Not Just a Number: A Young Adult Contemporary Novel

by Sara Michaels

  My mom had been regular enough about what she would include, so I had been able to mentally prepare myself for lunch each day just by knowing what to expect. It was usually a sandwich, with whole wheat bread because it was more nourishing, which I appreciated. She would usually put either tuna fish, hummus, or cheese and lettuce on the sandwich. I felt like my nutrition plan had also resulted in the whole family eating more healthy stuff, which I guessed was a good thing for everyone.

  On Mondays, I would often get some of the leftover roast meat from Sunday lunch with mustard on my sandwich. Also often added to the brown bag was a full-cream fruit yogurt and either a bag of nuts or a tub of berries. I was grateful that my nutritional plan specified healthy foods as I would not be able to handle burgers, pizza, or donuts yet. The difficulty would not be physical as much as mental as the high-calorie foods would just be too much to handle.

  I settled on the grass and opened the paper bag. Ryan was still keeping the bag for me until lunch time, and I had gotten over feeling like he was my lunch monitor for the most part. I peered into the bag and saw what looked like a cheese and lettuce sandwich, a strawberry yogurt, and a bag of peanuts. Totally doable.

  “You are looking so much healthier, Abby,” Kya said as she started in on her own sandwich. I wasn’t sure if it was planned, but I now realized that both Kya and Ryan bought lunch from home too and hardly ever ate food from the cafeteria.

  I smiled at her comment, thinking how just a few months ago she had told me I had looked ‘svelte’ and how that comment had encouraged me to continue with my weight loss plan. In all fairness, that was when I had just lost a bit of weight. I had lost a lot more since then. There was no way she could have known that she was encouraging something negative anyway; she was just being a kind friend at the time.

  “I’m also really glad that you let Ryan tell me about the issues you’re having. Everything makes a lot more sense now, and I feel like I’m in a much better position to support you.”

  It didn’t escape me that everyone seemed to see all the puzzle pieces falling into place all of a sudden. Jen had said the same thing. It was like there were these things that they knew had been bugging them about my behavior, appearance, or actions, but only when they heard the words “eating disorder” did everything make sense. I guessed that it wasn’t a conclusion you would ordinarily come to if you didn’t have that push to the answer.

  I took a bite of my sandwich and chewed.

  Kya continued, “I do wish you could have told me yourself, though.”

  I hadn’t expected that and suddenly felt cornered. I bit my lip. She looked at me carefully, trying to judge my reaction to that statement. I understood that she must have felt weird about it. She and I had been friends far longer than Ryan and me. I wondered if she felt bad because I hadn’t been able to confide in her. The truth was, that I hadn’t been able to confide in anyone. My secret had come out of its own accord, not because I had taken anyone into my confidence. I needed her to understand that.

  “It’s a really hard thing to talk about, Kya,” I said carefully. “I mean, it’s getting easier every day, but in the beginning I could not even say the words. I couldn’t tell anyone in the beginning. Ryan had to tell my mom.”

  Kya nodded as though she understood, and I wondered if she really did and if this would affect our relationship going forward. Would she be less likely to confide in me now that she felt I hadn’t confided my deepest, darkest secret to her?

  I continued to explain, hoping that I could make her truly understand. “If it wasn't for me passing out on poor Ryan and him being a hero and not being able to let it slide, you guys probably still wouldn’t know.” I almost swallowed the last few words because I was afraid to say them out loud. I had been on a serious downward spiral at that point from a health perspective, and if I hadn’t passed out, I actually didn’t know where I would be right now. I knew that everything happened for a reason, but the synchronicity of the events that had led to me getting help when I needed it most still amazed me. It had just been impossible for me to say anything, let alone to Kya who had known me almost my entire life. I wondered for a moment if it had been easier with Ryan because he had only known me for a few years.

  It was very clear that without him, I would be in a far darker place at that point, and I hoped that Kya was able to understand that. As it was, I was far from recovered. I still struggled with basic things, and although I was slowly picking up weight, my body functions were taking their time to get back to where they needed to be.

  Emotionally, the healing process was even slower.

  The lunch bag stretched out before me like an endless expanse of desert. The oasis at the end would be a bag that had magically emptied itself without me having to consume any of its contents. How nice would that be? I had only managed half a sandwich.

  I looked at Ryan, and a blush was just fading from his cheeks. My comment about him being a hero had clearly embarrassed him. I smiled at him. He was cute when he was embarrassed, but he deserved all the praise. He really was my hero.

  “It’s only what any friend would do,” he said. That wasn’t true, though, and we all knew it. It took strength of character to do what he did. It would have been so easy to just ignore the signs and let me figure it out for myself, pleading ignorance when I had inevitably crashed and burned in the depths of my disorder.

  I decided to have my yogurt before the second half of my sandwich, just for some variety. The stodginess of the bread was difficult to manage. I rummaged around the bag for the plastic spoon my mom always put in for me to eat my yogurt with unless she had given me drinking yogurt. She was organized like that and I was grateful for it. If I had packed my own lunch, I likely would have forgotten the spoon and ended up having to scoop the creamy yogurt out with my finger!

  My hand grasped something else, though. It was not a spoon, and without pulling it out of the bag, I peered in to see what it was, checking to make sure that Ryan and Kya were distracted by their own lunches. A cheese string! Since when did we even have cheese strings in the house? I could not remember ever seeing cheese strings in the fridge. What the heck? I knew for a fact that cheese strings were not on my nutrition plan. So why would my mom have included it? I fought the feeling that I was being sabotaged.

  My heart sank, and I pushed down to the bottom of the bag, pulling out the spoon that I eventually located and looking up at Ryan. He was distracted with the big messy sandwich his mom had made him, but I was pretty sure he knew what was in the bag. He and my mom had been annoyingly conspiratorial recently, and he seemed to know everything food-related that I did. I mostly loved him for it, of course, knowing full well that he was only trying to help me. The rogue cheese string did not fit into that helpful effort, though. It felt like a trap.

  Kya and Ryan chatted about events that were coming up at school in the next few weeks.

  “I have a sneaking suspicion that Mr. Harper is going to spring a surprise quiz on us in the next few weeks,” Kya said, clearly not looking forward to it. “You know how he loves to torture the seniors before they go, like one last differential equation dig to remember him by?”

  Ryan laughed at her description, and we both knew it to be true.

  I didn’t have a problem with a surprise quiz, and I knew that Ryan wouldn’t either, but it was likely Kya’s worst nightmare. I thought about offering to tutor her in differentials to help her, but I knew that I could not commit to that right now. My emotions were so up and down that it was difficult to commit to anything.

  Once again, Ryan came to the rescue. “Why don’t we sit down this afternoon and run through the work, Kya? If that would help you?”

  The look of surprise and relief on Kya’s face was visible. “That would be amazing! Thank you, Ryan.”

  They continued to chat among themselves, talking about big tests that were coming up, the impending start of exams, and, of course, the subject on everyone’s lips right now: prom.

  �
��I thought about asking Jeremy if he would like to go with me, just as friends,” Kya said, referring to a guy she had recently amicably broken up with, “but I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  Ryan agreed with her. “I don’t think that is a great idea, Kya. He is probably going to get the wrong impression.” He paused. “I mean, that guy was crazy about you. If you go back into his life now, it’s just going to give him false hope.”

  Both Kya and I knew this to be true. Jeremy had been borderline obsessed with Kya, and it had taken a long time for him to stop calling her, trying to get back together with her. It would only restart the nightmare if she asked him to go to prom with her.

  “Yeah, you are right,” Kya conceded.

  “And do you really want to have the memory of your prom being with someone you didn’t really want to go with?”

  I thought for a moment that Ryan was like our emotional shepherd. The more Kya and I scattered our emotional thoughts and actions about, the more he herded them back up and put them back in the fold where they belonged. What would we ever do without him?

  “You’re right, as always,” Kya said with a big grin on her face. I was glad that the prom conversation petered off then as it likely would have focused on me soon, and I didn’t have any answers for them.

  I focused on my yogurt instead, grateful that it was something I didn’t have to chew. The silky strawberry coolness was refreshing and really easy to get down. I knew that the good bacteria in there was also helpful to get my stomach working properly again. I wondered if I could exist solely on yogurt. After having eaten so little for so long, my body was struggling to get used to food again, and my stomach needed all the help it could get.

  The cheese string was never far from my mind, even as we chatted about Kya’s mom’s checkup coming up. She was a breast cancer survivor but had to go for testing every six months to make sure she was in the clear. Her next checkup was coming up soon, and Kya was nervous about it.

  “I mean, I know she has to go for these for the next five years until she’s really in the clear, and I can’t possibly freak out every time, but it is difficult not to.” That was totally understandable. I could not imagine having to deal with that with my mom. Kya continued, “She tries to act all brave about it, like it doesn’t bother her, but I know she is just putting up a strong front for the rest of us.”

  I clearly remembered that period in the family’s life when her mom had been fighting the battle. She had been really sick from the chemotherapy, and my mom had made casseroles and stuff that they could freeze to make it easier for them. She had even hired a cleaning service to go over the house when Kya's mom was in hospital so that when she came home, she didn’t have to worry about anything. The day we had heard that her tests were clear was such a relief. It had been difficult for me to comfort Kya because I really hadn’t understood what she was going through. I had tried to just be there for her if she needed to talk. That was really all I could do at the time.

  “I’m sure the tests will be all clear,” Ryan said. “She’s looking so healthy.”

  I thought about how unfair it was that I had taken my own healthy body and made it unhealthy through my own actions, while here was this woman fighting to keep herself alive through a disease that was no fault of her own and certainly not something that she could control.

  While Kya stressed about really serious stuff, I was nervous about a cheese string, and the ridiculousness did not escape me.

  My rational brain told me that it was totally fine to eat the cheese string. Cheese was a good source of calcium, potassium, and other minerals and macronutrients. My other voice, the ‘it’ that Theresa had made me identify in our first session, told me otherwise. It was just extra calories that I didn’t need. I wasn’t going to eat it, I decided.

  Having finished my peanuts and the other half of my sandwich, I made the decision and rolled up the brown paper bag like I was done, placing my hands over it in my lap.

  Ryan and Kya looked at each other. I knew that look by now. It had been cast between so many people around me since my eating disorder became known that it had almost become a natural reaction for people. At times it irritated me, but I knew that it was not them trying to control me, it was them trying to give me the help I had asked for in the best way they knew how. Just like me, everyone else was muddling through this for the first time. Everyone was just doing their best.

  “All done?” Ryan asked, and I knew he wasn’t asking if I was finished eating. He was asking if I had finished everything in the bag, regardless of whether I felt like I was finished or not. Those two things had become quite distinct in the last few weeks. Me feeling like I was full or didn’t want to eat any more no longer equated to me being finished. I was only finished when all the food was gone. The bag with the cheese string in it felt like it was on fire in my hands, but the lie came so easily.

  “Yep,” I said brightly, “all done. Sandwich, yogurt, and peanuts.” I counted the items off on my fingers as though naming the items somehow helped validate their finality.

  The fourth finger, the cheese string finger, twitched. I expected Ryan to reach his hand out for the bag to check, and I was preparing to argue with him. If I needed to feign anger to get out of my lie, then that was what I needed to do.

  Instead, he got up and Kya followed. They both dumped their lunch packets into the bin, and Ryan turned to me. “We’ve been doing this for long enough, I think. I trust you to be doing what you need to do to get better.”

  Old, familiar guilt washed over me, paired with utter relief that I hadn't had to eat the cheese string. I tossed the crumpled-up bag in the garbage and set out to walk next to Kya and Ryan back to class. I felt both victorious and like an utter failure all at once. Would I really ruin all the progress I had made over a cheese string?

  When I walked past the garbage later on that day, I had a crazy thought—one that was even crazier than many of the thoughts I had conjured recently. I wondered if I should take the bag out and throw it away somewhere else in case Ryan came back to check. I forced myself to carry on walking. That was just ridiculous. Ryan was not going to go digging in the garbage can to catch me in a lie. He was too kind and trusting for that, and I had just proved that I wasn’t worthy of his trust.

  I had just taken all of his concern and care for me, and all the effort he had put into trying to help me, and tossed it in the trash.

  Later that day, I sat on my bed in my room, obsessing over the cheese string. I felt like I had let everyone down by not eating the stupid cheese string and lying about it on top of it. Probably most importantly, I had let myself down by listening to my anorexia.

  I am anorexic. I have an eating disorder. I need help.

  I repeated the mantra that Theresa had taught me. It wasn’t an affirmation of my disorder so much as a way for me to acknowledge that I had a problem and that I was fighting a battle with an invisible opponent. The mantra brought the opponent to life so that I could visualize it.

  For all the good that had done me that afternoon under the oak tree at lunch. Sometimes it was easy to acknowledge my problems and push to overcome them, and sometimes it was far too easy to let the anorexia win.

  I wondered what Theresa would say if I was sitting in front of her telling her about this now. She had become the benchmark by which I measured my emotional progress. My physical progress could be measured on a scale, but what went on inside my head was not so easy to gauge. She was my normal-o-meter, I thought, laughing to myself—the person that could tell me in no uncertain terms whether what I was feeling was just part of the journey or something to be concerned about.

  When I had expressed similar concerns about my failures in recent sessions, she had been so kind about it. I had expected her to be angry with me and berate me for letting everyone down and wasting her time and my own, but she hadn’t.

  “Abby, you are only human, just like everyone else. A work in progress, remember?” She motioned to the ha
nd-painted collage that stretched around the room.” Every time I sat in her office, a few more sketches had been added, and I wondered if I would still be seeing her when it was complete. “You can cut yourself some slack sometimes with the small stuff. If you make a mistake and give in to the disorder, it’s not the end of the world. Just make sure you don’t give in completely and get back on the horse.”

  Her words echoed in my ears as I sat in my room fretting about that discarded cheese string.

  Would this count as a small mistake? It was just a cheese string, after all, and the effect on me physically was negligible, but that wasn’t what bothered me. What really got to me was the lie behind the cheese string. I had looked this friend of mine, who had probably literally saved my life, in the eye, and lied—again.

  I had done exactly what I had promised not to do that day on the curb. Ryan had given up a lot of his time and emotional capacity to help me overcome this thing, and I had dropped the ball over a damn cheese string. If I could do it all again, I would just eat it. If do-overs were allowed, I would rectify more than just the cheese string. I never would have started this stupid personal challenge to lose weight in the first place. Weight was not all I had lost, and that was really what hurt me.

  I knew in my heart that Ryan would forgive me, and that if I told Theresa, she would tell me not to be too hard on myself. So, could I forgive myself? Could I accept that it really wasn’t that bad? I had lied to Ryan, but he knew that I was a work in progress, and as long as I didn’t do it again, I could move past this.

  I just needed to make sure that tomorrow, and all the tomorrows after that, I didn’t give in to my anorexia again. I needed to make sure that I was stronger and tougher than it was, and be that person every day.

  15

  The next time Ryan and I walked home alone together, the weather was significantly cooler and I wasn’t wearing an enormous jacket. That felt like a small win. I had started to measure my progress in small wins versus big achievements. I had not gotten into this position overnight, and I knew that my recovery would not be that quick either.