The Weight of Balloons

CONTENT WARNING: Bulimia, Anorexia

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Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 117lbs.:

A simple Google search tells you that it takes about 4,000 helium balloons to lift a person weighing 110lbs. off the ground. Carlotta doesn’t really care about that. The idea is ridiculous. Anyway, she doesn’t want to float away. What’s the point? Six foot two at the age of sixteen, she doesn’t need any help from balloons if she wants to soar above everyone.

In her sophomore year of high school, on the first day of tryouts for the basketball team, when she leaps for an uncontested layup, she barely has the energy to get her feet off the ground. When Coach calls for a scrimmage, the white girl trying out against Carlotta for center position, barely five seven, effortlessly boxes her out beneath the rim, snatching rebounds that three months ago no question would have been Carlotta’s.

The white girl teases her, affecting a terrible Spanish accent. “¿Qué pasa, chica?” Over and over.

Carlotta’s father is not in the stands.

After practice, as coach announces the names of girls who survive first day cuts, Carlotta slinks off to a corner of the gymnasium. She slumps down the wall onto the hardwood floor behind the stands, and she doesn’t hear her name. No one says goodbye. She’s still there when they turn out the lights.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 123lbs.:

One month until high school basketball tryouts and 10th grade begins the usual way. On average, it takes about a half-year before the kids in her classes stop staring, but eventually they get used to her. The random kids in the hallways or cafeteria never stop staring. Of course they tease her. She’s heard all the names before. Giraffe. Bigfoot. In a month, when she’s on the basketball court in her team’s yellow uniform for tryouts, chants of Big Bird are a given.

At home, she doesn’t even bother to pretend to eat anymore. She thinks she hears her mother tell her father, “Well, at least she’s not pregnant.”

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 126lbs.:

The final game of summer league takes place two weeks before 10th grade begins, and Carlotta’s team doesn’t even come close to making the playoffs. For the first time Carlotta can remember, she doesn’t start, but comes off the bench in the 3rd quarter. She tires easily. Doesn’t fight for rebounds. At one point, she has an open layup, but blows it by somehow managing to wedge the ball between the rim and backboard.

Her father sits in the stands. He doesn’t cheer. He doesn’t say anything.

There are five college scouts in attendance, including the three who showed interest in her at the beginning of the season. They all seem infatuated with a point-guard who set a season record for assists. She’s five four in sneakers.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 131lbs.:

Tonight’s practice, she’s missed more shots than she’s made. Her father thinks she has an infection from her bellybutton piercing. He threatens to take her to the doctor, but she knows he won’t. They don’t have the insurance for it.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 133bs.:

Her father is six three and her mother is five ten, and they’ve bragged about Carlotta’s height being in the 99th percentile since before she can remember. Of course her sport is basketball. What choice did she have? Crazy ups, her father tells anyone who will listen. Mainly other basketball people.

At home, her mother tries to give her second helpings after dinner. Carlotta dumps the food in the garbage when her mother leaves the table to wash dishes. Her mother eventually refuses to leave the table until Carlotta finishes eating. Carlotta waits her out, and her mother doesn’t have the patience for it. But her mother is tricky. They only have the one bathroom in the apartment and her mother slyly races after meals to occupy it. It works the first few times, her mother staying in the bathroom long enough that when Carlotta finally gets in there, she can’t force any food up no matter how far she jams her toothbrush down her throat. So she begins saving plastic bags and skips the bathroom, vomiting in her bedroom after dinner. She hides the bags of puke under her bed and then waits for night, until her parents are asleep. Then she sneaks into the bathroom and dumps the foul contents into the toilet.

In the morning, when she rises from bed and stands too quickly, the room spins around her, and she must sit before she blacks out. When she regains herself, she stands in front of her bedroom mirror. She lifts her shirt, admiring the dangling blue jewel on her stomach, framed below the outline of ribs poking through skin.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 137lbs.:

Carlotta doesn’t have friends, really. She has teammates. She has practice, and training camps, and her father, who wears a whistle around his neck to signal starts and stops even if she’s just shooting around for fun on the blacktop courts outside their apartment complex. That’s not true. It’s never fun. It’s hard work. Her father’s favorite words. He shouts them over and over, hobbling behind her on bad knees from his busted chance at playing college.

Whistle. Hard work. Whistle. Hard work. Whistle. Whistle. Whistle.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 139lbs.:

Her parents finally see the bellybutton piercing when she least expects it. She has just finished vomiting macaroni and cheese into the toilet, and a bit splashes back up on her shirt. She has grown accustomed to the piercing. Unfortunately, she doesn’t think about it when she strips out of her stained shirt into her Nike sports bra. She’s sneaking back to her room when she bumps into her mother in the hall, and her mother’s eyes, like a shark’s, seem to roll up into their whites.

There is a sit-down in the kitchen. Her mother somehow connects the piercing to a future pregnancy with a non-existent boy. Her father thinks this is the reason she’s losing the touch on her jumpshot.

They compromise. Carlotta promises to take it out for games.

Carlotta has no intention of ever taking the piercing out. They don’t discuss her throwing up, which she’s pretty sure her mother was standing outside the bathroom listening to.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 141lbs.:

During her first game for summer league, Carlotta runs faster and jumps higher than ever before, but she tires easily. She drops twenty-two points on the other team and grabs ten boards before halftime. Her father’s shouts of “Hard Work” from the stands are constant. Her bodyfat is depleting, and veins striate her muscles. After the half, she grabs a couple more rebounds and adds another ten points, but she’s winded and feels dizzy.

When she steps off the court, her dark skin glistening with sweat, her father can’t help but compliment her on how ripped she looks.

The scouts gather around her father. She hears him call her ‘The golden goose.” The scouts’ eyes never leave her. She feels like some sort of livestock, graded and rated. A goose indeed. Her father beams as if he is being drafted.

Her teeth hurt. Her gums. They bleed easily from the constant brushing to cover up the scent of vomit.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 143lbs.:

Carlotta stops digesting her food a week after getting pierced, a leftover slice of her mother’s chocolate rum cake that serves as her last “official” meal. She drinks only water. She eats only when her parents are watching, and slips her fingers deep down her throat so she can trigger her vomit reflex and throw up as quietly as she can into the toilet.

She reads the internet for tips. Chew ice if you’re hungry. Throw up. Eat celery. Throw up. 8 glasses of water a day. Throw up. Use a toothbrush instead of your fingers. Throw up.

Somedays, she lies on the floor of her bedroom for hours. On her back, she isn’t taller than anyone.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 150lbs.:

Carlotta is out early waiting by the basketball court. She doesn’t bring a ball with her. The boys on the court pass by without a word and take up a game. She rolls up her t-shirt and ties it in the back. A blue sparkly gem dangles from her stomach.

The girls filter out of the apartments in cliques of three and four. Carlotta nods at each group as they pass. Some girls nod back. Some only look at her out of the corners of their eyes. They all whisper when they reach the parking lot. Some look back. Some laugh.

Carlotta waits for a game to end before joining the next one.

She rolls down her shirt.

She takes an elbow to the lip.

She doesn’t keep score.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 150lbs.:

Because of her height, Carlotta looks much older than sixteen. When she finally summons the courage to enter the dimly lit, trendy tattoo shop inside of Sawgrass mall a few weeks after her birthday, the employees don’t even question her when she asks to get her bellybutton pierced. The girl passing along the non-indemnity forms makes two jokes about Carlotta’s height that are meant to be friendly. Or not. Carlotta can no longer tell.

Reclined in a leather chair at the front of the store, in full view of the shoppers passing by with their stuffed plastic bags, Carlotta rolls up her t-shirt up, exposing her stomach. She stares at pre-drawn tattoos on the wall that customers can choose by pointing. Dragons. Skulls. Dice. The green-haired girl with two full sleeves of nautical tattoos selects a needle that looks identical to one of Carlotta’s mother’s sewing needles, except much larger.

The girl pinches the roll of fat over Carlotta’s bellybutton, then drives the needle through. Sweet pain in the dull ache of the piercing. For payment, she uses the birthday money her abuelitos mailed her, folded twenties she carries into the store inside the birthday card they came in.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 150lbs:

Carlotta decides that wishes cannot be stolen, and wishes are like dreams. They have to be worked for. She will get her bellybutton pierced. She imagines how it will look, a sparkly jewel dangling from her navel, and she is almost hypnotized by the thought itself, fixated, like the focus it takes at the free throw line with the crowd heckling you.

Something for her. Something of hers.

She will have to sneak over to the mall while her parents are at work if she wants it done, and hope the shop doesn’t ask for parental consent. She’s been thinking about it since her birthday. She’ll have to hide it all summer, because practice for her competitive basketball summer league has begun (where not one, but three college scouts approach her father the first week), and the league doesn’t allow players to wear jewelry. Also, her parents, second generation Cuban-Americans, are against piercings of any kind. No piercings, no tattoos, no make-up, no nothing. Carlotta’s mother constantly reminds her that Carlotta’s abuelitos, Mima and Papa, did not flee Castro, smuggled in the hold of a leaky fishing boat with crabs crawling all over them, so their nieta could turn herself into a freak show carnival act.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 150lbs:

During the first days of summer vacation, Carlotta watches the neighborhood girls cluster in packs and scream and laugh and talk loudly about their plans. Beaches and malls and boys and girls and taking photos and car rides and music and camps and pools and shopping and movies and sleepovers and tattoos. She watches from the free throw line. From the three-point line. Under the baking heat of a relentless sun and courts packed with boys and men who make it their mission to prove she doesn’t belong.

Summer evenings, her father and his whistle.

Hard work. Hard work.

A group of girls return when the streetlights switch on, exposed midriffs and dangling baubles pierced to their bellybuttons. They come and go from their apartments in the time Carlotta’s father has her shoot a hundred free throws. The girls climb into cars with blankets and coolers sloshing with ice, wearing less clothes than they did during the day, their jeweled stomachs on display, headlights shining brightly onto the court and taillights leaving red tracers fading into the night.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 150lbs.:

Every time the phone rings, it is a phone call from Carlotta’s summer coach. Her father stands in the kitchen, staring at her. Her mother sits on the couch next to her during these calls, a hand on Carlotta’s knee meant to be reassuring. Her father answers questions about her college goals. About her training. About how strong she is. About her diet. About her need to lose fat and gain muscle. About how soft her body is. About what her body is or isn’t, or what it needs to be in order to take the next step. About what it takes for her to attract a scout’s attention. Or maybe her father just offers these things without being asked. When he hangs up, he high-fives her as hard as he would one of his construction buddies, and her palm stings for a long time afterwards.

Carlotta Guerra-Montejo at 150lbs.:

On her 16th birthday, the day after 9th grade ends and summer vacation begins, Carlotta celebrates by blowing out the candles on the chocolate rum cake her mother baked. Her parents orbit around her, serenading her with an off-key duet of “Cumpleaños Feliz” at the kitchen table. There is a ‘Happy Birthday’ helium balloon strung to her chair. It hovers above her head and knocks into her. Carlotta closes her eyes and makes a wish. She takes a deep breath, but as she blows out her candles, her father shouts out his wish for her before the last candle is extinguished. Something about a sports scholarship. Carlotta worries if there is something in the rules of wish making that would allow her father’s wish to supersede hers.

For a present, she unwraps a shoebox containing a new pair of startling white Nike’s. Sneakers she knows her parents can’t afford. She crumbles the wrapping paper up and shoots for the wastebasket beside the kitchen counter. It sails high, bounces off the wall, and disappears into the can.

Her father has claimed her wish. She knows this.

Carlotta unties the balloon from her chair, and for a week it floats gracefully around their apartment. She can’t help but stare at it. The colorful lettering, the shiny silver backing. It draws her eye to it, demanding her attention, and she finds herself losing time following the balloon as it drifts along the living room wall. It appears shy, the way it sticks to corners, but how could something flying that high possibly hope to hide?

From a website promoting life hacks, Carlotta learns that if you put a piece of tape over a balloon and then stick it with a pin, the balloon will not pop. It will slowly lose air over time. Over the course of a week, speared with one of her mother’s sewing needles, the birthday balloon slowly leaks, until it barely floats above the floor. It shrinks into itself, becoming smaller, and smaller. Technically, without any air filling it, it’s just skin.

The balloon disappears one day, shriveled in a corner behind the couch. No one asks it to float again. In time, no one even remembers it was there.