*Homecoming 2008*

Y ES, I KNOW this post already reeks of high school. But quite honestly, I feel like I’m in high school.  Coming home has that effect on me, and especially now. Winter 2008—five years after we donned our white caps and gowns at Tanglewood—four out of my six best friends from high school are finding themselves in the same sleepy Berkshire town where we grew up.

In honor of this momentous homecoming, I’d like to share an essay I wrote shortly after we graduated. I haven’t touched it since then (except to change some names), and it is a strong representation of the kinds of reflections I was having about my high school experience at that time. Meet me after Bio to get high in the parking lot…

‘Picking at Scabs’

W HEN WE HEARD Brooke throwing up on Katelyn’s 18th birthday, the seven of us skipped a beat. Our spoons, heaped with chocolate sauce and ice cream, paused in midair before reluctantly arriving at our lips. Gator’s hand ticked for a split second as she sliced through creamy frosting and into birthday cake. No one said anything. We just listened. My mind wandered up the air vent to the cool blue tiled floor where I know Brooke knelt with watering eyes and a runny nose—her bony fingers brushing the back of her throat, coaxing and begging for release.

These girls are the closest things that I have to sisters. We are not fused with blood but with bruises and Band-Aids—our mutual growing pains. Our insecurities have bonded us together with can’t-live-without-you love. I watched the girls shift uncomfortably eyeing the caloric catastrophe that lay before us, sprawled across the kitchen counter. Our throats began to close around the clumps of cake and ice cream. We ate fast. We ate get to rid of it. Behind us, Justin sang Senorita through the kitchen speakers. Above us, Brooke coughed and spat. It was an eternity cruelly crammed into a split second.

When Natalie recognized Mariah Carey’s wails as the next song on our party mix, she crossed the kitchen and turned up the stereo. I couldn’t help but grin, remembering the night that Lauren performed this song while standing on a bar stool at Beth Leighton’s house when we were freshmen. Katelyn caught on and began laughing with me.  Lizzie maneuvered her 5-foot frame atop one of Brooke’s kitchen chairs and danced. We shrieked for her to sing like Lauren, to wave her hand the way Lauren did. We began to spill into singing and sloppy dancing. Sophia topped off our Vodka and Kool-Aid.

A S A CHILD I watched my mother obsess about food—now I ignore it. But for so long I listened and watched as she ate standing up at our kitchen counter. And her obsession faded into mine so now there is no line where the food fixation finishes or starts, it is just an absolute that stretches like the ocean back to the horizon of my existence. I don’t remember choosing to stop eating or consciously deciding to lose weight, but during high school I became acutely aware of the fact that food was ruling my life. I was exhausted. All my waking moments were spent worrying, calculating, obsessing. I felt bad about what I had already eaten and worse about what I feared I might eat. I was tortured by my ruthless and relentless mind.

The summer I turned 15 I stood in my sun-splashed bedroom room with Lauren. It was that perfect time of year just after school had ended. We were refreshed by our laziness, and the novelty of doing absolutely nothing had not yet worn off. Our teenage bodies were framed by the antique mirror hanging above my desk, which in turn, was framed by rows of pictures and magazine ads torn sloppily out of In Style, Vogue, and Elle. We laughed at our funny faces and poked at the flesh-eating hickey that had taken residency on Lauren’s neck; we penciled heavy eyeliner around our eyes and played with offensively orange shades of lipstick.

We told each other everything we had eaten for the past two days. I scrutinized in the mirror, pulling at my fleshy belly.

I hate feeling full.

Lauren agreed:

It’s so much easier just to throw up.

I looked at Lauren—her bony arms, bloodshot eyes, methodical cuts half-hidden under the sleeve of her Abercrombie tee shirt—I nodded. I admired her willpower, and I envied her success. Our secrets were safe, trapped between my lavender bedroom walls, lingering in the air around Giselle and Heidi; the faces of Ralph Lauren, Prada, and Guess; whispering to the smirking girls clutching Louis Vuitton purses.

D URING SOPHOMORE Health, my class watched a movie where young Ally McBeal played a bulimic girl. She continuously ate appalling amounts of food and then puked in old Tupperware containers that were hidden in her bedroom closet.  Lizzie, Gator and I half-paid attention in the back of the room, doodling on scrap paper, passing notes, picking at scabs.  We knew what eating disorders were. Fragile little Betsy Crandall was clearly anorexic, and Kate Hanovski used to vomit everyday in the Library bathroom after lunch. Once I went to Maria Garber’s house and their cupboards were padlocked to keep her bulimic sister, Emily, from binging. These were the girls with eating disorders. Textbook bulimics and anorexics, they were emaciated, crazy and miserable.

Lauren and I both grew out of purging. By the end of high school, we no longer found ourselves embarrassed and dirty on the bathroom floor, but the guilt from eating remained. This guilt swims in my blood, it is a cancer that sits in my belly and twists my stomach around itself. Passed to me from my mother, it is in my DNA. Spelled out in my constellations, it is a character trait that I can’t shake. Plastered on every colorful surface of my world, it is a societal obsession that has seeped into my pores.

B ABY GIRLS BORN in 1985, we yearn to be happy, successful, smart and skinny. My friends and I go to the gym so that we can “deserve” dessert. We cannot help but to despise our bellies, our butts. Our lowest weights are stashed in the back of our minds, coveted among soccer games, recitals, world travel and graduations—our greatest accomplishments.

Tummies were already swollen with birthday cake when Brooke came downstairs with her teeth freshly brushed and her hair swept back.  We opened Katelyn’s gifts in the living room, the eight of us squashed together on Brooke’s scratchy green sofa.  I felt our ribs expand and collapse into each other with every breath we took. I remember the smell of vodka from our drinks, the Pantene Pro-V in Natalie’s hair, splashes of Estee Lauder Pleasures around Lauren’s collar and cuffs.  Sex and the City played into the night; the theme song rolling over our rhythmic breath, replaying itself long after sleep blanketed our bodies.

When Brooke had walked back into the kitchen, after we had cleaned up the dessert mess, I remember thinking how even her neck looked bony. A suggestion of an Adam’s apple protruded from under her flimsy skin. For a moment I thought of yucky Tupperware filled with puke, of Ally McBeal shoving an entire box of Munchkins in her mouth. I heard the heavy clank of a silver padlock on the Garbers’ refrigerator door. I wanted to scream at Brooke. I wanted to shake her bony carcass of a body.

But before my mouth could form the words to say, I remembered my own reflection rippling in tears and toilet water. I caught myself, for a frightening and fleeting moment, wishing it was me. And I didn’t say anything.

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