“Bulimics don’t starve themselves, they binge and then purge. You wouldn’t see a weight loss. And there’s one more thing, Sean. In school, in the girls’ bathroom, Emma saw Amelia cutting herself.”
“Cutting?” I repeated.
“Like with a razor blade,” Piper replied, and suddenly, I understood. “Just go talk to her, Sean.”
“What do I say?” I asked, but she had already slipped out the door.
As Amelia showered, I could hear the water running through the pipes. Pipes-the same pipes we’d had the plumber in to fix four times over the past year, because they kept leaking. He’d said it was acid, which hadn’t made sense at the time.
Vomit was wicked acidic.
I walked upstairs and went into the bedroom you and your sister shared. If Amelia was bulimic, shouldn’t we have noticed food disappearing? I sat down at the desk and rummaged through the drawers but didn’t find anything except for packets of gum and a few old exams. Amelia brought home straight A’s. How could a kid who worked so hard, who did so many things right, have gone so far off track?
The bottom cabinet of Amelia’s desk didn’t close. I unhooked the drawer from its metal runners and pulled out a box of gallon-size Ziploc bags. I turned the box over in my hands as if I were examining a rare artifact. It didn’t really make sense for Amelia to have these up here when they were readily available in the pantry; it made even less sense for her to go to the trouble of hiding them behind the drawer. Then I turned to the bed. I pulled down the sheets but found only the stuffed, molting moose Amelia had slept with since I’d met Charlotte. I knelt beside the bed and ran my hands beneath the mattress.
They came by the fistfuls: torn candy wrappers, bread loaf wrappers, empty packages of cookies and crackers. They fluttered over my feet like plastic butterflies. Closer to the head of the bed were satin bras with the price tags still attached-in sizes far too big for Amelia-makeup with CVS price stickers, pieces of costume jewelry still riveted to their plastic display squares.
I sank to the floor, sitting in the center of all the evidence I hadn’t been willing to see.
Amelia
I was dripping wet and wrapped in a towel, and all I wanted to do was crawl into my pajamas and go to sleep and pretend today had never happened, but sitting on the floor in the middle of my room was my father. “Do you mind? I’m kind of not dressed…”
He turned around, and that’s when I noticed everything piled on the floor in front of him. “What is all this?” he asked me.
“Okay, so I’m a total pig. I’ll clean my room-”
“Did you steal these?” He lifted a handful of cosmetics and jewelry. They were horrible things-makeup I’d rather die than wear, earrings and necklaces for old ladies-but somehow sneaking them into my pockets had made me feel like a superhero.
“No,” I said, looking him in the eye.
“Who’s the bra for?” he asked. “Thirty-six D.”
“A friend,” I answered, and too soon realized I had screwed myself over: my father would know I didn’t have any friends.
“I know what you’re doing,” he said, getting to his feet heavily.
“Well, maybe you could tell me, then. Because I don’t really understand why we have to have an inquisition while I’m freezing and soaking wet-”
“Did you make yourself throw up before you took that shower?”
My cheeks burned with the truth. It was the perfect time, because the running water covered the sound of retching. I’d gotten it down to a science. But I tried for a laugh. “Oh, yeah, right. I do that before every shower. Which is clearly why I’m a size eleven when everyone else in my grade is a size zer-”
He took a step forward, and I wrapped the towel more tightly around myself. “Just stop the lying,” he said. “Just…stop.” My father reached for me and yanked my wrist toward him. I thought he was trying to pull away the towel, but that was nowhere near as humiliating as what he was actually trying to see: my forearms and my thighs, with their gray-scale ladders of scars.
“She saw me doing it,” I said, and I didn’t have to explain that I was talking about you.
“Jesus Christ,” my father thundered. “What were you thinking, Amelia? If you were upset, why didn’t you come to us?”
But I bet he knew the answer to that one.
I burst into tears. “I never meant to hurt her. I just wanted to hurt myself.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Because it’s the only thing I can manage to do right.”
He grabbed my chin, forcing me to look into his eyes. “The reason I’m angry isn’t that I hate you,” my father said tightly. “It’s because I goddamn love you.” And then his arms were tight around me, the towel the thinnest barrier between us, and it wasn’t creepy or embarrassing; it was just what it was. “This stops right now, you hear me? There are treatment programs and things like that-and you’re going to get yourself fixed. But until then, I’m going to watch you. I’m going to watch you like a hawk.”
The more he yelled, the more tightly he held on to me. And here’s the weirdest thing of alclass="underline" now that the worst had happened-now that I’d been found out-it wasn’t disastrous. It felt, well, inevitable. My father was furious, but me, I couldn’t stop smiling. You see me, I thought, my eyes closing. You see me.
Charlotte
That night, I slept in the chair beside your hospital bed, and I dreamed of Piper. We were at Plum Island again and we were boogie-boarding, but the waves had gone red as blood and stained our hair and our skin. I rode in on a wave so majestic and forceful that it made the shore buckle. I looked behind me, but you were being thrashed underneath the cutting edge of the wave, rolling head over heels, your body raked over the sea glass and the porous stones. Charlotte, you cried, help me! I heard you, but I started walking away.
I was awakened by Sean, shaking my shoulder. “Hey,” he whispered, looking at you. “She slept through the night?”
I nodded, stretched the muscles of my neck. And then I noticed Amelia standing behind him. “Shouldn’t Amelia be in school?”
“The three of us have to talk,” Sean said, in a tone that brooked no argument. He glanced down at you, asleep. “You think she’ll be okay for a few minutes, while we grab some coffee?”
I left word at the nurses’ desk and followed Sean into the elevator, with Amelia trailing meekly behind. What the hell had happened between them?
In the cafeteria, Sean poured coffee for both of us while Amelia lifted the tiny boxes of cereal and tried to decide between Cheerios and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. We sat at a table. At this hour of the morning, the large room was filled with residents cramming down bananas and lattes before making rounds. “I have to go to the bathroom,” Amelia said.
“Well, you can’t,” Sean flatly replied.
“If you have something to say, Sean, we can wait till she gets back-”
“Amelia, why don’t you tell your mother why you can’t go to the bathroom?”
She looked down at her empty plastic bowl. “He’s afraid…that I’ll throw up again.”
I stared at Sean quizzically. “Has she got a virus?”
“Try bulimia,” Sean said.
I felt rooted to the chair. Surely I’d heard him wrong. “Amelia’s not bulimic. Don’t you think we’d know if Amelia was bulimic?”