GROUP the next day is held in the kitchen again, which makes me want to bail. But this time, there are no caving cereal boxes, no dripping cylinders of ice cream, no hardened syrup stains on the counter. So I step inside, next to the other girls in Cottage Three.
We wait. Leaning against the counter, Ashley tugs her knit tee over her belly. Teagan plucks a single strand of hair from her head and examines the white-bulbed root. Cate flicks the tube coming out of her nose. We’re huddled together like the world’s most pathetic peewee football team, silently debating our final play. It won’t matter. We’ll get our asses kicked.
“Welcome to group, Cottage Three!” Shrink says brightly, joining the huddle.
We all make a noise like mehhh.
“Today’s group is a meal group,” she says. “We’ll cook our lunch together and then process as we eat.”
“What are we making? Do we get to pick?” I pinch my hospital bracelet between my index finger and thumb. It occurs to me that maintaining my weight this way could make me a Yellow Girl. But I’m not a Yellow Girl, I think, suddenly pissed. I look at the only other Red Girl here—Cate—but she’s nodding, like okay, okay.
Shrink shakes her head. “Here’s the menu: spaghetti with salad, and brownies for dessert.”
I purse my lips together to contain the burst of laughter that’s waiting behind the pink flesh like machine gun fire. Pasta? Salad, with dressing of course, slick, greasy calories that ruin the vegetables. Brownies? I look around to see if anyone else gets the joke. No one’s laughing.
“Before we divvy up the jobs, I’d like you all to choose something to drink.” Shrink nods at the refrigerator.
Ashley steps up first. The refrigerator makes a slurping sound when she jerks the door open. Standing at attention are rows of shiny aluminum cans—Coke, Sprite, Dr Pepper. I don’t even have to summon the numbers. They come instantly. 140calories39gramsofcarbs39gramsofsugar.Toomuchtoomuchtoomuch.
“Where’s the diet?” I ask.
“There is no diet,” Shrink says evenly. “Can we pause for a second? Check in with how everyone’s doing?”
“Oh.” Ashley is already clutching a fat red can.
“Seriously, though. That stuff is bad for you,” I say.
Ashley’s face crumples like a crushed can.
“I mean, I’m sorry. But like, isn’t the goal to get us to be healthy”—fat!—“or whatever? Because this isn’t. It isn’t.” I hate the way I sound, like a shitty whiny kid, even though I’m the only one here who’s thinking clearly.
Ashley closes the refrigerator door. She’s still holding the can.
“The goal is to start to take the fear out of food, out of eating.” I hate the way Shrink’s voice gets all gooey when she’s saying the worst things. “The goal is to show you that you can start to take the power away from some of your fear foods.”
“Do we have to?” Cate says quietly, pinching her tube. She’s staring at the floor.
Thank you.
Shrink shakes her head. “You don’t have to. But if you’re feeling some anxiety around the idea of taking a soda, then I would encourage you to challenge yourself.”
I hate words like process and encourage and challenge.
“Stevie? On a scale of one to ten, where’s your anxiety right now?” Shrink says it like the electricity in me is nothing more than a set of lost house keys—where’s your anxiety right now?—instead of this hot squirmy thing in me that makes me shaky and dizzy and sick. Forcing down a few bites at meals is one thing. But cooking is another.
“I don’t know.” My head is too jumbled up to answer.
“I’m at like an eight,” Cate volunteers. “Soda was one of the first things I cut out when I started to restrict, so . . .”
“So your anxiety is pretty high right now. Would you consider taking a soda?”
Cate bites her bottom lip. “Maybe like a Sprite?”
“Good, Cate. Go ahead.”
When the other girls are all clutching their soda cans, Shrink glances at me.
“No.” I wince at the metallic pop of the cans opening. I’ll try the salad, maybe. Some sauce without the noodles. But soda? Soda?
“Absolutely your choice, Stevie. So we need to divide up the jobs. I’ll make the salad, if a couple of you can take the pasta. And then who wants the brownies?”
“We’ll help with the pasta,” Cate offers. Teagan threads her thick wrist through Cate’s angular elbow.
“And we’ll do brownies?” Ashley almost asks. “Right, Stevie?”
“I guess,” I mutter at the floor.
“Great. You’ll find everything you need in the cabinets.” Shrink claps her hands together, breaking our huddle, and the other girls scatter. I don’t understand. Not figuratively, but literally. My brain isn’t wired right, can’t make sense of how the others are pulling ingredients from the refrigerator and boiling pots of water and snapping pasta in half when I can’t move. Maintaining my weight is too hard. I need a break. Just for today.
“Okayyyy.” Ashley stands on tiptoe and opens the corner cabinet, unearthing a box of brownie mix, a measuring cup, and a plastic bottle of oil. “Can you grab the eggs?”
As she walks by, Shrink squeezes my shoulder. I dip out of her reach and jerk open the fridge door. Standing in the cold white light, I try to focus. Almost impossible, when there are more cans and bottles and cartons and all the numbers zooming around inside my head. Somehow my fingers find the foam carton of eggs, and I retrieve it and hand it to Ashley.
“Thanks.” She reaches for a knife and stabs the plastic bag of brownie mix. Chalky brown dust escapes, and I hold my breath.
After we’re all finished with our tasks, we serve our plates and take them to the table. It feels fake sitting around a table in this semi-house with these girls and Shrink at the head of the table, like we’re playing a TV family and she’s the single mom who’s behind on the mortgage but still makes time for family dinner. I’m starting to have second thoughts about this whole compliance thing. Maybe a tube would be the better option. Maybe I could disconnect it at night.
No. The night nurse would notice.
“So, what was that like for you all, making the food?” Shrink’s eyes sweep around the table.
“Okay, I guess.” Teagan’s fingers find their way to her hairline. “It’s kind of weird making food together.”
“Not being alone, you mean?” Shrink twirls pasta around her fork, sending tiny spatters of sauce to her placemat. She doesn’t even notice.
“Yeah. Before I got here, I can’t remember the last time I ate around people, you know? Like it was just something I did by myself. Bingeing or purging or restricting. Whatever I was doing, I just didn’t want anybody to see.”
“Same,” Ashley blurts over a mouthful of wilted greens. “It’s embarrassing, and nobody understands.”
My chin drops to my chest in a half nod. After our mother left, I ate almost exclusively in the dark. Or drunk, which is almost the same.
“You felt a lot of shame around eating or preparing food or engaging in behaviors.” Shrink nods her understanding. “It’s exhausting, isn’t it? Carrying that kind of shame?” Her eyes flick to me, like Stevie?
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I look just beyond my plate. The smells are too much and all the food is touching and really, tomorrow is a much better day to stop losing weight. “Is it hot in here? It’s hot in here.”
Shrink reaches overhead and yanks a beaded brass chain, sending the ceiling fan above us in reluctant circles. “Better?”
I shrug.
The table goes silent, except for the clinking of forks that are not mine.
“You’re not the only one, Stevie,” Cate says quietly.
Shrink puts her fork down. “What do you mean, Cate?”
“I just mean . . . it’s hard for all of us, that’s all. Maybe if you talked about it some, it would make it easier. Or you’d see that you weren’t the only one feeling . . . whatever.”
I stare at my plate. “I’m feeling like . . . this pasta sucks,” I say, and the other girls laugh, but the laughter is too shallow to be real.
“Stevie, I notice that you’re having trouble with your meal,” Shrink says.
I look around, and the other girls are halfway through their pasta.
“I wonder if it would be helpful to you if we played a game to distract while you eat. Could we give that a try?”
I’ve looked at her before, but now I really look at her. I hold her turquoise gaze without looking away, like there is a silky thread strung from my pupils to hers, and I do the unthinkable: I beg. Please don’t make me do this. Not today. I try to make her understand what I know deep down: I can’t. Get it?
She gives me an almost imperceptible head nod that proves she doesn’t.
“We can play the alphabet game.” Ashley reaches over and squeezes my wrist. For a second, my red bracelet disappears. I don’t breathe again until she lets go. “Books. You like books, right? I’ll go. A: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It’s a kid’s book. I used to read it when—I was a kid.”
“I don’t want to play,” I mumble. Accidentally, my gaze falls on my plate. The pasta writhing beneath chunks of sauce. The salad limp and slick.
“B: Breaking Dawn. From Twilight,” Cate says before carefully pressing the tines of her fork into a pale, fleshy tomato.
“C: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Shrink says. “My absolute favorite. Give it a shot, Stevie. I know you can do it.”
I lift my fork, all the while thinking nonononono, but fuck I have to, there’s no other choice. It’sforJoshit’sforJosh. And I stab a chunk of carrot with my fork. It feels like lead on my tongue and I chew and swallow fast. The oil from the dressing coats the inside of my mouth, and Shrink smiles.
“Can I do a movie?” Teagan’s voice sounds far away. “D: Dirty Dancing. My older sister used to watch that movie all the time. The main guy’s dead from cancer.”
My fingers still frozen around the fork, I try again. Twirl the pasta around the tines while I think about anything other than the whiteness of it, the carbs, the butter. I stab and twirl, then slip the fork past my unwilling lips.
It should feel like something more than this. It should be a monumental moment, but it isn’t. One minute I’m taking a bite of pasta, and then next Shrink is saying G: Great Expectations and I can feel everything mixing around together in my gut and my stomach surges a few times—false starts.
At the end of the meal, we clear our plates and leave them in the sink.
“Excellent job, girls. I’m proud of all of you,” Shrink says. She drains the last of her Coke, which surprises me, because she seems like a coconut water kind of chick. “You can head back to the villa together, if you’d like. I’ll finish up here.”
Outside, I squint into the heat. I can feel my stomach expanding, my belly fighting against the waistband of my jeans. I hate this, all of it. I hate Shrink and I hate myself and I even hate Josh a little, which I know is unfair, but there it is.