Chapter 23 #2
“I stopped eating, after it happened. It…” I exhale. “I became anorexic.” I pause. “You do know what anorexia is, right?”
Daerios rolls his eyes. “Yes, Quinn. I know what anorexia is.”
“I mean, I don’t know.” I shrug. “You elves are so perfect. So untouchable. Surely none of your kind would ever deign to suffer from something as lowly as a mental illness.”
“First of all.” Daerios turns to face me more fully on the couch. “That is entirely inaccurate. Elves have mental illnesses, too. Believe me. In fact, I…” Pain flickers through his eyes, there and gone in an instant. “Someone very close to me used to struggle with eating, too.”
My heart squeezes. “Oh.”
I want to ask who he knew that struggled with their eating, but it feels too personal. Too private. Even in the face of everything he’s just shared with me. Maybe because of everything he’s just shared. I don’t want to push, when I’ve already gotten so much.
Instead, I give him more of myself.
“It was a long time ago. Right after my dad’s…
” I cut myself off. “I just, I stopped eating. I had no appetite at all. And after a few weeks of that, of surviving on almost nothing, I stepped on a scale. I don’t even remember why.
It was in my parents’ bathroom, and my mom, she hadn’t gotten out of bed in a while, so maybe I was in there checking on her when I saw it.
Anyway. I got on the scale, and I’d lost almost twenty pounds.
I was shocked at first; I hadn’t weighed that amount since before going through puberty.
But then I looked in the mirror, and…” I remember this moment so clearly: the slim lines of my arms, the flat plane of my stomach. “And I liked it.”
It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about this to anyone other than my mom. Maybe since the last time I saw a therapist, which was half a decade ago.
“I liked it,” I repeat. “I liked the feeling it gave me. The dopamine. It was the first time I’d felt good about anything since losing my dad. I looked at my body, and I looked like…” Here,
I have to stop myself from saying, like the elves. “Like the women I saw on magazine covers.”
Next to my knee, Daerios’s hand draws into a fist.
I don’t look up at him as I keep talking, the words coming out faster than I can stop them, now.
“So, I decided to keep it. I won’t bore you with the details of how, but it was all the classics: restriction, over-exercise, refusing to eat certain foods, chewing and spitting it back up, hiding foods in napkins.
And I hid it well.” I laugh humorlessly.
“But not well enough, because eventually, my mom figured out what I was doing and put me into a recovery program. I was furious, at first, like any addict who doesn’t want to give up their drug of choice.
There were a few months, even after starting recovery, where I refused to give it up.
Any of it. I was sick, and I held onto my illness like I would die if I let it go.
Because that’s what it honestly felt like. ”
Here, I finally glance at Daerios. His face is carefully neutral, but the knuckles of his hands are snow-white.
“Which was rubbish, of course,” I say, sighing.
“But anorexia is a very convincing liar. She whispers things to you. Makes you think you’re nothing without her.
I spent over a year in recovery before I finally started to shed those beliefs.
To stop assigning moral virtues to certain food groups.
To begin to see myself more objectively.
By the time I started high school, I felt completely neutral toward my body.
I didn’t love it—I still don’t—but obsession over its shape and the foods I put into it no longer occupied my every waking moment. ”
Plus, I found something new to obsess over, I don’t add. Something that took over my life just as much as anorexia did.
“Recovery is a lifelong process,” I continue. “I’ll never be ‘fully’ healed. But at this point, I’m far enough along that I only really have flare-ups when things are tough. When I’m especially sad or anxious or stressed. But I’m pretty good at recognizing it before it gets bad.”
My voice sort of trails off. I drum my fingers on the back of the couch, not looking at Daerios. While I was telling my story, the words sort of just flowed out, but now that I’m done, a wave of self-doubt rolls in. One that probably should have come earlier.
Why did I just say all of that? Was it a complete over-share?
I haven’t even told Cara most of that, and we’ve been roommates now for over a year.
Daerios and I have known each other for less than a month.
Why on Earth did I feel compelled to dump all of that onto someone who’s practically a stranger?
But he isn’t a stranger, whispers a voice in my head. In some ways, he’s the only one who’s ever truly known who you are.
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” he says at last, voice soft. I still don’t look at him. I can’t. “I’m really grateful that you did. But to be completely honest…” He pauses. “I already knew.”
At that, my head finally snaps up to look at him. “You what?”
“Well, not everything, of course. None of the specifics of your story. But the fact that you struggle with eating, or at least had done so at one point in your life?” He nodded. “That, I already knew.”
I shake my head, bewildered. “But how?”
“It was your plate, the day we sat next to you at lunch. The low-calorie food covered in low-calorie flavor? I recognized it right away.” He smiles, but his eyes are sad.
“Why do you think I feed you every chance I get? The vaaska. The honey cakes. The donuts.” He raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to put it all together.
Now that he says it, I feel like a fool for not noticing it sooner.
My breath becomes shallow. Not from attraction, this time, but from something else. A feeling I can’t name. It’s like something huge and fundamental has shifted inside my chest—a tower collapsing in on itself, or a mountain slowly rumbling aside to make room for a valley.
Daerios reaches out and takes one of my hands. “Thank you for sharing that with me,” he says softly. “I’m sure it wasn’t easy.”
Actually, it was, I think. Sharing myself with you is the easiest thing in the world.
“And I’m really sorry about your father,” he says. “Did they ever catch the person who did it?”
I shake my head. Which is true.
“I’m so sorry.” He looks into the fire, thumb tracing absentminded circles on my hand. “At least with Uian, we knew who to blame. In some strange way, that helps.”