For Eva

I wish I didn't know so much about eating disorders. I wish I was still blissfully ignorant like I was for the first fourteen years of my life. My sister, Eva, died nine months ago, just before her 20th birthday, but the drama started years before that. When I was a freshman and she was a senior, she got sent to the clinic at our school one morning because she passed out. Pretty soon after, we found out she was anorexic. Mom sent her to therapy, and she changed a lot, but in my opinion, she got worse. She ate and she wasn't bone-thin anymore, and to my mom, that was good enough. She quit all the after-school clubs she did, she never really had friends after that, and she wasn't a normal teenager ever again.

Eva was in and out of the hospital during the summer of last year, and when she was gone, I would go into her bedroom to take her clothes or borrow her makeup. Lucky for me, I also found her diaries under her bed, and even luckier for her, I took them before Mom could find them when she died. It wasn't a very exciting read. It was mostly drama between her friends in the early teenage years, and very quickly became ongoing entries of self-loathing. A little bit of teenage angst here and there. I possess a paper copy of every thought she had in the last five years of her life. It's chilling. I'm glad I do, but it's too sad sometimes. It's even sadder when my best friend, Taylor, is unknowingly recreating these scenes all over again.

Taylor Liu has been the thinnest girl in our friend group since fifth grade, and now she's anorexic? I mean maybe if she was fat and it was this thing she couldn't quit, maybe it makes since, but she was a twig and now she's like, a skeleton. In 10th grade, she stopped eating lunch, but, you know, nobody likes school food, and a lot of girls didn't eat lunch, so it wasn't a big deal. I would ask if she ate lunch at home, but I knew she was lying to me. I knew where she was headed, but I couldn't do enough to stop her. Taylor is what my sister would have called a "good anorexic." From the diaries, I've gathered that to mean a skinny girl, super athletic, scared of food, and always eating healthy. Taylor never uses laxatives like Eva did, because that would be "too dangerous." As if starving herself isn't slowly killing her. Taylor may be an honor roll student, but she's an idiot.

When I think about that year after Eva graduated, I wish my parents had done more for her. They didn't like her in therapy because it was expensive. That didn't make sense to me because if they could pay for my club soccer team, why couldn't they pay for her treatment? I think it was because my parents had crazy parents and weren't ready to accept that they had inherited the trait. They were in denial, so they stopped sending her. My mom sometimes would say "Eva, you're getting too skinny again," and she'd bring out the scale, and the number was high enough. But even at 14, I knew Eva was cheating a little because she always wore heavy pants and sneakers. Like I said, she wasn't 'too skinny' anymore, so she wasn't anorexic, no need to worry. People always talk about the impossible beauty standards and society's expectations of girls, but I don't get it. Just eat. It's not worth dying for.

I mean, I do get it. Sometimes, I wish I was a little bit skinnier, prettier, more athletic, more attractive. When we were little, everyone knew Eva was the chubby one. I wasn't much smaller, but nobody ever called me fat. Mom used to do diets with Eva, ever since we were 11 and 14, but time passed, and fad diets were forgotten. She'd justify it by saying, "You're so pretty, I just want the others to see it." Usually after a fight in the mall while shopping for clothes, Eva would tell my mom to get size 16 and she would bring back an 8. I just don't get why Eva went insane trying to be thin. Mom used to say, "you're not crazy, everybody has anxiety," to her, even though from where I was sitting, Eva was crazy. She was 18 and made a scene anytime she didn't get what she wanted for dinner, especially at restaurants. It was like dealing with a toddler.

If Taylor never ate food, she'd be dead by now. Two years later, there's no more weight to lose. I think she's not that different than Eva. I think she eats, and I think she does everything in her power to undo it afterwards. Eva still starved herself after the ordeal in her senior year, but she would rebound and eat all the food in the house a few days later. My mom thought there was no more eating disorder, or maybe she knew and didn't want to face her daughter's bulimia. I can't imagine that possibility, because that means my mom let my sister, her daughter, die.