Holding Up the Universe (13 page)

My dad finds me in the kitchen, eating standing up, and this is something we don't do anymore. It's one of the food rules we follow, along with don't eat in front of the TV, don't eat too fast, and stop eating when you're sixty percent full.

When I see him, I set the plate down. Wherever the ache is coming from—my heart, my stomach—the food isn't reaching it.

When my mom went away, I went empty too. Like all of me just flooded out and disappeared. In the hospital, I held her hand until my grandmother came in, and my dad, and the rest of my family. All of them sweet and loving and brokenhearted, but none of them like my mom. Not even all together. They didn't begin to add up to her.

My dad's eyes go to the plate, but he doesn't comment. Instead he says, “Bailey Bishop is here to see you.”

Bailey stands in the center of my bedroom, head turning, hair catching the light like it's trying to grab all of it and keep it for itself.

“It's been a long time.” She leans down to rub George under his chin, and surprisingly he lets her.
Traitor,
I think. Bailey says, “Didn't you have him back then?”

“I got him when I was eight.” My mom and I picked him out, or rather he picked us. We went to a rescue event, and George got free of his cage and packed himself into my mom's purse. “He was supposed to die four years ago, but he's not ready.”

The last time Bailey was at my house, we were ten. I had invited her and Monique Benton and Jesselle Villegas for a sleepover. The four of us stayed up all night and talked about boys and told each other our deepest, darkest secrets. Bailey's was that she tried to give her baby brother away when he was born. Mine was that I sometimes spied on the boys who lived across the street. This was before Dean, Sam, and Castiel became my only friends.

Bailey straightens and focuses all of her Bailey-ness on me and says, “I'm sorry I never came to see you. I should have come to see you. When you were in here. Well, not in here, but in your old house.”

This throws me completely, and I stand there like a lump.
How does she get to be so nice and also have hair like that?
Finally, I go, “That's okay. I mean we weren't best friends or anything.”

“But we were friends. I should have come.”

Should I hug her? Should I tell her it's okay? Should I tell her she should have come to see me a long time ago, way before I was trapped in my house, when my dad first pulled me out of school and let me stay home?

She says, “I have to tell you something, and it's horrible, but I don't want you to have to hear about it at school.” All of a sudden, she looks like she's going to cry, and at first I think she's going to tell me she's dying or maybe I'm dying.

And then she tells me about the game. How I was the grand prize in something called Fat Girl Rodeo, and how that news has spread across social media like a virus. Everyone is infected, and my two thousand classmates and many, many strangers are all weighing in (get it?) about whether they're Team Libby or Team Jack.

Someone's posted a picture of me, which they must have snapped just after it happened, because there I am in the cafeteria, looking mad as a hatter, fist still clenched, Jack Masselin sprawled at my feet. You can't see his face, but you can see mine (dangerously red, slightly sweaty). Caption:
Don't mess with Mad Lbs.
“Lbs” as in pounds, of course. There are seventy-six comments, and only a few of them are nice. The rest say the usual:
If I was that big, I'd want to kill myself.
And:
She's pretty for a fat girl.
And:
Just looking at her makes me want to never eat again.
And simply:
LOSE WEIGHT, YOU FAT WHORE.

This is exactly why I don't do social media. So many mean comments and snarky comments and bullying disguised as
I'm only expressing my opinion, as the Constitution of our great country requires me to do. If you don't like it, don't read it. Blah blah blah.

I have this overwhelming urge to throw Bailey's phone away and my phone away, and then go up and down the street collecting phones so I can throw them away too.

Bailey says, “Maybe I shouldn't have said anything.” She chews on a fingernail and squints up her eyes, and I can see the tears in them.

“I'm glad you did.” I mean I'm not happy, obviously, but I was going to find out somehow and being told by the world's kindest person is probably the best way to do that.

I turn my phone off, and then I shut down the computer so I can't read about myself anymore. I say to Bailey, “I am sick of reading about myself.” She nods in her eager-to-please Bailey way. I start pacing, which means I'm about to start talking. A lot. “For one thing, there's only so much new material you can get from the fact that I'm overweight. We get it, people. Move on.”

Bailey nods like crazy. “We get it.”

“And this whole ‘pretty for a fat girl' thing. I mean, what is that? Why can't I just be pretty period? I wouldn't say, ‘Oh, Bailey Bishop, she's pretty for a skinny girl.' I mean, you're just Bailey. And you're pretty.”

“Thank you. You're pretty too.” And unlike Caroline and Kendra, I know she means it.

“And what is this whole ‘fat girl equals whore' bullshit?” She flinches. “Sorry. ‘Fat girl equals whore' garbage. What is that? Why am I automatically a whore? How does that even make sense?”

“It doesn't.”

“If everyone who had something to say about me spent as much time on, I don't know,
practicing kindness
or
developing a personality or a soul,
imagine how lovely the world would be.”

“So lovely.”

I go on and on, Bailey as my cheerleader, until I run out of steam. I sink down onto my bed and say, “Why are people so concerned with how big I am?” She doesn't answer, just takes my hand and holds it. She doesn't need to answer because there is no answer. Except that only small people—the inside-small kind—don't like you to be big.

I've never built a robot before, but I'm determined. I watch a couple of YouTube videos. Consult a couple of books. By the time I'm done, I've decided it's going to be the best damn Lego robot ever.

For my eighth birthday, I asked for a hammer, screwdrivers, and wire cutters. I got my first soldering iron when I was nine. No one knows where this urge to build comes from, except that my dad has always been pretty handy, so maybe I get some of it from him. I just know that ever since I was little, making things out of thin air is what centers me, like the way other people turn to yoga or morphine. It's why we have a pizza oven and a pitching machine in our backyard, a catapult in our garage, and a weather station on the roof. When I'm working, I see the object as a whole before it ever exists, and I build my way there. It's the exact opposite of my everyday life.

But right now all I see are the pieces, which is exactly like my everyday life. Red ones here, blue ones there, white and yellow and green and black. At some point, I lie back on top of them, right on the cold concrete floor. It's uncomfortable as hell, but I tell myself,
You don't deserve comfort, asshole.

I wonder what Libby Strout is doing right about now. I hope she's not thinking about me or today. I hope somehow she can think about something else. Anything else.

I hear footsteps on the basement stairs, and a woman appears, first her legs, then the rest of her. I assume it's my mom, because what other woman would be in the house unless Dad's decided to bring Monica Chapman in here? I look for the identifiers. This is Mom-with-Hair-Down. Her mouth is wide. She's clearly black. I try to build my way to her face, but even after I locate enough pieces to tell myself
Okay, that's her,
it's not as if the image of her snaps into place for me, and it's not as if it sticks around. I suddenly feel old and so, so tired. It's exhausting, constantly having to search for the people you love.

She says, “I don't need to tell you how disappointed I am in you. Or how angry.”

“You do not.” I look up at her from the floor.

“We have to hope they don't decide to press charges. You may not see yourself as black, and you may not think people see you as black, but it's a fact that our society treats kids of color more severely than others, and I do not want this following you for the rest of your life.” We're both quiet as I think about my dismal, dead-end future. She says, “What are you doing?”

“I was preparing to build a Lego robot for little man, but right now I'm contemplating what an asshole I am.”

“That's a start. How are you going to make this better?”

“I don't think there's any making it better, is there? There's just making it as good as I can after the fact.”

“Is there anything you want to talk about? Anything you need to tell me?”

“Not tonight.”
Maybe not ever.
My phone buzzes on the floor next to me.

“Get your call. You can tell me tomorrow.”

Maybe.

She adds, “I love you anyway.”

“I love you anyway too.”

It's almost nine when Bailey leaves. I'm still fired up, so I dance for a while, and then I decide to do homework. I dump the contents of my backpack onto my bed and sort through my papers and notebooks and pens and gum wrappers, and all the miscellaneous rubbish I've stuffed in there, including
We Have Always Lived in the Castle,
which I carry everywhere.

Buried in the mess is a white letter-size envelope.

What's this?

I rip it open and start reading.

I'm not a shitty person, but I'm about to do a shitty thing…

At first I think he's making it up. I read the letter again. And again.

You know how it's easy to believe everything is about you, especially when something goes wrong?
Why me? Why do I have the worst luck ever? Why is the universe so mean? Why does everyone hate me?
My mom used to say sometimes it's actually about the other person and you just happen to be there. Like sometimes the other person needs to learn a lesson or go through an experience, good or bad, and you're just an accessory in some way, like a supporting actor in whatever their scene happens to be.

Maybe, just maybe, this whole nightmare is more about Jack Masselin than it is about me. Maybe this whole thing happened to teach him a lesson about how to treat other people.

I sit and think on that for a while. This was the thing Mom did—looked at all sides of things. She believed that situations and people were almost never black-and-white.

Ten minutes later, I'm reading everything I can find on prosopagnosia, which leads me to an artist named Chuck Close, neurologist/author Oliver Sacks, and Brad Pitt. According to the Internet, they all have face blindness. I mean,
Brad Pitt.

What if the entire world was face-blind?

If everyone had prosopagnosia, there'd be hope for the homely. No one would ever say “You're too pretty to be fat” or “She's pretty for a fat girl” because looks would stop mattering. Would people still care if you were overweight or too thin? Tall or short? Maybe. Maybe not. But it would be a step in the right direction.

At fat camp, we had to try to put ourselves into the skin of other people, just like Atticus told Scout:
You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it…
Skin's so fascinating anyway—I mean the way it expands and shrinks. I used to weigh twice what I do now—that's
two times
more—and my skin fit me then and it fits me now. Weird.

I try to put myself in Jack Masselin's skin and imagine what he sees when he looks at me. Do I look different, in some way, from everyone else? Or do I blend in? Then I imagine that I'm the one with face blindness.
What would the world look like?

I pull up a new document. I write:

Dear Jack,

Thanks for explaining your douchiness. I don't think prosopagnosia gives you the right to be a jerk, but I'm at least glad you're not rotten to your core. Maybe there's hope for you.

Libby

p.s. I have questions.