Skinny by Diana Spechler Read Free Book Online Page B

Pop-Tarts for breakfast. In the morning, I was always determined, waking to the thought, Today, I’ll get back on track. Sometimes I would fast until noon. Often, I stayed in control until nighttime. It was always later in the day that things would fall apart.
    As another counselor relayed a story about smoking a joint with a teacher, Bennett, the assistant director, appeared at the base of the steps.
    “Lord, he’s gorgeous,” Mia muttered. It was what she said every time she saw Bennett.
    Bennett was a personal trainer. He looked like a high school athlete, but with crow’s feet like crackle glazing around his blue eyes. His body was built exclusively of muscle. He wore soccer shorts and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, revealing the rolling hills of his triceps and biceps and a red heart tattoo on his upper right arm with a name inside: Camille . Looking at Bennett made me clench my hands into fists, not because I wanted to touch him—not exactly. I wanted to press my fingers to the glass that should have encased him.
    He emerged from the dark as if he’d been cloaked in it. Someone said, “You scared me!”
    And then my longing to eat was gone. In its place was the thought that Bennett could have found me in the kitchen, could have turned on a light and caught me eating as if someone were timing me. I’d been caught once before—some months earlier in an East Village diner. I had ordered three entrées, and had begun to eat from all three, when two girls I knew from college walked in, pointed at me from the doorway, and rushed to my table.
    “Gray Lachmann!” they said together.
    They wanted to catch up, to tell me who had married whom. I didn’t invite them to sit. They kept glancing at the seat across from me, as if surely, at any moment, I’d no longer be alone.
    I wrapped my arms around my stomach and looked away from Bennett. But then he sat beside me.
    “Hey, Angeline.”
    I turned to him. “It’s Gray.” He smelled like summer and muscles. I looked at the simple curve of his ear. I told him again: “My name’s Gray.”
    “I’m all brushed up on what your name is.” Bennett leaned back on his elbows, his T-shirt stretching taut against the bulk of his chest. “What’s everyone doing?”
    Brendan said, “We’re telling high stories.”
    “What are high stories?”
    “Stories about getting high.”
    Bennett looked at me and grinned. I grinned back. In that moment, we were old together, sealed by the superiority of adulthood. Bennett had fourteen years on me. Forty-one, he had told me during staff training, laughing, as if it were preposterous that he, Bennett Milton, could have entered middle age.
    “Angeline,” he said, his arm so close to mine, I could feel the coarse blond hairs of it. “She rides in a long gray limousine. And she struts around New York City. I can just see you struttin’ around New York City.”
    “I don’t strut.”
    He bumped my arm with his. “It’s a song.”
    “I think strutting requires high heels. I never wear high heels.”
    “That right?”
    “New York City. We’re always walking. I wear flip-flops.” I lifted one of my feet to show him my black rubber flip-flop. My toenails needed a trim. A couple were jagged. I curled my toes to hide them. “If it’s cold out, I wear sneakers.”
    “Sneakers? That what you Yanks call tennis shoes?”
    I looked hard at Bennett, pleased with his means of communication—an amused, detached acceptance of anything I said. This was not a man who would bother to know my brain. If I told him, “I’m a murderer!” he would probably say, “Well, are you now.” He probably loved baseball games. He probably played Frisbee. He probably liked to watch people walk by and note, “You know what I enjoy? People watching.”
    “What are you doing all the way down here anyway, Angeline?”
    This was not lost on me: My hunger was gone. From the second Bennett appeared beside me, I’d felt no desire to eat. I smiled and