The next day, after everyone else comes in from the smoking porch and we take our regular seats in Group, Claire announces that a new girl is joining us. She asks if someone will get an extra chair. “Put it there, please,” she tells Sydney. “Next to Callie.”
I sit very, very still.
The door squeaks open and the new girl comes in. She’s tiny, with dyed black hair held back in kiddie barrettes, red lipsticked lips, and the palest, whitest skin I’ve ever seen. She’s wearing ripped jeans and a sweatshirt.
Claire gestures toward the empty spot next to me and invites her to sit down. The girl slides into the chair, then grabs the seat, scraping the legs back and forth on her little patch of floor, trying to get settled. Her chair bangs into mine. The impact reverberates all through me.
“Oops,” she says.
Claire asks if anyone is willing to make the introductions, but it seems like everyone has suddenly gotten shy. So Claire goes around the circle giving names but not issues.
The new girl says her name so quickly I can’t tell if it’s Amanda or Manda. Then, when no one says anything, she says, “Jesus Christ, it’s hot in here.”
Claire asks Amanda/Manda if she wants to tell us why she’s at Sick Minds. Amanda/Manda pulls off her sweatshirt; I feel every movement through my chair.
There’s a gasp from across the circle. Debbie’s hand is clapped over her mouth and the other girls are staring at the new girl.
Her sweatshirt is on the floor and she’s sitting there in a little white undershirt holding her arms out so everyone can see a geometry of scars crisscrossing her inner arm: scars in parallel lines running up to her elbow, bisecting lines, obtuse angles. Scratched into the skin above her wrist are words. In pink scar tissue on one arm it says “Life.” On the other it says “Sucks.”
I pull my sleeves down around my thumbs and pinch the fabric tight.
“I don’t really need to be here,” she says. “Some dogood English teacher thought I was trying to kill myself.”
There’s scattered fidgeting, then silence. “You’re not?” Sydney finally says.
“As if,” Amanda/Manda says.
“Then why do you do it?”
“Beats me,” she says. Then, right away, “Low selfesteem. Poor impulse control. Repressed hostility. Right?” She addresses all this to Claire.
Claire doesn’t answer, so Amanda/Manda turns back to Sydney. “Listen, I don’t see how what I do is so different from people who get their tongues pierced. Or their lips. Or their ears, for Chrissakes. It’s my body.”
She glances around the circle; no one budges.
“It’s body decoration. Like tattoos.” She keeps talking, like she’s been in the middle of a conversation that everybody else happened to walk in on. Like we’re new, not her. “It’s better than people who bite their nails till they bleed. I mean, they’re actually eating their own flesh. They’re like cannibals.”
Tiffany, who bites her nails until they bleed, tucks her hands under her thighs.
“I mean, why is everyone so upset? It’s freedom of expression, right?”
I grind the hem of my sleeve between my fingers. The frantic barking of a dog rings in the distance. Amanda/Manda is saying something about an article she read in a magazine. I turn my head ever so slightly to catch the words.
“You know, they used to bleed people all the time back in the old days,” she says. “When they were sick. It’s an endorphin rush.”
“And…” All heads swivel in the direction of Claire’s voice. “Does it make you feel better?” Claire says.
“Absolutely.” Amanda/Manda shifts in her chair. “It’s a high. I mean, you feel amazing. No matter how bad you felt before. It’s a rush. Like suddenly you’re alive.”
“And you want to do it again, don’t you?” Claire says.
My fingers are numb from pinching my shirtsleeve.
“Yeah. So?”
“Let me rephrase that,” Claire says slowly. “You need to do it again.”
The new girl leans forward in her chair, her dark eyes blazing. “Not me,” she says. “I can control it. I always control it.” She folds her arms across her chest; her elbow nudges mine. I jump.
“What about you, Callie?” Claire’s voice is loud. “Can you control it?”
The room is dead quiet. Debbie stops cracking her weight-control gum. Even the dog stops barking. Far off, down the hall, a phone trills, once, twice, three times. It’s answered by an invisible voice.
“Callie?”
I feel the new girl turn to regard me.
I nod.
And I can feel the rest of the group exhale.
I spend the rest of the session counting the stitches on my sneaker and hating this Amanda/Manda person, hating Claire, hating this whole stupid place. Because now everybody knows why I’m here.
I’m at my usual place at dinner that night, at the far end of the long rectangular table, trying to make each mouthful last for twenty chews. That way, it takes me just as long to eat as it does for everybody else to eat and talk. The other girls are turned away, discussing some kind of petition. Sydney says she wants pizza. Tara suggests lowfat yogurt. The petition, I deduce, must be about the food. Becca says she wants croutons without gluten, whatever that is.
“How about an ice cream bar?” Debbie says. “Like a salad bar. You can go back as many times as you want.”
“Yeah, right,” says Tiffany “That’s just what you need.”
“I was kidding,” Debbie says.
“What do you want?” It’s a voice I don’t recognize right away the new girl’s.
When I look up, two rows of heads are turned in my direction. This reminds me, suddenly, of a book my Gram gave me when I was little, about Madeline, the little French girl who lived with twelve little girls in two straight lines.
I pick up my plastic spoon and sculpt my mashed potatoes into a little hill.
“We don’t know about her,” I hear Debbie say. “She doesn’t talk.”
I make a little mashed potato ski slope, then flatten it with my spoon. The other girls go back to talking about the petition and I decide that dinner’s over for me, that it’s time to bring my tray up to the conveyor belt that takes all the dirty dishes and cups and leftover food through a window into the dish room, where they disappear.
I stand and try to squeeze between the chairs at our table and the ones behind us. The space is tight and I hold my tray high so I don’t bump into anybody. I pass safely behind Sydney, then Tara When I get to the new girl, she rocks back; my toe stubs the leg of her chair. Milk sloshes out of my glass and down the back of her sweatshirt.
“Jesus!” She practically spits out the word. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing?” She’s wiping her sweatshirt with a paper napkin. They all look at me, six sick girls in two straight lines, waiting for me to do something.
Somehow I navigate through the sea of tables and chairs and more chairs until I’m finally at the conveyor belt.
The lunchroom attendant, a heavy woman who sits guard over the trash cans to keep track of how much food the anorexics throw out, gives me a bothered expression, then goes back to her paperback.
Across the room, a dish explodes on the floor; there’s the obligatory smattering of applause. The attendant gets up, turns her book face down on her chair, and brings a broom and dustpan over to the girl who dropped her dish.
I stand in front of the blue trash can marked “Recyclables” and finger the edge of my aluminum pie plate, aware that no one’s watching me, that all I’d have to do is rip the pie plate in half to get a nice sharp cutting edge. The clatter of dishes and conversation dims to a hush as I slip the thin, impossibly light disk of aluminum into my pocket. I’m calm, finally, because I know that even if I don’t use it right away, I have what I need.
That night, Sydney tosses and turns and fusses with her blankets for almost an hour after lights out. I lie on
