All I can do is remember how broken down I was. Every pound I gained during that time, I blamed on the stress. On the situations I was thrown into. That terrible excuse for a cop TV drama series where I cowered at the craft table. No one said a thing.
I was a retired model. A dancer. A tumbler since I was nine. I was surprised no one noticed at the craft table. I even managed to hide it from Detective Producer, the man I loved.
And still, I moved through it unnoticed. And no one knew.
Oceana knew. She could spot me from a mile away. Is it that women like us just know? A secret club? Dancer’s code? She didn’t have to say anything. She just looked once. And I knew she knew. Best part was, she didn’t ask me to stop.
It was better to eat than to go back there.
Where’s there? The places they sent me when I was a girl.
She locked me away without permission. She did it in secret. Illegally. Almost went to jail for lying to the judge.
I had already run away by thirteen. My second kidnapping by freshman year.
Still a virgin. Never touched a drug. But they treated me like a threat. Like I needed to be locked away.
I went from catered dinners, where I was ordered to eat with perfect manners, like every fork was a judgment or a scold. And now I was eating whatever we caught. Hunting. Eating with a spoon I carved from an old branch.
When I was returned, court-ordered, my dad was put in jail so he couldn’t find me, and my mom said, "I didn’t send you away sooner because you behaved last year."
I wasn’t even home. I was at dance. At the model house. Or staying at friends’ houses. She thought I was dating one of them? At 14? My best friend since I was 9?
So if I wasn’t inconvenient, I was a good kid? I remember the first time she sent me away: wilderness. No mirrors. No soap. Rich girls with baseball-team daddies. We were bad. We made a tribe.
Sometimes, I miss being feral.
You don’t forget how to start a fire with your bare hands. How to live without a bed. How to not bathe. How to survive with other lost girls.
You become something else.
I knew the cough-cough turn by heart before I was eighteen.
When I came back, my room was gone. Just a bare mattress on the floor. New room. Same house. So quick to erase me.
So I drank. My boobs finally grew now that I wasn’t being starved. From Wilderness Program food scraps with more calories than my mom ever gave me.
Senior boys noticed.
I was bored. Liquor without a chaser. The attention. The game. Letting them chase the cheerleader’s prize, like I was the trophy they’d never win.
I let them chase it just to watch them lose.
Paris Hilton gets to talk about it. And it’s still legal.
I wasn’t bad until I came back. Then I became the monster she always said I was.
And I did it well.
To her, me going out meant I was finally being "good." I hated it. I hated everyone.
Second rehab was real rehab. Not a mountain snowstorm in North Carolina. I had one therapist say, “This is the smallest file I’ve ever seen,” like I won a prize.
The only meds I could get in rehab were supplements. I was annoyed and embarrassed. Other girls got to go up there. I didn’t. The nurse looked at me and said, “Why do you need these?”
It’s not like I wanted drugs. But it felt like, wow. She went this far. My mom was just punishing me.
They said I took Demi Lovato’s spot. So I thought to myself, a Disney star is half as good at starving as I was?
It felt like a vacation from my mother. Girls like me. It was peaceful being around girls who found ways to cope, like sanitizer or contraband. Maybe even better than I was.
I’d quit drinking as much before anyone noticed. They hadn’t.
I drank in class. Plastic bottle. Still got A's. Dared them to catch me.
No one did.
Maybe they liked the cheer squad letters on my uniform.
I was never addicted to substances. Only to perfection. The discipline. The praise.
The dance coach would praise me in front of the whole room for how late I stayed, working myself into exhaustion. One of my vices of my ED.
My mom couldn’t send me away anymore, so she tried to make me sick.
Hyperbaric chambers before class. She said it was healing. The same machines that killed Michael Jackson.
I wasn’t allowed to wear tampons in the machine. So blood would drip down my legs. Male nurses who were in charge of me saw it.
I’d run out, scrub myself in the bathroom, cover bruises with makeup, and go straight to the dance studio.
The only thing left of me is my feet. Dancer feet, ugly, grotesque, a secret shame. My dad used to call them hoofs. But my arch was still there. Even now, they’re the only proof ballet was ever real.
When everything fell apart, I went back to my old self. A retired model. A retired dancer. I knew the cough-cough turn by heart before I was eighteen. It was invigorating. To finally see the skeleton of my body again.