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Authors: Elena Dunkle

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BOOK: Elena Vanishing
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You see how they try to make you weak
, says the voice in my head.
They make you stop believing in yourself.

A staff member comes to fetch me for my first individual therapy session. I walk behind her, still boiling with rage.

They'll get inside your head
, says the voice in my head.
They want to break you down.

Once again, a young woman faces me across the small office. What is it with all these young women? Are they anorexia wannabes? This one is Indian or Middle Eastern, and her face wears an expression as determined as Karen's was, as if her life depends on how well we get on together.

Scorn adds itself to the fury I feel. This young woman hasn't done this very many times.

The woman wants to talk about my disorder. I don't think I have one, so at first I don't talk. But when she starts asking questions about my parents, I find that I have things to say.

“My parents didn't mess me up!”

“What makes you say that?” she asks.

“The session today. You people think our parents screwed us up. Well, mine didn't!”


Are
you screwed up?” she asks.

But I don't bite on that one.

“The problems you're having now,” she rephrases. “What do
you
think brought them about?”

“My sister, Valerie. Two years ago, she was fine. Then she started spending all her time in her room and listening to this really hard-core music, ‘I am my nightmare,' leather-and-chains kind of stuff. Pretty soon, she was cutting and burning herself all over, on her arms and legs and hands. She didn't care that people could see it.”

I fall silent, thinking about the time Valerie came to my high school with four-letter words written all over her ripped clothes. I was humiliated! I couldn't bring myself to admit she was my sister.

The young woman is trying to control her face to keep it from reacting to what I say, but she isn't too good at it yet. This purely drives me crazy, the gamesmanship of the psychiatric people, who refuse to ask a normal question or have a normal reaction.

Maybe that's why I taunted the first psychiatrist until he blew up. I wanted to know if he was a real human being.

“Did your sister get help?” the woman asks.

“Eight weeks in a
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
clinic in England,” I say. “It was a Gothic mansion from the 1800s. She had tea on the lawn every afternoon.”

“That must have made you angry,” suggests the therapist—which, of course, makes me angry at
her
.

“Hey, Val went to a lot of trouble,” I say. “Might as well get something out of it.”

“So you started restricting after your sister began to self-harm.”

“No, I was doing that in boarding school.”

“Boarding school?” she prompts.

“In Germany,” I say. “We were a hundred and twenty girls from Germany and Switzerland and the Netherlands, too—even one girl from Australia. The headmistress was this big tall nun who wore the whole black habit. She had thick glasses and a deep voice that could make you jump out of your skin when she came up behind you and suddenly said your name.”

“A foreign girls-only boarding school,” the young woman says, and even though she's trying to stay expressionless, I can see that she's got her answer: the answer to What Went Wrong. “It must have been very hard for you,” she adds, “to go to school so far from home.”

“It wasn't that far,” I say.

“A foreign country,” she continues meaningfully.

“I live in Germany!” I say. “We moved there when I was eleven. America's the foreign country!”

But the young woman isn't about to give up. She's like a dog chewing a bone.

“To have to leave your parents,” she murmurs. “To have to spend months away from home . . .”

“We went home every three weeks!”

But her conviction acts like battery acid. It corrodes my confidence. Away from home at twelve—that does seem pretty cruel.

A memory flashes into my brain of my own voice, crying: “Please don't make me go back!”

And then my mother's calm voice: “Elena, this is a great opportunity for you.”

Now I'm holding my own face expressionless—or trying to.

“So you started restricting there,” the therapist says. “Did you know any other anorexics?”

“There was Anna Anton. She was anorexic.”

“And how did you know Anna Anton?”

“She sat next to me at meals.”

The thought of
that
little irony almost makes me giggle.

When I first got to the boarding school, I was one of the younger girls in the middle-school grades. We didn't play with dolls anymore, but we collected stationery with cute cartoons on them, and we brought
our games and stuffed animals from home. I brought my old cloth black-and-white cow, even though her black patches had faded to purple. She stayed on my bed, and my classmates called her the Milka cow.

The boarding school went up to class thirteen, one class higher than in America, and because of how the German school system works, it wasn't unusual for those seniors to be nineteen or twenty. It was the custom for each of the young girls like me to pick an upper-class girl to idolize. We wrote them little notes, and some of them treated us like pets. It was supposed to be good for us since we were so far from home, like having an older sister.

I picked Anna Anton, who was in charge of my table in the cafeteria. She was quiet, she liked to read, and she was nice to me. That was enough to make her my idol. I studied her like my very own manual for how to be a real almost-grown-up woman. And what did I learn from Anna Anton?

Anna Anton sat right next to me at the table. And Anna Anton didn't eat.

Most meals, all she did was drink hot tea. Maybe once a day, she would eat a slice of bread, and she could make that bread last through the whole meal. No one corrected her because she was the oldest person at the table. Anyway, I think I'm the only one who noticed. You're pretty selfish when you're sitting down to eat in a school cafeteria. All you care about is what's on your own plate.

When Anna Anton had her wisdom teeth taken out, they couldn't wake her up after the surgery. They tried to bring her back around, but her exhausted body slept right through it. She stayed unconscious the whole day.

I heard about that and thought,
Wow, that's so wonderful! I'd love to sleep for a whole day.

Anna Anton fainted in church a lot. She'd black out right there in the pew. Then there would be a big commotion, with two older girls putting her arms around their necks and dragging her out to the fresh air.

I used to think,
Wow, that's so cool! I'd love to faint in church.

So I worshipped Anna Anton, and I studied her day by day, trying to be just like her. And when I finally had her system down—the hot tea, the one piece of bread—she had the nerve to call up my parents.

“Your daughter is dying,” she told them. “Your daughter won't eat!”

And I had to lie my way through a whole frantic parent- housemother meeting to convince them Anna Anton was wrong.

“Did you admire this person?” the therapist asks me now.

“No. Anna Anton was a lying, backstabbing bitch.”

“I see. You knew an anorexic at boarding school, but you didn't like her.”

“Not that one. But Anita was amazing.”

The young woman's expressionless expression slips again. “You went to school with
another
anorexic?”

“It was a gymnasium,” I explain. “The highest level of German high school. We were under a lot of stress.”

“And was this girl Anita under stress?”

“Yes. Because she always got A-pluses. No matter what she did.”

I realize as I say this that it won't make sense. The therapist would have to understand the whole system of favoritism that went on at my school. Anita made the best grades because Anita had always made the best grades. She was the school's favorite student. It was that simple.

There's no question that Anita deserved those A-pluses most of the time. She had an amazing mind. Once, she decided to learn the entire Latin textbook in two weeks, so she did. I could turn to any page and ask her the questions, and she would write down the correct answers.

Anita didn't like the idea that she might be earning high grades just because she was a favorite. She wanted to believe that her hard work and brilliant mind were earning those A-pluses. So, the year before I got to the school, as an experiment, Anita decided to do nothing for a class. She ignored the homework, talked back to the teacher, and deliberately mangled her exams.

But there it was on her report card: an A-plus. And Anita knew she didn't deserve it. That meant there was no way for Anita to measure herself against the work—no way to find out who and what she really was.

So Anita shut down. In the middle of the busy boarding school, she stopped speaking—to everybody. She stopped eating, too, and just about melted away. By the time I got to know her, a psychiatrist was coming to the school once a week to meet with her, but she still did exactly what she wanted.

I try to explain to the therapist how much willpower this took. Not to speak in a busy, chattery boarding school—it's like keeping your mouth shut in the middle of a sleepover.

Anita was absolutely extraordinary. I adored her.

“When she came to tell you she was going to an eating disorder treatment center,” says the therapist, “what was your reaction?”


Wow! She's talking to me!
It was that unusual for her to speak. And we promised to write, but I couldn't. They wouldn't give me her address. It upset me so much! I knew she was waiting for my letters.”

“Your parents kept you from writing?”

“The housemothers. Leave my parents out of this!”

The therapist gives me her best bland smile, but her face isn't quite as expressionless as she wants it to be. The expression and the lack of expression—both of them make me mad.

“You know what?” I say. “I've had it. I'm done explaining myself. There's nobody to blame for What Went Wrong because there's nothing wrong with me. And that goes for Anita, too. This is who we are. This is what we choose! You just hate it that we have the strength of will to achieve it.”

The therapist's face sharpens a little. “To starve yourself?” she says.

“To—no, not to starve ourselves! To not be fat slobs! You go down to the high school, and you go counsel all those porkers who are already hanging over the tops of their jeans. They're the ones who'll die early, not me!”

She regards me with a superior, sphinxlike stare.

“Anorexia nervosa shortens the lives of twenty percent of its victims,” she says. “It kills young women at twelve times the rate of all the other causes of death combined.”

“Well, that's not what I've got, then. Okay? That's not what I've got! Because I'm not a victim—of
anything!

I come out of the office still seething and refuse to eat my supper. The nurses lose their tempers and threaten me.

So what? What are they going to do? Lock me up? Oh, wait—they already did that!

The nurse in charge scolds me, but this time, I don't even blink.

She hates you because she's fat
, says the voice in my head.
She hates you because you're in control. She'd break down that control if she could.

So the nurse calls up the psychologist on call. That's the pretty woman from group therapy this morning, with the flippy black hair
and dancer's hands. Her peasant blouse is now a sweatshirt, and her chunky necklace is gone. She must have been called in from home.

The pretty woman talks to me in the cooldown room. I can't help but wonder if Karen is behind the futon cushion.

“I know this is hard,” the woman says. “But you need to trust us. We know how to help you get better.”

Don't listen!
says the voice in my head while she cajoles and appeals.
She wants to make you weak like she is.

But I'm not so sure the pretty psychologist is weak. She looks like she works out.

We come out of the cooldown room to find the other patients clustered around a patient named Melinda. Melinda's in tears. She's decided to leave Drew Center, and she's over eighteen, so she can do this. She's waited out the maximum amount of time she can be held by law against her will: seventy-two hours. But her parents are supporting the doctors and therapists who say she should stay at Drew Center—which is pretty funny, considering that those doctors and therapists are blaming all her problems on them.

“Mom won't let me come home,” she sobs. “Mom and Dad say that if I leave the center, that's it. They're done with me. I thought they loved me!”

“They've been brainwashed!” one of the girls says fiercely, and the rest of us murmur in agreement.

“Is there anywhere else you can go?” Susannah asks.

“There's this guy I know,” Melinda says. “We've been texting. I think we have a future, but my parents don't like him.”

“Your parents aren't going to make you well,” Steph reminds her. “They made you sick. You have to do this on your own.”

“I would,” Melinda says. “I know where he lives, but it's too far away. I'd need a bus ticket, and I don't have any money.”

“I have some money,” I say.

And so do several of the others.

We scatter to go get it. When we return and pile all of our collected change and bills together, we have almost fifty dollars. Melinda can buy her bus ticket. She has a place to go.

Melinda is radiant. She packs her bag, and we take turns hugging her. One of us is escaping!

We all win when that happens. We all celebrate her victory.

BOOK: Elena Vanishing
5.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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