Last week, I got busted, red-handed, white-faced. Terrified that they would turn me into the very person whose behaviour had likely inspired the ultimate betrayal, I apologized and returned to my seat as soon as I possibly could. That weekend, I did homework, culling information from various texts that would soon lead me slipping and sliding down a muddy path of self-destruction.
***
I was seven, I was chubby and it wasn’t unknown to me. What was, until I was nearing 20, was that the abuses I took at home from my father likely had more to do with my eating disorder than the kids who mocked me on the playground, the nicknames and taunting, the older girls in the bathroom who’d so graciously pointed out my double-chins.
At seven and precocious, I read everything there was to read about losing weight. I wore out my library card, flipping through the pages of most magazines aimed towards girls and women older than me – as long as there was an article giving instruction on waist whittling, dieting, cleansing or leg lifts, it was applicable. It didn’t take me long to wander into the abnormal psych area of the Dewey Decimal System, and I quickly paged through the psych mumbo-jumbo, getting to the good stuff – the case studies.
Every day at seven years of age, lunch is torture for me. I can feel eyes on me as I sit lonely, but not always alone, taking the same baloney sandwich out of my yellow She-Ra lunch box. Seeing the low-priced brand of pudding five days a week – the kind that held onto the notion of aluminum tabs that usually, but not always, broke off before you could even get the damn thing open far enough to attempt to enjoy the chalky brown sludge inside – even while other kids have wagon wheels or cookies, causes my shoulders to stoop. The thermos of warm milk, deemed undrinkable by most kids, must be drank or it will become my milk the next day and the next and so on, until it’s all drank or soured and solid.
One day, I get this epic idea. If I’m to lose weight, I should just stop eating so much. Whether Cosmo or Oprah or the devil or misfiring synapses brought me the knowledge, I don’t know. But I did know that if I didn’t eat my lunch, I would be served the same thing tomorrow, which was even grosser a concept than the fact that I ate the same thing everyday for lunch, anyway. So I decided to throw it out in one of the gigantic green garbage cans that sat in the middle of the school’s gymnasium, right for everyone to see. A silent protest of action against my overweightedness, if you will.
Of course I got caught. But the only one who noticed was the lunch monitor.
***
Today, I’ve come up with a braver, more stealth idea. The lunch room monitors don’t keep an eye on the bathroom, so I’ll flush my lunch down the toilet. And I do, hiding in the stall during the last few minutes before I’m to return to the second graders’ classroom. Watching the water rising higher and higher on the bowl’s edges, I wonder if I should have taken the plastic wrap off of my sandwich, if it being more malleable might make it less likely to clog. Eventually, the stress of the moment – waiting to find out if my shoes will get wet or not – overrides my need to see the job to completion and I leave the stall, tossing the pudding in the garbage on my way out of the door.
I decide that tomorrow, I’ll take the plastic wrap off and tear that food bank-provided motherfucker in pieces before pushing the plunger.
This post is a response to the {W}rite-of-Passage challenge. See more by clicking the linky, below:
