Nothing to Lose

Chapter Ten

When Lindsay tried to go back to her room, she found all her boxes neatly stacked on top of one another, her fuzzy pink blanket folded at the foot of her bed, and her clothing out of the closet and in her suitcase. It was as though Cinderella had run through with her magically cleaning mice, making it as though no one had even unpacked the cartons of inside joke memorabilia. However, the closest thing Lucille Packard had to an enchanted cleaning staff was Levy, who ran around the wing armed with her industrial bleach wipes and a determined look on her face to keep us from dying of dystentary or any other equally humiliating and bacterial disease.

At the foot of the bed that had always been empty was the "NIKITA" urine capturing device.

"What's going on?" I heard Lindsay ask as a nurse wheeled her into the doorway. I was sitting behind her, traffic was always awful after meals, considering the narrow pathways and stupid wheelchairs.

"We found out that Nikita's eighteen, hun. We can't room adults with kids. You're being moved down to room two." The nurse said, navigating her way through the box maze. 

"Room two's my room." I said, looking up at my mother, who'd picked me up at the dining hall, not because she didn't know it, but because I was a bit surprised. I'd gotten pretty used to the single room life.

"I'm rooming with Maris?" She asked shyly. More than likely, she was nervous about rooming with someone who's mom never left. It was like spending the night at someone's house, but for an indefinite amount of time, and you couldn't escape awkward mom-conversation by pretending you had an early soccer game the next morning and "going to bed early".

"Don't worry Lindsay, we can make friendship bracelets and stuff." I called into her room as I was pushed past.

Lindsay and her many belongings were moved in by nightfall. Although I was only 14, not much older than her 12 years, I felt almost a motherly bond to this girl. Lindsay was one of those girls adults immediately fall in love with- her voice as small and sweet as her appearance. You wanted to pick her up and put her in her pocket to keep her safe, especially here. She didn't deserve to be locked up here in the zoo where doctors scrutinized their menagerie of deranged teenagers. We were fucking insane, she had simply fallen down the wrong path of yo-yo dieting. If anything, she deserved so much better than this hospital. The only time her father visited her was to inform her he was going on vacation with his new wife (who looked suspiciously like a younger version of his ex-wife) since she didn't "look like she was getting out anytime soon, anyway". She deserved to be in a house that reflected her gentleness, to be cuddled up around a cheesy fireplace playing a retro card game with her picture perfect J-Crew catalogue family. Not metaphorically changed to a plastic orange table until she could choke down enough Ensure to make up for food that was simply too hard to choke down.

No, she didn't deserve this. But I did.

I'd known it from the first time I realized I simply didn't have to eat. It's such a simple realization to come to, but one hardly anyone does. For years I tested my limits- just skip breakast. Oh, who really needs lunch? Dinner...well, only a few more hours til tomorrow, just wait it out. And then one day, I spent the majority of my days eating nothing at all. A bite a vegetable or tofu occasionally made it's way past my lips, but nothing that would fill the hollow ache that had become my stomach's perpetual companion. I remember lying in bed every night for the months leading up to my admission, wondering in my malnourished, delrious state, why I had to be the one who was cursed.

No, I wasn't referring to my disease. I was beyond that. I was certain that I simply didn't need food. Being a very fact-oriented person, I knew the science behind starvation. I knew the human body could only go so long deprived of nourishment before it would begin to shut down. And I was truly showing the signs of my hunger strike- my hair fell out in clumps, my skin turned waxy and grey, my eyes bugged out of my abnormally large head in comparison to my body. But somehow, none of this correlated in my mind with any real damage. If I was going to die from lack of food, it should have happened long ago. And so, I must be, due to some twisted curse or screw up in the evolutionary chain, that I was cursed to an existence without food.

I'd lay in bed at night, knowing that I could get up at any time and eat. I could eat the whole fucking pantry if I wanted to. But I didn't deserve it. I wasn't good enough to enjoy it. I'd see pretty people eating pretty iced cakes and macaroons and gourmet platters of food, smiling from their cooking channel-connived worlds. They deserved it. They must have earned it, somehow. They were beautiful and successful and worthy of a life free of the pain I felt. And it wasn't just celebrities who I was envious of. Everyone I saw was perfect in my eyes. Every stupid teenager, every tiny baby...they were all perfect. While I could name to you every fold and ugly line and freckle and edge and curve on my body that I despised, all I could see was the beauty in every person I saw. I was nothing but flaws. Flaws that could never be fixed by eating.

I was fucked up. I was delerious. I didn't need food. I simply didn't need it. Maybe at some point I would die from this starvation, but I was doing okay, it seemed. I still went to school (where I'd fall asleep in every class) and went out with friends (one time Freshman year, where I threw up in a public bathroom because I accidentally took a sip of someone's lemonade) and went to the gym (where, to my horror, I found I couldn't even lift the three pound dumbbells elderly women were tossing around as part of their social hour). I was functioning. I was breathing, however labouriously, and I had found my life without food.

If I were to die, who gives a fuck, anyway, right? All I felt was sick. Sicker than the worst flu or cold. Freezing in spring heat, dizzy walking to and from class. I was so weak my pencil felt like lead in my hand, and yet I would write and study with equal intensity to my past-  because that's what it was all about, in the end. Perfection. Nothing could be imperfect. Nothing.

Sitting in Lucille Packard, I wanted to shake Lindsay. I wanted to tell her to wake up and run, because it was too late for me. I had earned my weak heart and damaged organs. I had earned my swollen throat from throwing up bile. I had earned the loss of the thick, thick hair people used to be envious of. She didn't. But I didn't shake her, because a) she would probably snap, and b) I wasn't that strong.

Instead, I asked her to make friendship bracelets with me. As we picked out our string colors, she whispered to me, "I just want to go home, Maris."

I just want to go home.

Home.

And I knew what she meant by that. Not "home" the physical place. "Home", the J Crew catalogue I had imagined, where her father still loved her mom and her mom still loved her father and they skiied in Aspen for a week every winter. "Home" where someone paid attention to her long enough to notice if she'd skipped a meal or passed out in her bathroom. That home was gone. And looking at her, sitting on her bed like a tiny wax doll, surrounded by gifts that held nothing but emty promises, I knew why she was here. You'd think a stay in a hospital would bring your family together, if only long enough to make sure you were okay. But for Lindsay, all it did was reaffirm what she already knew- her world as she'd known it had fallen apart. And there was no home to go home to.

She didn't deserve that. She deserved the life she'd had before- her private school in San Francisco and her plush vacations and adoring fans who sent her box after box of inside jokes. But I knew right then and there that she believed she deserved all of this. This was her punishment for tearing apart her picture perfect life. She was one of those kids you read about in parenting books, who wrongly believe they were the cause of their parents' divorce.

I couldn't help but wonder if she knew why I was punishing myself. If anyone could see it. I was sure they could- someone as imperfect as me would be so blatantly obvious in this world of perfect people like Lindsay. I didn't have a noble, martyr excuse like Lindsay. In fact, I felt like I must be viewed with disgust- so flawed that they can't even make things right by becoming as small and unnoticiable as possible.

All I could do was offer her the box of string and hope she took the prettiest one, the silvery blue one, because she deserved something beautiful.