Crave by Christine S. O'Brien

Author:Christine S. O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 9

“You’ve enervated yourself; you need B vitamins, calcium, and magnesium.” My mother hands me a glass of celery juice. “Celery juice feeds the nervous system.”

Summer’s over. I don’t want to be here, back in our Plandome kitchen with its dark wood paneling and cold, dark brown, penny-tile floor, in our house of too many rooms with too many walls between me and the outside, surrounded by large, silent estates and endless, winding tree-lined streets. I want to be back walking the streets of tiny, knowable Point Lookout, with the sun overhead and the ocean over my shoulder, where anything can happen.

“Your nerves are shot. You overextended yourself this summer. You’re feeling the effects.” I can hear the scold in her tone, the message that I was reckless in my choice to unspool myself in the pure joy of summer, to let abandonment and feeling overtake the priority of feeding my nervous system.

I sip the celery juice. It’s dark green. I’m guessing my mother chose these stalks purposely; the darker the green, the more minerals.

“Drink it slowly. Digest it in your mouth first.” She hands me three calcium-magnesium tablets with another message: now it’s time to reel myself back. I swallow the tablets, waiting for the feeling of loss to lift.

* * *

It’s my sophomore year at Dalton and Greg is a freshman.

“Have you seen The Exorcist?” our classmates ask, when they see our blended salads.

In the recently released horror movie, blended salad–like vomit is sprayed on the walls. Though we hide in the hallway by our lockers to drink the blended salads—soured, despite the tinfoil my mother wraps them in, from their morning sitting in our lockers—and celery juice, it’s impossible to avoid detection in the small school. Greg is easy in his body and funny; he and his best friend, Andrew Zimmern, who will go on to write and host a Travel Channel program called Bizarre Foods, draw small crowds in the hallway as they riff off each other in impromptu stand-up. But, despite having friends, I’m still feeling awkward and shy, and the stigma of our weird diet feels less easy for me to shake off.

I like classmate David Cremin, but when he passes a note in math asking if I want to go to a movie on Friday, I am flooded with the familiar hot embarrassment I felt at camp when counselor Randy visited me to say good night. I stuff the note inside my backpack and am first out the door when the bell rings. I avoid him at lunch and for the next few days until I feel sure he got the message. But what’s the message? Can I like someone who likes me? Maybe, now that our lives are about deprivation, I only know how to want what I can’t have.

* * *

“It’s blond. Hardly noticeable,” my mother says. I’ve asked her for a razor.

It’s summer again. We are standing in our Point Lookout kitchen, looking at my lower legs, which are covered in hair that has seemed to appear overnight.

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