I ate and ate and ate at school. At home for breaks, I made a show of dieting (and continued eating everything I really wanted to eat, in secret). This double life of eating would become something that stayed with me well into adulthood. It lingers even now. My parents tried to figure out why I was gaining so much weight. I had no answers I could share with them. They put me on a medically supervised liquid diet during the summer after my freshman year. Every day, I drank five milk shakes that were chalky and disgusting. Of course I lost weight—forty pounds, maybe more. My parents were pleased that I had gotten my body under control. I went back to school, and my classmates admired my new body, offered me compliments, wanted to hang out with me. That was the first time I realized that weight loss, thinness really, was social currency. Amidst this attention, I was losing my newfound invisibility, and it terrified me. I was scared of so much as a teenager.
Early in the first semester of my sophomore year, I lost what currency I had gained over the summer. Within a few weeks, I immediately began eating again, working vigilantly to undo the progress I had made the previous summer. My newly narrowed face plumped up. My stomach strained against the waistbands of my pants. My breasts swelled wildly because not only was I gaining a lot of weight, I was going through puberty.
I still held on to the hope that my boarding school life might resemble The Girls of Canby Hall, that I would bond with all the girls in my dorm and all my teachers would love me. That was never my experience.
Loneliness remained a constant companion. I didn’t have many friends. I was awkward and maladjusted around the friends I did have, and most of the time, I was certain they only tolerated me out of pity. I regularly said the wrong things. I invented a boyfriend, Mr. X, and I don’t know what makes me cringe more now—that I used this bizarre pseudonym for my invention or that I invented a pseudonym at all. I couldn’t even come up with a credible name for the imaginary man of my dreams. Eventually, the girls in my social circle figured out that I’d described Mr. X based on one of their boyfriends, which was, as you might imagine, incredibly awkward, and they did not let me forget it. I had no fashion sense. I didn’t know how to style my hair. I didn’t know how to be a normal girl. I didn’t know how to be human. It was a sad, sad time. Every day was a crushing disappointment or gauntlet of humiliation.
And then, later in the fall of my sophomore year, I began experiencing severe pain in my abdomen. It would keep me up at night, gasping and in tears, alone in a dorm room, far from home. I went to the infirmary, which was not known for any kind of competence, and the staff asked me, over and over, if I might be pregnant. That was, in their minds, the most likely problem a teenage girl could have. I wasn’t pregnant, but they weren’t really interested in investigating further. They sent me on my way each time, not seeming to take me seriously. The medical community is not particularly interested in taking the pain of women seriously.
One night, I crawled to the door of the resident faculty member on my floor, a woman who, during my freshman year, had imitated me in a game of charades by widening her arms and waddling around the room until someone guessed my name as the clue. When she finally woke and came to the door, I was cold and sweating and clammy. Campus security took me to the local hospital, where the doctors discovered I had gallstones. I called my parents, terrified, and my dad told me not to worry. He told me to close my eyes and that in the morning, he would be there. I did as he said and when I woke up, there he was. That is the kind of father he has always been. I had emergency surgery, and my gallbladder was removed. It turned out the high-protein diet I had been on for the summer had not done my gallbladder any favors. I spent about ten days in the infirmary, and ended up with a wicked new scar, tender to the touch.
During my recovery, I was still in pain, and before long, doctors discovered that the surgeon had left some gallstones inside me—such tiny objects causing so much pain. I was rushed to Mass General in Boston, my first ambulance ride, and I was scared again, but also excited in the way of a child who does not quite understand mortality. This time, both my parents came and fretted over me until I was better. Before long, I went back to school. I had lost weight with all the sickness, so once again, I had work to do to make my body bigger and bigger and bigger and safer.