i.<\/p>\n
Once when my friend was seventeen, a woman stopped her in the shopping mall and said, \u201cDo you want to be Miss Teen Santa Clara?\u201d And she said yes, because why not, and she came in runner up that year for Miss Teen California. She took the modeling contract they offered her, too, and stood thin and blonde and flushed in front of the fan, wheat-blonde hair blowing out behind her.<\/p>\n
She auditioned for a role in a musical adaptation of The Ugly Duckling, and they cast her as the beautiful swan, and she drove every day across the hill into Santa Cruz for the long hours of rehearsals. Sometimes they didn\u2019t need her while they ran the other numbers, sometimes for hours, so she went out on drives, wandered the beaches.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey there, pretty,\u201d shouted one man, who was with a group of men. \u201cYou a mermaid?\u201d<\/p>\n
She was walking the shore, alone. Dusk drew dark to the horizon. Some of the men sat on the pier. Some stood.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou look like a mermaid,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you give me your number?\u201d<\/p>\n
The men clustered around her, and my friends heart pounded, and she didn\u2019t know if she\u2019d be able to get away to the silver honda her daddy bought her for high school graduation. She smiled and acted calm as she wrote out her number, like she wasn\u2019t a fish they\u2019d caught on their line, like they might not decide to reel her in and gut her.<\/p>\n
ii.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust shut up and enjoy it,\u201d my friend\u2019s mother said to her, when she went in for her first temp job. She\u2019s twenty-two and just out of college, very pretty, with long dark hair, and dark eyes, and pin-up curves accented by her pencil skirt. Men have been talking; have been leering; have been gearing up to touch.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust enjoy it,\u201d her mother repeats, \u201cYou\u2019ll miss it when you\u2019re not pretty anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
iii.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you even trying?\u201d The girl is blonde, tan. The letters \u201cUCSC\u201d are printed in yellow across the butt of her trim blue sweat pants. She stands next to the treadmill on which my friend is working out, her hands on her hips, a white towel tossed over her shoulder.<\/p>\n
She sneers at my friend\u2019s ass, the shape of which she can\u2019t even discern underneath the baggy sweats that hide the fact that my friend is much smaller than she looks. She\u2019s slender, though not as painfully thin as when she was at her most anorexic. After years of sexual abuse, she hides the contours of her body underneath clothing made for much larger women, each bulge and billow and fold suggesting flesh that isn\u2019t really there. She feels like it\u2019s there, though, still has the anorexic\u2019s view of herself in the mirror, the conviction that her body is spilling everywhere, uncontrollable, insatiable, massive.<\/p>\n
The blonde\u2019s eyes flick derisively from shrouded ass to bared face. \u201cIt obviously isn\u2019t working,\u201d she says. \u201cLeave the machines for someone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
iv.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou act well enough,\u201d the art director of the musical theater institute I\u2019m attending tells me, \u201cbut your singing is really incredible. You could play any kind of roles, as long as you lose weight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Every day, there\u2019s the toilet, the calorie count below starvation, the hours of exercise. Emotional control has slipped away\u2013I cry when the wind blows, and then rage a second later. I\u2019m not eating enough to run my brain. The pounds won\u2019t shed, won\u2019t shed. I can\u2019t be the person I\u2019ve always wanted to be. My body refuses, hoards its energy, would rather pitch into a faint than burn any more of its stores.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy are you eating that?\u201d mom says, when I\u2019m back on food again. \u201cYou really need that?\u201d She\u2019s furious about something else, and she wants to make me hurt, and this is such a good way. I throw away the food and she complains about the wasted money.<\/p>\n
v.<\/p>\n
My friend is very skinny and very tall. She\u2019s the kind of tall that attracts your eye across a store. She\u2019s the kind of skinny that draws bad remarks. \u201cYou play basketball?\u201d \u201cAre you anorexic?\u201d No one asks if she\u2019s a model; she\u2019s not that kind of tall and thin. Turns out you can be stretched too much, drawn too narrow. People watch her bones and her back.<\/p>\n
She wants to stretch free and become the thing she feels she\u2019s growing into, but her mother wants her home in the nest. Her heart is fragile. There are health reasons to keep her home. It\u2019s not health that makes her mom insist she wear makeup on her way out of the house, that makes her police her clothes for any hint of something too butch, too goth, too hard.<\/p>\n
My friend argues for leaving home. Going to a college far away. Getting to meet new people. Getting to choose her own clothes. \u201cI don\u2019t want to be here forever,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the end of a long argument that, in her mother\u2019s opinion, should have been over a long time ago. Her mother can\u2019t believe she continues to press. Decisions have been made. The shoe has been dropped.<\/p>\n
She fixes her daughter with hard eyes. She grabs away the half-eaten bowl of cereal. Milk spills over the edge onto the table. \u201cYou\u2019re as ugly on the inside as you are on the out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
i. Once when my friend was seventeen, a woman stopped her in the shopping mall and said, \u201cDo you want to be Miss Teen Santa Clara?\u201d And she said yes, because why not, and she came in runner up that … Continue reading