Why Me? (8 page)

I spent the rest of the day thinking about losing weight. It was the first day since the shoplifting incident that I walked through the hallways with my head held high and I was able to tune out the jabs and jeers from the other kids. I refrained from eating lunch or any snacks during the day and could swear that I felt the weight just slipping off my body. I couldn’t wait to get home and stand on the scale again and see if anything had changed.

Once the final bell had rung, I bolted out of school and ran home. Mom wasn’t home, so I let myself in, ran to the bathroom, stripped off my clothes, and stood on the scale. A wave of disappointment crashed over me. “Still 140 pounds?” I thought. “I have to eat less.”

My mood had gone from great to bad in a matter of seconds. I was pacing in my room, trying to figure out a way to lose more weight, when I heard my mother come in the front door.

“Sarah! Come up and help me with these groceries!”

“Oh, God! It’s almost dinnertime! I can’t eat!” I thought in a panic.

I rushed upstairs and started unloading the grocery bags stacked on the kitchen table. “OK, salad, I can eat that… . Little Debbie cakes … how many calories do these have? … Oh, no way am I eating that!” My mind was racing as I considered what I could and couldn’t eat.

“What’s for dinner tonight?” I asked Mom.

“Homemade pizza,” Mom replied.

“Crap!” I thought. “Well, I can scrape the topping off and just eat the crust… .”

Thinking about the pizza was consuming me. I couldn’t hear anything around me as I thought about how I was going to get out of eating that pizza.

SMACK! My head stung and my eyes watered. I blinked and ducked, instinctively covering my face.

“Take your hands off your face!” Mom screamed. “Show me your pretty face!”

I had no idea what had caused this, no idea what I had done to make my mother scream.

“Lip gloss! Lip gloss! WHORE! You don’t need to wear that shit!” Mom was screaming so loudly now that spit was flying out of her mouth and hitting my hands, which were still covering my face.

“Lip gloss?” I thought. Then it hit me: I had forgotten to take Mom’s lip gloss out of my pocket—the lip gloss I had spent the morning applying because it made me feel pretty. .

“Wait a minute—this is MY lip gloss?” Mom screamed into my face .

I peered through my fingers at my mother. I had never seen Mom’s face change like that before. It was as if she became someone else in a matter of seconds. Her eyes shifted and narrowed, her mouth became a sneer, and her jaw clenched.

Mom’s hands clamped around my throat. My hands came away from my face as I struggled to free myself from her grasp.

“M-m-m-m-om!” I heard
Rachel
Emily
stuttering from the corner, but Mom paid no attention. Her fingernails dug in tighter around my neck.

I couldn’t breathe; my eyes started to bug; and my heart began to race. I fought harder against Mom, trying to pry her fingernails out of my neck. Then, for some reason, Mom let go. I collapsed onto the couch, sputtering and crying, gulping fresh air into my lungs.

“Look at me!” Mom ordered. Terrified, I turned toward her. But before I could look my mother in the eyes, a force unlike anything I had felt before in my life smashed into my jaw. My eyes rolled, my entire jaw seemed to shift to the opposite side of my face, and my cheekbone felt like it was crushed.

I leaned my head back against the couch and forced my eyes onto my mother. She was standing above me with a large glass paperweight in her hands.

“Don’t you shut your eyes!” Mom said in a panic. “
RACHEL
EMILY
! Get some water!”

I started to shut my eyes, my head spinning and my jaw throbbing. I wanted to shut my eyes and never wake up, but Mom wasn’t letting me do that.

“Sit up and drink this,” she said almost lovingly.

I forced my eyes open and sat up. I took a small sip of the water and whispered, “Can I go downstairs and lie down?”

Mom got down on her knees and looked at my face. “Look at me!” she ordered. She held up her finger and moved it as she said, “Look up, look down, look left, look right.”

I complied, following my mother’s finger with my eyes. It was painful to move my eyes, but I was able to follow my mother’s orders.

“Go on; go lie down,” she said.

Shakily, I got to my feet and made it downstairs to my room in the basement. I collapsed on the bed and put my sore face into my pillow. It wasn’t long before the pillow was sopping wet from my tears. “I knew better!” I said to myself. “That goddamn lip gloss!” I could have kicked myself. Had I just remembered to take it out of my pocket when I got home, I wouldn’t be in this situation.

My stomach growled. That was a good pain. My tears stopped flowing as I felt my stomach rumble, and it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have to eat dinner that night. Suddenly, my face didn’t hurt as much and I didn’t feel as bad. I thought of losing five or ten more pounds and how good that would make me feel and look. I had found a way to put a smile on my face before I went to sleep for the rest of the evening.

After that, I began starving myself on a daily basis. The numbers on the scale continued to go down. The stomach pains helped make the pain from Mom’s beatings go away. As I got skinnier, I started receiving compliments from the kids at school; this made me even more determined to lose as much weight as I could.

Soon none of my clothes were fitting, my ribs were showing, and my face was becoming gaunt. People at school stopped making fun of me for stealing and started whispering about my new appearance behind my back. The compliments stopped coming, and people looked at me with concern in their eyes. Mom stopped making Thunder Thigh remarks and started to tease me about other body parts, such as my “Bug Eyes,” my “Nigger Lips,” and my “Ape Feet.” When Mom teased me, I restricted my food intake even more to make myself feel better. My life was absolutely consumed by the numbers on the scale and the food that entered my mouth. It was becoming apparent to all those around me that there was a problem.

One day at school I was called into the nurse’s office. Sitting in there were my mom,
Dale
Richard
, the nurse, and the principal. The principal stood up and said, “Hi, Sarah, do you mind sitting down for a minute?”

The nurse came over and put a blood pressure cuff on my arm. I observed as she worked the pump and watched her wristwatch, wondering what the problem was. The nurse looked up at Mom and
Dale
Richard
and shook her head.

“It’s low, it’s real low,” she said. She looked sadly at me and stroked the side of my face. “What are you doing to yourself, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Yes, Sarah, what ARE you doing to yourself?” my mother asked with a tone of sarcasm in her voice.

“Now, Mrs. Burleton , let’s stay calm. This is about Sarah now,” the principal said as he sat back down in his chair.

Suddenly the nurse’s office closed in on me, and my throat grew tight. “They found out!” I thought in horror.

“Sarah, are you starving yourself?” the principal asked with a quaver in his voice.

I summoned my courage and looked up. “Yes,” I said softly.

Dale
Richard
put his head in his hands, and Mom sat back in her chair and crossed her arms.

“Do you want to talk about it?” the principal asked in a soft tone.

“No!” I said, rather defiantly.

“Could you sit in the hall for a minute?” the principal asked.

Without a word, I got up and stormed out of the office. I was furious: furious that someone had learned my secret, furious that Mom had found out, furious that they were going to take away the only thing I had control of in my life. “Run away, Sarah!” my mind kept telling me. But before I could get up, the nurse came out into the hallway.

“Let’s go to your locker and get your books,” she said in a kind voice.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“I’ll let your parents tell you. Don’t worry about it, Sarah. Everything is going to be OK now.”

I got my books and followed the nurse outside, where Mom,
Dale
Richard
, and the principal were waiting for me. “Good luck, Sarah,” the principal said as he gave me a hug.
Dale
Richard
put his arm around my shoulders and led me toward the car.

Once we were inside the car and safely away from the school, Mom turned around and looked at me with fire in her eyes. “Now I have to send you to a clinic because you won’t eat?” she screamed. I started crying. “SHUT UP, you fucking mistake! What a BIG mistake you were, Anorexic Annie!”

I stopped crying and sat there in disbelief. I was anorexic? That’s what I was? Now I was diseased, had a clinical disorder? I’d thought I was just skinny, not anorexic. Now I was going to a clinic for help? “What kind of clinic?” I asked.

“A clinic for stupid kids,”
Dale
Richard
said.

“A clinic for crazies so they can attempt to be normal again,” added Mom.

The rest of the day was a blur.
Dale
Richard
and Mom packed a bag for me and had me admitted into an in-patient treatment center before nightfall. I spent the evening feeling like a caged dog. There were doctors in white coats walking around, and crazy kids strapped to their beds being wheeled in. Someone was watching me while I went to the bathroom, watching me while I ate, even watching me while I slept, making sure that I didn’t make myself sick or get rid of the food that I had been forced to eat for dinner.

I had lost complete control. In a matter of a few hours, I had gone from doing OK at home and school to being committed to a treatment center where right down the hall was a child in a straightjacket, screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs. “I’ve got to figure out a way to get out of here!” I thought in panic.

For the next two weeks, I focused on getting out. I told the psychiatrists what they wanted to hear; I made up stories about why I’d started to starve myself; I ate with a smile on my face and managed to keep the food down. Not once did I talk about the mental and physical abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother. That would have just meant more time in the psychiatrist’s office and more time in that damn clinic. And lo and behold, after two weeks I got my discharge papers!

Dale
Richard
and Mom came to pick me up after my two-week stay. At the clinic, they hovered all over me, hugging me and helping me put my bags into the car. After we pulled away and I had waved to the last nurse out the window, Mom turned around and said, “Well, Anorexic Annie, they sure fattened you up again, didn’t they?”

“Why does it have to be me?” I thought as tears streamed down my face. “Why me?”

Chapter 9

Homecoming

I didn’t change much after my trip to the in-patient treatment facility. That place was a joke to me; it was so transparent what they were doing and how they wanted patients to answer their stupid psychobabble questions. “A baboon could fool those assholes,” I said to myself. I would take my mother’s beatings any day over another night in that hospital.

What did change about me was that I got better at hiding my anorexia. I would eat just enough to make people happy, wear baggy clothes to hide my skinny frame, and lie about foods I had eaten with a smile on my face.

Mom didn’t let up on me at all. Now that I was going on sixteen years old, Mom was tougher than ever. I was rarely allowed out of the house except to go to school, and I was never allowed out on weekend nights. No boyfriends, no football games, no sleepovers. “I’m not going to have my daughter knocked up at sixteen!” Mom would declare to anyone who would listen.

I desperately wanted a friend: someone to talk to, someone to confide in, a shoulder to cry on. I would sit in the house on Friday nights, listening to the sounds of the football game from down the street. I would hear the kids laughing, the cheerleaders yelling, the crowd roaring; and my heart would ache.

It was about a week until Homecoming during my sophmore year of high school l. I had never been to Homecoming and never even been asked before. Who would want to go with the shoplifting anorexic girl? My reputation at school was so tarnished that I felt I would never have a date.

“Sarah?”

I was in the school library, working on some math homework during study hall, when I heard a soft female voice in my ear. I looked up and was shocked to see one of the most popular girls in school, Susan, kneeling next to me with a smile on her face.

“Um … yeah. Hi!” I stammered nervously.

Susan brushed her fingers through her long, blonde hair and gestured toward the back of the library. “Do you know Brian Schulte?”

I turned around. I knew
of
Brian: he was in football and he was a junior. Other than in study hall, I never even saw him during the day. I strained my eyes to focus on the boy waving at me. Then I turned back to Susan, sure that I was being set up. “No, I don’t know him; I know
of
him.”