Sure!
You were supposed to see a movie with Jae but she bailed on you at the last minute so you had been in your room watching YouTube videos and sketching a bit with your drawing pencils. You change out of your sweats and pull on jeans and a cute T-shirt, one that’s not been on your floor for weeks. You swipe on some mascara and paint your lips a glossy rose-petal pink. You sniff your armpits and spritz on some body spray for an added touch. You don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard, but you want to look like you care. There’s a delicate balance.
You find a pair of socks on the floor, smell them, and decide they’ll make the cut, but barely. Then you pull on your hot-pink Chucks and head downstairs.
“I’m going out with Ben for a little while,” you announce to your parents, who are watching TV in the family room.
“Oh, are you?” your mother asks, and you know what she means.
“May I go out for a little while?” you ask, rolling your eyes.
“Where are you going?” your dad wants to know.
“I don’t know,” you say. “He just texted to see if I could go out. It’s not a major deal.” You’re giving him all sorts of attitude. “How come Todd never gets the third degree when he goes out?”
Your dad sighs. “Be safe. And be home by eleven.”
“Eleven! It’s already nine-forty-five!”
“Your attitude, missy,” your mom reprimands.
“Good God,” you mutter under your breath. Then louder you say, “May I please have a little later?”
“Eleven-thirty.”
The doorbell rings.
“He’s here!” You turn to go.
“Eleven-thirty!” your dad reminds you.
“Bye!”
*
Ben’s waiting for you on the front step and he gives you a huge hug.
“I’m so glad our trip got cut short,” he says.
“Me too.”
You haven’t seen him since your date on Tuesday, the first time you kissed, and it’s all you’ve been thinking about—kissing him again.
You get into the car and he doesn’t ask where you want to go. You think you know what you both want to do so it’s no surprise that you end up at the playground down the street from your house. He parks the car and turns off the engine and the lights.
“Hi there,” he says, and moves closer to you.
“Hi.”
“Thanks for coming out tonight.”
“I totally wanted to see you.”
“Same.”
And then he is kissing you, and he pulls his fingers through your hair and his lips move across yours slowly, yet with purpose, and he’s whispering your name.
“What?” you ask.
“I like you,” he says so softly you can barely hear him. Then he says it again, a bit louder this time. “I really, really like you.”
You can’t hold back the smile you feel spreading across your face. “I really like you too.”
You kiss some more and then you pull away from each other to take a breath, and you both laugh.
“So how was camping?” you ask.
“It was okay. I’m glad it ended up being only one night though. My dad loves it so we go a couple times during the summer to make him happy.”
“I would hate camping,” you say. “I’ve never been.”
“You might not hate camping if you went with me.” He lifts his eyebrows.
“Why’s that?”
“Because we’d make it fun.”
“I don’t know. The thought of bears and snakes, and all that dirt. Sleeping on the ground. Not my thing.”
“Are you a princessy girl?”
“No way! Come on! You know I’m not. But just, ugh. Too much nature and outdoors with camping.”
“What about lakes?”
“Well, I happen to have met a great guy on a river once.”
“Oh really? What about that?”
“Just some guy. So maybe I’m partial to rivers,” you say.
“What if that great guy took you to a lake someday?”
“I’d consider it. As long as he cleared out all the snakes first.”
Ben intertwines his fingers through yours and laughs. “I’ll see what I can do about the lake snakes.” He traces paths along your palm with his fingers and it brings goose bumps to your skin. You want to kiss him some more.
“What were you doing tonight anyway?” he asks. “I didn’t take you away from anything important, did I?”
“Nope. Jae blew me off—we were going to go to the movies. I was sketching some stuff, not doing much of anything.”
“You’re really good at drawing, huh?”
“I pretty much love it. I wish I had more time for it.”
“You’ll show me your stuff sometime?”
“Of course,” you say.
“Cool. Maybe I’ll let you sketch me,” Ben says, and turns his lips up into a grin.
“You mean, maybe I’ll let you sit for a portrait sketch, because that’s how it works.” You laugh and kiss his nose playfully.
It’s a great night after all, and just a short while ago you had been in your room watching YouTube and drawing, but now you’re here, in Ben’s car, kissing and talking and laughing, and there’s nowhere else you’d rather be. He makes you happy. You think he brings out the best parts of you. You think you want this boy to stick around.
You hope he’ll stick around. You hope the monster won’t get in the way.
15
It’s Monday and you and Shayna have finished your one-on-one session and it’s time for group. There’s a spot open on the couch near a girl whom you met briefly last week but you don’t know if she’s nice or not, because you didn’t get a chance to know anyone. You still don’t want to be here. Well, it’s not like you don’t want to be here; you know you have to do something to figure out how to get rid of the monster and nothing has ever worked before, and you think this might be the only way to get him to leave.
But it’s stupid really, being here with these girls. Because you’re sure none of them can relate to you or what you’ve been through or this eating thing you have, this ARFID. You didn’t say anything at the first session, you just listened to them talk about their “relationships” with food. How much they love food, how they need food, how they are addicted to food. The bulimics anyway. Then there are the anorexics, who also love food but don’t love what food does to their bodies, so they reject the food and choose to starve themselves in order to waste away to practically nothing.
You decide that to get this process started, you’re going to have to share your feelings with them. Because isn’t that what group therapy is all about? So when it’s your turn to speak, you lift your head and clear your throat.
“I’m not like any of you,” you start, and every single one of them shifts in her seat. Their body language moves to defensive positions. Hailey, the worst of the bulimics, the one who binges on Oreos and pancakes, who hides candy bars in her sock drawer, who purges everything she puts into her mouth, says, “That’s bullshit. Your parents wouldn’t have brought you here if you weren’t exactly like us.” She crosses her arms over her chest and nods to the other girls, waiting for them to say something, anything to agree with her.
Shayna says, “Hailey, judgment-free. That sounds like an assumption to me.”