The Graffiti Artist (Camren/ Norminah)

18.

Trigger warning: Talks of eating disorders and mild drug use

Normani Kordei Hamilton is a perfectionist. From when she was little, to her current personality now, her ability to stress over seemingly minute things has never wavered. From a young age she would stay after hours perfecting her technique in dance, wanting to stay so long that she would start to cry when her mother would literally pick her up and put her in the car. Eight years old or not, she wanted, no needed to be perfect. Looking back, it honestly doesn't surprise her that she became the way she did.

Maybe it was the pressure. It's not that she was raised in an unstable home, or she was put under immense pressure by her parents. Normani's stress on herself was all self-inflicted. So severe that she would berate herself for hours if she scored less than satisfactory on any assignment in school. Panic attacks and depressive episodes were pretty much a routine part of Normani's early teenage life before she even started restricting.

Normani tries to think back to when she first started what would become such a huge part of her life, and she can't really put a finger on it. She knows stress as a whole is a trigger for her, but she cannot for the life of her remember how she started the illness that would get her to the point of collapsing in bathrooms and being put in facilities.

Everything just happened so fast that she can't even recognize her triggers. Whatever it was somehow led her to finding herself not wanting to eat. For some reason, it became her go to reaction when a stressor presented itself in her life. She remembers beginning to lie to her mom, who was someone that she used to tell everything to. It used to break her heart every time she did it, but when she would ask her about dinner, she would find herself lying about how she already ate or how she wasn't hungry anyways.

Sometime after that, Mani found herself stumbling upon terrible websites that encouraged anorexia and whose users gave each other tips on how to lose weight by starving themselves. Maybe this was the turning point. The endless threads on "effective" ways on how to lie to friends and family members about meals, work out plans, safe foods, and ridiculous goals of staying under eight hundred calories a day began to ingrain themselves into her head, quickly taking over her body and her life. She went downhill quickly. She wasn't near overweight at all when she started to try and lose weight, so when she was actually losing weight, it was very noticeable and concerning. Fainting at rehearsal was just the start of her downfall.

"Babe? Everything alright?" Dinah bites her lip and looks at Ally worriedly. Her, Ally, and Mani have been sitting at her girlfriend's spacious island counter for a while now, maybe even an hour or so. Mani has barely touched her food, and Dinah knows what she's trying to do but she can't let her. She will sit with her as long as she needs to make sure she finishes her food.

All day Normani has dodged Dinah's efforts to give her food, so when they got back to the older girl's house with Ally in tow, Mani gave in to the two girls, who made her a sandwich. Dinah made sure that she measured out the servings for the peanut butter and the jelly for her girlfriend so she could have some kind of control over her meal, and Mani wanted to tear up at her thoughtful girlfriend.

"Yeah, I'm fine." She tries her best to ignore the triggering intrusive thoughts about how many calories are in the different components of her peanut butter and jelly sandwich and takes a bite.

Peanut butter is one eighty-eight, jelly is one twelve, bread is one thirty-eight.

It takes everything in her to not moan at the taste of her first meal of the day.

"I'm sorry guys." She whispers after finishing the first half. One more half to go.

"We love you. We'll sit here as long as you need, okay?" Ally smiles, rubbing her friend's shoulder.