by Meg Haston
“So, um . . .” CB sits up. Her stomach ripples under her dress, making her look like a girl Buddha statue. Curly Blonde Buddha. I almost laugh. “What are yours about?”
“My what?”
“Your flashba—memories.”
“You’re not serious.” I would never tell her about the memory of the first time, or about Josh or Eden or seminar or my mother.
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. It’s just that sometimes it helps me to say things out loud. And you haven’t really said much since you got here.”
I lie down again and close my eyes against the buzzing fluorescent light and her voice.
On the other side of the room, the bed creaks. “You’re lucky. It’s like nothing gets to you. I have all this stuff trapped inside, and some days I think if I don’t get it out as fast I can . . .” She heaves a sigh. “It’s like a parasite or something. I don’t know.”
I do. And I feel the same way. Like my own memories could devour me.
“And the thing is, since my family looks so perfect from the outside, people just assume . . .” Her voice wavers.
I yawn and crack my neck. I need to focus on a new plan, a way to lose weight without alarming Shrink or the rest of my team. No distractions.
“Sorry. Never mind. You’re trying to get to sleep.” The bed creaks again, and I hear her pad across the carpet. With the click of the light switch, the room plunges into twilight. I keep on the small clip lamp attached to the built-in shelves. Here the dark is too dark. I flip onto my side and face the painted cinder block wall.
“Oh,” she whispers. “Before you go to sleep, do you think you could get my zipper? This one always gets stuck.”
I roll my eyes at the ceiling. “Fine.”
She perches on the edge of my bed, back to me. I cringe at the fleshy curves beneath the thin cotton.
“Here.” She scoops the mass of thick blond curls off her back and whips them into a twist so I can reach the zipper. I pinch the cold metal between my fingers and drag it down. The gasp escapes my throat before I can stop it.
Trailing from her hairline to the space between her shoulder blades is a shower of small, perfectly circular scars. Some are purple, some red, and some raised, thick, and white. It looks like someone has taken a hole punch to her, like she’s nothing more than a cheap paper doll. Horrified, I reach out to touch one. It’s callous beneath my finger.
“Oh. God.” She jerks away, reaching for the zipper as she escapes to her side of the room. “Sorry. I didn’t think—”
“No! It’s okay! I . . . what happened to you?” I dig my nails into the mattress, suddenly feeling like I might puke. What am I supposed to do? Go over there? Leave her alone? Call somebody? Shrink, maybe. There’s a phone in the hall, I remember.
“Nothing,” she says quickly. Her eyes are wide with concern, like she’s more worried about me than the meteor shower of scar tissue tumbling down her spine. “Nothing new, anyway. I’ve had these.” And then, as if she’s read my mind, “Staff knows already. Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about it?” I rub my face with my hands. My entire body is tensed. “But—”
“Seriously, Stevie.” She lets out a hard-edged laugh. “Would you just lie down? You’re freaking me out.”
I force a laugh, too, but it feels wrong, like I’m the one who put those scars there. Even though I didn’t. And she didn’t, either. There’s no way she could have reached those places on her body.
“Turn the light out? I can’t sleep with that thing on.” She climbs into bed, still clothed, and buries herself beneath the covers.
I have the sudden urge to climb in with her, to stroke her hair the way Josh used to do for me when I had a nightmare. But that would be weird. So I reach up and turn off the lamp, even though my mind is reeling with questions, and there’s this scream churning inside of me like wind, gathering speed.
“It’s not, you know,” I say into the dark, “normal.” I don’t say it to make her feel bad. I just say it so she knows it’s not okay.
“Yeah.” Her voice is a whimper, but she seems to understand. “I know.”
“You can tell me if you want,” I say to the ceiling, after several minutes have passed. My own marred flesh is aching, and I knead the scar with my fingertips. It does nothing to ease the throbbing.
Across the room, she says nothing. There is only the easy, rhythmic breathing of her sleep. In and out, in and out, like cool water lapping against a rocky shore.
day seven
Thursday, July 10, 4:45 A.M.
I lie motionless on top of the covers for hours, my mind filled up to the very edges, spilling over with the knowing of something I’m desperate to unknow. I sync my breathing with Ashley’s. In, out. In, out. In, out. A small and pointless act of solidarity. Every hour, a faceless nurse dips into the room for bed checks. She reduces us to numbers. One, two.
My eyes are tethered to the ceiling, wide and unblinking. I wonder what kind of animal could be capable of that kind of hurt. Her father, maybe. A stock image of a well-dressed asshole flashes through my mind. He sits in a mahogany-paneled office, sipping antique scotch meant for a special occasion that he knows will never come. At the end of his cigarette, a burning pinpoint of fire.
In, out.
Or maybe it was the mother. A woman who looks like Ashley but older, with slightly crepe skin and a thickness around her middle, where she has harbored years of resentment. She stands in the doorway while Ashley sleeps, stalking her prey, exhaling silvery breaths. Waiting for the right time.
In, out.
After the sixth bed check, I can’t stand it anymore. I jump out of bed and stretch out on the floor. The cement is cold beneath a paper-thin layer of dusty carpet. I take a measured breath and press my hips into the floor. Lift my right leg slowly, then lower it to the ground. The tightness in my chest dissolves like foam. Next, the left leg. With each exhale, my nearly empty stomach collapses against my backbone. Nearly empty. There was the half carton of yogurt this morning and the Gatorade water. Tomorrow will be better.
My thighs are starting to burn, the beginning sparks of an absolving fire. Forgive me, brother, for I have sinned. But the exercises don’t work the way they should. Soon, the thoughts start to creep in again. Tomorrow can’t be better. They’ll tube feed you before they let you get any closer to Josh. I pick up speed, doubling the reps on each side. If they skewer you with a tube, pump calories into your gut, you’ll lose everything. And if you start to gain on your own, it’s over. There is no way out. You are trapped. A caged animal.
A soft knock brushes against the door, and I jerk upright.
“Who’s there?” I gasp into the dark. My skin is clammy. I think I might puke. The thought soothes me.
“It’s just me.” The door opens a crack and Cate is standing in the narrow sliver of light. A perfect cartoon stick figure, all spindly lines and protruding joints. Faded pink pajama pants hang from two perfectly jutting hipbones.
“What—are you exercising?” Cate whispers the last word like she is speaking some dirty, delicious sin she can almost remember.
“I can’t sleep.” I jerk my head toward Ashley, but she doesn’t move. In, out.
“Oh.” Cate’s outline bobs and sways. She is dying to lie down next me, to give in just this once. “You have a call. On the hall phone.”
My throat goes dry, but I don’t move. “I didn’t hear it ring.”
“It’s from Paris.” Her voice shudders with childlike excitement. “Who do you know in Paris?”
“Nobody,” I say quickly. My heart is hammering in my chest. I hate my body for reacting at all, for betraying me this way. Abs tensed, I lower myself to the floor in degrees and resume my exercises. Let her watch. She’s too jealous, too weak to tell on me.
She licks her flaky lips. “But . . . what do you want me to tell—”
“Whatever. Hang up. I don’t care.” As I deepen the leg lifts, I hear her moving down the
hall, then a muffled apology before she appears in the doorway again.
“They said they’d call back later.” Her plastic tube glints in the hall light, a phantom limb.
“How does that thing work?” Seamlessly, I shift to abs.
“What thing?”
“The tube. Did you get it as soon as you got here?”
“Right after my treatment team meeting, yeah.” She fiddles with the tie on her pajama pants. “I passed out on the plane on the way here, so I guess they were worried.”
I won’t reward that kind of arrogance with a response.
“Anyway, at night they hook it up to this machine next to my bed. When they turn it on, this brown liquid stuff goes through the tube and into my stomach. I unhook it in the morning.”
“Gross.”
“I try not to think about it.”
On my last set of crunches, I lift myself to a seated position and hug my knees. “Did it hurt when they put it in?”
“Yeah. You have to lie down on a table while the nurses hold you down and stick it in. They try to get it over with as fast as they can, but sometimes they mess up and have to start over.” Her eyes flicker across the room and settle on Curly Blonde’s shape beneath the covers. “How can she sleep like that? I wake up every five minutes in this place.”
I shrug and squeeze my knees tighter. It’s weird, but all of a sudden I want to tell her about Ashley’s scars. To describe them in detail—how they looked like snaps on a flesh straitjacket—and not because I want to process it or I want Cate to normalize what I’m feeling (recovery-speak at its finest! I’m learning!) but because it isn’t fair. I have enough inside me: Josh and Eden and the Anniversary and my own vanishing act. I shouldn’t have to hold this, too.
Ashley slurs in her sleep.
“It’s so funny how she brought all those stuffed animals from home,” Cate murmurs.
“So? Maybe they make her feel better,” I snap. “Maybe they help her sleep.”
Cate’s eyes widen. “I didn’t mean—I have stuffed animals at home, too. And a blanket I’ve had since I was five. Binky? Stupid, I know.”
I watch Ashley’s body rise and fall.
“And they gave me a rubber duck to hold when they were putting the tube in.”
I go back to my exercises until Cate mumbles something about weight and vitals, then shuffles down the hallway. Then I get up and wander to Ashley’s side of the room. She’s got the stuffed dog and the blue bear in a headlock. The one-eared rabbit is sprawled at an unnatural angle in a nest of blond curls, like it got sick and tired of feeling sick and tired and decided to end it all with a spectacular swan dive. I reach for it. The animal has lost most of its stuffing, but it’s warm and soft and smells like lavender detergent.
Ashley’s mouth is open, her breath like white noise. I stand there for a while, holding the rabbit by its nubby broken neck. Outside, colorless light is starting to rise over the dust. I sink next to the bed and brush her curls from her hot cheek. I stay next to her, watching the tiny sleep twitches of her cheeks and mouth. I let her rest, because it’s the most I can do for her. For girls like us, escape from consciousness is our only reprieve.
day seven
Thursday, July 10, 12:47 P.M.
AFTER lunch the next day, the air in the villa feels tight, like late afternoon at home before a summer storm splits the sky. I watch Teagan stand sideways in front of the double doors, glaring at her thick rectangle reflection. At one of the round tables, Ashley snaps through the pages of a generic princess coloring book like she’s pissed at their happily ever after. I curl into a ball on the couch, trying to blink away the memory of Ashley’s scars. All of the girls are waiting. Some pretend not to be.
“Ooh! He’s coming!” Cate squeals from the hall, and a girl herd rushes the nurses’ station. The mail guy barely has the space to dump his battered plastic bin of letters before the girls start clawing. It’s a feeding frenzy: countless jaws unhinged, starved for love and words. It reminds me of this special on killer whales I watched with Josh two nights before I killed him. When an intelligent animal is held in captivity for too long, terrible things can happen. It can get depressed, or even violent. When an animal’s world shrinks, the smallest nothings become the biggest somethings. It lives sicker and dies sooner. It gives up before its time.
“Stevie? Mail!” The male nurse is probably supposed to make me come to him, but he’s one of the nicer ones. So he holds the red envelope like a Frisbee and when I nod from my spot on the couch, he arcs it over the heads between us. I catch it and toss it on the coffee table without looking. I have five more just like it in my underwear drawer. All unopened. “Oh. And one more today.” He sends a second envelope sailing.
“Huh?” I lift my hand just in time to grab it. The envelope is thick and gold. I know this paper. The realization blows through my body like hot desert wind: Eden. Without thinking, I lift the envelope to my nose and breathe her in. The sweet smell sends shudders through me. I feel sick and relieved.
“Ashley.” The nurse holds up enough postcards to start a collection.
A slow day for Ashley is three postcards, each one glossy with too-blue water and pink cake-frosting script: Saint-Tropez! Majorca! She never looks at her mail, either.
“Thanks, Jeff. I’ll get them later.” Ashley looks up from her princess. The hair is an angry wax red. I wonder if I should say something about last night. But rather than say the wrong thing, I say nothing.
“You’re lucky to have a dad who writes you.” Teagan slumps on the couch next to me, nodding morosely at the red envelope on the table. “Don’t you want to read it?”
“Not really.” Eden’s letter is heavy in my hand. I wish everyone else would disappear. Leave me to read her in peace.
“Okay, ladies!” Shrink announces from the nurses’ station. “If you have group on your schedule, meet me at the house! Otherwise, you’ll be with Kyle in the villa.”
I pull my folded schedule from the back pocket of my jeans. Group. Maybe I’ll have time to sneak a sentence or two, while one of the other girls unravels some knotted childhood revelation. Or maybe I should wait to burrow beneath the light of the clip lamp in Cottage Three tonight. Gather up the covers and her words and arrange them just so in soft tufts around me before I sleep. Deep in my gut is the same tugging I feel just before a binge. I want her words to fill me up and I’m scared that they won’t be enough when I’m done.
A group of girls follows Shrink down the hall. Ashley trails behind, alone. Ashley never walks alone.
“Hey.” I jump up at the last second, a half step behind her. “Did you, uh, sleep okay?” I slip the letters into my back pocket as we hop down the stairs, two at a time.
“Oh. Hey.” She fixes her gaze in front of her, on Teagan’s blistered heels. “I’m—if last night was weird for you—sorry. I just forget that those scars are even there sometimes.”
“No. I get it.” There were plenty of mornings after my mother left when I would wake up and my first thoughts would be totally normal, like, It feels like Friday or Quixotic. I should have played the word quixotic, and then I would roll onto my side and think, Oh. I don’t have a mother. It’s the one good thing my brain has ever done for me: kept little secrets to give me a second to breathe.
“Do you want to, like, talk about it?” I hold my breath.
“Nah. It’s okay. Thanks, though.”
We walk in silence the rest of the way, stepping in the shadowy prints of the girls before us. They lead through the front door. Once I cross into the foyer, I know: Group is a trap.
There are too many smells at once. Melted butter, slick dark chocolate, and powdered sugar. Thick, wet grease. Salt and the nuttiness of toasting bread. The scents try to overtake me, to drag me back to Le Crâpeau’s kitchen or the front seat of Dad’s Buick or Eden’s bathroom. I can’t go back there. I open my eyes wide, force myself to take in the details.
The kitchen here is somehow bright and dingy at th
e same time. Fluorescent bulbs fling light over a room of “not quite” colors: ugly light wood cabinets that aren’t brown or cream. Laminate countertops that aren’t white or yellow. Linoleum floor squares that might have started out eggshell but now have a faint muddy tinge. On the other side of the counter, there’s a long, oval-shaped table.
Ms. Dalton, the white-haired dietician from my treatment team meeting, stands behind the counter. Behind the jar of peanut butter and the sagging tube of cookie dough. Behind the boxes of sugary cereal and graham crackers and bloated cheese puffs. Behind the brown bag seeping with grease, like creeping night shadows on a bedroom wall.
What the hell? “Is this a fucking joke?” I ask.
“Stevie. Please be mindful of your language.” Shrink stands next to the dietician. “Come on in, girls. Welcome to group.”
The rest take their places on the other side of the counter: Teagan, Jenna the bobby pin dealer, and countless faceless others. They look like dumb, glaze-eyed animals that don’t realize they are heading for slaughter.
“Seriously,” I hiss in Ashley’s ear. “What. Is this?”
“BG,” she whispers back. “Bulimia group.”
“But I’m not—I think my schedule is wrong,” I say loudly. “Wait. Where’s Cate?” My eyes snap across the room, frantic. “Shouldn’t this be a cottage thing?” I should be nicer to Cate, I think. Since we’re more alike than anybody else here.
“You okay?” Ashley rests her hand on my arm.
On my other side, Teagan says, “It’ll be alright,” or some other lie.
“So as you’ve probably guessed by now,” Shrink says, “today’s group will be a binge experiential.”
I picture a row of girls bent over toilets, Shrink rubbing each girl’s back as she moves down the line, correcting form and holding back hair.
“Some of you have experienced this group before,” she continues.
Jenna moos her agreement, flicking the yellow plastic on her wrist.
“And for some of you, this is your first time.”
I clear my throat.