Skin and Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

let himself be overwhelmed by the kind of desire he’d only seen in movies and wondered if couples really did have sex while feeding each other Lean Cuisine—lying entwined afterward, making up poetry only they could understand. He wanted to stretch out beside Alice, count her freckles, play connect the dots with his tongue.
    “…unless you count George,” Lard said.
    “George?”
    “A guy we hung out with last summer.”
    “In the program?” Bones asked.
    Lard nodded. “I still can’t figure out how he smuggled beer in here. But you don’t have to worry about him. Alice was always making fun of his man boobs.”
    Bones dropped to the floor beside his bed, ignoring the dizziness in his sixth set of push-ups. He pictured Alice—the profile of her head and nose, the sexy curve of her neck. Just then Dr. Chu’s leather loafers walked across the floor toward him.
    “What have we here?” he asked in a tone that meant trouble.
    “Bones is looking for a screw,” Lard offered up quickly.
    “It fell out of the frame of my glasses.”
    “Here it is.” Bones held up two pinched fingers and nothing else.
    Dr. Chu acted like he bought it. “How’re you doing?” he asked. “The first few days are the toughest.”
    From here, Dr. Chu’s face looked too small for his head, like his creator had run out of clay. Bones wondered what Dr. Chu would say if he told him the truth. That he’d entered the program as a pristine specimen of anorexia nervosa—but was in immediate danger of becoming a person who throws up out the window.
    “I’m okay,” Bones said.
    “People who vomit don’t lose weight in the long run,” Dr. Chu said, as if reading his mind. “Bodies adjust when they think they’re being starved.”
    Lard slammed the cover of his cookbook. “Can’t we talk about something else, like ever?”
    Dr. Chu smiled again. He seemed to have a smile for every occasion, like a rack of greeting cards. “Gentlemen, lights out was ten minutes ago. Good night and sleep tight.”
    “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Bones said after he left.
    “Yeah, man, they flippin’ hurt when they bite.” Lard got up and slapped off the light switch. Between the door being ajar and lights from the parking lot streaming in through the window, the room wasn’t all that dark. Bones watched Lard’s hulking mass move through the room.
    Bones slipped under the covers tossing from one cramped position to another. The sheets were too stiff and too uncomfortable for his unstable state of mind. The mattress was hard as the floor. He felt like someone had stuck pushpins in his spine.
    He finally got up and stumbled to the bathroom where he peed with taurine force. The color had lightened from Root Beer to Afternoon Lift, the herbal tea his mom drank when winding down after board meetings. Sure the last five days had been hell, but they had to have been hell for his family too. Bones knew no one at his house was sleeping.
    Bones went back to bed. With the lights out the racket in the corridor seemed louder. He recognized Nancy’s voice and a deep male voice. Then he heard a weird noise. EE—UUU—RRRR—ACK! It sounded like someone was throwing up. No, more like someone was knocking down a brick wall with vomit. “Lard? Did you hear that?”
    Lard grumbled irritably. “What do you think?”
    “Who do you think it is?”
    “Who cares?”
    Bones didn’t really care, though he guessed it was Elsie. “What room will they put Alice in?”
    “Her parents pay for a private room,” Lard said. “The one next to us is empty.”
    Bones liked the sound of that.
    “But that’s just a guess, man.”
    “You’ll think this is a little weird, but you know what I thought when I saw her? I imagined us in our very own tenth floor apartment. No elevator. Medicine balls instead of chairs. A futon, silk sheets.”
    “I can picture it, man. A living room furnished with weights, his and hers stationary bikes, a treadmill with a high-torque