Read Online And Then Things Fall Apart by Arlaina Tibensky - Free Book Online

them.
    These were things that my father could never in a million years have done to help me. It was the most personal and private thing I have ever done with anybody, even my mom. Even Matt. I was so weak and helpless, it didn’t even occur to me to be embarrassed or modest. Of
course
Gram was once fifteen. Of
course
she has seen worse. Of
course
she loves me more than she says out loud.
    I stepped over the edge of the porcelain tub and heldon to her hands as I lowered myself into the milky water like a lasagna noodle. The itching stopped. Ribbons of pink swirled up, and I let the steam settle on my face. Gram kissed the top of my head and told me to lean forward. She dunked a washcloth into this slightly disgusting, yet oddly cleansing, hot water and rubbed it over my back and rib cage and neck, which felt so good I thought I was going to pass out.
    In The Bell Jar Esther is totally into baths, especially when she is miserable and lonely. When she is nervous or depressed, she hunches down below the water line and waits for the bath to cure her. My bath didn’t really cure anything, but it was, in its way, totally transformative.
    So when I stood to get out and blood poured down my wet legs, I didn’t really care. I was totally without shame or anything. Gram used a towel to dry me off and found a fresh pair of my underwear and a menstrual apparatus that she said she’d been holding on to “for a moment just like this.” Even though I felt like crap, we both stood there giggling our heads off. Clean itch-free body, clean nightgown, clean sheets, two Tylenol, and I slept for fourteen hours.
    In.
    A.
    Row.
    Ahhhhhhh.

DATE: July 23
MOOD: Retrospective
BODY TEMP: 101.5
    Last semester, right before my life went all Bell Jarian and we were a starry-eyed and crazy-in-love new couple, Matt made fifteen hundred dollars by drinking revolting things at lunch. Wrestlers have to make weight all the time, and like everything else body related, Matt was extremely talented at knowing how to keep things in his stomach and how to get them out.
    It started right before winter break. The guys were all sitting around eating their stupid protein bars and salads with chicken and ice-cream cups and whatever else wrestlers eat the week before nationals. Matt had a tall glass of milk, not glass-glass but plastic, the pebbled-shower-door-looking kind. They were impersonating Coach Pernaki and his insistence on healthy weight maintenance. “Try a tofu, fruit, and yogurt smoothie before a workout, son. Add a raw egg for extra protein.”
    Then someone on the team said, “A little ketchup, forstamina,” and squirted ketchup (spelled “catsup” on the packets at school, which totally infuriates me) into Matt’s milk.
    â€œYeah, and Italian dressing!” Into the milk it went. And on and on. Peanut butter, Orange Crush, gravy from the Salisbury steak.
    â€œDrink it, Matt,” Earl the Squirrel said. (Who else would want to see that?) “Five bucks you can’t.”
    â€œMake it ten.”
    â€œTwenty he can’t do it,” and on and on until three tables of jocks were gathered around Matt’s lunch table clutching money in their hands like strung-out poker addicts.
    Matt waited. He eyed the glass. He took a spoon. And stirred. He stood and, holding the glass aloft so light from the windows played upon the vile slop within, he held it to his mouth and drank it down in six giant gulps. He kissed two of his fingers and pointed to God. We had different lunch periods, but I have heard the story so many times I could make a YouTube video of it using sock puppets and a Barbie doll.
    Because I wasn’t there and didn’t actually witness it, Matt’s lunchtime exploits came to me through the awestruck whispers of other students. He was a celebrity. A legend. A mythical creature with ingestion skills of epic proportions. Already popular, Matt became the one person everyone was