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background almost twenty-four-seven. No matter how many times I cleaned my glasses things just wouldn’t focus, and the world looked blurred, like staring through a greasy window.
    I thought my eyes were getting worse until one day in math when I strained to make out the formulas Mr. Heinen had written on the board. My eyes throbbed from the effort and I took off my glasses to clean them again and just happened to glance up. The board still looked blurry, but it was clearer than with my glasses on. Weird.
    I left my glasses off for the rest of the day and a little of the pressure released from my neck as the headache eased. I didn’t want to deal with Mom’s questions, so I put them back on when I went to get Jake. By the time I got home and went downstairs to do my homework, the headache was back in full swing.
    Before dinner, I stepped into the bathroom to take some medicine for my headache, and pulled out the scale. I stepped on, then stepped off and then on again. Then I kicked it.
    “Mom,” I yelled, “is the scale broken?”
    “Not as far as I know.” she yelled back, then walked in and slung her dishtowel over her arm. She pushed me off the scale and checked the calibration, then stepped on herself and clicked her tongue. Then she stepped off and pulled me back on it.
    “Nope, looks like you’ve lost a couple pounds honey. And I think I may have picked them up for you.” She muttered and poked her stomach.
    The last time I’d told her my weight was in Chicago a couple months before we moved. She had no idea that I’d gained six pounds… and then dropped ten in the space of a few weeks, while eating more . It just made no sense.
    Over the years, I’d tried dieting, exercise, nothing worked so eventually I’d given up. The doctor Mom took me to couldn’t figure it out either; they gave up and diagnosed me with an unspecified eating disorder.
    By the end of the week I started using belt holes I hadn’t touched since middle school. I didn’t tell Mom, but I started to lose almost a pound a day, sometimes more. When it got noticeable, even the ever-scorning-never-rewarding eye of John caught on.
    One day in P.E. I blocked Jack’s pass and my team scored. I realized my mistake as soon as I saw his face. To make sure I knew my place, Malcolm body-slammed me later and I went down hard. I tore most the skin off my elbow, but by the end of the period, it was just raw pink skin.
    I came home from school with my stomach growling, like usual. I closed the heavy wood door behind me and leaned my head against it as I sighed. Mom sat next to the big living room window, elbow deep in cardboard. “Hey Jimmy, how was your day?”
    Would you like the truth, or do you just want to hear what’ll make you feel better? “Not bad, yours?”
    “Okay, it was… okay… Um, would you come into the living room please? We need to talk…”
    Every teenager dreads that sentence. Adrenaline dumped into my bloodstream while questions blurred through my mind a mile a minute. I remembered every bad thing I’d ever done or even thought about, plus a multitude of ‘what ifs’ ‘is it becauses’ and ‘did they find out abouts’.
    Mom summoned John from his office and they sat down across from me. All I needed was a bare light bulb hanging in my eyes.
    “Jimmy, we’ve been talking about it and both of us have noticed.” John took the lead. Mom looked on the verge of tears and I felt utterly confused. “And… well… is there anything you need to tell us about?”
    “Um…” My brain raced as I tried to predict which of my multitude of lies was about to be exposed. “Nothing comes to me; it sounds like you have something on your mind though?”
    “Well, we’re concerned about your weight. It almost looks like you’re shrinking every time we look at you.”
    “And… this is bad? Aside from needing some smaller clothes, I don’t see how losing weight could be a bad thing.” When in doubt, be sarcastic, I