Thin Girls

by Diana Clarke

  “That’s a cop-out.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “It is.”

  “I’m happy, you know.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I can see it.”

  “You could be happy, Dad.”

  But he’s not listening anymore.

  41

  In the following days, I relinquish the paintbrush and, instead, I use words. Writing is Lily’s language, and if I want her to hear me, I have to speak on her terms. I don’t write well, but I take the stacks of magazines Grace has stored in her garage. She kept every issue of every weekly that featured Absolute Abs, and there are hundreds and hundreds of glossy pages preaching calorie counting and juice cleansing and flash fasting. I cut those harmful words from their pages. Make puncture wounds, then great, gaping holes in every article. Words like fat and flab and wobbly and lose weight fast! I cut whole paragraphs that peddle the pros of substituting meals with a kale tea that clears the gut out quick as an earthquake drill. Then I cut images. I find magazines with Mim staring out, her old self, gloomy and looming on the page, so thin she looks serrated. I cut out her clavicle, angular as ramps, and paste the picture to a canvas. I cut “before” images of Grace, sad-faced and baggy-clothed, and the “after” ones, too, smiling a tooth-whitened grin beneath her pink-lipsticked mouth. I paste them side by side beneath the caption LOSE WEIGHT FAST. I cut and paste and cut and paste and I fill the whole canvas with supermodel legs and cavernous cheeks and bugging eyes and red-circled cellulite and the words fat, thin, summer beach body!

  By the time I am done, the piece is a screen of dismembered bodies and body-related adjectives. I add the title, YOURWEIGH: THE LARA BAX DIET, and leave the art to dry.

  Mim comes to Lily’s apartment with me for a second time. I press my ear against the door and hear the television playing some sitcom with a laugh track. Lily isn’t laughing along. I wonder whether she is even home. Sometimes she leaves the television on to deter thieves, because, she always says, thieves would think the voices in the sitcoms were people in the apartment. I never told her that I thought her logic would be sounder if the television were left on so thieves would assume that people were in there watching it.

  I kneel to try to peer under the door, closing one eye and squinting, but I can see only the fibers of her carpet, tall as a whole forest from down here. I sigh and stand, leaning my forehead against her door.

  Eventually, when the sitcom rolls into advertisements and then another sitcom, and because I can’t do it, Mim slips my canvas under my sister’s door. Then she pulls it back.

  “What?” I say.

  “She doesn’t know how to contact you,” says Mim. “When she’s ready, I mean.”

  She takes a pen from her purse and bites the lid off, then writes her phone number, her grandmother’s address, and her school email on the back of the collage. “There,” she says, and she holds my hand as she bends to slip the art under the door for the second time.

  I hold my breath as we leave, and Mim reminds me to inhale, exhale.

  On our walk home, I find myself stopping outside the coffee shop again, staring into the glass. I check the time. It’s six p.m., our meeting time, back when we were a we and an our, and I turn to Mim, who backs away from the café, eyes afraid.

  “Come,” I say, and reach for her hands, but she won’t take mine.

  “You’ve been helping me,” I say. “Let me help now.”

  She rolls her eyes. “We’re not keeping score,” she says.

  “What? I know that.”

  She looks through the café’s window, at the crowd in there, and then she looks at me. “She might not even be in there,” she says. “She might have stopped.”

  “She might have,” I say.

  “She might be all better. Cured.”

  “She might be.”

  “She might be dead.”

  “Don’t,” I say.

  “Okay.” She takes a slow breath, then walks toward the door, clenched fists, headfirst, and just as she is about to go in, she wrings her hands and spins back toward me, shaking her fingers as if to fling water from them. “I can’t.”

  “I’m coming with you,” I say. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “In front of me?”

  “Sure, if that’s what you need.”

  “No, I’ll go first,” she says.

  I nod.

  “No, actually, you go first,” she says.

  I nod.

  “No, actually, can you just come with me?”

  I nod.

  “Like beside me?”

  I nod. “Go,” I say.

  “Come,” she says.

  We stand at the door, hand in hand, our fingers interwoven in their own special padlock. The frame is too narrow for us to fit side by side very easily. We each hold our outside arm in front of us and have to sort of turn diagonally as we enter to fit together. It takes us longer than necessary to get inside the shop.

  Flee is easy to spot. She’s at our usual table, tucked into the corner, blue mug lifted to her lips, wet tea bag sitting on her saucer.

  I stare at her, looking dead, wet hair limp against bony face, and I feel wholly and entirely good about recovery for the first time. Of course I miss hunger, the empty ache of a vacant gut, and the feeling of two-dimensionality after a long fast. I long for that sense of invisibility, that if I were to be hungry just a few more moments, I might fade away into nothing at all. I miss being hungry, but I don’t miss this. This miserable existence, this life not worth living.

  “Mim?” Flee croaks. “Is that you? And who is that, wait, is that fucking Riz, too?” Two of her teeth have gone, eroded, eaten by the bile she kept forcing up, through her mouth, out. “What are you doing here?” she says, trying to stand from her table but falling back into her seat. She looks like a sick baby bird, dirty and made of bones.

  Mim breathes a long exhale and then says, “Hi, Flee.” She turns to me, a flicker of doubt, quick as a faulty neon sign.

  “You got fat, Mim,” says Flee. There is a half-eaten SkinnyBar sitting on the table.

  “Shut up,” I say, defensive.

  “Just saying,” says Flee.

  “It’s okay, Rose,” says Mim. “I’m okay.”

  Mim sits down across the table. She stretches her legs out before her and then tucks them under each other, like a kindergartner. She looks calm, as if she was prepared for this, as if she knows exactly what to do. I stand farther away, feeling like I might at a party of acquaintances. I had never belonged here, but I do belong with Mim, and so I stay, feeling like Michael Cera at almost any point in his life.

  “You look fucking awful,” says Mim. “Really fucking gross.”

  “Least I’m not fat,” says Flee.

  “Shut the fuck up.” Mim laughs.

  I smile at her strange vernacular. It’s the Mim I had known. The Mim I knew from outside of her domestic self, so different from her cottage self and the Mim she is around Grace. The curse words are awkward from her lips at first, as if she were trying to pick up a language she had learned at high school and long neglected. But soon she is fluent again, the cusses spilling from her lips, natural as an exhale.

  “This has to stop,” says Mim. “I know what I said before. About needing to support each other’s disorders. I know I said that, but I was stupid. I was wrong when I thought we could live this way. I’m saying now that nothing I said back then stands. You need help, Flee.”

  Flee looks hurt. She picks up the SkinnyBar, takes a bite, chews. “Zero calories,” she says as her teeth squeak against the rubbery texture.

  “I brought you here in the first place,” says Mim. “I found you. I encouraged the dieting and the tea and the laxatives. All of it. And now I’m saying it’s done.” She is brave and fierce. I watch her wild eyes scan her small audience, attentive but despising. “We’re done here.”

  Flee laughs, her autumnal mouth wide and possessed. “It’s not that simple,” she says, the laugh still echoing. “A
nd you know that. Not all of us have famous grandmothers in cottages. Not all of us are rich white kids who can get checked into the fancy facilities like Riz, there. I have nothing. No house. No parents. No friends. I haven’t got anyone left.”

  “You’ve got me,” says Mim. “And you’ve got Rose. Riz. R . . .” She looks at me, questioning.

  “Rose is fine,” I say, wanting the sudden attention gone.

  “And you’ve got Rose,” says Mim. “And that’s enough. We’re enough.”

  Flee looks around the coffee shop. “So what?” she says.

  “So we start meeting again,” says Mim. “But this time they’re recovery meetings.”

  “Recovery?”

  “That’s right.” Mim stands, paces the perimeter of the table, taps her fingers against her thigh, plotting. “Recovery meetings. They’ll be held in my grandmother’s cottage. Same time, six p.m.”

  “You can’t just come back and—”

  “I just did,” says Mim. She is so sure of herself. This was what makes a leader, this certainty in one’s own existence. I watch Mim speak, entranced. “Are you joining us?”

  “Why would I?” Flee sneers, holding her hip bones as if all that is holding them together is her own grip on herself. “You left.”

  “Because I want to help you recover.”

  “And what if I don’t want to?”

  “Then don’t come,” says Mim. “I’m not making you come. I’m not making anyone do anything. But if you’re interested in getting better. Surviving. Recovering. Then my grandmother’s house is open to you every day at six p.m. I’ll provide the snacks,” she adds. I am the only one who laughs.

  Before Flee can answer, Mim takes my hand and starts heading for the door. “I hope to see you there, Flee,” she calls over her shoulder. I turn back, and Flee’s eyes are bright on Mim, as if she were walking in a spotlight.

  That night, after I take myself to bed, a little earlier than usual given the big day, I feel a presence in my room. Not like a spiritual presence. Mim is standing beside my bed, leaning over me, her face hovering above mine.

  “Can I join you?” she whispers, and I shuffle closer to the edge of the mattress to make space. The whoosh of air that accosts me when she pulls back the duvet makes me shiver and my body is alive all over. “Warm.” She smiles into my back, pressing her body against mine.

  “Bad dream?” I whisper, not wanting to wake Grace.

  “Bad day,” she says.

  “Was it really so bad?” I turn and our noses touch. I feel conscious of the words I speak entering Mim’s mouth as soon as they exit mine, like I’m feeding her, mother bird style.

  “It was big,” she says.

  “It was,” I say. “It was big.”

  She sets a hand on my hip, and I tuck my head into her neck and we lie still for many moments. “Thank you,” I whisper. And I know that I could say it, I could say it over and over, but it would never be enough. I could never be grateful enough.

  “Flee looked so . . .” she said, and she didn’t have to finish the thought.

  “You’re not like that anymore,” I said. “You’re different now.”

  “Like how?”

  “In so many ways.”

  She smiles against my skin. “Well,” she says, “the body sheds all of its cells over a seven-year cycle, so technically, I’m not completely different.”

  “That’s true,” I say.

  “You told me that,” says Mim. “You don’t remember telling me that?”

  “No.”

  “Oh god,” she says. “It blew my mind. At the time I thought, I’ll never forget that. But you forgot telling me!”

  “Sorry,” I say. And I am. “I promise I’ll remember this.” I kiss her cheek, then the other one, her forehead, her nose. I will remember this.

  “How mad is Grace gonna be when I tell her I invited my old pro-ana friend to her house?” Mim snorts into my hair.

  “You’re lucky to have Grace,” I say.

  I feel Mim’s nod. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m lucky to have you, too.”

  “What?” I say, pulling away from her. “Why?” I say to the dark, hoping that I am looking her in the eye, even though she has no way of knowing where my eyes are.

  “I told you,” says Mim. “You saved me when you checked yourself in. In saving yourself, you saved me. I didn’t even know it could be done.”

  “No, you saved me,” I say. “When you came to the hospital. I had nowhere to go. You saved me.”

  “No, you saved me,” she says.

  “No, you saved me,” I say.

  “No, you hang up first.” She laughs.

  “No, you hang up first.” I join her.

  Then she kisses me, and her lips are hungry. She nibbles my lower lip and then licks the bite better. She trails her fingers down my stomach, between my legs, takes my tampon out, and slides her fingers into me. I’m wet, a combination of blood and desire, slick and wanting.

  “Can I taste you?” Mim says, and I moan in response.

  “Wait,” I say, as she licks her way from my mouth to my breasts, my torso, my cunt. “I’m bleeding.”

  She snorts her response. Her tongue is quick, and her lips are soft. She strokes her fingers so methodically inside me while her tongue circles my clit. I whisper her name when I come, and she holds me against her as I start to cry.

  “Was I that bad?” Mim smiles into my neck.

  “What?”

  “Am I so bad at giving head that I made you cry?”

  “Oh.” I swallow my tears. “Yeah.”

  We fall asleep dressed in quiet smiles, her lips reddened with me.

  42

  We read about the death in the news. I get back from a sunrise walk one morning to find Mim on the porch, squinting at the beach, looking for me.

  “What’s wrong?” I say, panting my way up the stairs. I’m getting stronger, but my lungs are taking longer to adjust to my new routine than my limbs.

  “Someone died,” Mim says.

  “What?”

  “Someone on the YourWeigh diet died.” She points at her phone where a news article is pulled up. She hands it to me and holds me from behind, arms lassoing my waist, her chin on my shoulder, as I read.

  A woman. Rachel Parker. She had eliminated everything from her diet except for Lara Bax’s SkinnyChips, which are made, the article explains, of almost the exact same combination of ingredients as fruit stickers.

  She was twenty-eight years old. A single stay-at-home mother. Found dead. Fruit stickers are technically edible in small quantities, but they do not a diet make.

  I use Mim’s phone to dial Lily’s number, and Mim leaves me to talk to Lily alone.

  “Hello, it’s Lily Winters here?” says her voice, so strange in its anonymous distance.

  “It’s me,” I say.

  “What is with that painting?” says Lily. “You did it?”

  “I did it,” I say. “That’s not important. I read this article—”

  “About the Parker girl? I already know.”

  “So you’re quitting?”

  “What? No.”

  “Lily!”

  “Rose!”

  I sigh, swallow to keep from crying. The waves are wild today, thrashing about on the shore like a tantrum, desperate to be soothed. “Lil,” I say. “People are dying.”

  “Oh yeah?” says Lily. “One person died. And how many people died from your little diet?”

  “My diet?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You mean anorexia?”

  Lily says nothing. I say nothing. This conversation is pointless. I know she is already too far gone to cede. I have been there. She knows I am going to keep pushing. We don’t need to talk to keep the disagreement on the table.

  I sit on Grace’s porch bench, and I hear Lily, too, sigh into a seat. We stay on the phone until our breathing is synchronized, slow and steady. It’s something Lily would do for me when we were in high schoo
l. When I was overwhelmed, starving and scared. We’d lie in our room, on our side-by-side beds, like two versions of the same person, existing in parallel universes. She wouldn’t talk to me, because she was so angry about what I was doing to myself, to us. I wouldn’t speak to her, either, because I wasn’t going to change. But we would breathe together, and although we were becoming separate in almost every way, we still had that one primal, necessary thing in common: breath, and we remembered that twins was something we would be forever.

  “I need you to stop trying to control me, Rose,” says Lily. “You can’t control me anymore.”

  I swallow. I know. I say, “I know.”

  She sighs.

  “Jemima has been going to YourWeigh meetings,” I say.

  Lil says nothing.

  “We came up with a plan to shut Lara Bax down.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” says Lily.

  “We’re trying to help.”

  “Controlling someone isn’t the same as helping them,” says Lily. “You know that, don’t you, Rosie?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I’m trying to know that.”

  Lily says nothing, but I hear her nod.

  “I ran into Phil,” I say.

  “I know, he said.”

  “So you’re still with him.”

  “Of course. I love him.”

  “He doesn’t love you.”

  “He does. He loves me. He loves me so much he told me he’d kill himself if I ever left him.”

  What I say: nothing.

  We breathe together. Mim leaves her phone with me, pressed to my ear, and goes off to live her day. Lily, since it’s a Saturday, doesn’t have to interrupt our silence to go to school.

  Eventually, I hear a ding that means Mim’s phone is running low on battery, and I inhale, count, exhale. I can hear Lily chewing her lip on the other end. The soft squelch of her flesh being mauled. She knows something is coming to an end, too.

  “I’m eating,” I tell her, battery dwindling. “Three meals a day.”

  “That’s great, Rosie,” says Lily. “I’m so proud of you.”