Paperweight (19 page)

Friday, July 18, 7:47
P.M.

AT evening snack, I make my selections at the window: pretzels, an apple. Supplement. Somehow the tray doesn't seem quite as heavy in my hands. Somehow it's easier to move. I am heavier and lighter, both.

“Hey, guys.” I drop my tray at my usual table and sit between Ashley and Jenna. Ashley's trail mix is arranged in a swirly mosaic design on her tray. It's only a matter of time before Hannah charts her, and she doesn't seem to care. Her eyes are glazed and pink.

“What's going on?” I glance from Cate to Teagan to Jenna and back to Ashley. The space between them is taut. “Did Kyle get pissed at you for sneaking out or something?”

“No.” Ashley sniffs. “I mean, yeah. But it's not that. I thought
my parents weren't coming for my Ninety-Six. But this morning, Kyle said they're thinking about coming.”

“What? As in, you have to do sessions and have meals and stuff with them?” I grip her wrist. I can feel her pulse, panicked and thready.

“Yeah.” Silent tears roll down her cheek.

“Could you tell them not to come or something?” Maybe I could talk to Shrink. Ask her to talk to Kyle. I'm almost positive that one or both of Ashley's parents put those marks on her.

“I don't think so. They pretty much . . . do . . . what they want.” She breathes in little gasps, like she doesn't have a right to the air.

“But you don't
have
to leave with them, right? I mean, if you want to stay in the cottage and stuff at night, you can?”

“Maybe. I haven't asked Kyle yet.”

“I'll ask Anna, okay? I'll ask.”

“Yeah. Okay. Thanks.”

I search her face, which is puffy from crying and deflated at the same time. It's strange, seeing yet another version of her. It hasn't been that long since she woke me up, journaling and organizing her clothes and puttering around the room like there was some sort of turbo engine inside her. And now this. It reminds me of these painted Russian nesting dolls my mother used to have on the mantel in the house on Broad. You opened one and found another. You opened that one and found other still.

“Hey. You want to go for a walk or something? Go see the horses?”

“We can't. It's still snack time.” She looks at me funny.

“Yeah. Right.” I pick at my pretzels and the table goes silent.
Teagan finishes first, and Cate's really trying. I can tell from the way she pinches her lips tight and forces the peanuts onto her tongue.

I lock my gaze on Ashley again. I feel the tiniest spark of anger—she's supposed to be the cheerleader here, she's not supposed to get upset—but then it goes away and I reach over and flick a dried cranberry at her.

“Got plans the rest of the summer?”

“Huh?” she sniffs up a giant wad of snot, which makes me laugh, and then she does, too.

“You could come visit after this if you wanted. Stay with my dad and me for the rest of the summer.” I can kind of picture it: us stretched out on ratty towels around the soaked concrete edge of the neighborhood pool. I can see my reflection in her cat-eye sunglasses, and I'm laughing so hard my stomach hurts. The concrete burns through my towel, so hot it feels real. My hair is a little longer, in that awkward stage, wispy and stubborn around the temples.

“Oh,” she says, and starts crying again. For real this time. “Yeah. That would be nice, Stevie. Thanks.” But she says it almost wistfully, the way I used to think about having a houseful of girlfriends over for a sleepover when I was a lonely kid: It was a nice idea, but I knew it would never happen.

In group the next day we sit in a “Kumbaya” circle on the floor: Shrink, me, Ashley, Cate, Teagan, Jenna, and Rain. Underneath her sweatshirt, Rain is doing ab work. Her forehead is wrinkled in concentration. She thinks no one notices. She thinks she is not us and we are not her.

“We're going to try a body image activity today,” Shrink says. She's sitting cross-legged, her maxi skirt stretched tight over her knees. She dumps the contents of her straw bag onto the floor in front of her, and everybody cranes their necks. There are a few balls of colored yarn. Real scissors, which I haven't seen since I got here. A measuring tape, the soft kind.

“I'd like you all to take the string.” She lifts a pinky-red ball. “And with it, I want you to estimate the circumference of your hips, at the widest part. How much string do you think you would need to wrap all the way around your hips? Remember, this is just a guess. Don't measure it against the actual circumference of your hips. When you've finished, let me know and I'll cut the string for you.”

We move syrupy slow, all of us, reaching listlessly for balls of yarn. I take the green, because that's what's closest. I tear the paper sleeve and start to unwind the yarn. It's cheap and acrylic, scratchy between my fingers.

“Wait. Our hips now, or they were like before?” I pat mine. They are thick, meaty. I try not to think about it, for Josh, but my mind keeps coming back.

“Your hips as they are right now.”

“Oh.” I cut my eyes to the left, at Ashley. She's just staring at the yellow ball of yarn in her lap. My yarn will be shorter than hers, longer than Cate's. Shorter than Teagan's, too, but Teagan's will be just a little shorter than Ashley's. Rain's will be the shortest. I don't want to care about that, but suddenly it feels like the most important thing in the universe.

That's the strange thing about life in this odd plastic bubble. One of the strange things, anyway. Here we're supposed to be
focusing on big-picture issues, like learning how not to despise our lives, learning how to love our bodies, how to make peace with who we are. If Shrink has told me once, she's told me at least ten times: I'm supposed to use this time to retrain my brain, my thinking, the way I perceive myself and the world around me. If I have to, if all of us have to, we're supposed to go back in time to examine our childhoods. To discover how we learned to hate ourselves with such intensity.
We're not born hating
, Shrink insisted once.

But we are a group of girls so overwhelmed by our mere existence that it's almost paralyzing, the idea of dealing with the “big-picture” issues. It's the reason we got this way to begin with. The reason a single caloric unit takes on such importance, the reason the pound becomes our currency of worth. These are things we can manage.

Here in this artificial world, it is the same. Self-worth, relationships, abuse, parents, families, expectations, dead siblings: they're the dark, low clouds that loom so close not even we know how big they really are. We can't step back to see them in their entirety. And so we focus the little things. Stashing bobby pins to pin our hair back while we wash our faces, because it makes us feel like any other teenage girl for just a second. Rolling the cuffs of our too-loose shorts high on our ghost thighs to get a little sunburn. The little things make us feel human. I get it now, why all the other girls spend so much time curling their limp, brittle hair and applying lip gloss to their flaking, starved mouths. It's what we have.

“This is hard,” I announce. The space inside my head feels electrified.

“What's the most difficult piece for you?” Shrink looks up. She is crouched next to Cate, holding a tiny notebook and a pen.

“I just . . . I have no idea how to do this.”

“It's difficult, isn't it, trying to estimate what your body actually looks like?” Shrink stands up. “Ready for me to cut your string, Stevie?”

I shake my head. “Hold on.” I stretch a length of yarn into an oval, widening it until it looks right. “Okay.”

“Here we go.” Shrink bends over and snips the yarn. Then she measures the length of it and makes a note on her notepad. “Stand up for me?”

I obey, and she wraps the measuring tape around my hips. I try to suck in, which is impossible. I'm aware, suddenly, of how tight my jeans are.

“Come here, Stevie.” Shrink pulls me outside of the circle, and tilts the notebook in my direction. The numbers should be comforting, but they mean nothing because I never really measured in inches. Pounds, yes. “So if we look at the difference between the measurements—what you think your hips measure versus what they actually measure—we can see that you view yourself to be about forty pounds heavier than you actually are.”

My head is throbbing and I can't focus. Ashley is finally undoing her yarn, draping it in different shapes: a circle first, then a triangle, and a lopsided little-kid star.

“So what's that like for you, to see the difference there?” Shrink asks.

“Sad?”

“Sad.”

“No. I mean—” I shake my head a little; try to focus. I have to give her an answer, or she'll never move on. “Weird. Or unsettling or something. I feel like I have a good idea of what my body looks like. So the difference is just . . . weird.”

It's enough. She moves on to Ashley. Bends over her, talks in hushed murmured tones. I try, but I can never see Ashley's face.

When we come back to the circle, Cate draws her knees to her chest and crosses her bird ankles and says quietly, “I hate this.”

“Which part?” I ask.

“I know we're not supposed to say this . . .” Her eyes flit to Shrink, and then to me. “But I miss my old body.”

“Before you were sick?” Jenna asks. Rain has moved on to legwork, the thready muscles in her thighs jerking beneath her yoga pants.

Cate pinches her tube. “No. Before I got here. When I was skinny.”

Some of us nod. It's been sixteen days for me, and I don't need a mirror to know that the negative space between my thighs, between my belly and my waistband, along the hollows of my cheeks, is melting like precious ice.

“It's a grieving process,” Shrink agrees. “When you make the decision for health, for recovery, you make the choice to let go of your eating disorder. Have any of you ever felt that that the eating disorder was almost a companion?”

I think back to the sitting at the dining room table, when we were still at the house on Broad. In bed, beneath the sheets, or standing in the kitchen in the dark, wincing at the sucking noise the refrigerator made when I opened it. The thoughts were
always there with me. Warm and pulsing. Suffocating. There. My name. My companion.

“If you choose to let it go, then it could feel almost like a death. And it is absolutely okay to grieve that loss,” Shrink says, mostly to Cate. “For each of you, letting go of your eating disorder would mean letting go of many things. Who you thought you could be with it, what you thought you could change, or fix.”

Next to me, Ashley ejects a puff of air.

“I wonder what some of those things are for you. Maybe we could talk about that. What will you have to let go of as you make the choice for recovery? Teagan?”

“Approval or something?” Teagan's fingers skitter across her scalp. Then she sits on her hands.

“Could you say a little bit more about that?” Shrink asks.

“It's really messed up, though.”

The room gets still, except for Rain, who is clenching and unclenching every muscle in her body. She looks too familiar. I look away.

“My stepdad. Or ex-stepdad. They aren't together anymore, Frank and my mom, so it's fine. But he liked my sister Liz better, from the start. Even when we were little and stuff, he would read us bedtime stories and she would curl up in his lap and I just sat next to them, which made sense because she was littler than me, and skinnier. And blond.”

It's the most I've ever heard her say. I imagine her as a little girl, shoulders sloped beneath a dingy, too-tight T-shirt.

“It felt like . . . rejection?” Shrink says gently. Around the circle, we are all doing everything we can not to look at Teagan. We are picking at toenails and adjusting bra straps and blinking
at the world outside the window, because to do anything else is just too much.

“And when we got older, it just got worse,” Teagan says. “Like he would hug her, and he never hugged me. And he would laugh at her jokes and take her to the mall whenever she wanted. It was like I wasn't even there.”

“You felt invisible.” Shrink again. The air sours. I curl my toes tight in my sneakers. Next to me, Ashley's shoulders are shaking.

“It wasn't just him. Everybody paid more attention to her. She was pretty and skinny and bubbly. Everybody was always telling her she should be on TV and stuff. And even when I was purging a lot, nobody said that about me.”

Shrink nodded. “But his attention bothered you most. Frank's.”

“It's so stupid.” Her voice is like smoke. “Even after Liz told my mom about him and we moved out, I kept thinking
why didn't he pick me? What's wrong with me
?

“Your stepdad's a piece of shit, by the way.” The words slither out of me.

Shrink rises up a little. “Stevie—”

“It's okay.” Teagan looks up at me with her face like a blank sheet. “He was. That's what makes it . . . confusing.”

“Yes,” Shrink says. Even she doesn't seem to know what to say.

“Can somebody else say something?” Teagan asks.

“The confusion is the thing that pisses me off the most.” Jenna jumps in. “This thing screws with your head and you wind up going literally insane. Which sucks, but sometimes it's not any worse than your actual life, so—”

“My life was fine,” Cate interrupts, and all the heads turn her
way. “My parents are very nice people, and I don't know what to tell them, about why I'm like this. They think it's their fault.” Her perfect face is pinched and red. “I'm almost
jealous
. Because at least if something really bad happened to you, you get to have a reason.”

“My brother died,” I snap. “Would you rather have a dead brother for a reason?”