Cures for Hunger by Deni Béchard (fun books to read for adults .txt) 📗

me wads of cash. Three or four times a week, we had dinner.

“A tournament!” he said, leaning forward. “When is it?”

“In a couple weeks, I guess.” I didn’t want him there. Though I liked that he believed in me, I got no thrill from battering others, and the best fighters in our gym lusted to hammer on anything. Besides, I’d been working on a dystopian novel, and often, after writing all night, I could barely train.

“I’m considering deferring,” I told him to change the subject.

“What’s that?”

“It means I’d put it off for a year.”

“Put what off?”

“College.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “You can do that?”

“Yeah. Besides, I never planned on going. I can write without it.”

He nodded as if this were a conversation of no great importance.

“You know,” he said, “I read in the paper one time about a really popular writer who didn’t go to school. Besides, you should be a fighter, and there’s this tournament.”

“I might not even be ready,” I told him. “It’s not a big deal—just practice.”

He appeared to be thinking hard, his eyes focused on the floor.

“If you’re planning to stay a while,” he said, “you’ll probably want your own place and a job that pays more.”

“I guess,” I replied, mostly just to prompt him to keep talking.

“I know a guy with an apartment for rent, and there’s a job I could get you. It’d probably be good for you to do things on your own. You want your freedom, right?”

Over the past month he’d mentioned that his stores weren’t doing well, so maybe he could no longer afford to keep paying me. I tried to see how he’d benefit from what he proposed, but I couldn’t. I liked the idea of my own place, of writing and reading where no one could bother me. So a week later, I moved into the apartment and started the job he’d lined up at an immense seafood processing and packing plant built on the edge of a canal just outside Vancouver.

My days started at five in the morning. Boats unloaded crates of codfish under clouds of wheeling seagulls. The sun rose beyond the cargo doors as forklifts crossed the processing rooms and propane fumes stank up the salty air.

I had been putting away money for travel and immediately realized my mistake. Rent and a vehicle ate up a lot of what I earned, and my job and training left me exhausted. The date for college passed, the weather cooling, rain replacing sunshine, and to prove I’d made the right decision, I bought a secondhand computer and wrote every night. The longer I did, the more my emotions overwhelmed me, and the hungrier I got. Insignificant scenes, a young man leaving a new friend, were charged with grief, as if I were saying good-bye to everyone I’d abandoned. My stomach rumbled, and I emptied the fridge, making 3:00 a.m. supermarket runs: orange and apple juice, blocks of cheddar, quarts of strawberry yogurt, instant mashed potato mix, value packs of sirloins.

“What happened?” my trainer blurted after weighing me in at the tournament. I was one pound over the limit for my class. Seeing my name in the heavyweight column, he took the pill bottle from his hip pouch, popped the lid, and swallowed one.

I’d read most of the night and now sat against the cinder-block wall to finish Brave New World. Fighters from my club shook their heads.

When it was my turn for the ring, a redheaded teenager standing next to me said, “Aw, man, you got the half-breed. Be careful.”

I hadn’t given much thought to the fight. As soon as I put down the book, I felt disoriented and then indifferent. A twinge of concern made it through only when I went into the ring. Nearly a foot taller, my opponent faced off—half-Chinese and half-Irish judging from his last name. Almost instantly, he was midair, spinning, driving his heel at my gut. He kicked repeatedly as I tried to circle in. I timed his landing and struck at his ribs, driving him back, but one of my kicks hit wrong, the side of my foot catching his hip bone. The pain was sudden and intense, and I limped, backing away, shocked to find myself here. The pain felt like the truth—that I should be elsewhere, that I didn’t care about this. The fantasy novels had been right and only by disaster, or something resembling it, could I learn what was real.

✴

“YOU LOST,” MY father said without inflection, sitting at the restaurant table, his arms crossed. When I’d called to tell him about my foot, so swollen it barely fit inside my shoe, he’d insisted that I meet him right away.

“I don’t know what to do about work,” I said, limping to the chair.

His eyes focused in, seeing my concern, and for the first time since I’d returned, he leveled his disdain.

“Fake hurting yourself.” He spat the words. “That’s why I told you to come here and not go to the doctor.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, trying to get my face back under control, embarrassed to have him see me like this.

“Isn’t it obvious? You go to work on Monday and pretend to hurt yourself. Then you collect workers’ compensation.”

I was taking slow breaths, telling myself that none of this mattered, that I could deal with it. But when I spoke, the emotion was there again.

“I’ll have to spend the weekend like this,” I said.

“What’s the big deal? All you do is write. You don’t need to walk.”

He waved his hand and then explained how to defraud workers’ compensation. “Everyone does it,” he added as if offering me a joint. “I did it once when I wasn’t much older than you. I was on a construction site, and I smashed my pinkie with a sledgehammer.”

“Did it hurt?” I asked, wanting to take the attention off myself.

“Of course it hurt. I was trying to break the bone. You always got a longer leave for a broken bone, but my finger