The Devil’s Deal
She was the perfect vision of beauty. She had long skinny legs and curves in the right places. Her make-up was caked onto her face making her lashes long and thick and her lips full. Her clothes fit like a second skin and her hips swaggered when she walked. Every guy I met would die for her and if she dropped something or started to pout, it seemed like every person in the vicinity was there to help her. Her skin was a medium tan and her eyes a precious blue with silver crackling in the iris. But most people did not look at her eyes.
Like most people, she had a dirty little secret. She never told anyone her secret because she wasn’t haunted by it. Since I was her sister, I knew. She conveniently had practice until past dinner, she had too much homework to go to lunch, and she woke up too late to eat breakfast. The money my mother would give her to buy food would mysteriously turn up as plastic and chemicals in Sephora bags.
The first problem came when her hip and bust size went down. There was a point when people started to notice. Like I said, no one looked at her eyes. She started losing some staring eyes in the hall. But still no one noticed her mealtime schedule. She didn’t really have friends just acquaintances, so no one brought anything up to her face. One night when she thought I was asleep, she came into my room and told me about her losing attention and how she was sort of glad.
“I’m getting tired of being under a spot-light all the time,” she said. “And besides, it weeds out the people who were only interested in my looks.”
Then the phantom came again and took all of the fat in her body. Her ribs started to show when she took off her shirt and her calves were thin and ugly with the shin sticking out from the muscle behind it. She started wearing pants and long sleeve shirts, even in the summer. She lost more friends and she started getting worried. But (she told me one sleepless night when I wasn’t supposed to be listening) she was too far into it to ever think of eating one of those disgusting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or snicker bars.
But then the phantom called his buddy, death, and asked whether or not he could do something about my sister. After all, the phantom wasn’t sure he could get her out of bed now that her body had started eating itself. But death is no match for me and my mom and a telephone. We called an ambulance; it took her away. My mom beat herself up about not paying better attention. She took the locks from our doors and my sister’s car keys.
My sister went through rehab. The first and last time I saw her, she was asleep, hooked up to an IV and breathing with the help of a machine. She was sent to Wisconsin for a therapy program as soon as she could walk with a walker.
My sister never came back. They said she ran away because she was tired of thinking about herself. She wanted to help other people, so she managed to get a plane ticket to Africa to help the children as a teacher. She called mom and told her everything was fine and she was completely cured. She called me, but I just got the message and didn’t get to hear her voice. She sounded already dead, like she was calling from the afterlife.
“Jenny,” her voice whispered. “Don’t ever get eaten by this monster, even if it means sacrificing your pleasure. Don’t get sucked into the Devil’s deal.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Fiction Prose, Realistic Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.