Sophie

Sophie:  Sleep pulls at me.  It’s fingers are twined through my brain, refusing to acknowledge the persistant beeping of my alarm. 

            “Sophia Margaret Lewellen, what the fuck is wrong with you?” screams my mother, who also bangs on the thin wall between our rooms with her fist.

            Sleep recoils, and I jump up, turn off the alarm, spin around in fright – is Momma coming in?  Will she trade me for the wall as a target for her fists?

            All is quiet again.  I’m standing on the bare wood floor, a sliver of space between my bed and my dresser.  Looking to the side, I check myself out in the mirror.  I’m not vain, it’s not like that!  I just can’t help it.

            All I can see is my stomach, protruding out as though I’m pregnant or something.  I think I grew fatter during the night.  Dropping to the floor, I begin a hard-core set of calisthenics, mostly working on my abs. 

            It’s almost eight when I finish, and the bus comes at eight-fifteen.  The clothes I’ve laid out are uncomfortable.  Itchy leggings and a long shirt that looked cute on the mannequin in the store, but only makes me look fatter.  Tossing through my closet, I end up yanking a pair of holey jeans out of the laundry pile and shoving my legs into them so fast, my foot catches on the hole in the knee and pulls it wider.  Don’t care.  Slip into a Hello Kitty black shirt I’ve had since I was eleven and it still fits, it fits great, it’s tight, and my ribs even show, and I’m not going to look in the mirror again, not going to check if my fat stomach is sticking out because it’s already eight-eleven.

            Rushing to my laptop, I start to write: 

            “Thirteen today.  Alone.  Momma’s in bed.  She won’t be up until after I get home, and then she’ll be on the couch with her big, plastic red cup of wine, and there won’t be a cake, but I don’t mind. I wouldn’t eat it anyway.”

            My bedroom door swings open, slams against the wall.  I jump.  Goosebumps rise on my arms.

            “The bus will be here in two minutes.  Two minutes, young lady!  I’m not driving you, don’t think I’m driving you.  What are you writing?  Are you writing about me?  Why don’t you write about yourself? Why don’t you write that you’re as skinny as a baby bird because you won’t eat, and your mother does nothing except try to make you the best meals…”

            She goes on, but I’ve already shut my computer and I don’t care if she reads my stuff while I’m gone, I don’t care about her.  I don’t need to listen to her lies.  One day I will be a famous writer and I will leave here and leave her and right now, I’m outta here.  Grabbing my backpack and hoisting it onto my shoulders, I bend over from the weight, but that’s good, because the position pushes my head out in front so I’m like a pointy missile, aimed at my mother.  She moves aside and lets me pass.

            I hear the bus as I run down the steps from the third floor, past the second, where Mrs. Findley lives and I smell bacon and my stomach twists inside, but I wouldn’t ever eat bacon anyway.  I won’t eat anything that used to have a head.

            I won’t eat anything.

            The bus chokes and grumbles past me just as I get outside.

            So what, I’ll walk.

            Staring down at the sidewalk, I’m careful not to step on cracks, but I count them as I go, and I’ve just passed crack number one hundred and ninety-eight when I see the bird.

            A cluster of flies rises off it as I get closer.  Only its skeleton and a few thin strands of flesh remain on it’s torso.  The head is gone.  But the wings!  They somehow remain completely intact, outstretched as if it is ready to fly.  

Nora

Nora:  I follow Gina into her room, and then freeze.  Maybe my mouth hangs open for a moment, but I quickly shut it and continue into the room – pretending I’m not humbled, awed, diminished? By the hundreds of pictures of supermodels.  Cut-outs from magazines paper the walls.  The dresser drawers.  The closet door.  Even the headboard of Gina’s bed is a rainbow of eyes, faces, bodies.

I guess I didn’t hide my surprise so well, because Gina says, “My mom and I cut out pictures of women we admire.  They’re for inspiration.”

For what?  I wonder.

As if she read my mind, Gina says, “It’s supposed to help me get thin.”

“Uh huh,” I say.  So lame. 

Gina crosses the floor, her corduroys swishing because of her thighs rubbing together.  That’s exactly why I never wear corduroys.  But if Gina is embarrassed, it doesn’t show.  Still, after patting down a curled corner on one of the pictures, she turns to me – a long way from supermodel thin.  A long way from any kind of thin – and she says, “I don’t think it’s working, and I don’t know why.  Don’t tell anyone, but I’m bulimic.”

I didn’t think I could feel any smaller than I already do, with all those beautiful eyes staring at me.  But I do feel smaller, less than.  And something burns in me – jealousy.

Allison

Allison has both weight and self-esteem issues.  She takes most of her self-image from what others think of her, especially boys.  Here, she begins a new diet, one of her many attempts at changing herself to meet others’ expectations.  Allison first appeared in OGW 4/8/10, and again on 10/28/10.

Allison:  I’m sitting all the way back at a table by the courtyard window, nowhere near through-traffic, and yet a bag of Fritos hits me in the head.

     “Sorry,” says Soulsucking Loser Number Two Hundred and Twelve – they’re all the same, the boys in my class.

     “No problem,” I say, putting the bag on the lunchtable and sliding it towards him. 

     Before the Loser gets to it, my fist smashes down, pulverizing the Fritos.  “Sorry,” I say.

     “Freak,” he says.

     Yeah, whatever.  Go home and cry to your momma.

     Now where was I?

Oh yeah, Diet, Day One:  I’m starting on a diet of Goldfish – the cheddar cheese flavored kind, not the swimmy kind.  First, I bite off the tail, carefully so the rest of the fish stays together.  If the fish breaks, I punish myself by throwing that one away. 

     After the tail is chewed five times and has basically just dissolved – I wouldn’t consider it swallowing, more like I absorb the taste of cracker… after that, I put the fish body in my mouth, and use my tongue to position the body upright between my top and bottom teeth, and then I split the body into two pieces with a gentle bite.  I chew on these five chomps too, and then I swallow three times.  Running my tongue over my teeth, I make sure they’re entirely clean of goldfish, and then I reach into my ziplocked baggie and get another one.

     And that’s how I do it.  That’s how I get through lunch.  Day One:  Twenty-two goldfish.

Ramona

Ramona is bulimic, and her therapist wants her to start each day with a positive affirmation, but it doesn’t work out that way.

Ramona:  I stare at myself in the mirror.  Actually, it’s more of a glare.  I’m supposed to look into my eyes and tell myself, “I’m pretty enough, I’m thin enough, I’m good enough, I am enough!”

     Instead, I say, “I’m fat.  I’m ugly.  No one will ever love me!” 

     I mean, fuck therapy.  Anyway, it’s true.  I see myself in the mirror, and I am fat, I am ugly.  I’m not enough for anyone to love me.  

     My reflection stares hard back at me.  I’m so crazy, I’m having a staring contest with myself, seeing who will blink first, LOL. 

     Blink.  Blink, blink.  My eyelids start moving fast, as if they’re holding back tears, only they’re not because I would never cry in front of anyone, even myself in the mirror.  I try never to cry at all, because what’s the point?  No one cares.

     “No one cares about me.  Mom would rather sit at her laptop writing than hear me talk.  What I say isn’t important.”

     I sigh.  Theresa, my therapist, would say that I’m holding on to a resentment against my Mom, but I’m like, for what?  For ignoring me?  I have a right to be angry.  I want to be angry.

     It’s not just that my Mom doesn’t have time to read the poem I wrote her, like happened last night. 

     It’s that I remember, the last time I cried, she said, “Ramona, I can’t understand you when you’re crying!  Go to your room until you can be calm enough to talk to me coherently.”

     Well, I went to my room, and I wrote in my journal, wrote how much I hate him, I hate my stepfather, Cody --

I hate him hate him hate him hate him hate him

FUCK HIM!

     Then I scribbled in my sketchpad, a picture of how I was feeling, black lines without direction, over and over, a black hole of graphite expanding and then PWOOF, it dragged me in, and I did stop crying.  I got all calm.  I went downstairs, and I said, “Mom, can we talk now?” and I was gonna tell her the truth about Cody, and she was gonna take me into her arms like she used to when I fell on my rollerskates and my knee was bleeding, or that time I took the wrong bus after school and got lost and was all the way in New Haven and –

     “Sweetie, I’m trying to make dinner now.  This isn’t a good time.”

     “Mom!  It has to be now!”

     “Cody will be home soon and you have homework, and I have to get this chicken in a pan.”  My mother squinted at an open copy of The Joy of Cooking.  She glanced at me.  She sighed.  “Please, Ramona, I’m busy.”

     “Mommy—“

     “Ramona!  I said not now!”

    

     Now, looking into the mirror, I say, “I’m thin enough for Cody.  I’m pretty enough for Cody.”

    

     But he’s ruined me for anyone else. 

     Even for myself.