Again, I breathed in. And then again. My brain felt flooded. Not with images, exactly, but impressions. Ghosts. Memories. Things.
“He’s poor,” I whispered to my pitiful doorway and the empty soccer field beyond. “He’s white. I smell his clothes. The T-shirt he wore, before mopping up with this towel. The shirt is old. It was his brother’s before it was his.”
I breathed it in greedily. There was so much there! How had I never noticed how complicated a smell can be? How much information it carries? How many different pieces it’s made of? And how easy it is to disentangle them, to analyze every separate thread and search for its source?
“Will Rutkey,” I said finally, louder than I’d meant to.
I clamped a hand over my mouth, but I was still alone. And before I got too cocky, I pointed out to myself that I’d started off with an easy one. Will Rutkey had a pretty strong and distinctive smell.
I went back to the library. I read about how olfaction worked; how odorants are dissolved into the mucus lining the nasal cavity and absorbed by neurons that transmit information to the brain.
I let my hunger lead me.
I went to strange rooms, after school when the buses had mostly left but before the building got locked down. I went to wood shop and the art supply closets. I went in with my eyes closed and turned out the lights and focused on the shape of the space. I breathed it in. I let myself feel it, map it, even in the dark.
The air felt charged, dense with swirling data. I let the smells of the room draw the picture for me. I let go of the sense of sight. And I could feel: the metal and the wood and the overflowing ashtrays; the cinder-block walls and the cold cement floor.
I walked. The hairs on the back of my neck pricked up, electrified. A giddy feeling started in my stomach. Euphoria mixed with fear.
This is wrong, I told myself. This is so wrong.
All the Afterschool Specials agreed. Starving yourself is bad.
But it felt so good.
The sense of smell was stronger in women than in men, the internet told me. They had theories from scientists, stuff about choosing a mate and ovulation and nurturing a baby, but I thought of Maya and knew—it was because the world is more dangerous for a woman. They need to be able to sense predators, because they are most definitely prey.
I walked into a wall. Hard.
I had gotten cocky. I let myself get distracted by what I had learned. The articles and analyses swirling inside my head.
The sharpest senses in the world are useless if your brain keeps getting in the way. And my brain got in the way—a lot. I had a . . . an ability. One unlocked by hunger. Concentration and focus were where I needed to work. To develop the ability to tune out all distractions and focus on what my senses were telling me. What my hunger was helping me see.
Or was it hunger? What if it was something else? Power can come from lots of places. Superman got his abilities from the absorption of solar energy; Samson’s hair made him strong; waterbenders became stronger with the cycles of the moon.
I went to the cafeteria. Empty now, except for the janitor cleaning it up after lunch and the glorious clean smell of bleach. I went to the vending machine and bought a Honey Bun, which I hate, but at 500 calories they’re the most fattening things you can find in most high school cafeterias.
I ate it.
I waited.
Was it my imagination, or did the smells die down? I breathed in and out, easier, feeling the weight lift slowly from my chest. But maybe that was just the bleach. I couldn’t smell anything besides it. I left the cafeteria, walked through the halls, wandering with no direction in mind . . .
And found Regan and Jeanine, post band practice.
Regan was at her locker; Jeanine was standing beside her. Something had changed between them. Anyone could see it. But they smiled, and talked, and whatever epic confrontation they were going to have hadn’t happened yet.
“Hey, Regan, hey, Jeanine,” I said, stopping beside them.
“Hey,” they said, and Jeanine gave me a death stare and then smiled the fakest smile ever.
I stepped closer. Breathed deep. Smiled.
Because other than the Pink perfume that Jeanine wanted everyone in a two-block radius to notice, I could not smell a thing.
RULE #8
Most people don’t realize the extent to which their bodies enslave them. They live like hogs in a slaughterhouse pen, obeying their bodies, blissfully ignorant of the treasonous monster they are chained to, how it will hurt them, how it will fail them. Once you realize the true antagonistic nature of your relationship with your body, you will be far superior to most of your peers.
And yet—
one’s enemy is the greatest teacher, according to the Dalai Lama. Respect your enemy and you will learn far more than if you declare that only hate and violence can exist between you. The student of the Art of Starving has much to learn from the body they are at war with. They will listen to it. They will understand it. Only by doing so can they force it to achieve its full potential.
DAY: 4
TOTAL CALORIES, APPROX.: 1000
At home, pondering what I’d learned, I realized: I needed a task. An assignment, something to focus on. Homework.
I needed to pick someone, learn their smell, and then follow them. Using only my nose.
I would let them get away from me—see how far away they could go before I lost track of their scent, and then focus on increasing that distance. Focus on picking that one smell out of the entire crowded school full of girls wearing too much perfume and stinking boys and backed-up toilets and dissected frogs and smokers in the stairwell.
And the second I had given myself that assignment, I grinned. I even said, “Excellent,” out loud, like a cartoon villain, because I knew precisely who I would be stalking.
Tariq. Soccer star. In the weight room after school every day, with the body to prove it. One recent addition, which jarred with the rest of his clean-cut jock image: a pierced left nostril. Gifted player, passionate, so competitive that many of his own teammates were afraid of him.
Best friends with Bastien and Ott since second grade. An inseparable trio, egging each other on to increasingly alarming acts of cruelty. His aloofness from their petty violence did not make him better than them. And if they could call girls ugly just to watch them cry—in full public view of others—what other atrocities might they have collaborated on in secret?
Might one of them have involved Maya?
I found Tariq at the end of the day, standing between two banks of puke-green lockers, arms folded over his chest. Watching traffic. An illegible expression on his face. Was he waiting for someone, lamenting a failed test, looking for future victims? No one could tell. He was a statue. A cypher. I stopped nearby and stood there, smelling the air, sucking up everything I could. Trying hard to tune out the angry churn of my empty stomach.
Pine trees. Gasoline. The vanilla air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of his truck. The toxic cherry hand soap in the bathroom. But under all that—