Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [32]
“I will, I’ll bring it back,” she whispered to the black dog.
But her hand dove into the pocket and pulled out the bit of red and in one moment she draped it across her face and a smell that was complicated and warm and demanding filled her senses. Tonight she would put it next to her when she slept and then she would have to move it to a safer place. Nobody could find this. Lloyd opened his eyes.
“Don’t look at me,” she suddenly growled. He shrank to a sadder size and put his head between his large paws.
This would require more sit-ups than usual. She was permitted to eat if she did the full crunches, which had risen to 400; this trouble with touching the red silky piece of cloth could mean 500. She might be able to eat then. She folded a towel into thirds the long way to protect her backbone and began the trance of motion, hands behind her head, knees bent for rapid, unrelenting crunches. When she was done, she felt worthy of logging on to her special website. This was something that no one knew about, not even Rocky.
Rocky could spoil everything for Melissa. No one had said a word to her about not eating enough until Rocky came to dinner and blew her cover. That wasn’t entirely true; her mother had begun to make everything that Melissa had ever said she loved to eat, and even took to bringing home Chicken McNuggets from the mainland.
Melissa logged onto the websites for girls with eating disorders. She knew her mother would never think to track where she had been on the Web and this gave her the freedom of a world traveler, disguised as a high school girl, an honor student, track star, but really she was a terrorist. Her camo gear included sweatpants, pristine running shoes, two layers of shirts, and sometimes two layers of pants. When she heard her mother go to sleep, the click of the bedroom light, the outer gear came off and bone girl appeared, skin stretched smooth over bone, enough toned flesh to keep her running. On to the websites. Her favorite was www.annierexia.com. The sites of resistance, the guerrilla fighters of world food. How to do without, to exist on defiance with an apple for lunch, to live on the razor’s edge between perfect brevity of body and the hospital. At all cost, said the Web-page star, do not let them put you in the hospital. As a prisoner of war, they can do anything to you, restrain you, and take away privileges. At the very worst, they will slide a feeding tube down your throat and defile you with a disgusting mixture of blended drinks that no one should have to endure.
Melissa shuddered with pleasure. Her nipples tightened at the heroic Web-page girl. She was ashamed for not being as brave, as strong, as perfectly beyond her body as Annie was. She couldn’t possibly be called Annie, could she? Melissa’s friend Krystal had been her starving partner last year, but now Krystal had a boyfriend and she had lost her edge and lost her time to be with Melissa.
As if by magic, Lissa spotted a new flag on the site that said, Going Solo. She clicked on it and the text sprang up.
“If everyone has left you, and gone back to food it’s because you have something that they don’t. You are ready to cross over. I’m not stopping. Are you?”
Her breath stopped, and then she clicked off, suddenly fearful. She had a cooked egg white waiting for her downstairs that she would have to eat by tomorrow morning, but the whole day could stay under 700 calories. She could easily move down to 600.
Was she just average, soft, not special in any way? She had to remember to put tampons on the shopping list on the fridge. She couldn’t let her mother know that her period had stopped. This was the third month and she had nearly forgotten to keep up the pretense. She padded silently down the stairs and into the kitchen.
She pushed the hardboiled egg across the plate, separating the yoke from the whites, and with deliberate strokes, cut the egg white into tiny cubes.