Skin and Bones Read Online Free PDF Page A

who’d been crying in therapy strolled in. Tamara? Tasha? No. Bones remembered her name was Teresa. Her makeup looked like it had been cried off. She wore a turquoise T-shirt, which she kept tugging over her voluminous butt.
    Bones tried to think of something nice to say to make up for all the mean things he’d thought about her. Truth was he’d started judging fat people long before he’d started trying to lose weight. Twisted logic, for sure.
    He tried to put himself in Teresa’s place, imagining how hard it’d be to squeeze into the hospital’s stall shower, how horrible it would be to see all that flabby flesh in the mirror. But the images required her being naked so he shrugged them off.
    Teresa picked up the TV remote and folded her overly stuffed self into an easy chair. She clashed with its sickly yellow and brown stripes. “Hardly anyone talks about shame,” she suggested, noting his journal. “Or remorse. Dr. Chu would wet himself if you wrote about that.”
    Teresa surfed the channels, finally settling on a reality show about disgustingly fat people who were looking for someone to share their life with. “The guy on the left used to have a twin brother,” she said. “But he ate him.”
    Bones laughed.
    She smiled at him and he smiled back.
    Teresa studied her reflection in the TV’s dim screen, fiddling with the safety pin in her eyebrow. It looked dull.
    She reminded Bones of a fat girl he met in a group therapy meeting a year ago. She’d been so depressed about her weight she’d quietly swallowed pills, chasing them down with Kaopectate to keep from throwing up. Her brother found her and called 911. Afterward she wore a hand-painted T-shirt to meetings to show she was learning to accept her body, More to Love .
    Bones set up folding chairs and tables for dinner before going back to his room, where he was horrified to see Lard eating cottage cheese (one-half cup, 90 calories) from the carton. Even the smell grossed him out.
    “Sharing a room with another person is hard enough!” Bones rushed to open the window. “But a person bringing food into my personal space is not okay! And I’m lactose intolerant!”
    “You can’t be allergic to smells.”
    Bones heard the empty container hit the trashcan behind him. “Tell that to the twenty-three million people with hay fever.”
    “Trying to appear tragic in an eating disorder ward is redundant.”
    When Bones leaned out the window he saw a string of twine tied to a nail below the sill. A bag of Cheese Doodles (7 ounce bag, 975 calories, 99% fat) hung from a clip on the end. Definitely contraband.
    “It could be worse, man,” Lard said. “You could have a roommate who pukes in his pillow case. “Come on, it’s time for dinner.”
    Bones felt shaky, unsteady at the thought of more food. The weight of regularly scheduled meals was so hard, and he hated other people deciding what he could and could not eat. The dayroom smelled like the burnt microwave burritos his sister bought at 7-Eleven. That and shattered hopes.
    Lard pushed by him. “Let’s sit with Eve.”
    To shake off impending doom, Bones noted that this was the first time he’d ever been invited to the popular table. Lard smoothed his hair self-consciously and chose a chair next to Eve. She wore shorts, an impressively tight T-shirt, and the type of running shoes that caused serious wallet-cramping.
    Bones sat across from her.
    Teresa joined them. “Chu man gave me an extra ten minutes on the treadmill. What a killer.”
    That was the best news Bones had heard since checking in. “There’s a gym in the hospital?”
    “Physical therapy,” Lard said. “But you won’t start on a program until your weight’s stable.”
    “That means he’s going to force calories down you,” Eve said with obvious disgust. “I could loan you a bra for weigh-in. Stuff it with something heavy so the scales show a gain. Then maybe he won’t raise your calories so much.”
    “Why tell him that?”