And so you started shutting down, shutting him out. You knew he liked you a lot. He really did. In the beginning, he liked everything about you. He told you that you were pretty. He told you that you were funny and nice. That he thought about you at night before he fell asleep. He told you so many great things. Things that a girl wanted to hear from a boy she really liked. You liked feeling important, and special, and like you meant something to somebody other than the monster.
Alex started to not understand. The way you were. Of course, you could go places with him. You could also manage to sometimes watch him eat a double cheeseburger with all that stuff on it—bacon and tomatoes and onions—and sometimes, if you could push the monster down far enough, you could stop your stomach from churning. And you could eat some French fries with him and pretend that everything was okay.
After a while, Alex felt like you weren’t into him anymore. That’s what he told you when he broke up with you—he felt like you weren’t “into it, into him” any longer, which was the furthest thing from the truth. It wasn’t that you weren’t into him. That hadn’t been it at all. It had been the monster the whole time, controlling everything you felt, and everything you did and wanted to do. It had been the monster that told you that you couldn’t be normal around Alex, that you didn’t know how to act normal, so it had only been a matter of time until he discovered this and got tired of you.
And, of course, as with anything in high school, everyone knew everyone’s business, so everyone knew Alex dumped you. And although he broke up with you in the nicest possible way—and did it in person and not with a text—you still felt the hurt all the way through to your heart. Because after all, you thought you were in love with Alex.
And you stopped eating.
For five days.
On the fifth day, you fainted in Math class.
The rumors started.
This is what they said:
Alex broke up with her because she got pregnant.
She fainted and lost the baby.
She got an STD from someone so Alex broke up with her.
She’s anorexic.
She cheated on him.
She’s a lesbian.
They were all over the place, the things that were said about you.
Because not only did everyone see you faint in Math class, but everyone saw the ambulance that rushed you to the ER.
Your parents met the ambulance at the hospital.
The doctor put you in a room, gave you fluids through an IV, and you lay there, thinking if only you ate, things would be better. You would be better. You would have Alex back, you would have a life back.
You felt the monster cackling inside.
When the doctor came in and asked you what happened, you answered, “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” he asked you.
“I fainted?” you said.
Your mom said, “I don’t think she’s been eating enough.”
The doctor asked if you’d been eating, and you said, “My boyfriend just broke up with me so maybe I haven’t been eating much.”
He asked you a bunch of questions about your diet, and your mom answered them, saying that you drank milk and ate yogurt and you ate peanut butter but no meat. And that you also ate apples and carrots and sometimes salads. A nurse drew blood, and the doctor said you were a little low on potassium and iron, suggested you take a daily multivitamin, told your parents your body weight was perfect for your height and age.
Perfect.
There it was again. That word.
The monster inside laughed.
See, you’re perfect.
Your parents sat with you while you were rehydrated and they pumped potassium through your veins. Your mom and dad thought you had fainted because you were depressed over the breakup. They had no idea you had not eaten for five days. In your mind, this was the monster punishing you, starving you, making you hurt. You deserved to feel the emotional and physical pain of your first real breakup.
You took the rest of the week off from school, but when you went back, the rumors were still swirling. People looked at you differently, whispered about you. Alex, who had said he wanted to “still be friends,” avoided your glances. You felt alienated. Alone. Alone with the monster.
Jae stood up for you as best as she could, and by the end of the year there was a girl who actually did get pregnant, one of the girls with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram. The rumor was she got pregnant by someone she met online, so her news was bigger and more rumorworthy than what you had gone through, and kids stopped talking about you.
But while they stopped talking about you, it wasn’t like they forgot about you, and you aren’t exactly looking forward to school starting next week.
School with the monster.
20
You stop taking your little yellow pills. You decide you don’t need them anymore because you’re happy. You’re finding ways to be happy and Ben is a part of this new feeling.
You started taking the pills after Alex. You were in a haze, going through the motions, barely doing what you could to get through the days to make it to the end of the school year, just to get to summer. If you could only get to summer. Make it to the last day of school.
Thank God for your mom then. She knew there was something more going on after Alex. While things were never right with the way you ate—there was always a push and pull with that—after you ended up in the hospital, your mom knew you weren’t well and took you to your pediatrician.
“She’s depressed. She’s more than depressed. She’s not functioning.”
You sat on the white crinkly paper in your pediatrician’s office, feeling like you were four years old, listening as your mother talked about you as if you weren’t there. Your hair stringy and covering your face, because you didn’t want to look at anyone, you didn’t want to see anyone, you didn’t want anyone to see you. You wanted to be invisible. The monster wanted you to be invisible. The monster wanted you dead.
Between your mother and your doctor, they decided you were severely depressed and that’s when the little yellow pills became a part of your morning ritual. The pills got you out of bed. They got you into the shower in the morning. They made you wash your hair. They made you eat occasionally even if it was just half a piece of dry toast at your mother’s insistence, or two pieces of apple at dinner.
The little yellow pills got you through the rumors at school. They got you through the stares from the girls in the halls who normally wouldn’t look your way. They got you through Alex walking past your locker and avoiding your glance. They got you through final exams. They got you through the end of sophomore year.