Thin Girls

by Diana Clarke

  I haven’t seen Mim since that night. The night we all slept in a weeping lasso around sick Flee. I was checked into the facility the next day and stayed for over a year.

  Still, I think about her. Every time I see a thin girl with dark, cropped hair. Every time I hear someone with a voice that purrs like oiled cogs, smoothed by cigarettes. I think about her every time I open an old magazine, hoping Mim might be in there, brooding out from its centerfold. I think about Mim as I masturbate, the way she would mew, feline and sensual, with every small pleasure.

  It’s Mim that I think of as I paint, then Kat, and Sarah, and Lily, but I don’t paint Mim, and I don’t paint Kat, or Sarah, or Lily.

  What I paint is a pile of birds, dead crows, bodies upon bodies, a mountain of feathered carcasses, eyes black with death. I climb a stepladder to add a bird to the top of the pile, and my eyes haze, my mind whirs, I fall, and, when my body hits the ground, it mightn’t make any sound at all.

  We Diet: We have been hungry since we were children. Our mothers taught us hunger from such a young age. Us girls were taught to eat only enough to blur the edge of hunger’s angry tone. Us girls were taught to fill our stomachs with water, water water water, there is so much liquid in all of us, pick us up and shake well and we will slosh about obediently.

  Today, we seem to be taking up more space than usual. We are filling our room like a gas, our bodies are pressed to bodies and our skin is wet with sweat, slipping against other skin, and those of us on the edge are pressed against the cold of the wall like climbing lizards and we are too big, we cry.

  We decide to stay inside. We decide to stay in our house so that no one will know, no one will see us taking up all of this space, too much space for women, that’s for sure.

  Our favorite brave idiot says, But how will we eat? Our favorite brave idiot says, There is not enough food in this house.

  We shake our heads, she is so sweet and so lovely, and we say, We will not eat. We will not eat until our bodies begin to eat themselves.

  Only, when our stomachs do begin to protest their emptiness, they shout their cravings so loudly the skies could be rolling with thunder and we would have no way of knowing, and we open the refrigerator and stare at its contents. We say, Perhaps we should finish this food so there is no more temptation. We say, Yes, yes, we must finish this food before we can start our diets. We say, And anyway, it’s 10:34 in the morning, which is no time to start a diet. We will start our diet at noon, we say. Noon is when we will start our hunger.

  Then we sit, eat condiments with spoons, suck mayonnaise from fingers. We sprinkle shredded cheese into our mouths from great heights. The pantry, too, says our favorite brave idiot. We must also finish the food in the pantry. She makes a paste from flour and water and spoons the solution between her lips until they gum together for good.

  She weeps and sobs and the rest of us lower our cans, which we had been chewing open, tooth to metal, trying to pierce the seal and swallow tomato paste or garbanzo beans, foods that had been in our possession for years and years. Our favorite brave idiot tries to tell us something, but her mouth has been glued shut and she can only cry and cry and hum and hum.

  Then we have an idea. Calories can only be ingested orally, of course. So we take the bowl of paste from our favorite brave idiot’s hands and we take handfuls of her special paste and we smear the stuff over our lips, cover our mouths in cement and wait until the glue sets. Once it does, then we, too, cry and cry, hum and hum. We are so hungry. We have no mouths.

  33

  Faces halo above me.

  I whisper, “Am I broken?” and lights flash blue and red and blue red blue red, and I say, “I’m not okay.”

  Lily’s voice, Mim’s, Lara Bax’s, and every stranger in the world is talking, strange tongues I don’t understand, and I can only say, “No, no, no, I am not okay. I am broken. Not okay.” Outside, things move fast. Inside, things move slow. Thoughts crawl, but life sprints so quickly I’m dizzy from it.

  Termites and Jram and Lily and Kat Mitchells and yogurt and Diamond and birds and Sarah and Mim and paint and Phil Bright and Instagram and Lara Bax saying skinny, skinny, skinny.

  The word intravenous eventually wakes me. I’ve been conditioned to fear the sound of its syllables, for at the facility it meant an invasion of calories.

  My mind is syrupy and slow. My limbs can’t move, or won’t, body heavy as concrete blocks or tied down. I think of how the word bound is a contronym, meaning both tied down and headed somewhere. Then I think about how I have more important things to think about. Things like, What happened?

  “Can you hear us, Rose?” says a voice coming from somewhere in my hazy peripherals. Searching for it is flailing underwater. I try to speak, to answer the anonymous call, but can emit only a dry grate.

  “Water,” I say. But I didn’t say it and am not able to, and so it must have been Lily. Lily is here, here, in the hospital. I try to reach for her, but my arms are either still bound or full of sand. Instead, I let my tongue trace my teeth, and there is the undeniable chill of ice, sharp, filling my mouth. Either Lily is afraid or I am drinking ice water or I am afraid or Lily is drinking ice water or both or everything.

  Her fear or the drink makes me shiver, and someone says, “She moved.”

  “Can you hear us, Rose?” says Lily again. “Can you hear us?” she whispers, her lips against my earlobe.

  The final story from WE:

  We Are Abused: We started dating them when we were young, so shut your damn mouths. They were sexy and gentle back then. Their bodies were perfect as lakes and their voices still cushioned with puberty. They whispered our names and asked permission to touch, then they trailed pillowed fingertips all over our flesh, too light to scratch an itch. We knew they would grow into men and we waited and they did but we were wrong. Things changed like this:

  Their words: Their wet lips started chapping started crusting started to scratch our fragile philtrum with every kiss. That new roughness seeped into them, spongelike, they absorbed their new jagged edges until their words were honed to a point. They were terrible critics and their new violent voices called us ugly called us awful. They called us bitches they called us sluts. They called us words that can only be written in a series of asterisks and pound signs, exclamation points and ampersands. Their new vocabularies tore through us like terrible winds, typhoons, tornados, tsunamis, our cheeks were slashed and burned and red and raw from the gusts they blew over us and we curled into corners, cuddled our knees and one another. We whispered about sticks and stones until we forgot their weaponed words.

  Their touches: They became artists overnight. Masters of color. Their fingertips hardened into tools and they worked with a violent passion. We were their canvases and they splashed us reds and purples, blues and browns. They coated our coats in color and we were beautifully beaten. Our lips grew bruised as grown women, as if we’d started drinking merlot by the gallon. But gin, neat, was a much better mask for our fresh pains, and we sucked it down with lime, those citrus teeth biting us better. They sat with us and watched for dusk, one strong hand in one weak, a romantic date, and as the sun fell below the corrugated horizon, we braced ourselves for the battle of night. Like werewolves, they turned with the light.

  Their emotions: They became feral so fast. Have you ever seen those clowns at the carnival? Openmouthed, heads swiveling on necks, they turned and turned back again. But when they turned back to us, their faces turned evil, and they were not ours anymore. Those clown men swallowed us whole. We are stuck inside.

  When I wake for a second time, I feel more myself. I understand why when I turn to see the IV, full of that telltale yellow gunk. The calories. I sigh.

  “Rose?” says Lily.

  “Lil,” I say.

  “Hi, Rose,” says a deep voice. It’s Phil. I could groan.

  “Why is he here?”

  “Did you stop drinking your CalSips?”

  “What?”

  “Have yo
u been drinking your CalSips?” Her voice is hard. Her anger, searing my tongue. “Have you been throwing your CalSips away?”

  I try to swallow, but my throat is too dry; it sticks.

  “Rose,” says Lily.

  “I had to,” I say. “I had to. You were hurting and you wouldn’t leave him. I had to do something. But I’m done with that now, I swear, Lil. I want to get better,” I say. “I’ve decided. I want to recover.” And I mean it. I do!

  “Dishonesty is a symptom of anorexia,” says Phil. I could hit him. I could stand from this bed, wrench the needle from my arm, spike his terrible eyes.

  “Shut up,” I say instead. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”

  Phil clears his throat. “Are you going to let her speak to me like that, honey? Are you going to let her abuse me like that?”

  “Me?” I could laugh. “Me? Abuse? Have you seen what you did to my sister? Her back? Have you seen the blood?”

  “Enough,” says Lily. She turns on me, her eyes ferocious. “You can treat yourself like shit, abuse your own body, but you can’t treat me like that anymore, Rose. That food you bought? All that junk food you filled the cupboards with? You don’t want to help me. The only reason you want me to be healthy again is so you can keep being the sick one. You think I don’t notice how you starve me into submission? How you stop eating to control me? Stop eating so I’ll forgive you? That’s not how forgiveness works. That isn’t how a relationship works, Rose.” She’s crying as she talks. Her tears, salty on my tongue. “There’s only one abusive relationship here.” Her voice, laced with anger. “And it’s not between me and Phil.”

  I am deep underwater.

  “You told Lara about us. Phil has a daughter, Rose. You could have ruined his life. Mine, too. Do you just not care? Do you just not care about me? Are you the only person you care about?”

  I say nothing. Am I the only person I care about?

  “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she says. “Your plan backfired. Phil and I can be together now. I mean really together. We’re thinking about moving in.”

  I swallow.

  “I give you everything,” she says. “I give you everything, Rose.”

  “I was trying to help.”

  “Your relationship is unhealthy,” says Phil.

  I close my eyes. I’m tired.

  “I can’t do this anymore, baby sister. I’m tired.” She takes Phil’s hand and leaves. The door slams behind them. My heart monitor’s beep is steady. I watch the calories drip from the plastic sack, through the rubber tube, into my arm. I can feel my body swelling. Thought Diversion. I take my phone from the nightstand and call the only number I know by heart.

  Siblicide is the process in which sibling rivalry among a litter of animals results in death. The spotted hyena, for example, begins to act aggressively toward its siblings just moments after birth. The behavior establishes and maintains a hierarchy among the littermates. In the instance of food scarcity, a hyena pup might resort to killing and eating its sibling in order to decrease competition for food and attention.

  34

  Mim is holding my hand when I wake. Mim! She’s made a bed out of hospital chairs, three of them, and is stretched out over the seats, asleep, clutching my hand with both of hers. I don’t want to wake her, so instead I watch her, the rise and dip of her breath, the tiny tics in her eyelids. With my free hand, I reach out to touch her cheek, needing to be sure she is real and alive. She wakes with the touch and smiles. “Can I help you?”

  “Mim?” I say.

  She smiles wider. “Haven’t heard that in a while.”

  Then she stands and arches her back, which snaps and cracks. “You look really shitty, Riz. You’re a ghost. You look like a fucking Olsen twin in public.”

  I nod. I know. “You don’t look shitty,” I say. “You actually look really, um, really—”

  “Fat?” she says at the same time as I say, “Healthy?”

  “You look good,” I say.

  She closes her eyes, nods. “I mean, objectively I know that’s true. It’s what everyone keeps telling me, but fuck.” She pushes my legs over to make room for herself to sit. I’m relieved to note that my limbs can’t be as heavy as they feel if Mim can move them so easily. “Let me tell you,” she says, her hand still resting on the mound of my knee. “It gets easier, babe—a little, maybe, but not much.”

  I sniff and realize I’m crying.

  “I wrote letters,” says Mim. “To the facility you were in.”

  “I know.”

  “You got them?”

  I nod. “Sorry I didn’t . . . I mean, sorry for not . . .” I swallow.

  “Shut up,” says Mim, so gently. She tucks a strand of hair behind my ears. “You look just the fucking same,” she whispers, a soft smile touches her lips.

  “I’m crying,” I tell her. She nods. “Your hair,” I say.

  “Was hideous,” she snorts. “Like a helmet. God. I thought it was so edgy. Idiot.”

  “You’re beautiful,” I say, and my whole face spikes with heat.

  “You still do that?”

  “What?”

  “Blush.” She touches my cheek with the back of her finger as if feeling for a fever. “Just like back in school. Cute,” she says.

  I sniff again. “Why am I crying?” I say.

  She shrugs.

  “I’m so glad you called,” she says. “I’ve thought about you every day. Every day since you left.”

  There’s a silence, and Mim uses it to reach behind me, puff my pillows. I feel mothered, looked after. Then she settles back down beside me and uses the heels of her hands to flatten her eyebrows. The gesture reminds me so much of Jemima Gates, of Mim, of her, her self, she is still so herself.

  “What happened to you? And the other girls after I left.”

  Mim sighs. “Flee got discharged, and we kept at it,” she says, and she runs her fingers up and down my blanketed leg as she talks. Mim pauses to clear her throat, maybe of tears. “I didn’t even fucking consider quitting my bullshit until Lin.”

  “Lin?”

  “Lauren,” says Mim.

  “No, I know who she is. I mean what happened?”

  Mim says nothing.

  “She died? Lauren died?”

  “She was hospitalized,” says Mim. “But it was too late.”

  “Lauren,” I say. “From school. Lauren. Lin.”

  Mim nods, wipes tears from her eyes, rubs her running nose, and then wipes her fingers on my blanket before going back to stroking my leg. I don’t care about the snot, so long as she keeps touching me.

  “That was six months ago. And then something sort of snapped. I was there. In the hospital. She was still breathing, but, god, her breath was so slow, and she couldn’t move. She started making this, this rattling sound. I called the nurse, but it was . . .”

  She takes a quaking breath.

  I lift her hand to my lips. Kiss her fingers. Turn her wrist over and kiss the network of veins there.

  “So I moved in with my grandmother,” Mim says. “Since I knew she’d force-feed me. I finally pulled my shit together. I came out to her. To everyone, actually. My parents cut me off. Fucking homophobes.” She sighs. “Ah, it was probably a good thing. So I went back to school.”

  I swallow. “You came out?”

  “As bi, yeah.”

  “Bi,” I say. Nodding. “Bisexual,” I say. “Bisexual,” I try, lengthening the word, rolling it like dough, adding a syllable between the last vowels.

  “Don’t be weird, babe.”

  “Sorry.”

  Mim shrugs. “So, I was controlling my eating because I couldn’t control my sexuality. Not exactly revolutionary.”

  I swallow, and the saliva hurts.

  “So, you went back to school? University?”

  “Art history.” She nods, smiles, her eyes piqued with a light. “I love it. It’s important to have something you love. I don’t mean a person; I mean something within yourself. You know
, Lin’s death probably stopped me from dying, but I kept me living. At some point, I think I realized that the thing you live for should be yourself.”

  “I’m so happy for you, Mim.” I mean it. “You really do look, you know, you look like a person,” I say. “Like a real human woman.”

  “Thank you?” says Mim, dusting imaginary dust off her knees. “I do pride myself on being especially human.” She looks at me, shakes her head, smiles. “But tell me about you. I caught the weird end of some pretty screwy stuff in your life, huh? You said something on the phone. A fight with Lily?”

  I tell her about the facility and about Sarah and about Jram, whom she calls a jackass. I tell her about Lily’s new diet and Lara Bax and the affair with Phil. About Phil. The abuse, emotional and physical. I tell her about painting and fainting and ending up here. And, lastly, I tell her about Kat.

  “Kat Mitchells? Like, the Kat Mitchells? Holy shit. What was she like?”

  When I say nothing, Mim sighs. “You know that’s not your fault, right?” she says. “You can’t take the weight of that, babe. It’ll crush you. Kat did what Kat did. It was the disorder, her own mind. It was her that did it.”

  “I helped,” I say. “If this were court, I’d be an accessory. To murder, Mim.”

  “Well, I’m the judge and I say ‘not guilty.’” Mim slams her fist into her hand, a firm gavel. “You are free of any burden,” she says. Then she reaches for my hand. I let her familiar fingers curl into mine, and we link, she and me, like LEGO. “No, but seriously,” she says. “You think I didn’t try taking the full blame for Lin? Flee, too? You, even? I took all of that blame, babe. I was so full of blame I was going to burst with it. I had your lives on my hands. And then Lily told me what you did. You got out. You were so fucking strong. You just, like, after Flee was in the hospital, you just said you weren’t coming back. Just like that. It was that easy. I called to tell you about Lin and your sister picked up and she told me you’d checked yourself into rehab. You made the call and you got out.” She shakes her head. “And I realized, you checking yourself in, deciding to recover, it made me realize, that it was my decision. On my own. I was the only one that could fix me. Not the group. Not the girls, friends, family, whatever. No. It was me. And I told myself, ‘Mim,’ I said, ‘Mim, if Riz can make that call, then you can, too. And Lin could have, too. We’ve gotta do it for ourselves. We’re the only ones who can. I mean, you’re the only one who can.’”