The circle was small. Allie’s parents’ flight had been canceled from New York. Lexi’s parents had bailed, too, claiming the traffic from Long Island would be a nightmare. I don’t know why Margot’s parents didn’t show, but she hadn’t really expected them to anyway. Jean’s came, though. They’d flown in from Toronto a couple of days early to visit and kept staring at her with watery, grateful grins. Beth’s parents were there, too. I’d assumed Beth looked pale and ghostly because of her eating disorder, but her parents were practically translucent, too. They probably needed to use sunscreen in a rainstorm.
Willa’s mom sat directly across the circle from me. I’d pictured her as an older Willa, wiry and short—maybe a cigarette smoker. But in real life she looked like Mrs. Claus. I bet if you stood close to her she smelled like fresh-baked bread. Even though she wasn’t wearing one, I pictured her in a frilly apron, holding a wooden spoon. Willa sat next to her, rubbing up against her like a cat. I couldn’t stop staring. They just didn’t match.
After we’d gone around the circle introducing ourselves and saying a word or two about how we were doing—a lot of “fines,” and a “nervous”—Marcia said, “Today we are going to do an exercise concerning food. Here’s how it’s going to work. I’m going to hand out a piece of paper with a list of different foods on it. What I’d like you all to do is to write down the first thing that comes to mind when you see each one. Then, afterward, we will share. Does anybody have questions?”
We didn’t. Maria passed around the handouts and a bunch of clipboards. When Mom started to read hers, her brow furrowed. I almost whispered, Wrinkles! but managed to hold my tongue.
“There’s no need to rush. Take your time,” Marcia said. But of course the parents dug in right away. I snuck a peek at Mom, who held her pen a millimeter from the page as if she wanted to write but couldn’t.
I looked down at the list. No wonder Mom was having trouble. There was almost nothing on there she’d have been willing to eat. Here were the foods:
Ritz Crackers
Carrots
Cucumber
Strawberry ice cream
Chips Ahoy! cookies
Cheese pizza
Diet Coke
Spaghetti
I had a choice. I could be honest and write down NEVER next to everything except Diet Coke and cucumber. But as mad as I was at Mom and Dad for sending me here, I didn’t want to embarrass them. On the other hand, if I lied and answered like a normal person, the other girls would know I wasn’t telling the truth, that I was weaker than they were. I hated that I cared. I looked around to see if any of the other girls were as perplexed as I was, but they were all busy writing.
I went with the truth. Call it peer pressure, or maybe survival. I had to live with these girls. I clicked the pen open and got to work.
Here’s how I filled out my form:
Ritz Crackers—16 calories and 1 gram of fat per cracker. Nasty, fake butter taste and TOTALLY terrible for you. Processed grossness!!!
Carrots—SO MUCH SUGAR!!!! More calories than you think. I will eat a few sometimes, but you have to watch out. They add up.
Cucumber—Almost all water. Eat away!
Strawberry ice cream—Frozen fat. Scares me. Makes me feel out of control.
Chips Ahoy! cookies—Stress me out. SO FATTENING!
Cheese pizza—Disgusting fatty carby greasy fat thighs.
Diet Coke—A LIFE SAVER!!!!!!!!!! Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Spaghetti—Sickening. Gross. Carbs. Never.
I put my pen down. I’d lied. The truth was, I liked pizza. Especially with spinach and sausage. And Ritz Crackers? I loved those, too. Not that I’d touch one now, but I used to beg Mom to buy them at the store the way other kids begged for Count Chocula. She always made me get the organic, boring wheat ones instead. And Chips Ahoy!? Katrina and I used to microwave them for a few seconds and, let me tell you, they were delicious. Soft, with melty chocolate chips. Yum.
But I didn’t eat that way anymore. I doubted I ever would again, even if I got better. My body would probably self-combust. Or I’d stuff myself to death.
I looked over at Beth, who was sitting next to us. Her blond parents had worry lines etched deep into their faces. I’d heard there was a good chance Beth would be getting another NG tube soon. She wasn’t eating enough at meals and was practically living on Ensure. She was also orthostatic, which meant that her blood pressure dropped whenever she stood up, so for the last two days she’d had a Gatorade in her hand all the time. She was so quiet and shy, but she seemed driven by this silent strength that kept her from eating, even when she wanted to. A part of me would have killed for her willpower. At an activity the other day, Marcia had asked us to write a list of things we liked about ourselves. Beth left hers blank. Now, on her form, next to every single one of the foods, with the exceptions of cucumbers and carrots, about which she’d written, OKAY IF PLAIN, she’d written one word—NO.
A few seats over, Jean wrote slowly. Sandwiched between her parents, she looked just as uncomfortable as I was. Her mom kept one hand on her arm, as if she was scared that if she let go Jean might fly away.
I looked over my form and added an extra Gross! next to spaghetti.
When everybody had finished, Marcia said, looking around with an encouraging smile on her face, “Would anyone like to start us off?”
None of the girls would even look at her.
And then good old Dad raised his hand. “I’d be happy to,” he said, clearing his throat. “Okay, so forgive me if my answers are off. I’ve never done something like this before. So, when I thought of Ritz Crackers I thought of Cheez Whiz.”
Most people in the room laughed a little. I smiled. Dad was a little obsessed with Cheez Whiz. Much to Mom’s horror, he ate it on Ritz Crackers and made nachos with it all the time. He kept a jar of it on a special shelf in the kitchen. Mom made him keep all of his food there, separate from hers, as if his snacks might pollute her lifetime supply of brown rice and the probiotics she took every day for what she called her “digestive health.”
When I was little, I loved Dad’s shelf. He kept tomato sauce and mac ’n’ cheese on there for the nights Mom wasn’t home and he had to cook, plus his other favorite things too: chunky peanut butter, which he loved eating with Wheat Thins for lunch, dill pickles, and his junk food—Double Stuf Oreos, Cheez Whiz (of course), tortilla chips, jars of salsa, canned baked beans, and yogurt-covered raisins, which he argued were healthy because they were raisins. And he always, always kept Twizzlers, my favorite candy, right in the front, never saying a word when a few would go missing every couple of days.