My mom found evidence of these binges on multiple occasions. I would hide a jar of empty peanut butter that I’d consumed the night before in a drawer in the computer room, along with wrappers and anything else I’d had to peel open. She mentioned these findings a couple of times, but I uncomfortably brushed them off. My mother would nag that I would attract mice and bugs, but she didn’t understand. I didn’t want to throw my evidence in the garbage. It seemed more visible in the garbage, like I had accepted that I had eaten it.
By the second half of junior year, my bingeing and purging turned into a nightly ritual. I was in denial of the effects until I was forced onto the scale at the doctor’s office for a checkup: 124 pounds! Did I see that right? Shit. I. Did. I had managed to gain twenty-four pounds in a couple of months. This was surely a record of Guinness proportions! Why hadn’t the laxatives worked? They were supposed to clean out my system. Imagine how big I would have been if I hadn’t taken them. All that pain and for what? To wind up an even fatter pig. Out of shame for how I looked, I tried to think of ways to convince my parents that they really didn’t want senior-year pictures of me, which I had to take at the end of junior year—lucky me. That didn’t work. When I got them back, I looked like a large slug-like alien, maybe a cousin or sister (the resemblance was that uncanny) of Jabba the Hutt. Where did those two chins come from? I was horrified and ripped one of the five-by-seven pictures into tiny pieces, crying angry tears. Even my mom admitted it wasn’t my best picture.
So began my crash diet. No food until dinner and only healthy steamed foods when I did eat. I wasn’t going to binge anymore either. I needed to face my reality, and the truth was, I was fat. That night I went into my bathroom, turned the shower water on to mask what I was really doing, and locked the door. I stripped down to fully examine my reflection. My face had become so round and puffy. The backs of my legs had cottage-cheese cellulite on them. My stomach was slightly protruding, and I don’t even want to get into how big and flabby my butt was. I held a chunk of my lardy ass in my hand.
I despised the person looking back at me. This person lacked self-control. She lacked basic discipline. I flopped onto the cold marble floor and lay there, sobbing. All I could see were the naturally skinny girls in school, the girls who didn’t worry about their weight and ate whatever they wanted. I always had to be on a diet, I always had to study extra hard. The more I cried, the more I conjured more proof that not only was I fat, but I was a failure, and the whole world was in on that secret way before me. Like the time at the blood drive at school, when the nurse saw right through me:
Nurse in the blood truck: “How much do you weigh?”
Me: “I haven’t weighed myself in a while, but I think I’m around a hundred fifteen pounds.”
Nurse (scanning me from head to toe): “Oh honey, you are way more than that.”
As my blood filled the bag, the nurse’s words echoed in my head. I must look like a monster! Why would she say that otherwise? “You are way more than that.” I am so fat and ugly. “You are way more than that.” I hate myself. Maybe this blood will drain out of my body, and I’ll disappear. She is telling you the truth, and she is unbiased! “You are way more than that.” Listen to her.
I did it, voice, I listened good and hard.
Why had I let myself get to this point? I had to pull myself together. I slowly got up off the bathroom floor and put my clothes back on. I wiped away my tears and turned the shower off. This was my fault, my doing, and I would be the one to fix it. I put my fake smile on and went downstairs to do my homework, passing my mom on the way to the computer room. She was reading a book at the kitchen table.
“How’s it going?” she asked, eyes following me as I came toward her.
I gave her a kiss on the forehead and shot her a smile. “I have a lot of homework to do, but I’m good.”
“Don’t study too hard. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I answered, shutting the door to the computer room and, at the same time, on the pathetic fat girl whose reflection stared back at me in the mirror. So long, Jabba’s cousin, sister, whoever that hideous creature was looking back at me. The one I didn’t recognize, and didn’t ever want to get to know. The truth was, if I had a choice about which Star Wars character to resemble, I would much rather be an adorable Ewok—a skinny as fuck one.
Chapter 4
Denial
In my senior year, I did something really hard—I quit soccer. I know, dramatic lead-up for what it was, but it was really hard for my teenage self. The sport I once loved had grown to feel more like a job I resented. Plus, I didn’t need to play in order to get into college, because I had worked hard to attain and maintain a 4.1 GPA. Side note: I bombed my SAT’s due to my testing anxiety/refusal to take extra time for my processing problem. My Ivy League dreams were dead with my mediocre test score, flushed down the toilet with all my other failures (and food purges), but I still had my high GPA to lean on.
Soccer had been a constant in my life, an enormous part of who I was. I had begun kicking the ball around even before I started school. My elementary, middle-school, and high-school years had been dedicated to soccer summer camps, school teams, and club teams. All my life, my parents dropped everything to drive me to away games and tournaments as far as Miami. But by senior year, it seemed I didn’t have the emotional and physical strength to keep up.
My high school team had nine girls in my grade, all of whom were best friends, popular girls who liked to party, and who saw me as a little study-hard goody-two-shoes and let me know it. The coach favored me, which only fueled their disdain. They made me feel like even more of an outsider than I did walking the high school halls.
I opened my mesh Nike gym bag only to discover I had forgotten my soccer cleats at home.
“Dammit!” I whispered loudly as I placed both my hands behind my head in frustration.
I decided my best bet was to speed home and grab my cleats before practice started and anyone noticed my absence. All was going according to plan until, on the way back to the field, an old man made a left turn into my car, skidding it into the side of the road. When I got back to the field I was visibly shaken, and practice had already begun.
“I am so sorry I am late,” I breathed in to fight back the tears. “I got into a really scary car accident. Everyone is okay, but I am a little shaken up.” I had some tears in my eyes and my voice quivered.
Behind me I saw one of the girls, Melanie, clearly mocking me as the other girls laughed. “I was in a terrible car accident. I am such a loser, poor baby me…” She went on and on, but I couldn’t hear the rest of what she was saying through my coach’s response.
“You shouldn’t have come back. That’s very dedicated, but go home and…” I couldn’t focus on either conversation because I was trying to listen to both, Melanie and the coach.
My heart sank to the pit of my stomach. Now I knew it for certain—my senior teammates thought I was “such a loser.”
So, even though I finished my senior-year season on the school team as captain, it was nothing like being the captain of the football team and ruling the school. In fact, being captain felt more like a curse than a blessing, and it definitely had something to do with how I came to the position.
The way my coach determined who was captain was by anonymous vote. Three girls were named captain. Unsurprisingly, I was not one of them. But having been on varsity since freshman year and being the first freshman girl in my town’s history to be named “First Team All-League,” I