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The thing about Jack, he doesn’t go out of his way not to eat.
It just happens. Little moments stretched across time all contribute—his essay is due at midnight, Kenny wants to go practice at six, and it just keeps slipping his mind. Cooking takes effort and time, and by the time Jack gets everything done, he has nothing left.
So he skips a meal. No big deal. It’s just once.
Except a week later, he remembers that midterms are tomorrow. He hasn’t studied beyond their short reviews in class, and he needs good grades. Mediocre is unacceptable. Mediocre is for other people, who can afford to slack off or only just scrape by.
Kenny cracks open his textbook, muttering under his breath, “Fuck my life.”
“Sorry,” Jack says before he can stop himself.
“Not your fault,” Kenny says dismissively. “If you didn’t say anything, we’d be going in blind.”
So Jack bends over his notebook, going through his notes and trying to ignore the ache in his stomach. Kenny is munching on beef jerky, and Jack wishes he could just be normal and ask Kent for some.
But he’s not normal.
He’s tired, and his head hurts, and everything feels tight, from the pit of his stomach to the top of his throat. He needs to keep studying. He needs to pass this test.
He keeps ignoring the ache, and eventually it goes away.
Jack takes his midterms and gets an A.
Jack promised himself that those would be the only times. But it starts to happen more and more often, every time being the last time and every time being a broken promise of the time before. He needs time to study. He needs time to practice. He needs time to go on whatever ridiculous “adventure” Kenny takes into mind.
He could order food or grab something on the way, but that involves talking to people, looking them in the eye, and having them look at him.
Eye contact is hard. Or sometimes eye contact is too easy, and Jack freaks people out because of how heavy his gaze is. He doesn’t get it right. He wants to, but it’s never enough.
One meal. Two meals. Three meals.
It’s a balancing act of how long Jack can go before it’s too much (or not enough, if he’s thinking about it correctly). How long he can go before Kenny gives him a weird look and says, “You haven’t eaten in a while, dude—you must be starving.”
Jack’s not. Starving is for other people, for people who don’t have the means or money to eat food. Jack has all the food he could ever ask for. It’s just, sometimes he doesn’t want to take it.
His coaches comment on his weight loss. They give him brochures and pamphlets on what and how much to eat. Jack tries his best to follow their instructions, and for a while, he’s so good.
But then the next test comes. The next game, the next party, the next moment when Jack’s throat feels too tight to swallow and everything makes him want to gag.
Jack waits for Kenny to say something. Maybe to his parents, maybe to the coaches, maybe to the team. He knows that Kenny is worried, that Kenny notices when Jack goes too long without taking a bite.
He’s sorry. He truly is. He tries to be better, for Kenny’s sake, for the team’s, for his parents’—he has every reason imaginable to do better, but he keeps failing.
Everything is fine. Everything is fine. Everything is fine.
Kenny drags him back up to surface when Jack swims too deep. He leaves cheese sticks on Jack’s dresser and crackers beside Jack’s bed. Fruit juice, protein shakes, and sandwiches with the crust cut off—Kenny knows the things that Jack can choke down and makes a point of making them available.
Jack knows this isn’t healthy for either of them. He knows he’s depending on Kenny too much, turning his best friend into a crutch, but he doesn’t know what else to do.
Kenny doesn’t tell anyone, and Jack never tells Kenny that he sometimes looks at Jack in a way that makes him feel small. They play hockey, Kenny’s vicious smile taking over half his face. They go out to eat on the days when Jack feels up to it, Kenny’s slender fingers tapping Jack’s knee and thigh under the table. Jack studies and writes and highlights while Kenny reads books or watches TV, his head resting carelessly on Jack’s thigh.
Kenny is one of the only close people in Jack’s life, one of the only ones who knows about the anxiety and the pills and the panic attacks, who doesn’t look at Jack like he’s broken, like he needs to be fixed. And so Jack will pull Kenny closer, will lace his fingers around Kenny’s wrist, will rest his forehead on Kenny’s shoulder.
Jack starts to eat again and gains back most of the weight that he lost. He has a ways to go, but he’s getting there.
Kenny never talks about it or tries to make Jack talk about it. Sometimes Jack wonders if they should, if Jack should find someone to talk to about his urges to throw his food in the trash or the temptation to skip just once and just once more.
Then the overdose happens.
Bob says that Jack has a habit of thinking things happen to him, rather than accepting the fact that he did them to himself. And he’s right, Jack knows Bob is right, but admitting that Jack has a problem, even to himself—
Jack forces down the shitty hospital food. Then he forces down the shitty rehab center food.
Kenny keeps trying to visit, to call, to talk, but he’s the only one who knows just how fucked up Jack is. And Jack can’t; he just can’t do it anymore. He can’t sit with Kenny and pretend everything is okay, knowing how much Kenny must pity him, knowing how fucked up inside he is.
After the third time Kenny tries to visit Jack at rehab, he ends up in the bathroom, acid rising up his throat as he gags over the toilet.
Alicia smooths back his hair later and hugs him tightly. Bob is on the other side of the room—he doesn’t like seeing Jack like this, and Jack understands why. Bob likes seeing Jack in control, on the ice, smiling for a camera. Bob doesn’t know how to handle a Jack Zimmermann too pale and skinny for cameras, too shaky and panicky to get out of bed when everything gets too much, his throat too tight to swallow his food.
“Did he hurt you?” Bob asks.
Kenny, kissing Jack’s hair in the middle of a panic attack; Kenny, holding Jack’s hand under the table and tracing patterns into Jack’s skin; Kenny, leaving food for Jack to eat when it’s too hard to get out of bed and get it himself; Kenny, keeping Jack’s secrets and entrusting Jack with his.
No.
Jack nods tightly because his parents are pinning him down with their gaze, and he doesn’t know what else to do.
Kenny didn’t. Not in the way Bob and Alicia are thinking, at least. Jack aches every time he thinks of Kenny, and the thought of seeing him again makes Jack want to throw up, makes him scrape the rest of the food off his tray into the trash and out of sight. So in a way, Kenny hurt Jack and is still hurting him—will never stop hurting him.
Kenny gets banned from the rehab center and, when Jack gets out, blocked from Jack’s phone. He emails Jack over and over, and Jack hides the emails from his parents the best he can. He doesn’t know why. He never answers them, and they all have the same message: I miss you. I love you. Please email back.
Jack is starting to realize that Kenny is fucked up, too.
Whatever. It’s best for them both if Kenny moves the fuck on, and Jack whispers this to himself over and over every time his finger or cursor hovers above the reply button.
Eventually, Jack gets a new email address, and he manages to put Kenny’s messages out of mind.
He goes to Samwell. He hates the way people look at him there. He knows what they must think about him (junkie, failure, idiot, failure), and God, he misses when he could pretend he was avoiding people’s gaze by fixating on Kenny’s.
He stocks up on protein bars and cheese sticks and shakes. He thinks Shitty notices something is wrong, and there is a desperate, itchy sensation whenever Shitty looks at him.
He waits for Shitty to say something, to tell him that he’s messed up, to drag him to the caf.
Instead, Shitty shows up at Jack’s dorm and convinces Jack to help him cook. Shitty, in the kindest way possible, is horrible at cooking, and Jack ends up tossing more food in the trash than he ends up eating. But it’s easy, it’s nice, and no one is looking at Jack except for Shits, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he burns yet another egg.
They go out for wings that night, and Jack finds that he doesn’t have to choke them down.
A few months later, after Jack comes out of a panic attack, gasping for breath and his fingers digging into his thighs, Shitty asks, “Have you thought about counseling?”
And . . . yeah, therapy is probably a good idea. Jack can remember going to therapy and how helpful it was. He has just had so many things running through his mind that he pushed thoughts of seeking help far away. But now, in the quiet of Shitty’s room with the cheap fairy lights reflecting off of Shitty’s face, Jack thinks, Okay.
He goes back to therapy.
He gets better. He has relapses every now and then, but he’s still moving forward. His therapist likes to say that relapses don’t negate progress, and Jack is beginning to believe it.
One night, over a pizza and a six-pack of beer, Jack tells Shitty, “I always thought I was fucked up, you know? And that it would never get better. But I don’t know, I think—I think it is. Getting better, I mean.”
“Brah,” Shitty says, bumping Jack’s fist. “Fucking radical.”
Sometimes Jack thinks about asking Shitty how he does it, how he manages to draw people in, no matter how awkward or stand-offish or shy. Jack suspects that Shitty is just good at noticing —people, places, things, and ideas, as the definition of nouns goes. He notices when Jack avoids going to the caf, when Jack doesn’t get food because he can’t bring himself to leave his dorm.
Shitty notices things. And the more time Jack spends with him, the more he begins to notice things, too.
He notices that one of the frogs is always rushing to and fro, that the most Jack has ever seen him eat is sugary bits of nothing that couldn’t possibly keep him full, that he shoves his food around his tray more than he puts it in his mouth.
Jack might be wrong. But he might be right. And the thought of doing nothing when he could be right is too much for Jack to handle.
So one day, his voice quiet but crisp, Jack says, “Bittle. You need to eat more protein.”