I feel light-headed, a sensation that I used to love and now just feels too familiar. I can’t turn off the skipping-record memories of that night. The crowded party. The smell of booze and sweat in the air. The way I danced. The number of tequila shots I took. The way Tyler led me upstairs. Even during the rare moments when I manage to quiet my mind, my body remembers everything. It remembers, and then it’s happening all over again.
I try to focus on what comes next. I’m going to make Tyler drive us to my family’s cabin on the Skykomish River. Our families had vacationed together there more than once. We’d go for spring break, Memorial Day weekend, and at least a week in the summer, taking hikes through the forest during the day and toasting marshmallows and telling ghost stories around the campfire at night. It was a place without electricity or running water, an A-frame, two-story log home with a wood-burning stove and an outhouse. It was an hour away from civilization, secluded enough that no one would hear a gun go off.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Tyler whispers. “If you’d just—”
“If I’d just what, Tyler?” I said, my voice rising. “Forgive you? Move on? Fuck that. And fuck you.” Even as I speak, I can barely believe that it’s him I’m talking to like this. That Tyler, the boy who sat next to me in my hospital bed every day after school for three months straight, making me laugh and encouraging me to do everything I possibly could to live, is now the person who managed to make me feel like I want to die.
My mind flashes to the way he asked me to go to his prom. That even in the midst of the dark place I was in—stuck in a locked eating disorder treatment ward—how excited I’d been to think that I’d be one of the very few sophomores at the dance. It was something I looked forward to as I trudged my way through my individual and group sessions at the hospital with Greta, the therapist whose job it was to help me get well.
“What about eating scares you so much?” she asked me the first time I met with her alone. She was a blond, sturdily built German woman, whose sharp accent chopped off the ends of her words.
“I don’t know. Getting fat, I guess.”
“And what would be so terrible about that?”
I shrugged. “No one wants to be fat.” Fat is easy, I thought. Being thin takes work. It takes vigilance and commitment—it takes a kind of inner strength that other people don’t have.
“I doubt most people want to be so thin that their heart stops,” Greta said, giving me a pointed look. “No one wants to end up in the hospital with damaged kidneys, pressure sores, and a feeding tube, either.” She paused, letting her words sink in. “Do you like being here? Missing school? Not seeing your friends?”
Again, I shrugged, because the truth was that other than Tyler, I didn’t really have any friends. Heather had moved away, and I didn’t hang out with any other girls in my class. Most of them didn’t like me—I never sat at anyone’s table in the cafeteria because I spent my lunch period in the gym doing sit-ups, jumping jacks, and burpees. I didn’t accept the few invitations I got to go to the mall or the movies because I had a strict exercise schedule I needed to stick to during the hours I wasn’t at school: a ninety-minute run as soon as I got home, then another hour or two of calisthenics in my room before having to endure the torture of dinner with my parents. Gradually, the invitations to socialize stopped, and I assumed it was because the girls were jealous of how skinny I was. Their envy sustained me in a way that food never could.
“What does being thin mean to you?” Greta asked. “What do you get out of it?”
“It’s just who I am,” I said. I told her the story of my birth, of starting school late, and always being given more attention and preferential treatment because of my size. I told her how when I started to gain weight, I panicked.
“So being thin makes you feel special,” she said. “And maybe better than everyone else who isn’t?”
“I guess,” I said, slowly, unsettled that she was able to so easily pinpoint what I thought were my very unique, privately held beliefs.
“Okay then,” Greta said. “So can you consider, just for a moment, that maybe all of this isn’t about food or even the size of your body? Maybe it’s about your identity . . . how you’ve always seen yourself. You’ve been conditioned to feel set apart from everyone else, so the idea of being like them in any way is terrifying. Maybe when you think about gaining weight, what you’re really scared of is not knowing who you are.”
“Maybe . . .” I said. I kept my eyes on the floor.
“Your thoughts are more powerful than you know, Amber. You’ve learned to equate thinness with purity and superiority. Your self-worth and how you look are concepts that have become so entwined that your brain sees them as one. We have to try and disentangle them, and then recondition the way you think.”
“Sounds fun,” I said, feigning a lightheartedness I didn’t feel.
“It’s not,” Greta said. “But it is a matter of life or death. Our focus won’t just be on getting to a healthy weight, it will be about finding emotional and mental balance, and figuring out a very different way of defining what it means to be strong.” Again, she paused. “Tell me something. Do you want to die? Or do you want to get well?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer. I thought about my parents and Tyler, how frightened they’d looked when they first saw me in my hospital bed, how much I knew they loved me, and how devastated they’d be if my heart gave out for good. I thought about the self-loathing that never seemed to leave me, no matter how long I went without eating or how low the number on the scale dropped, and I felt a flash of desperation, a need to finally cry out for help.
“I don’t want to die,” I whispered, fighting back tears.
“Good,” Greta said. “I don’t want you to die, either.”