Reasons to Be Happy Part 7

When I'd been on the track team, I almost always won.

I missed track. I missed losing myself in the laps. It would've been a comfort. It was a comfort as I ran all the way down to the big wide creek-the actual Sugar Creek the place was named for-before I slowed to a walk, panting. I'd run almost three miles without stopping. Not bad for not having trained for over a year. I clutched my side and gasped for air.

Maybe if I wasn't so fat, Dad wouldn't drink so much. Maybe if I wasn't so gross and had to shoplift and do my disgusting habit, I'd still be in my own home and Dad would be fine and working and we'd be sad without Mom but okay.

What was going to happen to me now?

I limped my way back to the car where Aunt Izzy sat on the hood, cross-legged, leaning back, looking at the sky. She looked all content, like she would've waited all day for me.

We went to dinner at the greatest restaurant, The Winds, which we could walk to from Izzy's cool purple house. Later that night, while she and her a.s.sistant Pearl discussed something in her office, I loaded my gym bag full of food from her cupboards and fridge. She'd stocked the house with all my favorite things which I shoved into the bag: a loaf of rye bread, a roll of sugar cookie dough, slices of provolone cheese, sliced turkey, the leftover chicken enchiladas we'd made last night, the leftover guacamole, the pasta salad, the tapioca pudding.

I hid the bag in my room. After Pearl left, we went to bed. I lay awake until I was certain Aunt Izzy was asleep.

It took over me again. It had been so long. Well, long for me anyway. I almost wept with relief, it felt so good, so comforting.

The trance took over.

I stopped feeling.

No shame. No worries.

Nothing. Lovely, wonderful nothing.

But the nothing didn't last. When I came back to myself, my stomach strained with all I'd forced into it. Sharp pains stabbed me as I crawled to my feet, clutching my belly, and snuck to the hallway bathroom. Aunt Izzy had her own bathroom in her bedroom. Since her bedroom door was shut, I thought I was pretty safe.

I quietly closed the bathroom door and turned on the light. I looked repulsive in the mirror, my face so bloated, a smear of something dark on my chin. I turned away.

I rubbed my bloated gut. Revolting. Vile.

I lifted the lid on her toilet and went through my ritual.

Once.

Twice.

Then flushed.

Ah, there it was.

Relief.

Twice more.

The tingles began. The floating. Numbness tickling my fingers and toes.

Now. Now, maybe I could sleep.

But the sliding sensation began deep inside my face. Red splatters fell on the toilet seat, startling against the white porcelain. I s.n.a.t.c.hed up a handful of toilet paper to plug up my nose, then used my other hand to try to clean up the mess.

I sat on the floor, leaning my head back against the tub.

The helium-light floatiness faded away. Queasy shakiness took over. The nosebleeds ruined everything and they were happening every time! My limbs trembled. This sucked.

By the time I got the bleeding to stop, my head throbbed like someone played a drum inside it. My arms and legs had a heavy flu-like stiffness.

I avoided the mirror, ducking my head as I pa.s.sed it to open the door.

Aunt Izzy sat on the floor in the hall.

She sat there in flannel pajama bottoms and a tattered sweatshirt. She had the same I-could-wait-forever air about her, just like when I had gone running that day-was that just earlier that same day? Was my life really crawling along so painfully slowly? A spray bottle of disinfectant cleaner and a rag sat near her left hand.

"Feel better?" she asked, squinting up at me in the light.

Was this a trap? But she asked it kindly, no judgment in her voice.

"I know it was a hard day," she said, her voice even and calm. "I know that the bingeing and purging is an old standby in tough times. I have to be on the lookout for my own self-destructive habits when I'm having a rough time."

My jaw dropped. "You...you knew what I was doing?"

She shrugged, her expression one of h.e.l.lo, of course I knew what you were doing.

"Why didn't you try to stop me?" I wanted to kick her. "You should've tried to stop me!"

Izzy shook her head. "You have to stop it. Not me."

Unsteady, I stared down at her.

She gestured to the cleaning supplies beside her. "I understand you're going to do this. You know we all want you to stop, but sometimes it's going to happen. When it does you'll need to clean up after yourself, okay? You have to take responsibility for your habits."

I stood there with my mouth open like a cartoon of a girl in shock.

"It's okay," Aunt Izzy said. "You can get over this. I've been there, sweetie, I know."

"You were...bulimic?" The word was bug spray in my mouth.

She shook her head. "Nope. That wasn't my thing."

I leaned against the wall, then slid down it across from her. "I wish I were anorexic! How did you do it? I wish I could do it!"

Aunt Izzy's face pinched up like she'd smelled rotting garbage. "What? Why would you say something so stupid?" Her mean, harsh tone slapped my face. She'd never called me stupid.

Tears scalded my eyes. "I-I just meant that..."

But Aunt Izzy's eyes were bright, like she had a fever. "You just meant what?"

"I want to be thin. I-I just want to be pretty. A-and anorexia is better. It's not so disgusting. If I could only pull it off, I-"

Aunt Izzy was on her feet so fast, it scared me. She yanked me up by the arm and pulled me down the hall, her nails digging into my skin.

She opened the attic door and turned on the light. She didn't release my arm until we were at the top of the stairs. The rough wooden floor chilled my bare feet. She dug around in a couple of boxes, muttering under her breath. When she found the one she wanted, she hefted it up from behind some tubs of Christmas decorations. She dropped it into the dust at our feet, where it hit with a heavy whump. "Sit."

I did.

She opened the box and handed me a manila envelope. "Open it. Take a look."

I undid the envelope's clasp. A pile of 5x7 black-and-white photographs slid into my lap. I frowned, then brought the top photo closer to my face in the weird light. It was Aunt Izzy, as a girl, standing naked except for a pair of panties. She looked like someone in a concentration camp, like those doc.u.mentaries we'd watched before we started reading Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. My nose wrinkled. She was a skeleton; every single rib stood out in stark relief, her hip bones protruded like shovels, her elbows and knees were grapefruit-sized knots, wider than her stick thighs and arms.

"That's not disgusting?" Aunt Izzy asked.

The next photo was a back view. Her shoulder blades were alien wings. Every vertebrae in her spine b.u.mped out like a pop-bead necklace embedded under her skin. At the end of that spine...I peered closer.

"Looks like a tail, doesn't it?" Her voice cut me with its iciness. "Look at how scabbed and gross my tailbone is. I got bruises just from sitting in a chair."

My post-purge headache throbbed behind my left eye.

She took the stack of photos from me and shuffled them, handing me another, a close-up of the empty bowl of her stomach and another of her face. "You don't think that's disgusting? You'd actually wish for that? I look like some circus freak! I couldn't create internal heat anymore. Your body tries to protect you, so it grows fur." There it was on her belly and cheeks, white fur like a cat's pelt. "Yeah, that's really pretty, isn't it?"

In the photo, the skull under her transparent, mummy-like skin was clearly defined, her eyes sunk in their cavernous sockets. The grain of her facial muscles was visible, like an anatomical model for science cla.s.s. The intersection of cartilage turning to bone in her nose was as sharp as two pieces set together in a puzzle.

Most of her crown was bald, and other bald patches showed through her thin hair.

"You look like Mom," I whispered. "After chemo."

Aunt Izzy's voice lost that nasty, hard edge. "Just think, your mom lost her hair fighting to save her life, and I lost mine basically trying to kill myself."

I looked up at her, not sure I understood.

"My body started to cannibalize itself," she said. "My heart. My brain. I've got an irregular heartbeat because of those years, did you know that? I stopped having periods because I was so malnourished. I didn't produce enough estrogen for my bones, so now I have these brittle, old-lady bones. I can't run anymore because I get stress fractures. But, hey, I was thin, right?"

I'd thought Mom was too thin at the end, but she'd looked downright hearty, even in her last days, compared to these pictures.

"I couldn't see myself at all," Izzy said, flipping through the photos in her hand. "I would do anything to lose weight. Anything. Once, my therapist even asked me if I'd cut off an arm or leg to weigh less and I said yes. That's...that's just obscene to me now."

I thought about that Sierra Leone video and what I'd wished.

Aunt Izzy shuffled through the photos some more. She stopped at one picture, putting her hand over her mouth.

I took the photo from her. Her face looked like she'd gone through a windshield. Her left eye was dark where it should be white, and the bruised lid stretched huge and puffy. The entire left side of her face was swollen to twice its size, and along her shaved hairline a row of st.i.tches looked like barbed wire against her white scalp.

"I pa.s.sed out in the shower," she said. "Your mother found me lying there bleeding."

I burst into tears picturing my mother young, frightened...still alive.

Izzy scooted closer to me on that splintery attic floor, wrapping her arms around me.

"I want to stop," I cried. "I really do. I don't know how. She won't leave me alone!"

Aunt Izzy leaned back so she could look in my face. "Who won't leave you alone?"

My stomach fluttered. "I didn't mean a person, I just-I don't know how...I don't want to...do that"-I'd never said the words "binge" or "purge"; they made it seem too real-"but then, it's like it tells me that nothing will make me feel as good as it can."

Aunt Izzy's eyes were bright. "So the bulimia? You referred to the bulimia as a person. You said, 'She won't leave me alone.' Do you think of her as a person?"

I hesitated. Would she think I was certifiably insane?

Before I could answer, she said, "I did that. I still kind of do. I started thinking of anorexia as a person. That was her name, you know, like she was this girl I actually knew called Anorexia."

My heart lifted. I nodded.

"It's like I could...picture her." Aunt Izzy drew her knees up to her chest. "I used to think she was beautiful, so tall and willowy, with this pearly white skin and big eyes, but now...now I see her for who she truly is. Some kind of monster. She's got fangs and these long limbs that are too bendy to be a real person's."

Wow.

"So," she asked me, "what does Bulimia look like?"

"I-I used to think she was pretty too, but now...she's short. And pudgy. She has bloodshot eyes and rotten teeth. And really frizzy, fried hair."

Aunt Izzy laughed. "That's good. That's great. It's not crazy, you know, to picture them. Especially to picture them as monsters. They are not our friends. They want to kill us."

Tears surprised me-for real, I didn't know I was going to cry again. "But..."

"There are no buts in this, Hannah! Bulimia could rupture your esophagus and you could bleed to death out of your mouth. That'd be a pretty way to go, huh? Or she could stop your heart. She could be making your bones brittle too. When was the last time you had a period?"

I shrugged. I couldn't remember. "I can't be malnourished," I said. "I'm fat."

"You are not fat."

"I am too! My face is all pudgy, and I'm gaining-"

"You know who made your face pudgy? Bulimia. All of this"-she cupped my ridiculous giant cheeks in her hands-"is your salivary glands. They're swollen. They're desperate. They're working overtime to absorb any bit of nutrition from you at all before you puke it up."

I flinched. It sounded so ugly, so harsh. And wasn't it?

She touched her fingers to my face. "Your eyes, your beautiful eyes, look like you've been in a fight. No amount of makeup can hide those dark circles. It's from the pressure when you vomit. Eventually, you start busting those blood vessels. And your teeth, they're so dark. She's rotting your teeth with all that stomach acid."

"Shut up!" I said. "Stop it, just stop. Are you trying to make me hate myself?"

Aunt Izzy stroked my hair. "No, sweetie, I'm not. I think you're doing just fine at that on your own."

Reasons to Be Happy: Nope, still can't think of any.

I wanted to hate Aunt Izzy, but I couldn't. She told the truth.

I hadn't told the truth in a long time.