Elena Vanishing (16 page)

“Yeah,” I say. “And guys wonder why girls always go to the bathroom together.”

Sandra digs a brick-sized history textbook out of her backpack to get a head start on next week's reading. Time to start on my own homework. Or maybe lie down for a while.

I change clothes to get away from the strawberry odor of the carpet cleaner, but it seems to be embedded in my skin. The smell gets into my nose and makes me queasy. God, my head hurts! I feel horrible.

There's no room in this life for anybody but winners
, says the voice in my head.
You're weak. You aren't a winner.

I think about how my weakness that morning almost led to disaster. If I hadn't snapped out of it . . . If they'd called in a psychiatrist . . .

You won't have a senior year with your friends!

So I stay strong.

First, I change the sheets on my bed and straighten the bedspread and plump all the pillows. Then I dust and tidy up my desk and bookshelves. I pull out my journal and flip it open to write a new entry. But what will I write? What can I say about last night?

The last entry catches my eye:

I don't know what I am doing, and I keep seeing myself and screaming, Please don't let me have kids so they won't have to go through stuff like this

Please

please

please.

What am I going to become? I honestly don't know. I am in a very deep dark bad place with no way out.

I stare at it in bafflement. I wrote that? When?

Forget it anyway! I flip back to what I wrote in my journal the first day I got to college:

No junk food.

Exercise every day.

Study hard.

Work hard.

BE hard.

No tears.

No meat.

No eating after 9 pm.

Get up at 6 every day.

Bed before 1 am.

800 calorie max on weekdays.

Weight day is Friday.

Days will be planned, and that plan will be followed.

Tidied room. No slacking. No laziness.

I will not be a failure!

A smile crosses my face. That's the Elena I recognize.

You didn't exercise today
, says the voice in my head.
You stupid bitch.

Strawberry scent wafts by me and carries with it a faint vomit smell. My stomach flops, and the room whirls.

Stupid bitch!

But I shudder and grit my teeth, and the room steadies again. I pull out my day planner and start to fill it in.

Every hour needs an activity. Every activity keeps me strong. Every hour I am forcing myself to do things that don't come easy is an hour when I am building perfection.

No slacking. No laziness. There is no room in my life for failure.

I work on the planner until the page is a thing of beauty. My tomorrow is full of work and study, full of firm, decisive action. But here, in the morning—here's a gap. Gaps aren't acceptable.

I tip my chair back and call to Sandra through the open door, “Do you want to go to the zoo tomorrow morning? You're supposed to do that primate study, remember?”

“Sounds great!” Sandra yells back.

I write
ZOO
in the gap and draw a heart next to it. Then I close the planner with a satisfied sigh.

Tomorrow, I will be Wonder Woman. Tomorrow, I will be alert and in control. I will accomplish everything I set out to do. I will be perfect.

I will even meet my sister next month when she comes out to visit, because that's how strong I am. Then Valerie will see that I am the successful sister now, the one who is completely in charge of her life.

As I put away the planner, the long slice in the flesh of my forearm twinges and makes me draw in my breath. But the cut's untidy edges are hidden away beneath a neat white gauze wrap, and that's how it's going to stay.

There will be no room for chaos in my life.

It's almost ten months later. I'm walking across campus in the steamy
heat of a Texas summer. It's so hot I'm sweating, but the sun feels good on my back and legs. I'm wearing a tank top with the thinnest straps possible in the hope that they won't leave tan lines. Tanning is hard enough for my skin to accomplish without straps to mess things up.

Around me on the short Bermuda-grass lawn are bikini-clad students on towels, letting the full force of the evening sun bronze them into perfection. But I don't have that kind of time. I'm on my way from my job at the mall to my job at a gym.

Currently, I'm working three jobs.

Freshman year is over. I came out of it with so many college credits that I'm officially almost a junior. It was fun, too—or at least it was fun until spring break, when Sandra fell in love. Then we started to bicker, and the last night in our dorm, we got into a fight.

She was weak
, says the voice in my head.
She let a man into her life. She let herself depend on somebody else.

But I won't need a roommate when school starts in a week. I've been a resident assistant in the dorms all summer now, an RA, and they've chosen me to be an RA in the fall, too. That means I have a whole dorm apartment to myself, and it's free. Also, I get a nice salary. I'm practically paying my way, just like I always wanted to do.

Take
that
, you bastard psychiatrist who tried to convince the world that there was something wrong with me! I'm not just a college student, I'm a super student—the kind they pay to be here. I've learned from my freshman mistakes, and I've made the honor roll twice. I even won a departmental award. I've turned down dozens of dates, and I'm still wearing size 00 jeans.

I've even allowed my sister back into my life. Valerie's still working her retail job, hanging up shirts on racks, but I'm trying to talk her into going back to college. You'd never know it now, but Val was a brilliant student once—she made better grades in the boarding school than I did. It drove me crazy that I worked so hard and she did so little, and she still beat me every time.

But those days are long gone. Valerie's crazy risks and lazy life have buried her opportunities, while my hard work and constant discipline are paying off. I'm the sister who gives the advice now. I'm the one with a future.

The meal-skipping I do these days isn't a disorder because it never lacks order. My control over food is the habit of a winner who refuses to give in to mindless grazing. I no longer skip meals because a black hole nibbles away at my core, making me too upset to eat. I'm over that. I've conquered it. I'm winning.

Sure, I face challenges, but I don't let them slow me down. The pain I feel spreading throughout my body day by day is a disability I've worked hard to overcome. The insomnia I live with is a golden opportunity to get more work done in each twenty-four-hour day. The panic attacks I've started experiencing lately are just another obstacle to test my determination. No pity and no fear. I'm the envy of everyone who knows me.

Life is a combat zone. People who say it isn't have already lost the war.

I pass the last of the slackers working on their tans, run up the concrete steps to my apartment, and unlock the door. The space is still cluttered but cheerful. We received our fall dorm assignments just last week, so I'm not finished moving in. I'm in charge of a floor in one of the freshman dorms, and I can't wait for my students to arrive.

Boxes and piles are everywhere, but Dylan, my betta fish, is already at home in his glass bowl. He unfurls blue fins as he sweeps past a little stone pagoda. My red rug from Germany is on the floor, and my blue sequined cushions decorate the slate-colored couch. This room will be the perfect haven for homesick freshmen when I get through with it.

But right now I'm late for my next job, the night shift at an upscale gym. I grab my uniform and roll it up, then stuff it into a workout bag. I'll change once I clock in.

With a schedule this busy, it's a good thing I'm used to skipping meals.

Fifteen minutes of rush-hour traffic later, I'm walking into the gym. Shining black granite counters face me, and golden cherrywood floors are under my feet. I like working here. I like the fact that this is such an upscale place.

Julian, my boss, is behind the counter. “I'm going to change,” I say as I whisk by him. “Oh, and don't let me forget, I need to sign the form about next Saturday being my last night.”

“I'll let you forget,” Julian says with a laugh. “You know I don't want you to leave.”

I hurry down the hall. The gym looks like a Japanese temple owned by Bill Gates. Even our climbing walls are things of beauty. Later tonight, I'll clean the women's locker room with a steam vacuum cleaner, and I'll spend the rest of the time folding hundreds and hundreds of fluffy white towels. It can be hard to stay awake at three in the morning when I'm folding my four hundred and ninety-eighth towel.

There won't be time for more than a quick nap in the morning, though. Tomorrow, RA orientation starts.

“Elena, what a beautiful tattoo!”

I turn. Mr. Morrison is just coming out of the men's locker room in a tweed sport coat, brown wool pants, and Crockett & Jones cordovan shoes. His salt-and-pepper hair is impeccable, and his blue eyes aren't as unhappy as usual.

“Thank you, Mr. Morrison,” I say, giving him a smile.

I like Mr. Morrison. He's just as driven as I am. He's at the gym every single evening. Also, I feel bad for him because he's got money and a great career, but his wife isn't just a dumb blond, she's an idiot. She makes his life miserable. At the moment, she's cheating on him with one of the gym staff.

He was a fool to get married
, says the voice in my head.

“I didn't know you had a tattoo,” Mr. Morrison says. “Most tattoos look like stencils, but that one's real art. What is it? Self-portrait?”

“No, it's a mermaid,” I say, glancing over my shoulder in its direction. But the tattoo is on my back, so I can't see it.

“Well, good-bye,” he says as I pull open the door to the women's locker room, and I give him one last smile.

Poor guy. Poor lonely, driven guy. People who work as hard as he does shouldn't have messed-up lives.

He was weak
, says the voice in my head.
He trusted other people too much.

Black leather couches and a big-screen television grace the outer lounge. It's a joke to call this place a locker room. I hurry past the cherrywood shelves, now depleted of their stacks of white towels, and drop my uniform next to a tall floral arrangement on the granite counter.

But before I change shirts, I turn my back to the mirror and look at my tattoo.

A beautiful woman looks over her shoulder back at me. Her long, willowy arms cross her bare chest and reach up to arrange her thick black hair. A cloud of red and blue butterflies encircles her.

Self-portrait? Sadly, no.

The beautiful woman could be a mermaid. Her portrait stops at the arms; the rest of her body isn't pictured. And I do love mermaids. I have truly elegant mermaid art all over my room.

Mermaids matter deeply to me. I don't know why, but they do.

Years ago, I made up a story about a girl and a mermaid. The girl lived in the air, of course, and the mermaid lived in the water. They could come face to face, like faces in a mirror, but they could never touch. When they first saw each other, the girl thought the mermaid was her face in the water, until the face swam away.

But the tattooed face staring at me right now isn't a mermaid. It's anorexia nervosa. It's the face that I can never touch.

Only once, I thought I saw her, back when I still went to the boarding school. I was home on break, and I hadn't eaten in days; I was terribly weak and tormented with hunger—I still felt those things then. I woke up and rolled over, and beside my bed stood the most slender, beautiful woman I could imagine. One by one, she put on the rings I had left on my bedside table. Then she held her hands out with the fingers pointing down, and the rings slid right back off.

That was how thin she was: even a little girl's rings slid off her fingers. She was hopelessly, magically thin. And before she vanished, she laughed at me—the most heartless, scornful laugh I have ever heard.

But that's not why anorexia is staring at me in the mirror now. She's here because of an appointment I went to a couple of months ago.

After my trip to the ER the morning after Halloween, the university made me meet with a counselor on staff. That counselor asked me to see an eating disorder specialist—just to make sure I was one
hundred percent better. I kept putting it off, but the counselor kept calling, so finally, at the beginning of summer, I gave in and drove to Sandalwood, the eating disorder treatment center across town.

Right away, I didn't care for the place. It was crammed into a series of ragtag offices in a rambling old building. Just finding it was like walking through a maze. I sat in the narrow little waiting room and thought back with something like fondness on Drew Center's solid New England doors.

Drew Center had been horrible and barbaric. But at least they treated an eating disorder with respect.

The secretary led me farther into the maze, to the office of Dr. Leben, Sandalwood's codirector. Dr. Leben had slightly untidy light brown hair, wire-rimmed glasses, a mildly crumpled blouse, and a suit skirt that wouldn't quite behave. In spite of her business attire, there was an indefinable air of hippie Earth Mother about her. But Dr. Leben's voice appealed to me. It was a voice that knew its own mind. It seemed designed by nature to command soldiers or—an even harder feat—a roomful of three-year-olds.

The first thing Dr. Leben did was run me through the same questionnaire Dr. Harris had used on me.

“How often do you think about food?”

“All the time.”

“How would you characterize your relationship with food?”

“It's a necessary evil and a waste of time.”