What I Lost

by Alexandra Ballard

At midnight, Lexi was at it again, doing burpees on the floor next to her bed. Boom-cha-boom-thump. Her panting filled up the room, and even when I whispered, “Lexi, please stop,” she didn’t. It was like she was in a trance or something. I counted along in my head, the way other people might count sheep. I was up to seventy-five when the bedroom door flew open.

  “WHAT are you doing?” The night nurse entered our room, a silhouette in the doorframe. I didn’t recognize her.

  “I—” Lexi, wet with sweat, struggled to her feet beside me. She panted and couldn’t talk.

  “Never mind. I saw what you were doing. Come with me, young lady.”

  Lexi stumbled. The nurse came over and roughly grabbed her arm.

  “Where are you taking her?” I asked, afraid.

  But I knew. So did Lexi.

  The next morning on my way to weights and vitals I found her. She was in the fishbowl, a single bedroom in the middle of the unit with a wall of windows so nurses could keep an eye on her at all times. It was the closest thing Wallingfield had to a hospital room. Lexi was asleep, curled up in a sad little ball in her knitting-dog PJs. I got a lump in my throat just looking at her. I raised my hand to knock on the window and wake her up, like I always did, for weights and vitals, but I stopped myself. She needed her rest. And to be honest, I didn’t know what to say.

  A few minutes later, when the nurse weighed me, I swear I saw her write down a nine and a four. For a second I completely forgot about Lexi. Had I gained 4 POUNDS?

  In four days?

  Talk about making an already bad morning worse. I could practically feel the fat on my lower back increasing as I tugged on my robe. Miserable, I walked back and climbed under my duvet, which didn’t smell like home at all anymore, and almost wished I’d done burpees with Lexi when I’d had the chance.

  An hour later I stopped by the fishbowl on my way to breakfast. Lexi was sitting cross-legged on the bed, writing in her journal. Her arms looked like chicken wings with the meat chewed off. So did her legs. I shuddered. The curtains were wide open. She could close them only when she was changing, and even then, only for a minute at a time. I felt weird watching her, like I was invading her privacy.

  I wanted to turn and leave, but Lexi saw me before I could. She didn’t smile.

  I stood in the doorway. “Hey.”

  “Hi.” She kept writing, her journal filled with cramped cursive.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine.” She spoke with no inflection.

  “How long do you have to stay in here?”

  She shrugged. “My therapist said I have to sign a contract or go home.”

  “Do you mean Michael?”

  “Yeah. He said I needed to show more dedication to my recovery.” Frowning, she scratched out the last sentence she’d written, pushing on her pen so hard it made a hole in the paper.

  “Oh. Is Michael nice?”

  “He’s okay, I guess. Why?”

  “Nothing really. I’d just wondered, because yesterday, after your meeting with him, you seemed upset.”

  She paused for so long I didn’t think she’d answer. When she did, her voice was soft. “Michael showed me my medical records.”

  “He did? Do they usually do that?” I’d assumed medical records were off-limits, like our weight.

  “I don’t know. I asked him.”

  “What did they say?”

  “I have something called mitral valve prolapse. My heart valve doesn’t close right anymore. Blood can go backward in my heart instead of forward.”

  “Were you born with it?”

  “No. They think anorexia caused it. It’ll probably never go away. They say I’m lucky, that MPS isn’t fatal, but it makes me feel sick sometimes. I get migraines. Sometimes, I’m so dizzy I can’t even stand. And every once in a while my heart gets all fluttery, which freaks me out. I always think I’m dying when that happens.”

  “Oh.” Panic bubbled up in me like acid reflux. Did I have MPS, too? My heart hammered away and felt loud in my ears. How could I never have listened to it before?

  Lexi bent over her journal again. At the far end of the hall, the doors opened for breakfast. “Hey, Lexi, the dining room just opened,” I said. “Come on.” She had to eat. She had to protect her heart.

  “You go on ahead. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I doubted that. “Lexi, please come with me. Maybe you could try to eat just a little?” She didn’t answer. “Lexi, I’ll eat with you. Please?”

  “Okay, Elizabeth,” she said. “Fine.” With great effort she hauled her frail body up off the bed. “But do me a favor.”

  “Sure, what?”

  “Don’t waste your time worrying about me. Be scared for yourself. Really, really scared, because that’s what’s going to make you better.”

  She stared at me for a long second. Then, together, we walked down the hall to the dining room.

  At breakfast Lexi sat with Willa and me, which I took as a good sign. When she looked at her eggs like they were a pile of poop and didn’t even bother to pick up her fork, I took that as a bad one.

  Willa cheered her on. “Come on, Lexi, you can do it!”

  “Yeah! Go for it,” I said. In solidarity I took a big bite of my eggs. They felt like plastic and tasted worse. If they wanted us to eat, you’d think they’d at least make the eggs taste good. I gagged a little. I tried not to let them fall back out of my mouth. I swallowed, somehow, eyes watering. “See?” I said. “Not too hard!”

  “Oh my God, that was terrible,” Willa said. I thought I saw the corner of Lexi’s mouth tug upward.

  Encouraged, I took another bite, this one smaller and easier to manage. “Yum!”

  Even Willa got into it. “Look, I’m taking a sip of my milk now!”

  Lexi pursed her lips together and started to cry. Willa took her hand. I rubbed her shoulder.

  Lexi shook her head. If she didn’t eat, she’d go home. Again. This was her second official attempt at treatment. What if she was one of those girls with eating disorders who never got better? Twenty percent never did. I’d learned that in my old support group. The number hadn’t bothered me much before, but here? Holy crap. These were the kinds of girls they were talking about.

  If you did the math, just fewer than five of the twenty-four girls in this dining room would never, ever get over their eating disorders. And if you wanted to get really morbid, one girl here might even die, since twenty percent of those who never get better do, either from health complications or by suicide.

  I didn’t want to die. Or for Lexi to die, or Willa, or anybody else here.

  “Come on, Lexi,” I said. “You can do this.”

  She took a tiny bite. She swallowed.

  Our response was to holler like fifth graders at a Taylor Swift concert. Even Kay gave a whoop. And that’s how breakfast went. Lexi taking a taste, us cheering. When time was up, Lexi looked like she might puke all over the table, but her plate was empty. And, focused on Lexi, I ended up with an empty plate of my own. And nobody in that entire room had to have an Ensure.

  They let Lexi out of the fishbowl the next morning, and I had a roommate again.

  13

  I didn’t want to admit it, but I was excited for mail call that afternoon. But when we arrived, only one package lay at Nurse Jill’s feet. You could feel the disappointment ripple through the room. Everybody lived for mail call. It really was the highlight of our day.

  The package was a brown cardboard tube covered with Janis Joplin stamps, just like last time. My heart blipped, but I didn’t dare hope. The first package was probably a fluke. A second? Impossible. But then Nurse Jill held it up at boob level and called my name. I had the weird urge to turn to everybody else and apologize for being the lucky one, but I managed to rein it in as I took the tube, clutching the smooth, cool surface against my body. Twenty-four pairs of eyes stared at me.

  “What is that?” Allie asked.

  I shrugged, mumbled something about headin
g to the nurses’ station, and got out of there as fast as I could. I didn’t like the pressure of everybody’s eyes on me, hoping I’d be their excitement for the day.

  Willa followed me, ignoring the jealous glances. “What do you think it is, Elizabeth?” she asked, walking so close behind me that she almost clipped my heels. “Is it from your sec—”

  I cut her off fast. “I don’t know, Willa!” The last thing I needed was for the other girls to hear about Willa’s secret-admirer theory.

  “God, way to be all clique-y,” Coral muttered as I walked by. She said it low, so only I could hear. Typical. If Coral had had an aura, it would have been a big black ring that darkened anything it touched, she was so sour. I didn’t know how the girls in her cohort could stand her, pro-ana celebrity or not.

  “Another package?” Ray asked when I arrived. “Some girls have all the luck!”

  I leaned the tube up against the wall next to his station. That’s when I noticed it didn’t have a return address. Again. I smiled a little.

  He craned his neck out of the nurses’ station to check out my tube. “Looks like I better come around for this one,” he said, walking to my side of the counter. “You want to know what it is?”

  And, like last time, I shook my head.

  He winked. “I get that. Surprises make life better.”

  I turned as he slid something out of the tube, unrolled it, rolled it back up, then slid it back in.

  “All set,” he said. “You’re good. Carry on!”

  When I got to my room, Willa was still on my heels. I closed the door and sat on my bed. Without asking, Willa jumped on, too. I tried not to be annoyed.

  I popped off the end cap and slid out a poster. Against a black background, a terrified-looking kitten clung to a branch. Above the photo were the words HANG IN THERE.

  “It’s so cute!” Willa said.

  “I guess,” I said. “But doesn’t it look like something you’d find on the cover of a third grader’s notebook? And the kitten looks petrified.” I felt sorry for the poor thing. It really did look like it was holding on for dear life.

  “No! Definitely not. I love it.”

  I rolled it back up.

  “Aren’t you going to hang it?” Willa bounced next to me.

  I took a deep breath and summoned my patience. Willa was driving me bonkers. Secretly I thanked the universe for making me an only child. Then I forced myself to smile at her. “Maybe a little later. Hey, pass me the tube, will you?”

  When she lifted it, something rattled. Our eyes met and Willa’s lit up. “Something else is inside!” she said. She dumped out a little plastic capsule, the kind you get from twenty-five-cent gum ball machines. It spun across the carpet and landed at my feet. My stomach dropped. No. It couldn’t be.

  “Ooh, what’s that?” Willa said.

  I knew exactly what it was. A plastic ring with a giant blue plastic gem glued on it fell into my hand. I knew these rings. I had three just like them, two reds and one green. They were all from the twenty-five-cent toy machine at Esterfall House of Pizza. Every time we went there, Charlie would get me one. It was a running joke between us. His friends loved to give him crap for it. They called him the plastic romantic.

  It had to be him. But what did this mean? Did he want to get back together with me?

  If so, that made no sense. He was with Heather now. Or should I say back with Heather, who’d been obsessed with Charlie since middle school. For a while they were together. Then they broke up. Then they were back together. And so on. Even when they weren’t going out, Heather made it clear that Charlie was hers and hers alone, and that she’d do whatever it took to keep it that way. Back in ninth grade, when a new girl named Edith said she liked him, “somebody” (Heather, of course) started a rumor that Edith had breast implants and had gotten a nose job to look more like Katy Perry. It was stupid and obviously not true, but people spread it anyway.

  And last year, when Charlie and Heather were “on a break,” he asked a freshman to the winter formal. “Somebody” spread a rumor that Erin had lice she’d caught in rehab.

  Heather didn’t mess around.

  And then I came along. Charlie told me he’d called Heather after our first date and that she was fine with everything. And she did leave me alone—until the second we broke up. Then she’d gotten me good. But I couldn’t think about that now. I wanted to think about happy things, like the plastic ring on my finger.

  Still, I wondered what she’d do to me. Visions of insults on Instagram and Snapchat ran through my mind. But Charlie was worth it. Even if I pissed off the most vindictive girl in school.

  Hang in there.

  Okay, Charlie, I thought. If you want me to, I’ll try.

  14

  The next morning, right after breakfast, reality hit. So, say Charlie sent the presents. That would be awesome. But it didn’t answer the question: What the hell was I supposed to do about it? Call him? What if I ruined it by reaching out too early? What if he wanted to call me? My fingers itched to pick up the phone, but my gut said to wait. Be sure, it said. See if he sends something else. Wait until you’ve got good news for him. That’s what he’ll want to hear. So I listened to it. I didn’t call.

  Instead, I did something I’d been meaning to do since Margot’s meltdown in the dining room. I knocked on her door. I wasn’t sure why, exactly, I felt the need to reach out to her. Maybe I wanted to distract myself. Maybe I wanted see if she remembered me. Maybe it was because she felt familiar, even if we’d only been six in that ballet class. Whatever it was, I felt bad for her. It wasn’t like we were friends, but we’d known each other once. And I kept thinking about her walking alone into Wallingfield, how awful that must have been.

  The door opened. Or, more precisely, I heard footsteps, saw the handle turn, and watched the door swing open a crack. Margot was already back on her bed. She hadn’t brought sheets from home, so she slept on the same generic white-and-brown bedding there was in the fishbowl. The rest of the room looked just like mine except that her enormous suitcase had seemingly exploded on the second bed. Clothes—mostly black—were everywhere, mixed with toiletries, pens, hairbrushes, and her toothbrush, which was partially hidden on the floor by a running shoe.

  “Thanks for letting me in,” I said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “HELLO?” I said again, louder.

  She took off her headphones. “You’re welcome.”

  “I don’t think we ever officially met. I’m Elizabeth.” This was ridiculous. Why had I thought she’d want to talk to me? Girls like Margot never wanted to talk to me. I was never bad enough, or angry enough, or rebel enough. I studied hard. I didn’t get into trouble. I wasn’t super popular. I did sports, but wasn’t really an athlete. I was, despite my best efforts, a Goody Two-Shoes.

  “I know who you are,” she said. Was it because of ballet? Or because of here? I felt stupid asking, so I didn’t.

  Margot shifted her weight on the bed. The frame squeaked.

  I tried again. “You’re from Esterfall, right?”

  She nodded.

  “Me too.” I hoped this would be when she said, Oh yeah, from ballet, right?

  She said nothing.

  “So, um…” Margot watched me fumble and did nothing to help. Coming here was a mistake. “Did you know we took ballet together when we were six?”

  She squinted at me and said, “Oh, right. I thought you looked familiar.” I didn’t believe her.

  “Yeah. So. I guess I’ll go.” I backed toward the door. “Bye,” I said.

  “Bye.” She put her headphones back on and turned away from me.

  I showed myself out. That’s what I got for trying to be nice.

  Back in my room, I stewed. I had to stop trying to rescue people. It obviously wasn’t working. At least not here.

  At home, though, I had a pretty good track record. If people had a superpower, I guess you could say mine would be helping the wounded birds. In fourth gra
de, when Katrina and I met Priya, she was the new kid, super shy, and had just moved to Esterfall from New Jersey. She was the only Indian girl at our school. For the first two days, no one talked to her. She was invisible. So one day at lunch, when she was sitting alone, I’d invited her to sit with us. Within a week we were best friends.

  When Shay arrived the next year, she befriended us, even though she was loud and flashy and not really our type. But she came up at recess, said, “I’m new. I need to play with you guys, okay?” Totally shocked, we said yes on reflex. In sixth grade her parents got a divorce. Her dad moved out of state and her mom went off the rails, and I talked my parents into letting Shay stay with us until things settled down. “Settling down” in Shay’s world meant that her mom hired an Italian au pair. Which we were sworn to secrecy about, because who in sixth grade still had a nanny?

  And now? When I’d told them I was coming here, Priya had said, “Oh my God. I promise I will call you every day.”

  Shay had nodded along with her. “Me too,” she’d said.

  Well, I’d been here for five days and I hadn’t heard from Shay or Priya once except for that one package, the one Katrina had obviously sent by herself. Junior year is busy, I told myself. If I were home, I wouldn’t have time to call someone at a place like this either. But deep inside, I knew they had time. Of course they did.

  I was still sulking when someone knocked. I opened the door and there was Margot, taking up my whole doorway in her Carhartt overalls and Docs, headphones around her neck.

  “Do you like the Smiths?” she said instead of hello.

  “Sorry?” I had no idea who she was talking about.

  “The band. The Smiths? ‘Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want’?”

  I’d never heard of them. “Uh, yeah. They’re cool,” I lied. “Do you want to come in?”

  She sat on my bed. I sat on the floor.

  “What’s your favorite of theirs? This is mine.” Margot plugged a speaker the size of a playing card into her iPod. The room filled with a guy droning on about his girlfriend being in a coma. I didn’t get it.

  At the end Margot smiled. “Pretty awesome, right?”