“Only Tuesdays” by Alex McCullough

When Ben said, “Only Tuesdays,” he really meant it this time.

This was a decision made to weather through time, the unfavorable depressant; Ben was familiar with how quickly conviction could wither given the omnipotent power of decision. When Mom told him he needed to wake up at a normal hour, the pragmatist in him set alarms in his phone that, day by day, dragged him out of bed earlier and earlier until he was comfortable with daybreak, and his sleep schedule was repaired. When he noticed as the piles of sweat-stained shirts and stretched-out shorts formed small, distinct molehills around his room—and then when they began to converge—he set a reminder in his phone for every Sunday afternoon at three: ​clean room​, in all lowercase. Even when the mess began to beleaguer him around Friday evening, he knew that, on Sunday, the choice to clean it would be made for him. He would tidy, dust, vacuum, and sanitize his bedroom with aplomb. There would be no decision for him to dwell on.

Ben enjoyed not making decisions. He enjoyed yielding his autonomy to his ​Reminders app, because it meant someone—something—else would be doing the thinking part for him, and all he had left to do was blindly obey. When Ben was forced to confront his indecisiveness, the paralysis of it all forced him into retrogression. Everything came to a grinding halt. Every personal goal—any habits he wanted to build, or already had built—was shattered on the floor, and he went back to square one. He resigned to his bed for days, even weeks, bewitched by the glowing blue light of his laptop as he perused mindless TV shows and YouTube videos. He stopped brushing his teeth. He stopped washing his hair. As late as four in the afternoon, he was startled awake, his face hot and drenched in sweat and streaked with cushion scars, his arm dangling off the side of the bed into a bag of Tostitos, his pillow wet with saliva stains.

Then, when he’d been to the brink of no return, the ​Reminders app found its way back to him, and the cycle repeated.

So when he said, “Only Tuesdays,” there was a newfound conviction in the toothless smile he gave the mirror. He surrendered control to ​Reminders​, and, somehow, that made him feel more empowered.

Tuesday was not chosen at random. At five in the afternoon, every week, Ben picked Phoebe up from volleyball practice and took the family car five miles north to Chelsea Heights, where Dad had been renting an apartment since Christmas. Ben supposed that was Dad’s gift to himself: a grand unfolding of two decades’ worth of duplicity, tucked away in a thousand-a-month on the outskirts of town, with two guest bedrooms and a riverfront patio. Maybe it would’ve been more tolerable to look at were it still empty; at least then there was still a foot in the door, and a hopeful lack of total commitment. But now it had furniture he stole from the basement, or bought with money he said he didn’t have. The worst was when Ben saw the stuff Dad borrowed from his family. There was a betrayal enveloped in Uncle Sam’s sofa and Aunt Terri’s barstools, as if everyone Ben loved had, this whole time, been in cahoots, banding together behind his back to fund Dad’s childish pursuit of anyone-but-your-mother. And to think that at Thanksgiving dinner, they were shoveling old nightstands and ratty leather armchairs out of their basement into his greedy hands, sharing jaded laughs at an inside joke to which only Ben, Phoebe, and Mom, of course, were not privy. Then, as if revealing an impractical joke, Dad broke the news. He hosted gatherings at his new digs, where everyone picked out housewarming gifts, and congratulated him. “Here’s to another twenty-one years!” they cheered, while Mom, alone at home, sobbed until her head pounded.

But, at five-fifteen, when Ben and Phoebe arrived, they still parked themselves on Uncle Sam’s ugly argyle couch, while Dad silently grazed his Facebook feed and kept silent.

Then there was dinner.

On Tuesdays at seven, Ben silenced his phone and ate as much as he wanted. Three cheeseburgers with fresh, medium-rare beef, organic swiss cheese and artisanal buns; or a whole box of penne pasta with meat sauce and soft, greasy garlic bread; or pancakes dripping with batter and strawberry syrup, pork bacon and scrambled eggs; or hot dogs slathered with ketchup and corn on the cob soaked in butter. Then, after dinner, half a sleeve of Oreos and a glass of whole milk; oyster crackers and microwave popcorn to entertain his mouth through an episode of Black Mirror or in between Mario Kart tournaments; Nutter Butters, Hawaiian bread rolls, or that last Bob Evans sausage patty that Dad was saving for himself so don’t you dare touch it, but fuck him because he left Mom, and all he had to show for himself was four measly hours a week. Ben tossed another bag of popcorn in the microwave as Dad refreshed his Facebook feed a fourth time, paying no attention to Phoebe’s movie pick of ​The Parent Trap.​

From five to nine, Ben ate.

But then he went back home.

Ben threw four empty family-sized bags of Tostitos into the garbage can on the first Tuesday evening of June, after he’d returned from Dad’s apartment. The other snack foods he’d amassed beneath his bed—Cheerios, peanut butter-filled pretzel bites, Cheez-its, Goldfish, and several bags of mini blueberry muffins—went back to the pantry from which he’d stolen them. He vacuumed the food crumbs and sprayed the room down with half a canister of Glade air freshener to get rid of the smell. When all the buttered corn on the cob he’d eaten that night made him queasy even still, he knelt in front of the toilet bowl, clutching the gleaming porcelain while his muscles trembled and his face flushed with heat.

When he stood up he saw in the mirror that he was crying. Grabbing a fistful of his own abdomen, squeezing the fat between his white fingertips, Ben whispered, “Only Tuesdays.” He spent the whole night spilling tears onto his pillow as he shivered with shame.

The next morning at eight, Ben’s phone reminded him to eat a Kind bar. It was two hundred calories. Thirty minutes later, he was to go on a walk. Still clammy from the night before, he put on a sweatshirt that was too big, even for him, and sweatpants, despite the temperature climbing well into the eighties. Fifteen minutes later, he stumbled his way back into the house, light-headed and damp from the heat, and weighed himself.

Two hundred thirty-nine point eight pounds: two-and-a-half down from yesterday. He quietly rejoiced in the decrease as he took a shower, looking up at the ceiling the whole time.

At the top of every hour, Ben’s phone reassured him he wasn’t hungry, but that his mouth was just bored again. He masticated on gum and ice water as he re-downloaded ​MyFitnessPal and ​8Fit and ​LoseIt! Calorie Counter and ​Carb Manager and ​Happy Scale​, and sequestered them into a folder and dragged it into the middle of his home screen, where he’d see it every day, front and center. Right next to the ​Reminders​ app.

At three o’clock, Ben’s phone was gracious. ​eat 5 ritz crackers. He was already in the kitchen at that point, watching the flicker of the clock on the oven as it counted upwards to two fifty-nine, his mouth wet with anticipation. And hunger, of course. Before his phone had even finished vibrating, he tore open the Ziploc bag like a child opening the first birthday present, and before he could think—before he could decide upon a sixth—five crackers were on the counter in a neat pile, and Ben had stowed the bag away in the pantry. He quickly devoured the crackers, licking the salt off before punching his teeth through the wafers, feeling his mouth fill with stale flavor as the pieces tumbled down his throat.

Another eighty calories​, he thought as he ate the final cracker.

At three-thirty, Ben set his phone beside him as it guided him through ten warm-up pushups. Then ten sit-ups. Then twenty crunches. Then twenty lunges, ten for each leg. Then twenty jumping jacks. Then ten burpees. Then a one-minute downward dog. Then another ten cooldown pushups. Then repeat. His phone didn’t tell him to do that; rather, he took it upon himself, in a brief rush of motivation, to ignore the advisory fifteen-minute break between routines ​8Fit recommended. He went deftly through the motions of a workout, jumping from set to set with the alacrity of an experienced athlete. He knew the routine because he’d done it before. It was the fifth first day he’d had that year; the fifth day of one Kind bar, five Ritz crackers, and too much exercise; the fifth day of waking up dizzy after a night of gorging on junk food and crying into the toilet.

But it would be the last first day, he told himself. And he really meant it this time.

Ben allowed his phone to coach him through the rest of the day, waiting for his pragmatism to beget concrete results, and beaming with delight when they did. After making it through dinner eating only two apple slices and half a grilled chicken breast, he relished in celebration of a successful last first day: he’d passed just shy of five hundred calories. ​Better already,​ he thought. ​I feel s​ o​ much better.

Mom asked him if he wanted the last chicken breast: an offer which he politely declined, grinning from ear to ear.

“It’s a miracle! Ben doesn’t want to eat!” Mom gasped. Phoebe stared at Ben, her mouth agape, and his smile went slack. “Are you sick?”

“Shut up, Phoebe.”

“Hey!” Mom chided.

“I’m just... not hungry.”

The truth was, Ben was hungry. He was starving. He’d burned more calories that day than he’d eaten—this he knew for a fact, because he was keeping fastidious track of every calorie in and out of his system. He wanted so desperately to snatch the chicken off Phoebe’s fork and swallow it whole. He wanted to throw open the pantry doors and fill his mouth like a cornucopia, with Cheerios and muffins and pretzels and Tostitos, and gulp it all down like a python gormandizing woodland vermin. He had thoughts of food so intimate they transcended normalcy. He lusted for food. He yearned for food. The images of food, juicy and savory and salty and sweet, hurtled through his mind like a truck barrelling through an intersection, until he couldn’t look at the brown oak-wood table without imagining it being made of silky chocolate, or at the walls without wanting to scrape the cream paint off with a knife as if it were butter, and lather it on a tortilla or toasted Italian bread.

And maybe he would’ve acted on these impulses. Maybe, later that night, when the household had lulled to sleep, he would’ve crept into the kitchen to bask in the inexorable allure of a midnight snack. Maybe everything would’ve fallen right back into the way it was before.

Maybe...

...if not for the eight o’clock chime of his phone, reminding him how deceptive his own head could be; reminding him that whatever he ate would turn to grief, and burn in his stomach like caustic acid; and he’d feel it in his fat. The grip of his abdomen as it hung over his hips and clung to his meaty thighs. The pulsating of his neck, and the way it folded when he spoke. The protruding of his breasts through every shirt, and the outline of his grotesque figure in the mirror behind clothes only skinny people could wear. The puffing of his cheeks. The sweat he wicked away when no one else was hot. The clothes that had fit him a month ago. The clothes that wouldn’t fit him in a month. The desire to shrink. The need to shrink. To fade away and become nothing but thin air, drifting listlessly in the place he used to stand. To be small enough to be invisible.

dont eat! u can do this :)

The reminder pulled him out of a dangerous delirium. He quickly excused himself from the dinner table and withdrew to his bedroom, out of reach from temptation.

The next morning, Ben weighed himself again. Two hundred thirty-seven point eight pounds. He couldn’t contain his disappointment; he’d lost more the night before last, and he wasn’t even trying then.

“What the fuck...”

Nevertheless, Ben spent the rest of the day moored to his phone, beguiled by the reminders and the rewards they promised for his diligent labor. At eight, a Kind bar and a walk. At three, crackers and ​8Fit​. Then dinner at seven-ish, and no exercise necessary, as a treat to keep him sturdy and motivated. He kept the murmur of his insatiable stomach at bay with gum and ice water, chomping, crunching, and chugging through half a pack of ​Extra Spearmint and eighty ounces’ worth of trips to the Brita filter. And, strangely enough, he was galvanized by the pain of his hunger, as if the constant stomach growling and pellucid urine were battle scars to be paraded around with gleaming pride. Even when he looked in the mirror before a shower and saw nothing new or extraordinary about his body, that disgust which once contorted his face into a wrinkly, shameful frown was replaced with hope, because now he was in control, and soon the skin he despised—and everything buried beneath it—would melt away.

However, as the days fell on top of each other and the weeks bled together, Ben’s mood began to sour. He’d dropped thirty-five pounds in less than a month. He spent every evening swatting his family’s comments on his diet away, even as Mom’s joy turned to concern, and Phoebe couldn’t meet his eye anymore. The meticulous tracking of his weight was not enough to satisfy him anymore. His goals, he knew subconsciously, were far too intangible to achieve; anything he once thought he wanted became an enigma floating in the past, stuck in limbo, as he pursued some phantom finish line he didn’t even recognize. He was slimmer, but paler. He felt his once thick brown hair turn thin and gray. His skin hung loosely in pockets where the fat used to be. And he was always angry. Why was he angry? He logged his weight daily, but watching the numbers go down had lost its charm now that he couldn’t remember where to stop. Maybe he didn’t think he’d get this far. Maybe it still wasn’t far enough.

On the fourth Sunday at three o’clock, he took a sixth cracker out of the Ziploc bag, without even thinking, as if suddenly possessed by an impulse he’d buried deep within himself. He’d gone this far without cheating—with the exception of Tuesdays and only Tuesdays at Dad’s—but once the sixth cracker hit his mouth, the snapping of the wafer on his teeth was like a clap in the dark, and it echoed through his mind like a siren whistling in a tempest.

Then came the seventh. And then, instinctively, an eighth. A ninth. Twelfth. Twenty-ninth. The bag emptied as quickly as he’d opened it, salty crumbs of Ritz brimming his twitching lips and scattering onto the linoleum floor.

And then, when he’d devoured the last morsel in the bag, he was left with nothing but the debris, and he froze, hands fanned out on the counter as his forearms began to quiver. He’d committed his first sin. There was no way to recant, or to reverse the actions, or put the crackers back in the bag and pretend it never happened; it was as if he were falling back into the canopy below the mountain he’d just finished climbing, sailing through the air, filled with the crushing sensation of an impure, deathly failure. He quickly pushed the empty bag away and scuttled back into his bedroom, slamming the door shut. ​Failure! he thought as he grabbed at his thinning hair. Fat fucking failure! You fat fuck! Fuck you! Then he dropped to the floor and opened ​8Fit​. Pushups, sit-ups, crunches, lunges, jumping jacks, burpees, downward dog, pushups; repeat; repeat again; repeat a third time. By his fifth downward dog, sweat was pouring down his neck and saturating the collar of his shirt, and when he felt the sultriness of his face with his hand, he couldn’t distinguish the sweat from the tears.

And then he didn’t eat dinner. He didn’t deserve it. ​Only Tuesdays.

Except, suddenly, Ben wasn’t looking forward to Tuesday as he had the weeks before. His irreconcilable blight made a Tuesday night of binging feel unseemly. He didn’t want to pretend he’d earned his right to indulge in the addiction he’d failed to overcome. It was cheating. Cheating. Tuesday was meant to be his cheat day, but he went and plowed through a bag of Ritz crackers like it was nothing, like all that hard work was for naught. The carefully constructed artifice he’d built through the ​Reminders app and exercise plans and Kind bars and burrowing up in his room, away from food, was obliterated in an instant, sending everything patched up behind it cascading into the light.

The following morning, Ben weighed himself again. One hundred ninety-nine pounds—the same as the day before. It was the first time he didn’t get the pleasure of seeing a lower number, and the sameness of those three digits flashing on the screen made him miserable. Ben considered whether he could get over his distaste for throwing up for just one day. Just one do-over for Sunday’s wretched misdeed.

Tuesday came insidiously. Dad had promised buttered corn on the cob that week, with burgers and fries and fresh fruit. After, they would either play Mario Kart or watch an episode of Black Mirror​, which Ben had gotten both Phoebe and Dad addicted to.

That morning, Ben forfeited the Kind bar; fortunately, there were also no more Ritz crackers, of course, so there wasn’t anything he wanted to eat for lunch either. The lack of food was not something his phone dictated, but more of a self-induced fasting to prepare for dinner. He drove slowly to the apartment, dragging forty-five minutes out of the five-mile commute while Phoebe pawed impatiently at the door handle.

When they finally arrived, Ben stayed behind, waiting for the top of six o’clock, when his phone would buzz again.

it’s tuesday! eat all you want :)

Ben did not obey the reminder. When Dad set the dinner platter on the dining table, Ben took one look at the corn, slick with viscous butter that dripped down the sides and pooled in a chartreuse puddle around the base, and suppressed a gag. He couldn’t remember how it used to taste, and whether he even liked it or if his mouth was just bored. Eventually, after poking around the plate for something healthy, he settled on one of the burgers, which he picked apart with his fork until he’d crumbled the artisanal roll and dispersed it around the perimeter of his plate, and shredded the cheese into filaments which he discreetly fed to his napkin. All that was left was the patty, and a single piece of pineapple.

Phoebe didn’t bat an eye at his behavior; she was used to it already, the siphoning of small bits of food into bite-size pieces, and constituting such as a whole meal. Dad, on the other hand, made the mistake of commenting.

“You don’t like the food I made?”

Ben paused. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’re always hungry, tubs!”

“Dad...” Phoebe sighed.

“Did you already eat dinner or what?”

“Yeah, I ate a lot for lunch,” Ben lied.

“Jesus, Homer Simpson’s not even eating the corn.” He dropped his fork on his plate. “I buttered it extra just for you.”

Ben laughed weakly. What little appetite he had left had gone. He dropped the pineapple back into the bowl and half the burger into the trash when Dad wasn’t looking.

He was almost in the clear, ready to put on ​Black Mirror and take his mind off his stomach, until he turned back around and Dad was holding an ear of corn between his index fingers, poised at mouth level inches from Ben’s nose. He could smell the stink of fat in the butter leaking down the palms of Dad’s hands.

“Come on. Try it.” He pushed it closer to Ben’s face. “It’s good tonight.”

“I’m not hungry!”

“I made it just for you, Ben. I thought–”

“Stop, I said–”

“I ​thought if I made it the way you liked it, you’d start eating more.” Ben didn’t know how to respond. “You’ve been eating ‘big lunches’ every day this past month. I don’t know what the fuck there is to do anymore.”

“I’ve been hungry earlier in the day.”

“You know, I don’t get a lot of time with you guys anymore, and–”

“Dad, quit it!” Phoebe hollered.

“Just taste the goddamn corn, Benjamin,” he pleaded, the stench becoming aggressive and noisome. “Just try it, please!”

Ben keeled over the counter and blew pure bile into the sink, dousing the dirty dishes with splatters of thin, flaxen liquid. Dad flung himself backward and out of the way, dropping the corn in the process, and watching, aghast, as Ben heaved a second time, coating the garbage disposal in stomach acid.

“Christ Jesus,” Dad muttered. Ben saw, in his periphery, Phoebe covering her mouth with her hands, and the glossy tears in the corners of her eyes.

Ben went home feeling hungrier than when he’d gotten there. There was a pack of gum in the center console, which he used to mask the taste of bile in his mouth. As the car pulled into the driveway, he turned slowly around to face Phoebe, whose gaze had been pointed at the window the whole ride home.

“Not a single word to Mom.”

And that was all.

When Ben clocked his weight the next morning (one ninety-four point seven), his phone screen erupted with a confetti video graphic. He’d forgotten that, when he made the account, he’d set his goal weight to one ninety-five pounds. The app congratulated him, commending him on his weight loss journey, and then asked if he’d like to set another goal.

The prompt box hovered in the middle of the screen, trembling slightly. Ben realized after looking in the mirror that it was because he was shaking.

He smiled and set a new goal.

If someone were to ask him the next day what that goal was, he’d hesitate a moment, eyes skittering up into the sky, and tell them he doesn’t remember.

For the rest of that summer, a Kind bar, five Ritz crackers, and half a meal for dinner was all Ben’s stomach could tolerate. Mom did everything in her power to get him to eat: potatoes, peach cobbler, Annie’s mac and cheese, bratwursts, spaghetti; his favorite foods all came rushing back up his throat into the toilet bowl, at just the smell of them, and soon even at the sight. She cried into his fragile shoulders, begging him to eat something, but he couldn’t even if he wanted to. He really, really wanted to. Half a cookie, even, or a single penne noodle; anything at all.

He looked in the mirror so much he became sick of himself. His skin was stretched and bloated like wrinkly latex hanging off his emaciated figure, stretched where the pockets of fat used to hang. He grabbed and poked and prodded but the grayish tone never went away. He became so weak he couldn’t exercise anymore, exhausted after a single jumping jack; even stretching sent his muscles into a violent tremor, until they seized. He was always in pain, even when he was standing completely still.

And when Ben returned to school that fall, he’d sunk to one sixty-five. His hair had receded a full inch backward and was falling out in clumps, shivering down his neck like a tree shedding its leaves overnight. He first tried dying what remained back to brunette; then, when the gray returned to the roots, he bleached it. Then he wore baseball caps to school to hide the patches of pallid skin glaring from behind combs of white hair. He trekked through the hallway like an vacuous carcass of himself, his bones shuddering against each other as, after every five steps, he had to stop just to catch his breath.

And when Ben told his friends about how he felt sick all the time, it was they who made sure that Ben was cognizant that, at the very least, he was finally skinny, just like he wanted. After all, every conversation the year before was a groaning lament of his figure, of how much weight he’d been gaining, of his fears of being fat forever. ​Isn’t it an accomplishment now that you’ve lost the weight? they said. Aren’t you skinny now? Isn’t that what you always wanted? Aren’t the skin and the hair and the mirror and the bile and the Kind bars all worth it?

And when Ben’s head dropped over the toilet bowl, clay-colored vomit running in smeared tributaries down his torso, and his face, unconscious, struck against the cold tile floor, it was Phoebe who had to find him lying there, curled in a fetal position, his wrists limp, and eyes opaque and blinding white.

It was Mom who had to sit by him, the gasps between her screaming sobs piercing the silent ambulance air, while Phoebe burrowed her face in the nape of her mother’s neck.

It was Dad who had to drive separate, mulling over every word he’d ever said, beleaguered by guilt, thinking of the burgers and the corn as he looked upon the gurney, and the skeletal shell of his son strapped upon it.

It was Ben’s friends who had to look at their reflections in the shiny surface of his closed casket, and tell him they wished they knew how to help him before it didn’t matter anymore.

It was Ben.

Who died much less of a person than he was before. Who couldn’t bear to live a healthy life if it didn’t look the way others wanted. Whose BMI still marked him as overweight even as his daily calorie count dwindled in the double digits, and his skin turned translucent and his bones jutted angrily through his skin. Who was complimented on his new figure. Who was asked for weight loss advice. Who was praised for becoming healthy even as his life was rotting away. Who was so repulsed by his skin he had to give up everything he had just for the courage to smile in pictures, to not obscure his body with his arms, to not vanish into thin air.

Who thought a life worth living was one worth letting expire.

It was Ben.

It ​was​ Ben.

Alex McCullough is a rising U-M sophomore from Toledo, Ohio, and is pursuing a major in English and a minor in Spanish. In his free time, he enjoys reading (and buying way too many) books, playing piano poorly, scream-singing in the car, and writing.