New story. This one's different than my others. Third person present with some het thrown in for good measure. And my last attempt at a multi-chapter angst fic on FP.

I don't expect many people to be interested in this because it is angsty and filled with my blundering attempts at trying to find something I'm comfortable with beyond first person present humor. But if you do like it, let me know. If you don't, let me know. Constructive criticism is greatly appreciated.

Thanks and thanks for reading. :)

Belly of the Whale

Prologue

The mirror shows him, skinny and pale. Naked, he studies the sharp lines of his body, the bones and muscles underneath. He sucks in a deep breath and watches his stomach curve inward and his chest puff out, and his hands touch the space the lack of air left behind. Slowly, he spins till he sees himself from the side. Yesterday he measured himself – how many inches he is around, how many he is from the side.

He feels anxious but he doesn’t know why. He isn’t sure where to place the blame.

The tape measure is in his hands again and he stretches it tight across goose-bump spattered skin. The numbers haven’t changed and he bites his lip hard until it tingles and hurts. The tape measure falls and he slides down to the floor with it, back hot against the cold surface of the mirror. He can count the lumps of his spine, pinpointing each one pressed against the mirror, and he counts them over and over till his heartbeat slows and he can shove the tape measure away and forget about it till tomorrow.

She stands in her shower down the hall, legs shaking and leaning against the wall. She holds the bloated swell of one of her breasts in both of her hands and feels the heaviness centered in the palms of her hands. No one told her that this would happen – that they would grow and they would ache – and she squeezes the one in her hands, watching the milk work free and swirl around her feet with hot water slowly turning cold. No one told her that it would be like this. It was never supposed to be like this, and she pictures the raspberry red of a baby’s mouth wrapped around her as her body did what it was made to do.

Oh god she says, just once, and brings up hands to hide the words, the prayer, the blame. Oh god. Just once and then there’s silence. Oh god and she switches off the water, wraps a towel around her shivering body, and leaves the steaming bathroom, head held high till she’s locked behind the door of her bedroom and it sags once more.

Chapter One

disappear;

He wakes up sometime around midnight with pain nestled in the bottom of his belly. The mirror glints in the moonlight peering through his cracked open curtains when he swings long legs over the side of his bed and gets up to pad from his room and downstairs to the kitchen.

She’s sitting at the counter, sipping milk from a wineglass. When he ghosts past her into the kitchen, she jumps with a hand on her heart.

“Jonah. You scared me.” Her voice is tiny in the dark kitchen.

Jonah doesn’t say anything back to her. It’s been years since he’s been able to find the right words to say.

He pulls a glass from the cupboard and fills it with water from the sink, standing over it and looking out the window into the backyard. His back is hunched protectively over the water that settles heavily in his stomach, temporarily quieting the hunger that growls there.

There’s satisfaction in the familiar motions of washing the glass, carefully drying it, and setting it back in the cupboard. When he shuts the cupboard door, his sister is staring at him, her wineglass paused halfway to her mouth.

“What?” he asks. His voice croaks with sleep still dried along the insides of his throat.

Her eyes are wide and black in the darkness. “Nothing. You’re just… It’s nothing.”

For a long moment, black eyes search black eyes, seeing nothing, and Jonah slams the cupboard door shut. “Good night, Leah,” he throws over his shoulder on his way back up the stairs.

His sister catches it and holds it to her aching chest. “Yeah. Good night, Jonah.”

Upstairs, he locks the door behind him and crawls back into bed. Sleep evades him, circling just out of reach above his head. Across the room, he sees himself in the mirror, a pale smudge of who he remembers being. Only when he gets up and turns the mirror around to face the wall can he fall into a restless semblance of sleep.

--

Summer hasn’t yet arrived, but the upstairs bedroom is already filled with heat as Jonah stirs. For long moments he lies in bed, unmoving, listening to the birds outside his window and the sounds of dishes clanking downstairs.

He wishes that he is capable of sleeping in, like Leah, who is undoubtedly still dreaming in the room across the hall and will stay that way through most of the weekend. He wishes that half his day would disappear when he closed his eyes.

But now he gets up and pulls on clothes – jeans, T-shirt, and a baggy sweatshirt – and sweat gathers along his skin. He feels like he’s baking from the inside and rolls up the sleeves of his sweatshirt before leaving his room and descending the stairs.

At the dining room table, his mother sits with the newspaper splayed out before her. She eats oatmeal without looking at the bowl. Her spoon blindly scrapes along the insides of the curves and sometimes her lipstick-coated lips take in nothing but air. From the doorway, Jonah watches her till she looks up from the paper and smiles at him. There are wrinkles along the outsides of her eyes and he looks away.

“Good morning, Jo,” she greets. He doesn’t answer.

In the kitchen, his dad stands in his underwear, dress shirt, and black socks, staring at the calendar magnetized to the fridge door while he eats Cheerios. He doesn’t acknowledge his son like he doesn’t acknowledge his wife, and Jonah skirts around him to find rice cakes tucked up into one of the cupboards.

Through the kitchen doorway and with the rice cake held in his mouth, he looks back and forth between his parents’ backs. He takes his breakfast up into his room and leaves them behind to stare at the calendar and the wall.

They weren’t always this way. He remembers when they used to talk and give quick kisses in front of them. He remembers family camping trips and visits to the beach. He remembers the day when all that ended, but he doesn’t like to so he shoves it away.

After breakfast, the mirror is turned back to face the room once more and he sheds his clothes to stand before it, the daily ritual. There are freckles on his shoulders, and he brings up his hands to cover them, arms crossed over his chest, a living skull and crossbones. His palms slip down his arms, sliding along like his skin like a lover’s embrace, gentle and soft till they reach his stomach. Fingers locked together, he presses against his bellybutton and feels the bottom of his ribcage along the tops of his thumbs. Sometimes he thinks that if he pushes hard enough, that space between his bellybutton and his spine will disappear all together and he’ll fold himself up along with it.

“Jonah?” A knock comes at his door and he jumps. His heart thuds painfully hard in his chest, a fast rhythm that makes his head throb right behind his eyes. “Jonah, I’m off to work. Your father has already left. I’ve made a casserole and put it in the fridge. There are oven directions on a post-it on the counter. Make sure Leah doesn’t sleep the whole day away.”

Jonah licks dry lips and looks at the door via the mirror in front of him.

“Jonah, are you listening to me?” his mother wonders. He affirms that – yes – he is as his voice cracks and splinters in his throat. “Okay. Okay, well good-bye. I love you.”

They’re words spoken through a closed door because she can’t look him in the eye when she tells him, or maybe he can’t look in hers.

“I love you too,” he says back, but by then he can hear her car start up in the driveway and when he sits up on bony knees, painful on the hardwood floor, he watches her slowly drive away.

He spends the next few hours sitting in the center of the bed, halfheartedly looking over sloppy school notes in an attempt to prepare for upcoming exams. His Chemistry notebook is nearly empty – just marks that resemble shorthand but mean nothing to no one – especially not to Jonah. He considers asking Leah if he can see her notes because some days he watches the back of her head, from where he sits two tables back. He watches her long brown hair pulled over one shoulder as she diligently takes notes and answers questions in class. She smiles and laughs and offers help to fellow classmates and answers to their teacher. She reaches out to everyone, always a smile on her face, always a light in her eye with her head held high and Jonah smiles at the thought before tearing each page from his notebook and shoving them deep into his trashcan.

He decides it won’t be worth it to ask her for help.

--

The casserole in the fridge sits, pale and wet, and Jonah imagines that a cancerous tumor would look the same way if cut open. He wears oven mitts to take it from the fridge and set it on the counter. They stay on his hands as he reads through his mom’s instructions. Preheat oven. Set timer. Make sure edges are lightly browned and crisp.

Leah’s on the phone at the kitchen table with a magazine in the center of her schoolbooks. Her voice distracts Jonah. Her laugh cuts through his head so he has to reread the temperature written on the post-it three times before he can punch the numbers into the oven.

The red and white checkered mitts are still on his hands as he passes his sister and goes into the living room, turning the TV on with the volume low so he can still hear her voice while she talks to her friends.

“No, I haven’t even started yet… God I know… You talked to David? I’ve just been really busy lately and haven’t been able to call him back. Did he… What did he say? Did he say anything about me?”

David. With the mitts still keeping his hands warm instead of the cold tingling that normally resides in the tips of his fingers, Jonah abandons the TV and goes upstairs. In his bed, he slides under the covers with his legs pulled up beneath him, a baby curled into the familiar position of fetal position, trying desperately to keep shivers from making his teeth clack together.

The oven cries out downstairs but Jonah doesn’t move. When the smell of cooking sauce and noodles finally reaches his nose, he knows Leah got up to do it. The smell curls down into his belly, beating at the sides, starting up a familiar ache that gets Jonah out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom where he gulps down water from a refilled Dixie cup that has seashells printed one after another in pastel blues and greens around its outside.

In his fist, the cup crumples in on itself and Jonah tosses it into the trash among used Kleenexes that threaten to overflow onto the floor.

Back in his room, he lies back down, crumples in on himself, and breathes in the smell of dust from his mattress.

If that space between belly button and spine went away, he thinks he could fold himself into the trashcan. He thinks he could maybe disappear.

The arrangement since they got the car is that she drives in the morning, and Jonah drives them home from school. Like every other morning since the first one, her brother is already waiting in the car for her when she trips down the sidewalk, backpack, purse, and lunch bag in hand.

Leah avoids looking at him when she starts up the car and arranges the radio from his favorite station to hers (also in the agreement) and carefully backs the car out of the driveway. They don’t speak the entire drive to their school, and Leah’s not surprised. She remembers the last time they talked beyond polite words exchanged while passing each other in the hallway or the words that cling to her tongue at midnight in the kitchen.

She notices the curve of his back beneath his oversized wind jacket while he hunches over in his seat and stares out the window. She sees the thinness in his cheeks, in his arms, in his legs, in his stomach. She puts one hand on her own stomach at a red light and closes her eyes.

They hurt and tingle as they wake tears that desperately press at the crease where her eyelids meet, decorated with a thinly applied layer of black eyeliner. If she cries, her makeup will run. If she cries, her twin might look to her with wide brown eyes and wonder what’s wrong. He might even ask her and she doesn’t know what she’d say – what lie she’d conjure up.

“Leah?” Jonah speaks up and she brings her other hand to her cheeks to feel if she accidentally let one tear free. “Leah, the light’s green.” When she opens her eyes, Jonah has his neck craned to stare at the line of cars piling up behind them.

Leah’s foot leaves the brake and they creep forward. “Right. The light is green.”

She wasn’t supposed to feel relieved that her brother might see her crying. She doesn’t deserve to feel any relief.

--

Ruby meets Leah at the front of school, rearranging her jean skirt as she stands. She waves a tiny hand at Jonah who walks past the two girls to disappear into the school.

“God, he is so not a morning person, is he?” she asks with a roll of her eyes. Leah laughs and weaves her arm around her friend’s and the two are herded into the school by their peers. “It’s weird to think that we used to be friends, you know? I was just thinking about that last night when we were on the phone.”

“He just…grew up, I guess,” Leah says. Grew up. Is that what it was? Did growing up mean growing apart?

No…

“Well, anyway. I’m so screwed for the exams. Seriously.” Ruby’s voice buzzes in and out of Leah’s ears like an AM radio station and she nods her head and gives grunts of agreement at all the right spots until their shared locker comes into view with a tall, blonde-haired boy leaning against it.

David sees them coming and pushes away from the lockers with a smile on his face. Leah can’t help it. She doesn’t mean to wince when he pulls her toward his chest and gives her a kiss on her forehead, but she prays he doesn’t notice.

He puts his arm around her shoulders while she pulls books from her locker and listens to Ruby talk. His lips touch her neck. She shivers as he asks, “Why didn’t you return my calls all weekend?”

You know she wants to tell him. You know, god damn it, you know. She wants to scream it and tell him to get his hands off her, but she just smiles and shrugs and says, “I’m really sorry, David. I was just tired and trying to study for exams.” She kisses the soft peach fuzz of his cheek and leans back to smile at him and look up at him through her bangs.

Every muscle in her body is tense and waiting, ready for the questions and angry accusations while Ruby turns her head and watches everyone walk by to give some semblance of privacy, but the bell rings above their heads, vibrating and loud above voices and the resounding slams of lockers.

“Shit. I meant to get to Chemistry early to ask a question… I’ll see you guys later!” She takes off running, leaving her best friend and her boyfriend behind. Up the stairs and her legs hurt and a zinging pain slices through her belly. She finds herself on hands and knees at the top of the stairs, backpack riding up and one hand tucked beneath her to grip the softness of her belly. “Oh, God. Oh, God, oh God, oh God…”

“Hey, are you okay?” a boy whose face she recognizes but whose name she doesn’t know asks her and she nods her head, pushing the waves of her hair from her face.

“Yeah. I just tripped. God, I’m such a klutz.” She forces a sheepish smile and ignores the hand he offers her as she uses the wall to help her back up to her feet.

The stares she gets when she enters the Chemistry room late makes her cheeks burn red. She excuses herself and sits at her table, giving her brother a glance over her shoulder as she rummages through her backpack for her notebook. His eyes are on her but they quickly flit away.

When attention goes back to their teacher perched at the edge of his desk at the front of the room, Leah lets her concentration flit away from her. There’s pain in her hands and she looks down to see her palms skinned from her fall. While questions are asked about what will be on tomorrow’s exam, she uses the pads of her thumbs to roll the skin away from the rawness underneath.

It hurts.

She doesn’t stop.

--

At lunch, she watches Jonah sitting with Adrian. They sit across from each other and Adrian picks at the food on Jonah’s tray. She finds herself smiling and she’s not sure why until she sees a crooked smile, identical to her own, on her brother’s lips. She can’t remember the last time she saw that upward quirk of his lips.

The smile on her own face wilts as David sits down across from each other and the view to her brother is blocked by David’s broad chest and unsmiling face. She offers him a greeting and then stares down at the casserole left over from the night before. She’s the only one who ate it. Jonah went to bed early, and her parents were both out late. She eats as if she’s eating for two, focusing on her plate and the slimy texture of unheated leftovers sliding down her throat.

“You know, you probably shouldn’t be eating so much. You’ve already got weight you need to lose,” David says.

Leah drops her fork and Ruby, appearing from the vending machines with a soda in one hand and a bag of Doritos in the other, clucks her tongue.

“God, David, she looks fine. Do you want her to starve herself or something?”

“I’m just thinking that summer’s almost here and I’ll hear her bitching about how she looks in a swimsuit.”

Summer. Beaches and swimsuits and trips to the amusement park. It all seems so normal. It all seems so incredibly far in the past and trivial. Juvenile.

With her shoulders hunched and her hair falling down around her face, Leah finishes eating her lunch and then shoves the Tupperware into her lunch bag.

“I’m going to go put this in my locker,” she announces. She cuts off Ruby who’s in the middle of a story about what her host family is planning on doing the night school lets out for the summer.

She leaves them behind, hurrying through the hallways that are abandoned and quiet and eerily still. A shiver runs through her as she runs through the game that Ruby and she always play. The what if game. What if you saw some guy looking in through the window right now? What if someone tried to break in? What if – now that you’re alone in this hallway – someone came out with a knife? Or you found a dead body?

A scream crawls up her throat but spirals back down into her belly when a hand closes around her wrist. She recognizes the feel of that hand, the tightness of the grip, and turns to look her boyfriend in the eye.

“You scared me, David. What is it?”

He leans in closer to her. She can smell his lunch on his breath. “Don’t you dare put all the blame on me,” he orders. His words are sharp and she winces as they touch her face in the form of heat.

“I’m not,” she insists and pulls away.

She’s not.

She can only put the blame on herself.

When she turns to walk away, her arms curl around her belly and she feels her shoulders riding up, a protective wall put up around her. She wishes she could raise them far enough that they’d make her disappear.