Hunger Point by Jillian Medoff

Author:Jillian Medoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins

It’s been five months since Shelly died. I try to deal with her death as something final, but I can’t. Every time I think about her, gaunt and hunched over, inspecting a string bean, tears cloud in my eyes like filmy contact lenses. The only way I can comfort myself is to imagine that she’s on a tropical island, baking in the sun, planning to come home as soon as she runs out of money.

Her last few days were excruciating. We rushed her to the emergency room at Northside, the hospital closest to Lindsey Point. They pumped her stomach, but her weight was so low, she lapsed into a coma and they had to move her into intensive care. We gathered outside the glass. Chubby came to visit and stood with my mother for hours at a time, looking at my sister hooked up to tubes and machines. “She’s young,” Chubby said, taking my mother’s arm. “She’ll fight.” I couldn’t look at her, so I focused on everything else in the room: the feeding tube, the blinking lights, the monitors above her bed. I don’t remember what I thought during that time, but I do know that it never occurred to me that she was going to die. If I had thought that even once, I wouldn’t have been able to look at her. The entire scene was very intimidating, and it gave me respect for Bryan Thompson. I guess when you’re forced to deal with this type of thing all day long, you have to be an asshole in real life. For most of the week, I wished he was around. I even tried to call him from a pay phone in the lobby. I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I needed to hear some random guy’s voice, pretending he cared. But the second I heard his voice, I started to cry and hung up. He knew it was me, I’m sure, but for once, I didn’t care.

My mother slept in the hospital in a chair next to Shelly’s bed. My father came every day with my grandfather, who spent most of his time in the cafeteria. I sat with Grandpa Max and held his hands while he ate bowls of tapioca pudding. “She’s such a beautiful girl,” he kept repeating. “Why does this happen to such beautiful girls?”

“She’ll get better, Grandpa,” I said. “She’s just resting to give her body strength. Shelly’s a fighter, Grandpa. She’s just too thin.”

“Ach,” he said, swallowing his pudding. “Fat, skinny, fat, skinny, girls girls girls. What does it matter?” Spittle formed on his lips. “Your grandma…Grandma wasn’t all skin and bones. She had meat on her. But she was beautiful, kiddo.” He started choking. I patted his back until he caught his breath. “But no one asked how much she weighed. No one. ‘Adoring wife, loving mother.’ Not her weight, not ‘too fat.’” At first, I didn’t know what he was talking about. And then I realized he was referring to the engraving on her headstone.

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