“Hmm,” I said. “Maybe we can get a mini-fridge in our room.”
“Oh, here we go,” said Noe. “Smoothie machine.”
I breathed an inward sigh of relief. Noe had said yes to Northern as a first choice back in June, but she could be fickle at the best of times, and I knew that our college roommates plan could be thrown off by an errant bacon bit just as easily as by something important like academics.
“Ladies,” called Mrs. Fessendorf. “Are we discussing The Waste Land and identifying three instances of allusion?”
“Yes, Mrs. Fessendorf,” sang Noe.
“Good.”
She moved the booklet to her lap and we continued to browse it.
“Student-run coffee shop,” Noe read. “We could get jobs there. I’ve always wanted to be a barista.”
“Ladies!”
Noe smiled at her.
“Just planning our future, ma’am,” she said.
10
THE NUTRITIONIST WAS A PLUMP, pale, sad-looking thirtysomething who seemed uncomfortable in the tiny phys-ed-office-slash-storage-room, crammed behind Ms. Bomtrauer’s desk with the basketballs and the kettlebells. When I showed up for my appointment, he had an audiobook playing on the beat-up CD player, a narrator with a plodding nasal voice reading a fantasy novel. “Nay,” said the serving wench, “I’ll not wed thee.” “I think ye shall,” said Prince Everstall, drawing his blade. The nutritionist startled and smacked the CD player’s stop button just as Prince Everstall was about to nick the laces on the serving wench’s bodice. He blushed and brushed at the desk, sweeping a box of Cheez-Its into the trash.
“You must be Annabeth,” he said, extending a clammy hand for me to shake.
“The one and only,” I said.
He was wearing a tweed jacket that was much too warm for the weather. It looked like he’d gotten lost on his way to Harvard and wandered into E. O. James by mistake.
“I’m Bob,” he said. “Please, have a seat.” He gestured at a cracked plastic chair wedged between a box of rugby cleats and a pile of soccer jerseys. When I sat down, it made a sound of protest and collapsed underneath me.
“Oh dear,” said Bob. “Are you okay?”
I picked myself and the chair up from the floor and sat down again gingerly. My knee was throbbing where it had banged the desk.
“They’re supposed to put in a better one,” said Bob apologetically.
“Really?” I said. “I thought it was a test. If you break the chair, grapefruit diet. If you don’t break the chair, weight-gain pellets.”
Bob smiled. “That would be quite the system. There’s a beautiful sort of Procrustean logic to that.”
“Indeed,” I said.
He looked like an academic type, I thought again. The hair, the voice, the tweed jacket. I wondered what he was doing in a basketball storage closet at E. O. James.
I braced myself in the chair. It was threatening to buckle again. “Can we get down to business?” I said. “This is kind of uncomfortable.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. “Let’s start with a simple questionnaire.”
He fumbled under his desk and took out a textbook. Applied Nutrition.
“What’s that for?” I said.
“I’m still finishing my master’s degree,” he said. “This is my practicum.” He flipped around inside the textbook for a few seconds, checked the table of contents, and finally arrived, sweaty-fingered, at the right page.
“Am I your first subject?” I said.
He looked up. Another one of those shy, apologetic smiles flitted across his face. “Actually, yes.”
Aha, I thought. A discount nutritionist. Good thing the nurse hadn’t sent Noe to see Bob. She would have eaten him alive.
He cleared his throat. “Just so you know,” he said, “everything you say here will be taken in complete confidence. Please be honest with your answers. Are you ready?”
I nodded, trying not to laugh.
Bob the Nutritionist read from the textbook, his eyes never leaving the page. “Do you obsess about your weight?” he said.
“No.”
“Count your calories?”
“No.”
“Binge and purge?”
“No.”
“Abuse laxatives?”
I grimaced. “No.”
He ran through a dozen more questions, ticked a few boxes, and then added the columns up.
“You’re not anorexic or bulimic,” he said glumly, as if this was a great disappointment. I realized he must be looking forward to his first real anorexic the way new firefighters look forward to their first blaze. Seeing his face, I found myself feeling almost disappointed too. He seemed like a nice man, and I was sorry to let him down.
“I know,” I said apologetically. “The only reason I’m here is because the nurse has a thing about vegetarians.”
“Ah,” said Bob. “I see.”
He groped around his desk and drew out a slender file folder. From the folder, he located a sheet of paper, which he studied closely, going Hmmm, hmmmm and nodding as he read. “This note from the nurse says you are a few pounds underweight. Do you ever have trouble eating?”
He blinked at me from behind his goggle glasses. His face, I noticed, was broad and open, anxious to please. He looked like a plump elf. A sad elf. I wanted to open the door of the cramped office and shoo him back into the woods where he belonged.
I hesitated. “Not really,” I said.
Bob looked lugubrious. I felt bad for him, in spite of myself. “When I was a kid, I went through this phase where I gnawed on sticks and stones,” I volunteered.
He seemed to perk up. “Oh?”
It was true. Sometimes, when I was mad at Mom for walking too fast when we went on hikes, I’d suck on a stone so that when my father or my fairy godmother or Minnie Mouse or my fantasy-creature-of-the-moment finally showed up, they would see how mean she was—poor Annabeth, dragged all over the woods with nothing to eat but stones!—and take me away.
“But I don’t do that anymore.”
Bob slumped again.
“Don’t look too disappointed,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll find plenty of anorexics if you hang out around this place long enough.”
“I’m not here only for the anorexics,” said Bob. “Maybe there’s something else I can help you with. For this month, how about you keep a journal of everything you eat, and we’ll take a look at it together and see if there’s anything that could use some tweaking.”
“You mean you want me to come back?”
Bob closed his textbook and slipped my nurse’s record back into its file. “Yes, sure. Why don’t you come back and we’ll, um, we’ll look at the food journal and figure out how to proceed.”
“How to proceed?”
“Make a plan, set some goals.”
He wasn’t meeting my eyes. I raised my eyebrows at him. “This doesn’t have anything to do with your funding, does it?” I said.
He blushed a deep tomato red. “How does late October sound to you?” he tapped a box on his calendar.
“Do I have to?”
“I can’t sign off on this until I’ve reviewed a food journal. So yes, you do.”
I got up from the broken chair and started to collect my backpack. The nutritionist pulled open the squeaky desk drawer. “I have pizza coupons,” he said, brandishing a sheath of them held together by an elastic band. “If it makes it any better.”
“Pizza coupons.”
“One for each session.”
I hesitated. Bob looked up at me imploringly, coupons in hand. I thought of what my nan always said, about never passing up an opportunity to help a person in need. The nutritionist seemed like a nice person, and he definitely had a need. I shrugged. “I guess so,” I said.
11