Free Artichoke's Heart by Suzanne Supplee Page B

I’m sitting here. Just restless, I guess. Every five seconds, I either have to poop or I have gas that feels like it may or may not be a poop. Gross, I realize, but my stomach’s so twisted up, I feel like there’s a whole Boy Scout troop in there—working on their knot badges with my intestines.

    Today at lunch, I felt the need to masticate. The liquid diet was making me insane. My teeth needed to crunch and chew! And there’d been too much misery all weekend—my depressing phone conversation with Grandma Georgia, surfing more Hodgkin’s websites. And to top it all off, Mrs. McCutchin had another heart attack yesterday. Every problem must’ve been thumbtacked to my face, because right in the middle of a unit test, Mrs. Edinburgh leaned down by my desk and whispered, “Are you okay, Rosemary? You don’t look like yourself.”

    “I wish I didn’t look like myself,” I mumbled. Mrs. Edinburgh cocked her head to one side. “Only joking,” I lied. “I’m fine.” I smiled up at her just the way Mother would’ve done. Thankfully, Mrs. Edinburgh didn’t ask any more questions.

    At lunch, I ate like a Survivor contender who’d just been kicked off the island. I grazed my way through three lunch shifts— two barbecue sandwiches, french fries, chocolate pudding, ice cream . . . I sat in the hinterland, my back to the world, and ate away the success of the last several days. If I’d been slashing my skin with razors or shooting up, someone would’ve stopped me. There would’ve been interventions and meetings. As it was, the fat girl was eating. What else was new?

    By the time the episode was over, I was thirty minutes late for study hall. I didn’t have a late pass. I didn’t care. The whole waddle down the empty hallway, I thought about Kyle Cox. I wondered if he’d missed me the way I always miss him when he’s late to study hall. Yeah, right. When pigs fly out of my ass! I thought (and considering what I’d consumed during lunch, this wasn’t entirely unrealistic).

    The library door squeaked loudly when I opened it. Every head turned toward me, then jerked quickly away. Just once, I’d like to know how it feels to walk into a room looking like Kay-Kay Reese—the lingering eyes, the longing glances, the envious hearts. Fat chance.

    Mr. Lawrence sat grading papers. I held my breath and waited for his scolding, but he just rolled his pointy black eyes at me and wrote something in his grade book. Points off for tardiness, more than likely. I didn’t look in Kyle’s direction.

    Ronnie Derryberry was asleep and drooling on his books again, but for once his fingernails were clean and neatly trimmed, a sharp contrast to my own, which were now dirty and sticky with barbecue sauce and chocolate. I settled into some pre-calculus homework and tried to forget myself. Impossible. My overloaded stomach was killing me.

    “ Pssst ! Hey, Rosemary.” It was Kyle (his cold sounded better). The shame of having gorged my way through lunch was lodged in my throat, and my gut rolled like that giant bingo barrel down at the American Legion building. I kept my eyes locked on the blurred page of my textbook. I didn’t want to see Kyle’s friendly brown eyes or Kyle’s million-dollar nanosecond smile. Kyle would never belong to me, and there was little point in torturing myself. “ Pssst !” he hissed again.

    Quietly, I closed my book and stuffed it into my backpack. I slid my purse over one shoulder and my backpack over the other. Thunder thighs swishing together, I walked out—no hall pass— no acknowledgment of Kyle’s pssst s. I did not tell Mr. Lawrence where I was going.

    FAT GIRL GOES BAD! WANDERS HALLWAYS WITHOUT A PASS! That’d be the headline for Misty Winters’s next big Spring Hill High School story. The corridors were empty. I passed the teachers’ lavatory, then turned back again. My stomach rumbled like Mount St. Helens.

    Inside, the cherry-scented disinfectant made me light-headed. My