I didn’t put another bite of food in my mouth that night, chanting those phrases over and over again. I lay in bed, my stomach empty and growling, feeling oddly powerful about my decision to do whatever it took to force my body back into shape. I would lose weight and everything would be okay again. I’d go back to being the smallest girl in my class—to being special—and everyone would want to be like me. Brittany and her friends would give me envious looks, and I’d know that they were wishing their bodies looked like mine. They might even ask me for diet tips, which I’d refuse to give them, of course, so they’d know what it was like to feel powerless, to feel disgusted by their own shapes. My body, how thin I became, would become the standard by which they measured their worth.
I started skipping breakfast, then throwing away the lunch my mother had packed for me to take to school. At dinner with my parents, I did as the websites suggested—I cut my food into tiny pieces, chewing a few of them slowly, hiding the rest beneath piles of mashed potatoes or rice, shaping and forming my food into piles that made it look like I’d eaten more than I had. It only took a couple of weeks for me to lose ten pounds, and one more week to lose another eight. My face slimmed down, and by Thanksgiving of my eighth-grade year, I started to be able to fit back into the clothes I used to wear. But by Christmas, those were hanging off of me, too. I weighed myself up to ten times a day, training myself to do jumping jacks or sit-ups in my room if the scale tipped even a few ounces in the wrong direction. I took up jogging, since my thinspo websites insisted that running was the absolutely most efficient way to burn off any calories I ate.
As the number on the scale dipped lower, the number of compliments I received went up, and that warm light in my chest returned. When I started my freshman year, even the popular upper-class girls would ask me to share my secrets for staying thin. “I just exercise a lot,” I told them. “And I’m supercareful about what I eat.” What I didn’t tell them was how I used my allowance and birthday money to buy phentermine, the one still-legal prescription medication of the fen-phen weight loss pill phenomenon, off one of the girls in Heather’s ballet class. I’d learned about the drug on one of my favorite websites, which touted how taking it made you forget about food and eating altogether. It also gave me a crazy, jittery amount of energy, amping me up enough that I could get by on just a few hours of sleep a night. I hid the pills inside a pair of black boots that I kept in the back of my closet, spending the hours I should have been asleep in front of the mirror, examining my body, pinching at skin I was convinced was still thick with fat, sucking in my gut, counting my ribs, and relishing the empty space that remained between my thighs, no matter how hard I tried to push them together.
“Do you think Brittany Tripp is fatter than me?” I asked Tyler one autumn afternoon during my freshman and his junior year. It was a Tuesday, and we were sitting in the family room off our kitchen, doing our homework together. His mom was working at the hospital pharmacy until six, and then she had a date with an orthopedic surgeon, so Tyler was going to spend the evening with my family for “taco night.” I had already decided that for appearances’ sake, I would force myself to eat two one-inch cubes of chicken, four grape tomatoes, and one quarter cup of shredded lettuce. That way, if my mom or dad said I hadn’t eaten, I could point out that yes, in fact, I had. Both of my parents had expressed their concern over how little I was eating—my mother had gone so far as to take me to the doctor, to whom I lied about how many calories a day I was taking in, and who believed I was heavier than I actually was because I’d used a trick I learned about on one of my thinspo websites—I wore two extra layers of clothes, thick-bottomed hiking boots, and put a handful of lead weights in my coat and jeans pockets when the nurse made me step on the office scale. Since then, the only place I put any food in my mouth was at the dinner table, in order to help keep my parents off my back.
“You’re not fat, period,” Tyler said, looking up at me. His pencil was poised over the notebook that rested in his lap. “If anything, you could stand to gain some weight.”
“No way,” I said. “I want to lose at least ten more pounds.” Dropping that amount would put me just under a hundred on the scale, and according to my websites, double digits were the only acceptable place to be.
“That’s crazy.” He shook his head and made his longish blond hair fall over his eyes. “If you lose any more, you’ll disappear. Like your boobs.”
“Hey!” I said, shooting out my leg to kick his. “Be nice!” I crossed my arms over my chest and curled my shoulders forward, even though I knew what he’d said was true. My boobs had gone from a D to barely an A cup since Tyler and I first met, something that secretly pleased me, since it had stopped all the weird stares I’d been getting from boys.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, quickly backtracking. “You’re still pretty and everything, but you have lost a lot of weight.”
“I know,” I said. “But it’s only because I needed to. Ten more pounds and I’ll look perfect.”
“I think you’re perfect no matter what you look like,” Tyler said, ducking his head down so I couldn’t see his face.
“Thanks,” I said, feeling a twist of pleasure inside my stomach. He always seemed to know exactly the right thing to say.
Of course, when I told Daniel the story about Tyler pointing out how my boobs had shrunk, I made a joke out of it, leaving out the part where Tyler also told me I was perfect. Daniel knew that my best friend was a guy, that Heather had moved to San Francisco with her family right after we finished our freshman year, leaving Tyler as the person with whom I spent the most time.
“You two never hooked up?” Daniel had asked me when I told him about my friendship with Tyler.
“Nope,” I’d said, though that wasn’t one hundred percent true. I’d certainly never slept with Tyler, and I reasoned that that was what Daniel had meant. “He’s like my brother.”
“That’s cool,” Daniel had said, and then never mentioned it again. I didn’t tell him about the fight Tyler and I had had back in August, and now that it was resolved, I didn’t see the point in bringing it up.
I closed the refrigerator door and walked back over to Daniel, slipping my arms around his waist. “You know what’s not good in moderation?”
“Hmm,” he said, with a slow smile. He reached his long arms down and cupped my ass in his hands. “I’m not sure that I do.”
I kissed him, then, letting the tip of my tongue brush over his lips. “Let me show you,” I said, and a moment later, our clothes were off, and we were welcoming each other back home.
Tyler
“Hicks!” Mason’s loud voice boomed in the station’s bathroom, echoing off the walls as I stood in front of the sink, washing my hands, mentally replaying the last few hours I’d spent with Amber and our respective families the night before, on New Year’s Eve, watching college semifinals football, playing poker, and toasting with champagne at the end of the night. I could still see her freckled face, the twinkle in her eyes when she laughed as she tried to get her father to believe her bluff. If I tried hard enough, I could almost feel her body against mine as we hugged goodbye.
“Yeah?” I said, grabbing a few paper towels in order to dry my hands.