Part 14 (2/2)

Lila's dark eyes grew large. She demanded, ”What? Is that true?”

I could hear the hurt in her tone. I wasn't surprised by her reaction; Cameron had become like a surrogate big brother to her. Besides clandestine conversations regarding my well-being, they enjoyed spending hours playing Xbox when the three of us were together. I would watch from the couch, giggling as the two of them talked trash while shooting each other with virtual machine guns.

”I don't want to talk about it,” I mumbled and started to leave the kitchen. I wanted to warn them: proceed with caution. I was highly combustible, and flicking a lighter in my direction was ill advised.

Lila jumped into my path and grabbed my arms to hold me in place. This wasn't challenging for her, because she probably outweighed me by thirty pounds. Her voice was pleading. ”You need help, Kayla. You're anorexic, bulimic, depressed; I could probably list your problems all day long.”

”Don't do this to me, Lila,” I begged quietly. ”It has always been me and you against everyone else. Don't turn on me, too.”

”Kayla, you promised you'd never leave me. But you are. You've stopped caring about everything. The only thing that matters to you now is what the scale says. This isn't the Kayla who came into my room at night after Dad died, wiping away my tears and telling me outrageous stories until I fell asleep.”

The memory warmed me. I wasn't the greatest storyteller, but I made an effort for my fourteen-year-old bereaved sister. I would twist fairy tales, telling stories of how princesses saved princes, and I wouldn't stop talking until her eyes fluttered closed.

My mother placed her arm around Lila, a rare display of affection. ”You need to get hold of yourself, Kayla. I saw your grades for the semester. I chalked it up to you getting caught up in a new relations.h.i.+p, but I'm starting to see there's more going on here. If you keep it up, you'll be academically dismissed from college. Also, if you insist on treating Lila and me like garbage, I'll seriously consider asking you to leave this house. You're twenty-one, old enough to take responsibility for your actions.”

At Lila's silence, I understood they'd become a united front against me. My mother, a villain hiding behind her mask of exquisiteness, had poisoned my sister into believing I was the problem within our dysfunctional household. I could fill a dictionary with all the slights, all the disdainful glares, but my sister had turned amnesiac and thought I was the one who deserved to be locked away.

Wordlessly, I took flight. I had to escape. My mom was right, I was an adult and I'd make my own decisions. It was my body-no one was going to dictate how I treated it. I was creating new truths, a fictional tale of Kayla versus the world. Cameron, Lila, and my mother were all trying to force-feed me their ideas of how I should be. Their unwillingness to accept who I was drove me away, and I refused to relinquish control of my life.

Chapter Twenty-Four.

”Thanks for letting me stay here for a couple of days,” I said awkwardly to the rail-thin girl standing in front of me. When SkinnyGirl89, aka Marti, answered the door, I was taken aback for a minute. I couldn't look like that. She wore a tank top and a skimpy pair of shorts. The bones of her rib cage were visible through the fabric of her s.h.i.+rt, and her collarbone was prominent. During our online exchanges, Marti had stated she was anorexic and proud of it for the past two years.

She was a couple of inches shorter than me, and if I had to venture a guess, she couldn't weigh more than ninety pounds. Her bleach-blond hair was a.s.sembled into a messy bun, and her overdone makeup only brought more attention to her gaunt features.

”This is going to be so fun!” Marti said happily as I followed her numbly into her apartment. ”I've never had a roommate before. Not a lot of people would understand how I can't keep a lot of food in the house and why I have pictures of obese women on the fridge. I was so psyched when you called!”

I had called Marti from my car an hour after the showdown with my family. She insisted her family was just as judgmental and that I should room with her until I moved back to campus. Since she lived nearby and alone, I agreed readily and made plans to leave the next morning. Lila's pleas and my mother's cold indifference as I packed up my things haunted me as I placed my suitcase in the center of Marti's foyer.

The apartment was a two-bedroom unit in a large complex. She'd been using the second bedroom as storage for her huge collection of clothes and cosmetics, but she had cleared it out once I told her I'd come stay for the rest of the summer.

Marti explained she'd make me a key and I could come and go as I pleased. She had a bartending job a few miles away and she'd be gone most nights from five o'clock to three in the morning. She said she loved the job, trilling about how she got a kick out of wearing skimpy outfits and showing off her thin body. Her hope was to break into modeling one day, and she was saving money to build her portfolio.

We were polar opposites. Marti craved the limelight, while I wished to stay invisible, safely tucked away in the shadows. But despite our differences, I was drawn to her. She'd be my safety net, my a.s.surance I would stay on track and not become fat again. Marti sympathized with my fears and told me to carry around a picture of myself at my plumpest as a reminder of how far I'd come.

As I turned in for the night, I could hear the ba.s.s from the radio playing next door. The walls were thin, and I was grateful for it. The music could block out the noise in my head. I'd turned off my phone hours ago, but now I powered it up as I lay in bed, sleepless. Unsurprisingly, I had several texts and voicemails from Cameron and Lila. They were unwavering in their resolve to never give up on me.

Lila's messages went from being enraged over my departure to later being apologetic and promising she'd never mention the word anorexia again as long as I came home. Cameron had called me an hour earlier and tears blurred my vision when I heard the familiar deep tenor of his voice.

”Well, I know your mom said I need to give you s.p.a.ce and stop pressuring you to get help, but not talking to you is destroying me. I was never trying to make things harder for you and I'm sorry if that's what happened.

”Kayla, I'm not p.i.s.sed about what you said about my mom and I hope it's not the reason you're refusing to talk to me. I get that you're trying to tear us apart, but I'm not letting you walk out on me. Maybe you weren't off base about some of the things you said-I do have a lot of unresolved s.h.i.+t I need to deal with.

”Whatever you're going through, I want to help you through it. If I came on too strong, it's only because I love you so d.a.m.n much. You make everything better in my life and I only want to do the same for you. Just call me, Kayla. Please.”

His words swirled around me and suffocated me with unfathomable longing. I didn't want to be in this strange bed, alone, silently reciting the rules of not eating. I wanted to be touched and loved by a man as beautiful on the inside as he was on the outside.

But I was experiencing my own personal apocalypse, and I knew I'd take him down with me. To protect him, I needed to stay away. To get past his mother's downfall, he needed to save someone. But I didn't want to be saved.

”What are you doing?” Marti asked, wandering into the kitchen the next afternoon. She grabbed a water bottle out of the fridge and sat next to me at the table wearing only a t-s.h.i.+rt and a thong. I had a feeling I'd have to grow accustomed to her lack of modesty.

”Adding a couple of new pages to my Thinspiration book. I want to drop these last few pounds and move on with my life. After I get below my goal weight, then maybe things can go back to normal.”

Marti nodded knowingly. ”I hear ya. If you drop to a couple pounds under your goal, you won't be as stressed if you gain a little bit here or there. What tips are helping you the most?”

”I think about food constantly, so I'm trying to fight my cravings. One of the things that works is I count to a hundred whenever I want something to eat. By the time I get to a hundred, I've had enough time to think of all the reasons I shouldn't eat. Another thing is I'll pinch each spot on my body where I find any fat, really hard.”

Marti tapped her acrylic nails against the table while she seemed to mull over her own tips. ”You know what else helps me when I want to eat? Watch people eat! It's kind of gross, especially when you see fat people doing it. Or do something else you think is revolting. Like clean the bathroom, or change kitty litter.”

A buried part of me understood how sick it truly was. We were talking about how to starve ourselves in the same way people talk about the weather. It made me wonder if I should be listening to the sensible ones in my life and stop the insanity. I was on the brink of my own personal destruction, but I was too detached to care enough to stop it.

I turned the page in my Thinspiration book and froze.

I will not relent. They will not break me.

I had posted the words on a Pro-Ana forum page and printed it out afterward as a reminder of my resolve. I wrote the message during my first week back at my mom's house, at the start of my summer vacation. I was paranoid after overhearing Lila and Cameron, convinced they were concocting plans to make me fat again.

Marti may not have been the best influence, but she didn't want to undermine my goals. My object was to lose five more pounds and then return to a normal diet and a normal life. I'd stop the fasting, binging, purging, and laxative use. All the things tearing me away from the people I cared about could be in my past. I'd have it all: my dream guy, my best friends and sister back in my life, and the perfect body.

”Try and smile, Kayla, you're scaring away my good tippers,” Marti joked two weeks later as I sat on a stool at the bar she worked at. The bar was a hole-in-the-wall place named the Idle Hour with clientele who were looking to get drunk fast. About ninety percent of the patrons were single men who tended to zero in on any girl who stumbled in. Marti joked about how she brought home the leftover sc.r.a.ps at the end of each night.

I watched Marti working energetically, collecting bottles of alcohol to mix drinks. When I asked her before where her endless s.p.u.n.k came from, she told me she popped caffeine-filled diet pills throughout the day.

I took a hesitant sip of my seltzer with lemon. My life had changed drastically since I'd come to live in Toms River with Marti. My days mostly involved hanging out with Marti before she went to work. We didn't have much in common, but she pa.s.sed no judgment and proved to be a distraction. There was a frantic desperation bubbling below the surface, and despite her Pro-Ana allegiances, I wondered about how content she truly was with her life.

At night, I buried myself in work, trying to take on as many article a.s.signments as I could handle. I was sleepwalking through my life; things were crumbling around me, but nothing mattered.

Marti was a storm, and I was getting sucked into the vortex. She was outspoken, chastising me for not taking pride in my body. She relished her thinness and took pleasure in her appearance. She brought home strangers from the bar, men with blurred vision, drunken with l.u.s.t for the outrageous bartender. Most nights, the sound of wall banging was what I drifted off to.

I hadn't spoken to any of my friends or family since arriving at Marti's apartment. And when I could no longer bear to listen to the pleas left on my voicemail by Cameron, Lila, and Brittany, I changed my cell number. Messages left on Facebook and in my email inbox got deleted without being read. The only communication I had was a quick one-line email to Lila letting her know I was okay-and that was only after she threatened to report me missing if I didn't get in touch with someone immediately.

I fantasized over and over again about how things would be once I got to ninety-five pounds. I'd pack up my stuff and drive right over to Cameron's place. I'd tell him how much I'd fallen for him and that I could finally be the girl he deserved. I'd be able to take my clothes off in front of him, shamelessly, and he'd be floored at how I had the body of his wildest fantasies.

Two measly pounds stood in my way. It was all I had left to lose, and I was determined more than ever to drop them.

I wanted out of this life. I didn't want to lie awake, painfully isolated, as another faceless stranger moaned through the thin walls and Marti screamed out in ecstasy. Her lifestyle was one I couldn't understand, and resentment snaked around me. How was she able to do it? How could she let go completely with someone she barely knew when I wasn't able to do the same with the man who possessed my heart?

Marti interrupted my thoughts. ”Hey, take off that sweats.h.i.+rt. The guy in the corner has been eyeing you.”

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