Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“No,” I said, looking him in the eye.

“Who’s the bra for?” he asked. “Thirty-six D.”

“A friend,” I answered, and too soon realized I had screwed myself over: my father would know I didn’t have any friends.

“I know what you’re doing,” he said, getting to his feet heavily.

“Well, maybe you could tell me, then. Because I don’t really understand why we have to have an inquisition while I’m freezing and soaking wet-”

“Did you make yourself throw up before you took that shower?”

My cheeks burned with the truth. It was the perfect time, because the running water covered the sound of retching. I’d gotten it down to a science. But I tried for a laugh. “Oh, yeah, right. I do that before every shower. Which is clearly why I’m a size eleven when everyone else in my grade is a size zer-”

He took a step forward, and I wrapped the towel more tightly around myself. “Just stop the lying,” he said. “Just…stop.” My father reached for me and yanked my wrist toward him. I thought he was trying to pull away the towel, but that was nowhere near as humiliating as what he was actually trying to see: my forearms and my thighs, with their gray-scale ladders of scars.

“She saw me doing it,” I said, and I didn’t have to explain that I was talking about you.

“Jesus Christ,” my father thundered. “What were you thinking, Amelia? If you were upset, why didn’t you come to us?”

But I bet he knew the answer to that one.

I burst into tears. “I never meant to hurt her. I just wanted to hurt myself.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know . Because it’s the only thing I can manage to do right.”

He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look into his eyes. “The reason I’m angry isn’t that I hate you,” my father said tightly. “It’s because I goddamn love you.” And then his arms were tight around me, the towel the thinnest barrier between us, and it wasn’t creepy or embarrassing; it was just what it was. “This stops right now, you hear me? There are treatment programs and things like that-and you’re going to get yourself fixed. But until then, I’m going to watch you. I’m going to watch you like a hawk.”

The more he yelled, the more tightly he held on to me. And here’s the weirdest thing of all: now that the worst had happened-now that I’d been found out-it wasn’t disastrous. It felt, well, inevitable. My father was furious, but me, I couldn’t stop smiling. You see me, I thought, my eyes closing. You see me .

That night, I slept in the chair beside your hospital bed, and I dreamed of Piper. We were at Plum Island again and we were boogie-boarding, but the waves had gone red as blood and stained our hair and our skin. I rode in on a wave so majestic and forceful that it made the shore buckle. I looked behind me, but you were being thrashed underneath the cutting edge of the wave, rolling head over heels, your body raked over the sea glass and the porous stones. Charlotte, you cried, help me! I heard you, but I started walking away.

I was awakened by Sean, shaking my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered, looking at you. “She slept through the night?”

I nodded, stretched the muscles of my neck. And then I noticed Amelia standing behind him. “Shouldn’t Amelia be in school?”

“The three of us have to talk,” Sean said, in a tone that brooked no argument. He glanced down at you, asleep. “You think she’ll be okay for a few minutes, while we grab some coffee?”

I left word at the nurses’ desk and followed Sean into the elevator, with Amelia trailing meekly behind. What the hell had happened between them?

In the cafeteria, Sean poured coffee for both of us while Amelia lifted the tiny boxes of cereal and tried to decide between Cheerios and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We sat at a table. At this hour of the morning, the large room was filled with residents cramming down bananas and lattes before making rounds. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Amelia said.

“Well, you can’t,” Sean flatly replied.

“If you have something to say, Sean, we can wait till she gets back-”

“Amelia, why don’t you tell your mother why you can’t go to the bathroom?”

She looked down at her empty plastic bowl. “He’s afraid…that I’ll throw up again.”

I stared at Sean quizzically. “Has she got a virus?”

“Try bulimia,” Sean said.

I felt rooted to the chair. Surely I’d heard him wrong. “Amelia’s not bulimic. Don’t you think we’d know if Amelia was bulimic?”

“Yeah. Just like we knew that she’s been cutting herself for a year or so now? Shoplifting all kinds of crazy shit-including razor blades-which is how Willow got her hands on one?”

My jaw dropped. “I don’t understand.”

“Nope,” Sean said, leaning back in his chair. “Neither do I. I can’t figure out why a kid who’s got two parents that love her, and a roof over her head, and a pretty damn good life would hate herself enough to do any of that.”

I faced Amelia. “Is it true?”

She nodded, and I felt a twinge in my heart. Had I been blind? Or had I just been so busy watching you break that I failed to notice my older daughter going to pieces?

“Piper stopped by last night to tell me that Amelia might be having a problem. Apparently, we didn’t see it-but Emma has. Repeatedly.”

Piper. At the name, I felt myself go as still as glass. “She came to the house? And you let her in?”

“For God’s sake, Charlotte-”

“You can’t believe anything Piper says. For all you know, this is part of some ploy to get us to drop the lawsuit.” Distantly I realized that Amelia had confessed to the behavior, but that hardly seemed to matter. All I could see was Piper, standing in my house, pretending to be the perfect mother when I’d screwed up.

“You know, I’m starting to see why Amelia might have done this in the first place,” Sean muttered. “You are completely out of control.”

“Brilliant, there’s your old MO,” I said. “Blame Charlotte, because then none of this is your fault.”

“Did you ever consider that you’re not the only victim in the universe?” Sean said.

“Stop it!”

We both turned at the sound of Amelia’s voice.

She had her hands pressed over her ears, and tears in her eyes. “Just stop it!”

“I’m sorry, baby,” I said, reaching out to her, but she jerked away.

“No you’re not. You’re just glad it wasn’t something else that happened to Willow. That’s all you ever care about,” Amelia accused. “You want to know why I cut? Because it hurts less than all of this .”

“Amelia-”

“Just stop pretending you care about me, okay?”

“I’m not pretending.” Her sleeve had slipped, and I could see the scars tracking up to her elbow like some secret linear code. Last summer, Amelia had insisted on wearing long sleeves, even when it was ninety degrees outside. To be honest, I’d thought it was a sign of modesty. In a world where so many girls her age were hardly wearing anything, I thought it was refreshing that she wanted to be covered up. I hadn’t even begun to think that she might be not shy but truly calculating.

And because I didn’t have the words for this-because I knew at this point Amelia would not want to hear anything I’d want to say-I reached for her wrist again. This time, she let me take it. I thought of all the times, as a child, she had fallen off her bike and run crying into the house; of the times I’d lifted her onto the counter to clean gravel out of a scraped knee and to set it healing with a brush of my lips and a Band-Aid; of how once she stood by me as I wrapped your leg in a makeshift magazine splint, wringing her hands and urging me to kiss it and make it better. Now, I drew her arm closer, and pushed up the sleeve, and pressed my lips to the fine white lines that marched up her arm like the marks on a measuring cup, yet one more attempt to count the ways I’d failed.