As I was a black student from a reasonably well-off family, and I was from Nebraska, of all places, the white students didn’t quite know what to do with me. I was an anomaly, and I didn’t fit their assumed narrative about blackness. They assumed that all black students came from impoverished backgrounds and lived in the inner city. They assumed all black students attended Exeter by the grace of financial aid and white benevolence. Most of the black students only grudgingly accepted me into their social circles because I didn’t fit their assumed narrative about blackness, either. As a Haitian American, I didn’t have the same cultural touchstones. There were few students with whom I had any kind of common ground. As a socially awkward, shy girl, my loneliness became even more pronounced. Food was not only comfort; food also became my friend because it was constant and I didn’t need to be anything but myself when I ate.
When I went home for that first Thanksgiving holiday, my parents were shocked, as if I were unrecognizable, and maybe, to them, I was. They saw me plainly while looking right through me. I had gained at least thirty pounds in only two and a half months. Suddenly, I was very round, my cheeks and gut and thighs fleshy in ways they had never been. My clothes, the ones that did fit, strained at the seams. Though I didn’t want to go, my parents took me to a doctor who charitably declared that I was blossoming when so much more was happening to my body. He didn’t seem overly concerned, likely attributed my weight gain to being away from home for the first time. My parents had no idea what to do, but they were incredibly alarmed and immediately began to treat my body as something of a crisis. They tried to help me without realizing that this early weight gain was only the beginning of the problem my body would become. They had no idea at all about what created the problem. They knew nothing of my determination to keep making my body into what I needed it to be—a safe harbor rather than a small, weak vessel that betrayed me.
17
During the first two years of high school, I ate and ate and ate and I became more and more lost. I started high school as nothing and then became less than nothing. I only had to pretend to be the girl I had been when I spoke to my parents on the phone or when I went home for breaks. The rest of the time, I didn’t know who I was. Mostly, I was numb. I was awkward. I was trying to be a writer. I was trying to forget what happened to me. I was trying to stop feeling those boys on and in my skin, how they laughed at me, how they laughed as they ruined me.
I remember so little from high school, but in the past few years, as my profile as a writer has gotten more visible, I’ve started to hear from the kids I went to high school with and, oddly enough, they all remember me distinctly. They reach out via e-mail, or Facebook, or at events, and ask me, eagerly, if I remember them too. They share anecdotes that make me seem like I was interesting and not as unbearable as I remember myself. I don’t know what to make of the memories of other people or how to reconcile their memories with mine. I do know that I developed a sharp tongue in high school. I was quiet, but I could cut someone with words when I put my mind to it.
In my free time, I wrote a lot, dark and violent stories about young girls being tormented by terrible boys and men. I couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to me, so I wrote the same story a thousand different ways. It was soothing to give voice to what I could not say out loud. I lost my voice but I had words. One of my English teachers, Rex McGuinn, recognized something in my stories. He told me I was a writer and he told me to write every day. I realize, now, that being told to write every day is writing advice many teachers give, but I took Mr. McGuinn very seriously, as if he were offering me sacred counsel, and I write every day, still.
The most important thing Mr. McGuinn did for me, though, was to walk me over to the campus counseling center. He saw I needed help and took me to a place where I could get that help. I won’t say I found solace or salvation at the counseling center because I didn’t. I wasn’t ready. The first few sessions with my counselor, who was a man, were terrifying. I sat on the edge of my seat, staring at the door, plotting all potential routes of escape. I did not want to be alone with any man, let alone with a stranger, in a room with a closed door. I knew what could happen. And still, I kept going back, maybe because Mr. McGuinn asked me to, maybe because some part of me knew I needed help, and I was so hungry for it.
18
I ate and ate and ate at school. At home for breaks, I made a show of dieting (and continued eating everything I really wanted to eat, in secret). This double life of eating would become something that stayed with me well into adulthood. It lingers even now. My parents tried to figure out why I was gaining so much weight. I had no answers I could share with them. They put me on a medically supervised liquid diet during the summer after my freshman year. Every day, I drank five milk shakes that were chalky and disgusting. Of course I lost weight—forty pounds, maybe more. My parents were pleased that I had gotten my body under control. I went back to school, and my classmates admired my new body, offered me compliments, wanted to hang out with me. That was the first time I realized that weight loss, thinness really, was social currency. Amidst this attention, I was losing my newfound invisibility, and it terrified me. I was scared of so much as a teenager.
Early in the first semester of my sophomore year, I lost what currency I had gained over the summer. Within a few weeks, I immediately began eating again, working vigilantly to undo the progress I had made the previous summer. My newly narrowed face plumped up. My stomach strained against the waistbands of my pants. My breasts swelled wildly because not only was I gaining a lot of weight, I was going through puberty.
I still held on to the hope that my boarding school life might resemble The Girls of Canby Hall, that I would bond with all the girls in my dorm and all my teachers would love me. That was never my experience.
Loneliness remained a constant companion. I didn’t have many friends. I was awkward and maladjusted around the friends I did have, and most of the time, I was certain they only tolerated me out of pity. I regularly said the wrong things. I invented a boyfriend, Mr. X, and I don’t know what makes me cringe more now—that I used this bizarre pseudonym for my invention or that I invented a pseudonym at all. I couldn’t even come up with a credible name for the imaginary man of my dreams. Eventually, the girls in my social circle figured out that I’d described Mr. X based on one of their boyfriends, which was, as you might imagine, incredibly awkward, and they did not let me forget it. I had no fashion sense. I didn’t know how to style my hair. I didn’t know how to be a normal girl. I didn’t know how to be human. It was a sad, sad time. Every day was a crushing disappointment or gauntlet of humiliation.