a.
There is something you should know about me, before we begin:

I have anorexia nervosa.


      b.
The denial was thick.

Anorexics, I believed, were skinny girls with even skinnier bones, combing their falling-out hair against mirrors where they appear as a sliver of a profiled coin, dying as the air beats them and hating their folded-paper bodies. Anorexics, I thought, had to be girls who achieve your standard perfect grades and are incredibly athletically-gifted, all the while going on zero calories for days at a time. Anorexics were built of disgusted strength, sickened determination, and a muddied line between self-preservation and -sacrifice. Anorexics were withered girls on billboards, stealing the sun from the beads of the sky laid before them, pressing it into their arms, and yet somehow taking no pigment with them.

I was not—and am, I am not, I am not I am not I am not—one of these—one of these—paper-bodied, thin-hearted, shaky and shabby—I couldn't possibly—

And then in late May of 2008, I stumbled onto a pro-ana (pro-anorexia) Web site community, which was full of girls who shared tips on hiding their systematic and rhythmic purges, deftly skipping meals with their families and significant others, and dealing with boyfriends who somehow learned to love their spreading, dying bones and friends who couldn't stand the tripping disease; and they declared, fiercely, that anorexia was a lifestyle, that their denial was nonexistent, and that their barely-two digit BMIs were still not good enough. These girls who were dying to see pronounced collarbones and shoulder blades; these girls who refused to uncurl their fists.

And it hit me, slowly, that they sounded like me—my diet plans, my weight goals, my hidden habits. They were me without the shame, the embarrassment, and the secrets; they were proud of and willing to discuss their cut-ribbon piles of unsubstantial vomit and spit, their five-hour exercise periods, and their two-hundred calories per day.

I pressed my caked-skin hands against my ribcage, blooming from the ridge of my stomach like an internal pair of wings beneath my shirt, and I closed my eyes and shook my head and said, "No, no," over and over again, because I spent eight months telling myself that I was not one of these girls only to find out in a morning before school and therapy that I very much was.

My therapist smiled at me like I was maybe a little girl or a doll that couldn't understand her words, and I hated her for it. I hated her for it until I was in her office and the wind was beating down her sliding-glass window and I started to cry because anorexia has a six-percent average death rate, higher than all other mental disorders, and I told her that I didn't want to die and she said, "Good," and I stopped hating her because it was me and her all alone in a room with all the lights turned on and I was anorexic.

And when I went back to school I waited by the reception desk because Caitlin, who had been absent for two weeks, was coming back for the first time, and she took me aside and said she trusted me and told me she had been in the hospital for attempted suicide. I paused and looked into her face, framed in brown-taffy curls, and I said, "If it makes you feel any better, I'm coming back from therapy," and I didn't want to cry anymore, and we smiled and talked on the way back to the English class we shared, and she told me about her grandparents who cried on the phone and I closed my eyes and tried not to imagine it.

And at lunch I gathered Ellen and Emily and sat in a bendable green chair and I could've sworn I was all out of tears but the words came through my mouth like they were breaking through a filmy glass and all I could think about was tall pretty Caitlin trying to end a life that doesn't deserve her, because she's too funny and talkative and outgoing and lovely for all that contaminating nature and buildings and sky could contain, and I am an idiot wallowing in the corner with fat expectations and skinny plans.

Denial will keep you rooted in whoever you used to be and take away your hope of an accurate, realistic future, all the while letting you forget who you are. It will build up a wall that you could easily scale but are too afraid and too content to stand in front of; not quite blinded, just disbelieving. Denial will grab your ankles during an earthquake but will never let you go, forever in fear of an aftershock, long after you would have liked to start moving.

Reality will be that earthquake. Reality will help you forget your past, give you a barren future, and make a mess out of the present. Reality will hold you by your eyelashes and force you to stare into its depths until you work up the courage to walk into it.

And together, they teach me two things: that I am just a fat little girl who hates her body, and that my body still doesn't quite understand why.


      c.
My first therapist would not talk about it.

Mid-October, seven p.m., a dark room surrounded by bookcases, heavy with dimmed lights and frequent telephone calls, a man with white hair and a wrinkly face holding his chin in his hands, talking even and tempered in a slow Southern accent, my legs curled up on the breakback green couch, a pillow squatted beneath my arms: "I've been skipping meals."

"Really."

"Breakfast. Lunch." A pause; maybe a hesitation. "Sometimes—sometimes dinner. Sometimes."

"Hmmm."

Do you think it's a problem? Do you think I have an eating disorder? Am I taking this out of proportion? Or do you think it could become an eating disorder? Do you think I need to stop? Is this unhealthy? Does everyone do this? Will this hurt me—damage me, irrevocably, out of the realm of repair? Am I winning, Dr. Carey, or am I losing?

"So tell me," he says, "about your last panic attack."

And so it became a silent discussion we had every time I came into his office, which was about twice a month (or once every two weeks). The words existed between my loosened fists and his tilted head as I moved my mouth in quick, stumbled agony, and he drew out his words, long and touched. On his couch I felt like a thick, padded skeleton, and on his couch I felt hideous. I taught myself to talk to him about it without ever giving it vocal form. Our unspoken conversations left me feeling emptily, briefly satisfied, even if still hungry and hushed.

They would go like this:

"How many panic attacks have you had since our last session?" How is your eating disorder going?

"Three—five—ten—fifteen—forty, forty-five hundred—once a week, twice a week—three times this week—every night for the past month, every Tuesday and Thursday at school." Terrible—continuous—consistent—still present—badly, horribly—I'm so fat, Dr. Carey—I'm so fat, please help me—this is a battle I don't understand, Dr. Carey, and I'm not sure I'm fighting back.

"Have you been using the coping statements?" That's not good.

"I'm—I'm too afraid to say them to myself, in the bathroom stall. I'm afraid someone will overhear me." I—I know, Dr. Carey. I know.

"Why?"

"I don't want—I don't want anyone to know I'm there. I'm too scared." Do I look thinner—please tell me if I look thinner to you, Dr. Carey. Please?

"Well, we'll work on that."

Please.


      d.
I think about it when I wake up. It is pre-prepared, sitting nervously in my brain, legs crossed and waiting for me. When I open my eyes and greet the cold hotel room with prickly flesh and newly-gained weight, it slips through the leaves and curtains of my brain, making itself known in a spotlight on a stage, hugging the backs of my eyes.

I think about it in the shower and I prick my skin with both of my puckered fingernails. I think about it in the car on the way to breakfast and I can hardly look at Ellen because I know she can see the fat in my cheekbones, bulging there, little round Santa stomachs and dimples. I think about it in the restaurant and I push my food around and eventually away with disgust poking the insides of my fingertips, because it's not about eating anymore, it's about proving a point: yes, I can eat. I think about it in the car ride on the way back home and Ellen falls asleep with the barest reaches of her newly-cut hair touching at my excess jeans, and I keep my iPod earphones tight and pocketed away in my ear, and I think about how much I have eaten in my couple days of recovery.

And I think about the gas station bathroom where I shoved my hand down into my mouth but didn't grasp far enough to actually purge, just let it hang there, nearly touching the area where the gag reflex begins to kick back, and a sickening, soothing comfort sweeps over me, pleased at the feel and taste of skin in my throat.

And I promise myself, five hundred times over, repeating the words until they are loud within the confines of my head, and I am confused when all the cars and my dad in the front seat and slumbering Ellen haven't managed to hear it: I WILL NEVER EAT AGAIN.

And I think about the food and I close my eyes and the panic sets in because I know it's impossible and I know that when I get home that evening we will go out for dinner and I will collapse and eat nearly a plateful of food and I will not allow myself to purge and suddenly, I am on my knees in the dirt outside and my dad is telling me to get back in the car, and the tears make a mess of my face like fingers scrubbing my facial flesh around, angrily.

And I sit and wonder, quietly, why he is ashamed of me, until I remember the painfully obvious.


      e.
The place I began to purge is a little green cove behind some stranger's house, surrounded by trees, with a sign asking you not to let your animal defecate in the vicinity a little to the left.

On a February afternoon, my mother says she's convinced my panic attacks are linked with me skipping breakfast this year—she has no idea about the rest of the skipped meals, just breakfast. At the local Mexican restaurant she says, "So, I've decided we're going to experiment. For two weeks, you will be getting up extra early in the morning and your dad will be feeding you some oatmeal. And we'll see if it helps."

I object, with as loud and fierce of a voice as I can muster. No, my brain says. No, no, no, no no no no no, until all of the nos blur into a single repeating word, nononononononononono, they're trying to make you eat. They're trying to make you eat.

My mother will have none of it. "What?" she says. "It's just breakfast for two weeks. Calm down." I bite my lip and realize I can't risk blowing my cover. I close my eyes and know what I have to do. We leave the restaurant and my eyes are grim with a determination I am barely clutching onto. Dad looks at me funny in the car and Mom stares out the window.

Two days into it, on a rainy Tuesday evening, I leave the house with my earphones stuck deep in a pink ear canal. I walk down the street, making a quick right and going straight for a long time, and I think about it, squeezing the fat at my hipbones, making finger-love to all the heavy pounds on my body.

I stop when I come to the clearing. I kneel, my joined kneecaps now dusted with dirt and worm remains. I crane my neck and lean forward until I am on all fours, and I raise one hand and securely hold my ponytail back. My other hand comes up and I shove it, centimeter by centimeter, down the squishy hollows of my throat.

My gag reflex kicks in and water rushes to my eyes, fleeing to the corners of my lids, deep-slit and terrified. My body shudders and my stomach turns, rolling over and over, trying to kick up out of its hollow shell. I shove it down deeper until I can feel my knuckles, barren against my insides, and then I close my eyes and slide it in deeper, as deep as I can bear.

My hand scrapes out of my jaw in a hurry and I squeeze my fist around a curtain of my hair. A mix of spit and brown liquid tumbles out and down my chin, gathering up in my mouth, and systematically, I spit it all out. Recent root beer and water come back up to meet me and I stare at the footprints they leave in the grass, darkened and smelling like acid and dirt and my flesh.

My breakfast is too far into digestion to have been purged, but it feels like a weight has been lifted from the watery ocean of my stomach. It distends and I do this four more times in a row, mastering the art of shoving my hand down quickly, closing my eyes, squeezing my left fist, clenching my gut, and letting it all come out.

When I go home I feel like I have broken out of a marvelous cocoon, awakening into something deeper and more soothing than I ever could have imagined. I brush my teeth to rub the acidic stains off, but secretly, something sitting in my brain between my dreams and my fears hopes they never rub off, disappear, and leave me.


      f.
Treat me like a horror story.

When you shut your eyes and close the closet door and fumble with your arms and legs under the covers, and you can feel all your skin thick and smeared on your bones, and you wonder what holds you up inside, organs like stilts and blood like smooth waterways—I want you to think of me, fainting spells, dying nervous system, abused body, craving crawling ravenous hungry monstrous stomach, and all.

And I want you to fear it. I want you to cringe at the sight of me, huge in the mirror, bones drawn like demented Etch-A-Sketch lines, all connected and long and thin, cross-sections of pixels and bumpy right turns. I want you to pinch the skin on your forearm and think, Oh, God, oh, God, don't let me be like that. Don't let me end up like her, oh no, oh, God, oh, God.

"Oh, God, please," I want you to say, and I want you to listen to the resounding silence.


      g.
I hated my parents for being unable to help me.

I hated my parents for telling me to sit in the stall in the school bathrooms when I was going to have a panic attack instead of letting someone help me. I hated them for looking around confusedly when I had one, and looking alarmed when they discovered there was a panic attack I hadn't told them about, as if I should share willing secrets with those who promise to help and hesitate before lifting a finger. I hated them for demanding information and for doing nothing but driving me to my therapy to help. I hated them for their hands-off approach and I hated them when they clenched their fists down, hard, like I had been afraid they would.

Numerous times after my diagnosis, I wanted to break down and tell them. Let it out. Often the paranoia would work into my brain and I would be convinced that they already knew, somehow. Once, my uncle and I had been in the living room discussing his OCD, and our conversation wandered onto other mental disorders. My mom, who was starving, walked into the room and said, "Well, no one here is anorexic, so let's get some goddamn food already." I was sheet white for the rest of the morning, and I stared at her mechanically in the car, wondering if and how she knew, if she could tell it by the paleness of my arms or the loss of weight around my legs, wondering all the while if my therapist had secretly sold me out and my mother was simply waiting for me to confess to her myself.

(I consider telling. I wake up in the shower and jump into a monologue: Dear Mom and Dad, I'm an anorexic. It's okay if you're surprised. I mean, I was, too. And I purge. You know, stick my fingers down my throat, the whole... the whole deal. Don't blame yourself for not noticing—I was tricky about it. Or maybe you noticed and just didn't want to think about it. I think we were in that boat together for a long time. Because I was in denial for like, eight months.

A few people know—my therapist does. Ellen and Emily know. And... some other people. A few. If it makes you feel better, I'm a really, really bad anorexic. I understand if you're angry and upset and I understand if you want me dead, but please. Before you consider your new situation, consider mine.

I come downstairs. Dad makes me go to the grocery store with him. Our car ride silence is pleasant, and our in-store teasing is bright. When I come home I psuedo-beg my mother for money and pretend I have cooked all the food in the house. She laughs, hard, and when they exit for a smoke, I steal the smallest bit of food and hold my fingers against my lips, promising myself recovery.

And I know that if I told them, it would change everything.)

And I hated my parents for loving so much; for my mother, who made me lunch every school day, and my father, who believed the best intentions out of the exercise I tried to start until it was restricted. I hated my mother because I knew I would break every last muscle and tissue-paper window in her heart, all the crevices and dams in her eyes if she knew, and I hated my father because he tells me that I am such a good kid and if he knew, oh if he only knew, he would break every last one of my bones and leave me for the giant crows and living trees that inhabit our backyard; leave me to rot and die like I have been trying to do for so long.

"I have to be completely honest with you," my new therapist says. "I am uncomfortable with your parents not knowing."

I smile. "That makes two of us," I say.

"But you're not going to tell them?"

I shake my head like I am trying to let the air rip the hair off my scalp, tightly and quickly.

When my therapist concludes the session I stand, stretch. On the way home my mom asks me what we talked about and I tell her I don't want to talk about it. She gives me my privacy and I close my eyes. Privacy is the last thing she should give me, and the only thing I have anymore.

"All right," she says, and she glances at the clock. "We're out of time. But in our next meeting, we're going to talk about why you're so intent on protecting your parents. All right?"

I breathe. "All right, Dr. Lake. All right."

I would tell them, in the end. I would finally come to a decision, and I would call up my therapist and leave her a voicemail saying that our next session was going to be spent confessing, and I would sit before them and between them on a white couch, secrets spilling out my lips. It would just take a few weeks, that's all.

So no, no—let me take that back. Let me take it all back. I don't hate them at all, no, God no. I couldn't. I can't.

No, it was never them.


      h.
On the fourth day, I talk them out of force-feeding me breakfast. Dr. Carey tells me in therapy that I should stop talking to my parents. I purge every weekday at lunch, until my eyes are blurred with layered water and my mouth feels empty of spit and bodily contents.

We quit seeing Dr. Carey and move onto a new therapist about a month later. I have fainting spells, and my memory becomes a scratched record, clearly imprinting events and feelings into my brain, but losing dates, times, schedules. I begin to forget the difference between last year and a week ago, between tomorrow and yesterday.

Underneath my clothes that grow from two to three to four to five sizes too big, my pulled-back and undone hair, my purpling fingers and the trees and branches of veins on the backs of my hands—underneath all of this is a sense of sickening pride, of controlled strength, a swelling in my heart and a smile in my lungs.

Underneath all of my shame, I feel indestructible.


      i.
I have a phobia of tornadoes—lilapsophobia is the technical name—which has manifested itself into a phobia of thunderstorms (astraphobia).

I decide I am going to conquer my fears, and when the storm comes I walk onto our screened-in porch and open the door to the outside and stand on the steps with the fleeing spiders and long-limbed mosquitoes and angry little black ants, and I close my eyes and let all of the rain fall on me, drop by steady drop, and I try to think of appreciative things towards mother nature, calling them tears of joy and pleasant showers for her children. I let my eyes open and watch the thunder like vibrant veins in the sky and watch the sky turn a shade of whitened, see-through purple, like a cloth held over the darkness of the evening.

When the hail begins, I walk back into our porch, and Maggie cowers around my legs, her tail flicking up into the cavern of the back of my knee. "Maggie," I say, and watch her ears focus. "Are you afraid of storms, too?"

She yells at me for asking such a stupid question. My brain begins to pound and words spill out of my mouth, like someone had tipped over a glass of sentences and confessions in the back of my throat.

"I'm afraid of storms as well, Maggie, you know. Terrified. We have so much in common. We should totally date." Her ears cringe. Breathe, breathe. Listen. "But can I tell you a secret, Maggie? Would you mind? I mean, since we're boyfriend-girlfriend now, and all?"

She retreats from my legs and stumbles over onto the other side of the porch, pressing herself into the side of the screen, closing her eyes and wallowing in the hungry sound of thunder. I rest my palm on the cover of the book of poetry I bought earlier at the used bookstore.

"This is something you can't tell anyone else, Maggie. Not even Mom, because I know you like her better."

She flicks her tail back and forth and I notice that she is asleep, deep in a pit of something I cannot quite reach. I open my book of poetry and read the line Life is some kind of loathsome hag/Who is forever threatening to turn beautiful. The thunder attempts to swallow us in noise, and I close my ears against the wind, thinking of tornadoes, of a windswept house and the terror of sound.

"I have anorexia nervosa, Maggie," I tell her sleeping, fragmented body, torn between running inside and away from the thunder, and throwing myself out into the hail again. "And that scares me more than any thunderstorm, tornado or hurricane ever could."

I rock back on my heels and begin to tremble, and the sky murmurs above us, and I think for a moment that maybe God is weeping just as hard.


      j.
Emily asks us if she walks like a man.

We discuss body sizes: pear, apple, stick and hourglass. In the back of my mouth I can taste fruit and I throw up a little, a socket of skin shuddering down my back. I avoid the eyes of my lunch, and Ellen makes her way through it, haphazardly. I crane my back until I feel like a sack of fat sitting on the top of the desk, and I try not to show that I am listening, quite attentively. I try to look faraway and only manage to look vaguely distant and cold.

Becca calls me out. "Hey, LeeAnn," she says. "Stand up."

I throw the pink off my cheeks and get to my feet, nervously. I am now officially up for judgment.

She sighs, impatient. "Pull back your shirt," she says, chidingly, and I know it's maybe a little too big, but it's the skinniest shirt I own.

"Hourglass," she notes, and nods. "See, look at me—I'm all pear."

Someone tells me I have a pretty figure. I shake my hair and bury my face around my jeans. Hourglass sounds like a padded, secret codeword for fat. The number 120, my ideal weight goal, echoes in my head, and I cannot forget it.


      k.
I want an anorexia buddy.

I want someone who lives across the street and has anorexia, who loves me and is maybe a little heavier than I am, so I always feel reassured. I want an anorexia buddy who has it worse than I do, but who binges more often. I want an anorexia buddy who will shove my hand deeper down my throat when I hesitate before the purge. I want an anorexia buddy who will leave bottles of water on my front porch and who will promise never to give me a casserole when someone dies. I want an anorexia buddy who is jealous of all my non-anorexia friends, and I want an anorexia buddy who cries herself to sleep every night, and I want an anorexia buddy whose weight loss goals are even lower than mine are, down into the depths beyond my 120, into 100s and 90s.

And I want her to be a part of that six-percent death rate. I want her to be a suicide case. I want her to call me up late at night so she can tell me how much she hates herself. I want her to close her eyes and hate the disease, hate the way it swarms in her face and reaches out to her bones and tells her to keep going, to be ashamed. I want her to be unable to stop.

I want an anorexia buddy and then I want her to die.


      l.
"I'm sorry I left my lunch in your room."

It takes me solid minutes of silence to get it out. He waits, patiently, leaning against one of his desks. One of the other English teachers stops by, a little girl at her heels who is dressed in a yellow gown. There is another English teacher who stops by briefly, weaving her hands through her hair, and she references some sort of private email that I am not supposed to know about, because she won't talk about it directly. She smiles and waves at me before she walks out.

When the school is quiet, he smiles at me. "So," he says.

I tell him. I tell him and I rip my hands, one over the other, tearing at each and every finger. I tell him without looking into his eyes. Before he can say anything, I ask him if it is noticeable. He says he noticed that I never ate my lunch and he says I look sort of sickly, and I don't take offense. He looks at me softly and suddenly, I feel it, I feel sickly and absent and stupid. He reads me and warps it into a conversation about my move here, about the weather, about the ocean, and suddenly, we aren't talking about anorexia at all.

A silence falls between us. I realize that it's late after school, that my mother is probably sitting in the parking lot, sweating hot, wondering where I am. He asks me if I want my lunch back and I tell him no, slowly, no, and I mean it, hard. He gives me a disapproving look but he does not force it on me.

He finishes, "You'll get better. I promise you. Everybody goes through at least something hard and I know you'll see this through. I promise you because I know you. I have faith."

I consider telling him right there: You're my role model, by the way. I look up to you. We share so many interests and yet you manage to be so much cooler, funnier, smarter. I think you're even a little prettier than I am. You are my role model, and I am sorry that I am just the weird girl who sits next to the air conditioner in your third period class and sits in your room during lunch period. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

When I leave and watch the red lockers in the corner of my eye, I know, quietly, that it is all I wanted. I don't need him to hold me or save me or make a big speech or cry or laugh or help me. I don't need special acknowledgement or a game of favorites, I don't need him to run off and tell my parents and my guidance counselors, and I don't need him to take my lunch and shove it in my mouth, until the paper bag is roasting in the depths of my bottomless stomach and my acid is burning right through all the brown paper.

He didn't. And that was all I needed.

When I get into the car, my mother asks me what took me so long. I tell her I had to make up a quiz for Spanish that I missed when I had a panic attack—a quiz that I had, in actuality, made up the previous day at lunch.

"She graded it right there," I tell her, though she had, in reality, given it to me today during fifth period, right after lunch. "I got a one hundred."

My mother smiles and rests her hands like a sunrise on the steering wheel. There is an awkward stiffness in her voice, and she pushes to control it, to soothe it. "Nothing can stop you," she says, half-joking. "Not even panic attacks."

If only, I say, inaudibly. If only.


      m.
"I'm sorry I called you anorexic," Jesse says.

I close my eyes. Looking at her would validate and explain something. She would see right through me, I am convinced of it.

I pull my denial around me like a shawl. "It's okay," I whisper.


      n.
I have this nightmare.

Last year, on our eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C., we stopped at a buffet for dinner. I went into the girl's restroom to wash my hands, and had just turned on the faucet when I overheard a girl puking.

Unsure, I rubbed my hands, one over the other, dousing them in cold water. I took extra long lathering my arms with soap. As I was drying off, one of the stalls flew open, and one of the three Rachels—Rachel B., I believe—stumbled out. She had short blond hair and manicured nails and green smeared around her lips—the messy kind of vomit, the one your mouth refuses to forget. Her skin was gold under the lighting, and her eyes had little popcorn red veins in them, standing out against the white.

I looked at her sideways, my eyebrows constricting into a concerned approach at the rim of my forehead, and I said, "Are you okay?"

She smiled. "Food poisoning," she explained, her voice like a mountain of scratchy pebbles, resting inside her throat—a voice I have come to know since then, a voice that preserves my dreams and makes me feel sick and swallowed when I wake up.

I gave a breathy laugh. "I was afraid you were bulimic or something," I said, as I walked out the door.

Over my shoulder I could hear her say, "No, no, I'm not that stupid," her voice still bogged down with spit and bile.

In my dream we have reversed positions, and I am in my school's locker room, my face down in the toilet. She throws open the stall door and I turn to her, my eyes manic, my heart beating through the dream, until I can almost feel it in my fingers. She has the same hair, same frame, but a clean mouth.

"What are you doing?" she says, her face just as I remember it, chipmunk cheeks and big brown eyes. "Are you that stupid?"

My lips are sealed with vomit, and I can't open them to make words. Instead I take in the vastness of her statement and I nod, slowly, admittedly, ashamedly, because she's right.