Tao Lin - Richard Yates

Haley Joel Osment went to stay at Dakota Fanning’s house. He woke each day at 6:00 a.m. and made her breakfast and lunch. He did laundry and cleaned the house and did other things to allow her more time to sleep, exercise, study for the SATs, do schoolwork using the computer and therapy work in her notebook. After school she exercised and worked on things until around 5:30 p.m. when they watched DVDs or walked to the health food store and other places. Sometimes they drove about thirty minutes to Middletown to steal clothes from H&M, see movies in a theatre, buy food from a different health food store, or eat dinner at a Japanese restaurant. After a few days Dakota Fanning began waking earlier to exercise in the morning in addition to after school. Haley Joel Osment felt calm during this time and focused on being nice and encouraging and thought things like “Don’t be upset or complain about anything no matter what from now until three days after I’m back from Georgia and Florida.” Sometimes he became upset then apologized. One afternoon in the kitchen Dakota Fanning said she was getting fat and made a sad facial expression. Haley Joel Osment said she looked good and hugged her and patted her head. “Really?” she said in a serious voice. “Are you sure?” Haley Joel Osment said he was sure and hugged her and touched her hair and she said “Okay” with a very worried facial expression. One night there was a loud noise upstairs and Haley Joel Osment asked what it was and Dakota Fanning said it was her mother screaming. Dakota Fanning went upstairs and came downstairs and said someone had called saying her brother got drunk at a party and punched someone in the face and drove away and wasn’t answering his cell phone. The next twenty minutes Dakota Fanning’s mother screamed once every two to five minutes. “She’s really screaming due to being in agony,” thought Haley Joel Osment. “Short loud screams with silence in between. Like the noises people possessed by demons make in movies.” He heard Dakota Fanning’s mother shout “Fuck off, Aladdin” and then a loud yelping noise.

Dakota Fanning went upstairs a few minutes.

“What did you do?” said Haley Joel Osment.

“I hugged her,” said Dakota Fanning.

“I thought your brother killed himself or something when she screamed again.”

“This is just how she copes,” said Dakota Fanning. “By screaming in agony.”

The next morning Haley Joel Osment emailed Dakota Fanning after she left for school that he would like to know more about her binge eating. She emailed from school that one time she binge ate on Kashi cereal which is really hard to throw up but she was really depressed and worried about Haley Joel Osment noticing if she gained weight so she threw it up right away anyway and was pushing so hard that she started screaming almost like weight lifters do in the world’s strongest man competition when they are lifting a car and she got up to look in the mirror and her face was bright red and swollen and she was afraid the blood vessels in her eyes were going to pop. “A lot of times I was afraid I was going to choke to death or suffocate on my own vomit,” said the email. “I’m not sure if I should tell you things like that. I feel sad when I think about things like that.”

Around 5:30 p.m. that day they walked to the health food store.

When they returned to the house Dakota Fanning’s mother was sitting at the dining room table eating an entire pizza while openly crying. The house was dark except for one light in the hallway. Dakota Fanning looked at Haley Joel Osment and began to say something and he nodded and patted her shoulder and she went through the kitchen to her mother. Haley Joel Osment looked a little at Dakota Fanning hugging her mother. He heard them calmly saying things to each other in quiet voices. He went upstairs and lay on Dakota Fanning’s bed.

The next night Dakota Fanning’s mother drove Haley Joel Osment to the restaurant. Dakota Fanning went with him into his room and they hugged and kissed and he thought “She seems happy and confident, maybe everything is okay now, but the last two times she left here she binge ate right after, would it really happen again” and she left.

“What did you do tonight?” he said later on the phone.

Dakota Fanning said she did homework.

“I did something bad,” she said.

“What did you do?” said Haley Joel Osment.

“I binge ate and threw up.”

Haley Joel Osment vaguely felt a little confused.

“What happened?” he said after a few seconds.

“After we left we stopped at Price Chopper. I was just going to buy cereal but then I saw these shitty chocolate things. I kept saying not to get them but then I got them.”

“I’m going to the hospital,” she said in the morning on the phone crying. “I’ve been packing. I’m packed already. I’m going today, I already decided. I just wanted to call to let you know so you wouldn’t be worried.”

“Thank you for letting me know,” said Haley Joel Osment. “What did your mom say?”

“She just kept saying I was really brave and then talked about how she knew because she noticed that foods I normally wouldn’t eat were missing. She kept saying ‘a mother’s instinct.’ ” There were no openings until the next afternoon at the hospital. The next morning Dakota Fanning told her mother she didn’t want to go until the next day because she wanted to see Haley Joel Osment before leaving and her mother said “I don’t know what to say” and walked away and then said she got the day off from work because she thought Dakota Fanning wanted to go today and that she wouldn’t be able to get another day off, that it was hard enough for her to get today off. “She said she’s worried that I don’t want to go anymore and that I’m trying to push it off and that the longer I wait the more I will lose my ‘momentum of helping myself,’ ” said Dakota Fanning in an email. “I don’t know what to do. What do you think?” Haley Joel Osment said she should tell her mother she was going tomorrow no matter what. He said he was going to shower very fast. He refreshed his email account and saw another email from Dakota Fanning. “She talked to me,” said the email. “She started talking about how she was trying to ‘juggle too many things at once’ basically implying she just wanted me to leave so she wouldn’t have to worry about me while she is at work getting ready for the show that’s the biggest one of the year.”

Haley Joel Osment showered and put on clothes and shaved. He thought about Dakota Fanning having stayed home two days from school while putting in contact lenses and then read an email from her that said “I listened while she was talking to the doctor about me and I talked to her sometimes and she told the doctor that her stress about my brother and the things happening to my brother were probably the main cause. I told her that was wrong and she just kept talking to the doctor and said ‘well, she doesn’t think that but you know’ and then the doctor said that for insurance purposes I have to be evaluated by a doctor first and then get a referral from them to go to the hospital.” Haley Joel Osment called a taxi and went to Dakota Fanning’s house and he and Dakota Fanning talked about the hospital. People on message boards had said that in hospitals it felt like a competition for who was most extreme with their eating disorder and that patients who gained weight were viewed as weak and nurses were viewed as enemies to be defeated in a game of deception and camaraderie in which patients banded together to secretly continue to be bulimic or anorexic.

They decided it would be better if she did not go to the hospital.

The next morning Haley Joel Osment went to New York City and then Georgia. In the airport he met the editor of a magazine that had published his poetry and another author and they went in a minivan. The editor asked Haley Joel Osment if he read the new Lorrie Moore story in the New Yorker .