“I know why you're sick,” she says.
“Why?” I ask. I'm afraid of the answer, but I wait. My lips twitch, my eyelashes flutter. All in a split second, little movements that someday all of me will be just as delicate as.
“Because you don't eat enough.” It's the answer I was afraid of. youdon'teatenoughyoudon'teatenoughyoudon'teatenough. It's this little chant she always has here and there, and even when she doesn't say it outloud, it's in her eyes when she looks over at me. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I swear it's always there.
“Dak, believe me. I eat enough. I do.”
“No, you don't.”
“I just like salad and stuff is all. I eat enough.”
“What do you eat?”
My fingers flutter. What do I eat? White foods boil in my mind. I want to lie, I want to say that I like cake and ice cream and cookies and pizza. But all those things make my skin crawl. “Apricots, cucumbers without skin, green leaf lettuce, radishes, artichoke, vegan cheese, soup-but only when it's made by me-, plain rice cakes-sometimes, only sometimes-, tea, plain oatmeal, green beans, bean sprouts. Yogurt, one brand though. There's more. There is. There's a lot.”
17, 30, 8, 1, 76, 40, 10-90, 35, 0, 37.5, 20, 30. 50.
“You don't eat bread.”
“I like saltines sometimes.”
“You need to eat bread.”
“People eat bread for carbs. There are carbs in fruits. I eat fruit.”
We've had this kind of conversation twice today.
I'm scared. I want to tell her, I want to tell her that yesterday all I ate was three leaves and that I still worked out. I want to tell her that I started throwing up when I was twelve, that I started starving and fasting when I was thirteen, and that now I'm just afraid of everything, that now I eat and I starve and I binge and I purge and I cry and I cut. I want to tell her that I'm almost fifteen but I don't know if I'll make it to twenty.
But I won't do that.
It's dangerous to give her more of me to worry about.
Today, I told her that someone asked me out.
Her reply was: “WHAT? BY WHO? I'LL KICK THEIR ASS.”
Even though it makes me sad that she doesn't want to have me, it makes me happy she doesn't want anyone else to either.
When I ask if I look like a boy, she says
“No, you're a girl. A lady.”
A lady must eat no more than a small bird.
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