Layla tells us that she was down to 500 calories a day when she saw God. We’re all at Bri’s house, the four of us knee to knee and shivering because her mom turns off the heat at nine. The basement TV is paused in the middle of an episode of Gossip Girl, which none of us are allowed to watch, and a 60-inch Blair Waldorf looms behind Layla like an ultra-crisp shadow.
“It wasn’t scary, actually,” Layla says. Her collarbones are knives underneath her hot pink volleyball camp tank top. “It was really nice. He told me that He was really proud of me for being so disciplined and that I was still allowed to take the Eucharist on Sunday, but not the wine, because it’s all just sugar anyways, and sugar makes you break out.”
The bowl of popcorn in the center of our circle sits forgotten; my fingers itch for it, but after Layla’s sermon I don’t dare make it seem like I’m the least bit hungry
“What did he look like?” Morgan ask
“Like light,” Layla says, a beatific smile on her face. “You know how when you stand up sometimes and everything goes white for a second? It was like that, but for a long time. And His voice was, like, right in my ear, like I had headphones in.”
“Wow,” Bri says, eyes wide behind her neon blue glasses. “500 calories? That’s, like, not even a sandwich.”
Layla nods. “Yeah, I know. But you can’t see God if you don’t start cutting down. It’s the only way.”
Layla thinks she’s better than the rest of us because God has been talking to her since she was eight. She was even on the news about it once—not the real news, but one of those weird fuzzy Christian stations that only airs at three in the morning. They call her “God’s Gift to Gresham,” and I hate her sometimes. She’s needle-thin and pretty without trying to be, with a ski-slope nose and big eyes and skinny legs. She looks like one of those old paintings of Mary, with buttery blonde hair and ocean-blue eyes, which is probably why she’s always picked to play Mary in the church Christmas pageant. Everyone is in love with Layla, even the boys who don’t go to our church. Last year they all voted for her to win the costume contest on Halloween, even though her costume was just a black leotard and a pair of cat ears. My Frida Kahlo costume, complete with eyeliner unibrow and a flower crown I hot-glued myself, didn’t even get nominated. Last year the boy I asked to be my Valentine, Kyle Donovan, turned me down because he wanted to ask Layla. She called me that night to tell me that she’d turned him down “for me.”
“It’s not your fault that he doesn’t like you, I hope you know,” she said. I pressed the receiver to my cheek, trying not to let the tears swimming in my eyes fall. “He just said that he thinks you’re a good friend.” I knew this was a lie; Kyle never talked to me before or after Valentine’s Day.
“I want you to know that even though I think he’s cute, your friendship is more important to me,” she said, which made me feel even worse about the whole thing. Layla always acts like she’s got it all figured out, even though she’s the same age as the rest of us. She was the first one to get a bra, the first one to get asked out, the first one to see God. So when she tells us that we have to stop eating, we all agree that we’ll stop eating.
It’s about to be Lent so it’s easier to get away with it. Fridays, you’re supposed to do it anyways, and even though we’re technically exempt because we’re under fifteen, our parents are all very proud of us for making such a sacrifice and being so devout. The rest of the days we have to be discreet: purposefully running late in the mornings to avoid breakfasts, dumping our lunches in the trash, eating only a little bit at dinner. The first few days are really hard, and we keep each other accountable via Google Messenger, sending each other our calorie counts for the day so that Layla can add them to the Excel spreadsheet her brother helped her make.
“I know it’s hard,” Layla messages us after Bri complains of feeling nauseous during math class. “But it’s so worth it!”
Layla’s father works at the church library, and she recently checked out this book about the saints who starved themselves and didn’t eat anything except for the Eucharist, the men and women who had special relationships with God because they gave up everything on Earth. She shows us the pictures at recess, glossy paintings of euphoric-looking men and women lounging in the throes of salvation. The boy saints are all too skinny, ribs jutting out like the Holocaust victims we’re learning about in history class, but the girls are always depicted as pretty okay with the lack of food, still glossy-eyed and radiant but slim and demure like models, eyes rolled up to heaven with pink mouths curved in rapturous smiles. Morgan and Bri think we’re going to look like them. I look at the pictures and notice that none of them have wiry hair or pimples or weird oil tracks on their forehead. Maybe God’s favor makes you hot.
*********
One week in, Bri whispers to me on the bus, “I lost four pounds already.” We’re not supposed to be worried about weight, according to Layla, but Bri and I have both been weighing ourselves obsessively since we were nine. Bri and I always complain about our weight together, but when she says she’s lost four pounds something electrocutes me.
“Do you feel any different?” I whisper back. I’ve lost half a pound so far.
Bri shakes her head. “Well, I mean, I’m a little dizzy sometimes, but it’s worth it. I might have to get a belt for my jeans.”
Bri weighs 110 pounds—make that 106. I weigh 120. According to my pediatrician, I’m “on the high end of the BMI index.” My mom assures me that it’s normal to get a little bulky at this age, that we’re just growing into our “mature” bodies. But neither of us ever hit a growth spurt, and everything on me is going out instead of up, except for my boobs—I’m still wearing a training bra, and even that’s probably not all that necessary. When we got our volleyball uniforms this season, I was the only one who had to order a new jersey. The pants make my legs look like tubes of sausage, dimpled and hairy because my mother won’t let me shave my legs until I’m a freshman in high school. Volleyball isn’t even that fun anymore; I try not to play as much as possible. Not that the coach really cares if I play or not. It’s not like I’m one of the good players—the most I did was dive to avoid a ball that ended up going out of bounds, so our team got the point. Layla, on the other hand, scored seventeen points against St. George last weekend, and everyone says that she should join a club team.
*********
Two weeks in and Layla says she had another vision.
“He says to keep it up,” Layla tells us, like she’s talking about a boyfriend she just got off the phone with.
“How come I haven’t seen Him yet?” Morgan asks. She’s eating an almond, one of her three sanctioned, and her eyes are up in her head while she counts the number of chews.
Layla gives her a patient smile.
“God works in mysterious ways,” she says. “That’s what my father says.” She turns to me. “What about you, Alicia?” She says. She refuses to call me Allie, the nickname I’ve been trying to go by since third grade.
I haven’t been sleeping well; the hunger that scratches at the insides of my stomach is most persistent at night. My mom brought home chocolate chip cookies from work and I ate one, and then almost two—the second one was in my mouth when I realized what I was doing and spit it out into the kitchen sink, spitting again and again until there were no more streaks of chocolate in my saliva.
“It’s going okay,” I say. “Nothing yet. But I think I’m getting there.”
Layla reaches over to squeeze my arm, and I feel her fingers working to close around the flesh. She was the one who showed me that my arms flap, that every inch of jiggle was supposedly a pound you had to lose.
“That’s what the Victoria’s Secret models say,” she told me once, flapping her own bony arms triumphantly. “But my mom says they’re not good role models. So maybe it doesn’t matter.”
I’m worried that the reason it’s not working is that I’m not faithful enough. My mom got me a devotional for Christmas last year, which up to now has been on my nightstand collecting dust under my retainer case. The book is a glossy paperback with a flower on the cover called Girlz 4 Christ: How to Be a Godly Girl in a Fallen World, and is purportedly by “girls like you! (with help from Father Marcus Yasbeck, Ph.D.).” All the girls write about how Jesus is their boyfriend.
“I want my future husband to understand that Christ is always my first lover,” one girl, Mindy W., writes. “He pursues me like no man ever will.”
“Bury yourself in Christ,” another girl, Shannon J., suggests. “Hide your heart so deeply in Jesus that your future husband will have to find Christ before he can pursue you.”
I have an image of a tall, muscular Jesus, decked out in the white robe and red sash like from my children’s Bible, smiles radiant in a tangle of dark beard. Wrapping his arms around me, gazing deeply into my eyes.
“I love you, Allie,” he says, and I get that feeling.
My mom won’t let me close my door but she’s not home, so I do. Rubbing myself along my pillow, pressing the soft corners against the place where my jeans meet, fills me with a shaky, sweaty feeling that I can’t describe but want more of. I run my tongue across the bed sheet, kissing and biting it like adults do in movies. The air smells like strawberry deodorant. I imagine a blonde, bearded man with blue eyes underneath me, mouth as soft as the pillow, and then everything goes starry.
“I saw Him!” Morgan alerts us on Google Messenger. “He called me Morgan and said that my grandpa is with Him!? omggggg I feel so amazing !!!”
She’s the first one besides Layla to have contact. Bri thinks Morgan’s making it up.
“It’s just so Layla likes her more,” Bri says, the two of us walking laps around the church parking lot at recess. She’s gnawing at a bag of mini pretzels and offers me one. I wave her off. Nothing in the world sounds better than a mini pretzel right now.
“Have you seen anything?” I ask Bri. She shakes her head.
“Not yet, but I think I’m not trying hard enough,” she says. “I think it was easier for Layla, since she’s had all this connection to God in the past. She told me yesterday that Jesus came to her in a dream and told her that she was going to have a new baby sister soon.”
“Really?” Layla already has nine brothers and sisters. They live in a big house out by the dairy plant. “When?”
Bri shrugs. “I don’t know. It was probably just a dream. Probably not real.”
“Yeah,” I say, then reach over and take a handful of Bri’s pretzels.
During history class I review my food journal, a sheet of yellow legal paper stuffed in the back of my notebook. Apple, 95 calories. Nabisco Oreo Thins 100-calorie pack, 100 calories. String cheese, 80 calories. Two mini pretzels, approximately 110 calories. More than halfway done for the day. I’m getting used to the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, the scratch of hunger at the back of my throat. My stomach feels flatter, more hollow, and I think this is good. My pants are looser and my butt doesn’t jiggle as much as it used to, even though I’m not supposed to be paying attention to any of that. Morgan says to drink water when I’m feeling weak, but Seventeen says that water can make you bloated, so I try to avoid it. Only little sips from the big clanking machine before recess, and that’s only if my mouth tastes really bad.
My mother is worried about me but I can tell that she’s relieved that I am finally getting skinny.
“You’re not on a diet or anything, are you?” She asks me once. We just went through the Chick-Fil-A drive thru and I ordered a Southwest salad with grilled chicken, no cheese, no dressing, no bacon, the same as my mother.
“No,” I say. “Just trying to be healthier.”
I chew three of the cherry tomatoes, eating shreds of lettuce one at a time like chips. If I chew long enough, I forget that I’m eating anything at all. My head hurts most of the time these days, and when I stand up I get that white rush that Layla told us about at the beginning, although there’s never any voice, just static like I’m caught between radio stations.
The next morning I notice there’s blood in my pee. I message Bri about this, ask her if she’s experienced this, and she says no.
“It’s probably a good sign tho!” she says. “Didn’t a lot of the saints have blood stuff happen to them?”
Morgan faints at the volleyball game on Saturday against Our Lady of Lourdes. Layla rushes to her side when she goes down. Layla’s mom lets her wear tiny little shorts that show off the gap between her thighs, and they almost go up her butt when she bends down to help Morgan up. The coach pulls Morgan for the rest of the game, which means that Bri finally gets a chance to play. I stay on the bench. She smiles at me before she serves directly into the net. We almost lose the game, but Layla ends up saving it with a five-serve streak that takes us over the top. Afterwards, the team goes for pizza, and I watch Morgan tear a single pepperoni into seven pieces, chewing each one seventy times before swallowing. Layla sits next to her, the two of them whispering and giggling. Bri gets a pile of spinach and mushrooms from the salad bar for us to share.
“They’re so annoying,” Bri whispers to me, casting a dark glance across the banquet table to Layla and Morgan. “I heard them in the bathroom before this, talking about how God likes them best because he always talks to them now. And I guess Layla’s mom is going to have a baby.”
I take a tiny sip of Diet Coke, let the plastic fizz melt over my tongue. “Do you think we’re doing something wrong?”
Bri gnaws a spinach leaf. “I don’t know. Maybe. Or maybe they’re just making it up to look cooler than us.”
Bri’s parents are both doctors at the ER and don’t go to the same church as all the rest of us. She says that they only send her to St. Francis because it’s better than public school.
“I don’t think you should say that,” I say. “If God knows you doubt Him, he’s less likely to appear. That’s what Layla said.”
Bri looks at me. Under the fluorescent lights of the restaurant, her face looks extra gaunt.
“And how do we know she’s telling the truth?” she asks.
One of the writers in Girlz 4 Christ, Grace M., says that most Christian girls aren’t actually Christian.
“God doesn’t want wimpy Sunday Catholics,” she writes. “If He did, then everyone who went to Church would go to Heaven. But we know that’s not true. God knows if your devotion is pure or not, and He will judge you accordingly. I pray a Rosary at least once a day and go to Mass every day that I can, and I’m happy to let myself be subsumed by God’s plan. If you’re not willing to do the same, maybe rethink why you’re a Christian in the first place. Real Godly girls don’t care about the opinions of the world and are happy to be overtaken by Christ. Remember, we are in this world, but not of it!”
I feel like I should underline this or something, start making annotations like I’ve seen Layla do in her Bible. I fumble in my bedside drawer for a highlighter and feel a weird stab in my lower back. I lay back, but it happens again. I decide to forgo the highlighter and start saying Hail Marys in my head. I think that this is what God would prefer I do anyways, and if I don’t move it doesn’t hurt as bad, so I mumble the mysteries to myself until I fall asleep with my jeans still on.
“You’ll never guess,” Bri messages me on Friday. “I was at the movies with my mom tonight and Layla was there with Kyle!! And she was eating a BUNCH of popcorn AND m&ms. I don’t think she saw me but wtfreak? I thought we weren’t supposed to be eating that stuff???
I stare at the message for a while. Layla went to the movies with Kyle. I imagine them holding hands in the darkness, their fingers brushing in the bucket of popcorn, maybe he leaned over to kiss her cheek at the end of the movie, and I feel sick. I heave into the sink, but nothing comes up.
Sunday is the last CYO game of the season, the St. Francis Lady Falcons against the St. George Lady Dragons. I’m fully expecting to spend the game on the sidelines again, but when I arrive at the gym I learn that both Layla and Morgan are out, plus a few other girls—a stomach bug, someone says—so I finally have a chance to play. The St. George girls are really good, and right from the start I’m huffing and puffing, running around the court trying to keep my eyes focused on the ball, avoiding the dark spots in my vision and the occasional bright flash. It’s not long before I’m sweating, which is disappointing—Layla says that the more you sweat, the more out of shape you are—but I manage to get a serve over the net, which makes my mom cheer, and even though we don’t get the point it feels like a victory.
When it’s my turn to serve I feel another spasm in my lower back. I’ve been checking my underwear for days for a sign of my long-awaited period, which according to my mother is often heralded by back pain and cramps, but so far nothing. I hold the ball in my hand, trying to keep it from shaking too hard, and swing, missing the ball with my fist. Somewhere, a whistle blows. I concentrate on the ball, though it won’t stay in one place, and my serve fails to connect again. And again.
“One more try and you’re done,” the ref says from somewhere far away. My legs feel like they’ve been replaced by gelatin. I lurch forward and the volleyball drops from my hand. A ringing in my ears like in the movies when someone’s about to die. I hear a voice—God?—say, “Allie!” and then everything goes white.
When I wake up, I’m in an unfamiliar bed in someone else’s pajamas. Somewhere there is a woman talking, her voice too quiet for me to hear what she is saying. A clock is ticking, its beat incredibly loud. I am aware there is something in my arm. A drip, drip, drip near my ear, and the sound is like a prayer.
My back still hurts, my tongue huge and dry in my mouth. But I feel better than I have in weeks.
“Did it happen?” I hear a voice somewhere on my right. I turn my head and Bri is there, at least I think it’s Bri, she looks different than I remember, but I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep.
“Did what?” I say. My voice is a rasp; my throat is so dry.
“Did you see Him?” she asks. Her eyes are red like she’s been crying. “Alicia, that was amazing. Not even Layla has ever had to go to the hospital.”
Is that where I am? I sit up, feel the tug of something in my arm. An IV unspools from the crook of my elbow.
“What happened?” I ask.
“You passed out at the game. They couldn’t revive you so someone called the ambulance. St. George forfeited the game because they thought you might be dying. So we won.”
I run my hands over my body. I can feel my hip bones jutting up, the basin between my hips and my ribs deeper than before.
“I won us the game?”
Bri pushes her bangs out of her face. “Anyway, did you see anything? Like Morgan and Layla?”
I close my eyes. The whiteness, the ringing sound, someone calling my name. He was under me when I fell, those muscled arms waiting to embrace me.
“Yes,” I say. Bri gasps, her hands flying to her mouth.
“Oh my God,” she whispers. “I thought Morgan was just making it up, but—” she swoops down and hugs me, the smell of her strawberry shampoo filling my nose. I don’t say anything. I don’t have to.
“I’m going to message them,” Bri says when she straightens up. “Right when I get home. God, they’re going to be so jealous.”
This makes me smile. “You have to tell me what Layla says,” I say. She nods and says she will.
The mirror across from my bed makes me look small, a withering brown-haired sylph amongst a mountain of pillows. My lips are cracked and colorless, my cheeks spotted with pink. I don’t think I’ve ever felt more powerful.
Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash
