Cleanse

On the first day of summer, Skya opens up a new tab and types 'how to lose weight fast.'

And with that, it all begins to shatter quite beautifully.

She and Vanessa decide to try a juice cleanse. On the second day of summer, they blend the first juice: pineapple, lemon, ginger, tumeric. Skya drinks hers slowly, through a straw so the acid doesn't destroy her teeth, and wanders outside to Vanessa's garden in the sun, feeling happy and excited and at peace with the world.

Fourteen days later, she's sick of juice, but she's done it. Vanessa gives in to cravings for Olive Garden breadsticks on Day Three, but Skya sticks with her juices and washes the blender up six times a day. On Day Four, she tops her glass with a strawberry, and then feels horrible the moment she's swallowed it. By Day Ten, she fits into the bikinis she grew out of when she was sixteen: she drinks juices in the shade of the palm trees in the garden and shops online for new ones, scrolling through pages of bikini models and wondering if she'll lose double the weight she already has if she does the juice cleanse for another two weeks.

"That's not healthy." Vanessa says, looking concerned, but Skya doesn't care. She's sleeping better than she has been since she was ten and she'd like to do one properly, anyway, without eating a strawberry halfway through. On Day Fifteen, she gets the blender out and starts chopping kiwi fruit, feeling proud that not only has she made it through fourteen days of the juice cleanse, but she's still going. She wonders whether it would be even more effective if she only drinks three juices a day, but stops herself. She doesn't want to end up with an eating disorder.

On Day Sixteen, Vanessa tries to talk her into getting smoothies ("It's basically juice, isn't it?"). Skya gets strawberry and banana with coconut flakes on top and spends the rest of the day trying to convince herself that it's fine. She skips the last two juices of the day and then feels even worse because now she's messed it up.

On Day Eighteen, she wakes up early and does a hundred lengths up and down the pool, though the water's cold and the garden's still covered in shade. On Day Nineteen, she does the same, and then a workout for a toned stomach as the day gets hotter, and a hundred lengths again in the evening. On Day Twenty, she only gets halfway through a second workout before she feels dizzy and has to stop, and she blames herself for not getting up earlier when it was cooler, and then she wonders if maybe it wasn't the heat.

The thought scares her so much that she looks up whether it's healthy to do a juice cleanse for more than two weeks, and the general conclusiom seems to be that it's not healthy to do a juice cleanse at all. She considers stopping, but she doesn't.

On Day Twenty-One, halfway through length one hundred and ninety-nine of the pool, she realises that she can't keep drinking juice for the rest of her life: she can't keep getting thinner. She starts to feel panicky and the moment she starts to cry she immediately thinks 'I'm probably about to start my period,' and then she's relieved because that's why she's panicky and it'll be fine.

On Day Twenty-Two, before she heads outside to do her morning two hundred lengths of the pool, she digs out the pair of black period swim bikini bottoms that she bought when she was fifteen and had just started and was too scared to use a tampon, just in case it does start that day (which it doesn't).

Day Twenty-Three, and she can clip up the bikini top she hasn't worn since the summer she was thirteen, which is concerning when she considers that she didn't really start hitting puberty until she was fourteen. It's perfectly decent, too: no side or underboob even if she tried. She ignores the part of her that wants to panic and tells herself that if she can fit into her bikini top from when she was thirteen, then she can go and get a smoothie with Vanessa and she can enjoy it (she gets banana berry with almond milk, and drinks it through a straw without touching the cup because it's so cold).

Her period still hasn't come on Day Twenty-Four, and it was due on the second, which was Day Sixteen. It's normally a few days early or late, though, and she wouldn't be panicking had it not just occured to her that isn't that a symptom of an eating disorder?

She grabs hold of the bathroom rail to steady herself, and tells herself to stop being so dramatic. All the same, she skips her two hundred lengths that day.

On Day Twenty-Five, she bleeds through a pair of bikini bottoms she's had since she was twelve. She puts a tampon in and changes them and then goes to swim her two hundred lengths, although she's tired and cold by the first fifty, and she only ends up doing a hundred.

On Day Twenty-Six, she skips all her morning juices and that afternoon, she takes bikini pictures in front of the palm trees in her garden. She sucks in her stomach and hitches her bikini bottoms as far up her hips as they will go (which is not very far, given that they're a size 12-13 from the children's section). She deletes all the photos afterwards, because she's squinting into the sun in every single one.

On Day Twenty-Seven, the blender breaks and she cries for two hours.

On Day Sixty-Four, she's in the hospital.

On Day 2910, she counts the calories in her wedding cake: soft vanilla sponge and thick white fondant icing.

On Day 4218, she counts the calories she burns walking to the divorce lawyer's office.

And on Day 21912, her daughter locks the bathroom door after her mother's funeral, lifts up the toilet lid and sticks two fingers down her throat. Downstairs, her granddaughter, who is nine years old, looks down at her stomach in her black dress and says she doesn't think she will have a raspberry pastry, thank you.