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The first time he tries to eat he doesn’t get very far. He swallows, but the food doesn’t even get down.
The second, he tries a little harder. He keeps it down for a few minutes. Then he’s running to the bathroom to vomit everything up again, and it stings. A lot.
The third, he keeps it down for almost half an hour. It ends up on the floor, because he can’t make it to the bathroom in time.
The fourth, he tries just water. He drinks too much. It feels worse than anything else, though he doesn’t know why. It makes him nauseous.
The cycle repeats over and over. He’s reminded of why he’s supposed to stray away from food. The hunger pangs get bad. He convinces himself to ignore them, to reduce them to an ache. He reaches a point where ignoring them doesn’t work. He tries something different, just to see. He’s reminded of why he’s supposed to stray away from food…
He tries to ignore it entirely. He can feel it, of course. He can feel hunger eating away at him, can feel his stomach folding in on itself. He’s tried to keep things down and make that hunger go away. Nothing can stay down. But it doesn’t matter if he’s hungry all the time. It doesn’t matter if he despises it, or what it means. None of it matters. That’s what he tells himself. What matters is staying close to Mom. Only that.
If he feels tight in his middle, which happens all too often, he stops and learns to move with the tightness. If Mom hands him something to eat, he finds a way to fake it for her, if he can’t manage to dodge it at all.
She keeps trying to give him things, though. He wishes she would stop, for her sake if not for his, but she never does. One morning she fishes out the cereal they have on standby and pours it into a bowl. He picks up the box and stares at it, grimacing.
He pushes it away, but Mom sets the milk down with it. She tosses him a questioning look when he doesn’t eat anything. She pours the milk herself.
“You’re gonna be late,” she tells him, “and you’ve got a huge day today.”
He takes the chance to set everything to the side and distract her.
“You have no idea what I do all day.”
His eyes drift to the untouched bowl. His stomach twists. He almost reaches for it before remembering not to draw attention to it.
She lists off his schedule, and he has to have more back-and-forth with her while pretending not to feel the pit inside him. The real, physical pit, not the metaphorical one. That one is a problem too, but the one he’s most immediately concerned with right now is the physical one. The genuine cramping, like his stomach is eating itself in the absence of something real. He doesn’t understand that part; if he’s not able to keep something down, why does his body think he can?
It doesn’t matter, he thinks. He wasn’t blessed with a digestive system that knows what it’s doing. He might as well come to terms with it and move on. The concept of moving on would register as ironic to him, if he cared about that a little more. As it is, he’s just trying not to tip sideways while running up the stairs.
He wonders—past the stream of one step more, almost there, don’t hold the rail too hard, I hope this looks right—if he’ll be stuck in perpetual hunger for the rest of his existence, however long that is. If he’ll never be satisfied.
“Morning, Sunshine,” he calls to his sister as she passes him on the stairs. Maybe if he brings Mom’s attention to her, it will take it off of him, and he can curl up in the guest bedroom that’s turned into his, and feel sorry for himself for a while. He’ll try again in a few hours, when Mom is gone. Just to see.
“So—I got the date for my winter recital. Do you think you guys can come?”
Natalie doesn’t respond to him, which is fine. He would act hurt about it, but his mind is on other things, so his sister not seeing him is not currently a problem. The problem is that Mom doesn’t respond to her at first; her eyes follow him up the steps and she takes a moment too long to realize Natalie is speaking to her.
“Uh, yeah! We’ll put it on the calendar.”
He winces and slips through the doorway of the guest—of his bedroom.
“…still on April of last…,” he hears drifting up the stairs and through the open door. He aims for the bed but doesn’t make it, landing on the floor instead. He brings his knees to his chest. Pressure usually helps. If he presses himself into a tight enough ball, it reduces the pains somewhat. Enough that he can manage them for a while.
Mom sweeps the cake into the sink, and his eyes linger on it. They keep finding their way over to where he knows it lays, through when he’s defending Mom from Dad, when he’s making things worse, when he’s shouting and holding Mom’s face in his hands and hiding against the wall.
He looks for it near the end, when things have gone quiet. When Mom is on the floor and Dad has told her about a new therapist he’s going to book and his sister has had a shouting match of her very own—finally, something that’s hers, before he takes it again. His feet silent on the tiles, he drops from the counter and moves around it to reach into the sink.
The cake is a little lopsided from the way it landed, the frosting messy. The candles have fallen on their sides, pressed into the top. He removes them carefully and sets them next to each other, a silver one and a gold eight, and stares at them for a moment. Then he opens a cabinet, takes out two plates and two forks, and taps Mom on the shoulder lightly when he’s done preparing everything.
“Hey,” he whispers, crouching in front of her. She hasn’t moved from the floor past lifting herself up into a sitting position. Her head lifts slowly, eyes hazy, and she flinches when she sees him. He pushes down the feeling in his stomach and holds out the plate in his hands, smiling. “I know it didn’t go how you wanted. But I thought…”
She just looks at him, and his smile fades. She doesn’t take the plate from him.
“You’re…,” she begins, trailing off and lifting her head to try to catch a glimpse of the candles on the counter. He flinches away from her as the rest of her thought reaches him, but luckily he doesn’t think she notices. She pushes the plate into her hands, ensures she’s holding it tightly enough that it won’t slip, and reaches for his own.
“Mom,” he says, to get her to focus on him. He looks down at the cake, puzzling out how big of a bite he should take. He’s out of practice with this. If he holds his fork this way, does it look normal? “Mom, look. I’m here, I promise. How else could I do this?”
He wants to throw up before the food goes down his throat, before the fork even reaches his lips. He grits his teeth, feeling the cake go down the entire way. It hits his stomach, and he almost gags. He bites it back.
“See?” he says.
Her brow is furrowed, but she’s relaxing. A little confused, trying to reconcile the knowledge she has with what she just saw, but relaxing all the same. She trusts him. It’s not that she stopped at any point, but he’s given her proof to strengthen that trust.
“Oh,” she sighs, quiet, a little relieved, looking down at her slice of cake. She brushes her fork over the frosting on top.
It’s not even that good of a cake, he muses. Mom has never been that good of a baker. The cake is a little too salty, the frosting too sweet, and there’s some kind of grainy texture that wouldn’t have agreed with him even if he wasn’t this way.
Maybe he’s doing this because part of him hopes it’ll be different this time. It isn’t just for Mom. It’s for him, too.
Mom eats her slice, and he tries to stay with her. He manages to sit all the way through their little celebration on the kitchen floor. He finishes his plate despite the tightening in his stomach or the way the cake starts to taste like sandpaper halfway through.
“This was nice,” Mom remarks when they’re done. She takes his plate for him. A small mercy, because he doesn’t think he could make a detour to the sink even if he wanted. She cups his cheek, and he rests his hand over hers. He can’t even make an effort at smiling anymore; he tries to put it in his eyes and hopes she understands it. Hopes she interprets it as him trying to get over his birthday being ruined, and not him doing his best to hold everything together. “Thank you, G—” Mom freezes. Closes her mouth. Opens it to try again. “Thank you.”
“Mm-hm,” he hums.
As soon as she’s turned around, he stumbling out of the kitchen as quickly as possible. It’s a miracle that he even makes it to the bathroom. Everything comes out on the floor rather than the toilet or sink, both of which he was aiming for in blind desperation, thinking that as long as he made it to either, it would be okay. The half-digested cake rips through his throat, and he’s sitting curled on the bathroom floor heaving long after everything has come out.
He looks numbly down at the mixture of cake and stomach acid. Watches it spread and start to seep into his pants. His hands shake. He fists them in his hair, trying to breathe, remembering that isn’t something he needs to do, ignoring that and trying to breathe anyway. His throat is raw, the air scraping it as it goes through.
He fumbles for the cabinet door under the sink and finds a towel. He thinks it might be his sister’s; he doesn’t know how he knows that she uses the softer yellow ones—maybe he just noticed it subconsciously whenever he saw her in her room. He feels bad for dirtying it, but only slightly. He doesn’t have the presence of mind to feel anything more.
A voice rises downstairs as he’s wiping the floor. He balls the soiled towel in his hands, stares at it. He feels sick again just from the smell, the sensation of it against his palms, and he drops it on the ground and scoots against the wall, wiping his fingers on a dry spot on his pants and then pressing them to his mouth.
The voice calls again. Not saying his name, because she’s never said his name. But he knows she’s talking to him. He whimpers, closing his eyes.
When she shouts for a third time, he lifts his head and yells back, much weaker than he intends, “Coming, Mom.”
He doesn’t move. He just sits on the floor of the bathroom, his knees to his chest, his eyes wide and fixed on the tiles.