”

  That was a horrifying thought, and in that instant, before I even realized it, I committed myself to one of Coralee’s interests. I promised myself that I would eat better, that I would exercise, and that I would drink more water. It would all be so simple, and how could it ever be a bad thing?

  ************

  Two weeks later:

  I was always tired, from exercising.

  I was always hungry, from not eating enough.

  I was always running to the bathroom, from all the water I was drinking.

  And as far as I could tell, I hadn’t lost a single ounce of weight.

  “Well, you know, it might take a little longer,” Coralee suggested.

  “I don’t that I have much time,” I said. “Today I fell asleep during an English test, and last week I nearly got run down by a truck while I was jogging. You know, it was a lot safer when I didn’t care what I weighed.”

  But Coralee wasn’t listening. She seemed lost in thought, as we sat at the lunch table.

  “I wonder if you have an inhibited metabolism,” she said.

  “Is that something I’m likely to have?” I asked.

  “I read somewhere that some people are overweight because they don’t eat enough.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, really.”

  “So I can eat again?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t pig out. Just eat a lot more vegetables. See what happens.”

  “With my luck, I still won’t lose weight, and I’ll start looking like the Green Giant.”

  ************

  But it turned out to be good advice. As soon as I started stuffing my face with vegetables, my weight started to ease down. I had discovered I actually weighed 142 pounds-- much higher than I had believed-- but within a month I was down to 125. Everything from my waist down slimmed out so much I needed new jeans. And I did feel better, which was the main reason I’d started to watch my diet.

  It was all good.

  Of course, my parents were a bit mystified. They weren’t used to someone in our house losing weight. But they figured that my new, healthy life-style agreed with me, and that it was for the better.

  Coralee, by now, didn’t even care much. Like her previous interests, nutrition and fitness had already given way to a new hobby, rock-climbing.

  “We’re in Illinois,” I pointed out to her one day at lunch. “We’re do you go rock climbing in Illinois?-- it’s all flat.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said, and rattled off about a dozen nearby locations, before wolfing down a couple beef tacos and a non-diet soda.

  “What happened to the nutrition thing?” I asked.

  “Didn’t work for me,” she said, chewing her food. “I’m naturally skinny, anyway. But you-- wow! Guys are actually looking at you.”

  “Guys looked at me before,” I said, somewhat defensive.

  “Yeah, the guys nobody wants. Now it’s, like, the hot guys are looking.”

  “Go on,” I scoffed.

  “No, really, girl. Just keep up whatever you’re doing-- seriously. By spring, you’re gonna be smoking. You should get one of those teeny bikinis and started going to the tanning salon. You’re gonna have guys drooling over you.”

  “Please, that’s not why I started this,” I said. “I just wanted to feel better, really.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll feel a lot better with a bunch a guy chasing you around.”

  I found the thought embarrassing, but kind of nice, too. Everybody wants to be wanted, maybe that more than anything else in life.

  “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking, maybe, of going out for a team.”

  She stopped eating and stared at me.

  “A team?” she said dully. “You’re kidding.”

  “Maybe soccer or volleyball or maybe even cross-country. I kind of like running. It makes me feel good.”

  “You’re sick, you know that,” she said. “I send you on the path to gain these new powers, and you’re gonna waste them on sports? You don’t even care about the guys and whether your favorite cousin picks up your leftovers? That’s gratitude for you,” she said, and stood and grabbed her tray. Before she left, she said, “You know, I don’t even know you.”

  I couldn’t believe that she was getting all snarky on me. She was actually mad
at me. What was with that? It was bizarre. She never got mad at me.

  Well, let her be mad, then, I figured. It didn’t make any sense, anyway; she’d been the one who encouraged me. What did she had to be mad about?

  ************

  Over the following weeks, my weight slowly decreased. As I physically faded away, so did my old life, only to be replaced by a strange new life that I could never feel was really mine.

  Half the time when I awoke in the morning, I didn’t feel like myself, the good old Lisa Beaumont, but some stranger into whose skin I had somehow slipped.

  Coralee avoided me like the plague. At first, it didn’t seem like a terrible thing, but after a while it didn’t seem natural for her not to be around, jabbering on and on about this or that. I missed her babbling. She could be annoying, sure, but annoying in a comforting way. Now I sit alone in the lunchroom every day, left to realized how few friends I had always had.

  Guys who had never before noticed me now began to drift in my direction, sitting at the opposite end of the lunch table. Lose a few pounds and all of a sudden you are visible to people who had never really seen you. How incredibly shallow! Inside I was exactly the same person I had always been, but it seemed people, especially guys, were interested in outsides. I just ignored them and their hedging attempts to talk to me. They probably thought I was stuck-up, but I didn’t care what they thought. Oddly they more I ignored them, the more they tried to talk to me, which annoyed me in a much more annoying way than Coralee had ever been, and that made me miss her even more.

  By Christmas vacation, I was down to 109 pounds. The clothes I had worn were all now baggy. My waist was so slim I could see the abdominal muscles I never knew I had. My wrists and ankles seemed too bony, and veins looked like tiny blue worms under the skin of my hands and feet. To me it was pretty gross, but everybody seemed to like the way I looked now-- as though before there had been something wrong with me, and nobody had had the heart to mention it.

  On Christmas Eve, my aunt and uncle visited my house, as they always did. For them it was a short walk down the street. They brought gifts, but they also brought Coralee. I had no doubt she had made a fuss about even being in the same house with me. It appeared as though she would rather be anywhere else on earth, maybe even in the simmering cone of some active volcano.