You blurt it out: “Jae asked me if you’ve done it before and I told her I didn’t know.”
He kind of smiles sideways. It’s really cute but you can’t tell if it’s an answer. You don’t know if it means yes, he’s a virgin, or no, he’s not a virgin.
He takes the ice cream out of your hand and puts it on the counter next to you. He leans into you and starts kissing you. His lips are cold and he tastes like Reese’s peanut butter cups. He puts his hand behind your neck and pulls you closer. You kiss for a while, and you get that feeling in your low abdomen where everything goes empty and swoops at the same time, that feeling like you need to be filled up. You don’t know if you want to stop at just kissing.
After a while, he pulls away and looks into your eyes, his hand still on the back of your neck. You’re glad you’re not standing because your knees are weak.
“What were we talking about?” you finally say.
“If I’ve done it or not,” he says.
“Yeah, that,” you say.
“Here’s the truth,” he says.
“Okay?” You bite your lower lip, unsure of what you want the truth to be.
“I’ve had girlfriends, and I’ve done some stuff. But not that. There hasn’t been anyone I’ve wanted to get close enough to. Yet.”
He kisses you again, then picks up the ice cream and feeds you a bite of it. You don’t feel the monster anywhere inside you.
Ben doesn’t need to ask you the same question. Because you’re sure he knows the answer.
18
The monster’s been quiet, but he’s there, lurking still. Lately though, he’s been hiding in a dark corner, and you know it’s because things have been pretty great with Ben. Actually if you were to describe what’s happening with Ben, it would be way more than “pretty great.” You’ve never felt this way about anyone.
Alex had been your first boyfriend, and now that you have Ben, you know that Alex meant nothing and only caused you pain. You don’t want to give Alex the credit of calling him your first real boyfriend because with Ben you’re discovering what a real boyfriend is. It’s true, Alex was the first boy who paid attention to you, the first boy who wanted to kiss you, but he knew nothing about kissing. He was the first boy who held your hand in public, the first boy who declared your relationship a “relationship” back when Facebook was something. He was the first boy who met you at the movies, who kissed you in the back row in the theater, who made you think you had butterflies in your stomach.
Those weren’t butterflies.
With Ben, you have butterflies. A flurry of them.
Now that you are experiencing what it’s like to spend time with a boy who really gets you, who wants to be with you for you, you realize that Alex was nothing. And the difference between the way your mind and body worked then and now is worlds apart.
And the fact remains that Alex was also the boy who didn’t understand that your mind worked differently when it came to eating, and thinking about food, and being around food. And while you can’t completely fault him for that—because you weren’t capable of explaining yourself or your problems to a fifteen-year-old boy—he made a pretty big mess of your life in the aftermath.
And while the monster’s quiet now, you know he’s there still, gnawing. Maybe he’s sitting in the corner of your mind, rocking in a tiny chair, whittling away at you, like you’re a piece of wood he’s been carving at, trying to create something new, something that he wants to own. Yet somehow you’re fighting it. Because if you’re not fighting it, he would have won by now, right?
The gnawing: you try to ignore it. You’re trying really hard. You’re embracing what you’re learning at Healthy Foundations. You’re trying coping skills. Using them at home. With your parents, with Todd. Even though Todd treats you like you don’t exist. You’re hoping that one-on-one therapy with Shayna and group therapy will be the monster’s demise.
You eat salad at another family dinner. Your mom glows and encourages you.
“Honey, that’s wonderful. I’m so proud of you!” she says when you place a piece of lettuce in your mouth. You chew it and imagine you’re chewing grass. Then you stab a crouton and eat that.
“Look, Mom,” Todd says, “I took a bite of my lettuce too!”
You glare at him.
Your dad pierces his ham, rubs it into the potatoes, and shoves it into his mouth. Then he corrals some peas and wrangles those into his mouth too. You imagine all of that in his gut soon, churning away, mixing together, and the image is too much for you to take. Thinking about the colors and the textures of the food, and the smell of it all. But you push the gnawing monster back into the corner and you take a long sip of your ice water.
Cope.
Cope.
Cope.
Shayna is teaching you at therapy.
And even though you’ve only had group twice, you feel there was a crack in the surface with the girls last week, and they may be able to help you. Their eating disorders are different from yours, but the ways to cope are the same. They’ve all been in therapy longer than you have and you can learn from them if you give them a chance.
You smile at your mom. You really want to please her. She does mean the world to you. You know she’s trying to help you.
Your dad finishes swallowing the chum in his mouth, and he speaks about something other than football for once.
“You kids ready for school to start?”
Not what you wanted him to talk about. But you guess it’s a small attempt at something other than football.
“I can’t believe I have a junior and a senior in high school.” Your mom is too wistful.
Todd actually looks at you and rolls his eyes. You smile at him. It is a bonding moment the two of you haven’t had in years. You are encouraged to take another bite of your salad. You chew. You stab a raw baby carrot and put that in your mouth. You’ve never been afraid of raw carrots. You’re not sure why. Maybe it’s the crunch they make when you put one between your teeth, or maybe it’s the sweet tang of orange crisp you taste when you bite into one. But you’ve never feared carrots. Carrots are safe.
Your mom sips her wine. Your dad plows through some more ham chum. Todd starts talking about a hot chick he thinks he might want to “hook up” with this year.
“Todd!” your mother says, glaring at him. “Don’t talk like that!”
Todd puts one earbud in his left ear, and you’re pretty sure he’s listening to some new rap artist. Your mom gets up and pours another glass of wine and your dad asks for more potatoes. This is the most normal family dinner you’ve experienced in like forever, and you don’t know what’s happening here, but it’s really weird.
You might kind of like it.
Is this what it’s like to cope?
Is this how to kill the monster?
“Does anyone want to go get froyo after dinner?” your dad asks.
19
When Alex broke up with you, the monster made you stop eating. It was spring of sophomore year and you thought your world was over. Alex didn’t understand how you couldn’t eat in front of other people and you couldn’t explain it to him. He wanted to go out with friends, you didn’t want to be with other people. He got tired of you, of how you were. He didn’t get it.
In the beginning with Alex, you thought everything was perfect. You held hands and kissed. You hung out at your locker. You texted all the time. You went to basketball games and movies—perfectly fine things to do that didn’t involve unsafe foods. Normal stuff you’re supposed to do when you get your first boyfriend.
Then the monster interrupted. He made you turn quiet. You couldn’t explain to Alex why being at social events with food made you anxious. How you couldn’t really eat much of anything, and how thinking about food made you sick sometimes, and how even, if you were in the wrong frame of mind, watching other people eat a hamburger could make your own stomach churn. Those kinds of things couldn’t be explained, especially to a teenage boy whose
second favorite thing to do was eat.
And so you started shutting down, shutting him out. You knew he liked you a lot. He really did. In the beginning, he liked everything about you. He told you that you were pretty. He told you that you were funny and nice. That he thought about you at night before he fell asleep. He told you so many great things. Things that a girl wanted to hear from a boy she really liked. You liked feeling important, and special, and like you meant something to somebody other than the monster.
Alex started to not understand. The way you were. Of course, you could go places with him. You could also manage to sometimes watch him eat a double cheeseburger with all that stuff on it—bacon and tomatoes and onions—and sometimes, if you could push the monster down far enough, you could stop your stomach from churning. And you could eat some French fries with him and pretend that everything was okay.
After a while, Alex felt like you weren’t into him anymore. That’s what he told you when he broke up with you—he felt like you weren’t “into it, into him” any longer, which was the furthest thing from the truth. It wasn’t that you weren’t into him. That hadn’t been it at all. It had been the monster the whole time, controlling everything you felt, and everything you did and wanted to do. It had been the monster that told you that you couldn’t be normal around Alex, that you didn’t know how to act normal, so it had only been a matter of time until he discovered this and got tired of you.
And, of course, as with anything in high school, everyone knew everyone’s business, so everyone knew Alex dumped you. And although he broke up with you in the nicest possible way—and did it in person and not with a text—you still felt the hurt all the way through to your heart. Because after all, you thought you were in love with Alex.
And you stopped eating.
For five days.
On the fifth day, you fainted in Math class.
The rumors started.
This is what they said:
Alex broke up with her because she got pregnant.
She fainted and lost the baby.
She got an STD from someone so Alex broke up with her.
She’s anorexic.
She cheated on him.
She’s a lesbian.
They were all over the place, the things that were said about you.
Because not only did everyone see you faint in Math class, but everyone saw the ambulance that rushed you to the ER.
Your parents met the ambulance at the hospital.
The doctor put you in a room, gave you fluids through an IV, and you lay there, thinking if only you ate, things would be better. You would be better. You would have Alex back, you would have a life back.
You felt the monster cackling inside.
When the doctor came in and asked you what happened, you answered, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he asked you.
“I fainted?” you said.
Your mom said, “I don’t think she’s been eating enough.”
The doctor asked if you’d been eating, and you said, “My boyfriend just broke up with me so maybe I haven’t been eating much.”
He asked you a bunch of questions about your diet, and your mom answered them, saying that you drank milk and ate yogurt and you ate peanut butter but no meat. And that you also ate apples and carrots and sometimes salads. A nurse drew blood, and the doctor said you were a little low on potassium and iron, suggested you take a daily multivitamin, told your parents your body weight was perfect for your height and age.
Perfect.
There it was again. That word.
The monster inside laughed.
See, you’re perfect.
Your parents sat with you while you were rehydrated and they pumped potassium through your veins. Your mom and dad thought you had fainted because you were depressed over the breakup. They had no idea you had not eaten for five days. In your mind, this was the monster punishing you, starving you, making you hurt. You deserved to feel the emotional and physical pain of your first real breakup.
You took the rest of the week off from school, but when you went back, the rumors were still swirling. People looked at you differently, whispered about you. Alex, who had said he wanted to “still be friends,” avoided your glances. You felt alienated. Alone. Alone with the monster.
Jae stood up for you as best as she could, and by the end of the year there was a girl who actually did get pregnant, one of the girls with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. The rumor was she got pregnant by someone she met online, so her news was bigger and more rumorworthy than what you had gone through, and kids stopped talking about you.
But while they stopped talking about you, it wasn’t like they forgot about you, and you aren’t exactly looking forward to school starting next week.
School with the monster.
20
You stop taking your little yellow pills. You decide you don’t need them anymore because you’re happy. You’re finding ways to be happy and Ben is a part of this new feeling.
You started taking the pills after Alex. You were in a haze, going through the motions, barely doing what you could to get through the days to make it to the end of the school year, just to get to summer. If you could only get to summer. Make it to the last day of school.
Thank God for your mom then. She knew there was something more going on after Alex. While things were never right with the way you ate—there was always a push and pull with that—after you ended up in the hospital, your mom knew you weren’t well and took you to your pediatrician.
“She’s depressed. She’s more than depressed. She’s not functioning.”
You sat on the white crinkly paper in your pediatrician’s office, feeling like you were four years old, listening as your mother talked about you as if you weren’t there. Your hair stringy and covering your face, because you didn’t want to look at anyone, you didn’t want to see anyone, you didn’t want anyone to see you. You wanted to be invisible. The monster wanted you to be invisible. The monster wanted you dead.
Between your mother and your doctor, they decided you were severely depressed and that’s when the little yellow pills became a part of your morning ritual. The pills got you out of bed. They got you into the shower in the morning. They made you wash your hair. They made you eat occasionally even if it was just half a piece of dry toast at your mother’s insistence, or two pieces of apple at dinner.
The little yellow pills got you through the rumors at school. They got you through the stares from the girls in the halls who normally wouldn’t look your way. They got you through Alex walking past your locker and avoiding your glance. They got you through final exams. They got you through the end of sophomore year.
And now, you have stopped taking the pills. You’re trading Ben for the pills. At first, you simply forgot for a couple of days, then you realized you didn’t feel much different, and that you felt good even though you hadn’t taken your pills. So you skipped them. And you’re still feeling moments of happiness more often than not. Despite the monster. You think the monster may be dying. You haven’t heard much from him lately. Maybe you’re learning how to quiet him. Maybe he’ll go away. Through therapy, although you know you haven’t been in therapy all that long. But. You know you’re trying.
Shayna is going to help you learn how to like food and you’re starting to trust her and the process. One of the things she plans to do is reintroduce food to you through four of your five senses: through touch, sight, smell, and then, finally, taste. You’d be lying if you said you weren’t scared about this part of therapy. It’s food. And it’s very unfamiliar to you.
But you want to be able to enjoy it someday. When you are older, you want to go to functions like weddings, parties, and business meetings and not feel socially awkward. You want to walk to the buffet table and thoughtfully consider the foods and select things that look delicious and pretty—foods that you know are healthy and that will taste good. You want your stomach to growl in an
ticipation of a good meal, and you want to feel that fullness that others describe after they’ve had Thanksgiving dinner, when they pop open their top button, thankful for a home-cooked meal.
You’ve never felt that way. You want to appreciate food. You do. You just don’t know how. And you so badly want to learn.
21
It’s Ben’s birthday and he’s decided he wants to spend the evening with you and that you’re going to meet his family later in the weekend. This is a huge deal because although you knew it was his birthday you hadn’t talked about doing anything together.
“We’re going out tonight, you and me, okay?” he says when he calls you that morning.
“What about your family?”
“Sunday afternoon we’ll go to my house and celebrate. You’ll get to meet everyone, okay? I want to see you tonight,” he says.
You get butterflies in your stomach when he tells you again that he only wants to spend his birthday with you. When you ask where he wants to go he says he’d like to go to a movie and dinner.
You and Jae had gone shopping earlier in the week to find a present for Ben and you finally decided on something simple: movie tickets, and a gift card to Nike. Then as a joke, at the bookstore you bought him a Fault in Our Stars key chain.
“He’ll either love it or hate it,” you told Jae.
“Well, then, you’ll know how he feels about you when you see his reaction to the key chain,” Jae said.
“That’s true,” you said, laughing.
But now you think that since he wants to spend his birthday with you, it’s a pretty good sign that things are going very well.
When you tell your mom you’re going out with Ben, she gives you a sideways glance and says, “You’re seeing a lot of him.”
“I guess so,” you answer her.
“Don’t you think you should be more focused on therapy and working through your other problems? And not spending so much time with him?”
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