Hemorrhage.

During grade school, I was more of a science and math kind of kid. I liked the straightforwardness of knowing that these were the given facts, and they would never change. There would always be a nucleus in a cell, and energy would never just disappear. To find the answer, I had to open my book, or do a lab. There was nothing to interpret, nothing to make conclusions about.

Freshman year, I maintained a solid B in English 1-2 GATE, but after that, I started to struggle. I had a problem expressing my feelings, even if it was just about my opinion on whether or not I thought Scout Finch was relatable or not. Essays, book reports, and responses to literature had me shaking in my shoes. My dislike for words started to grow, sometimes to the point where I contemplated going mute, or switching to Morse code for communication.

Writing a letter, especially one pinpointed on things that I didn’t really feel like talking about, wasn’t on my list of favorite pastimes. Writing was not an avocation, and I usually liked to avoid it at all costs. I thought about blowing the letter off a few times, maybe just winging it when I got up there. Unfortunately, Lipstick was on speaking terms with Dr. Meyers. Dr. Meyers was on speaking terms with my mother. It seemed like there was no way out of this, except for thinking about my feelings and writing a few of them down.

The task took me days to complete, and when I finally added that last period, I didn’t have the guts to read it over. I was afraid of how I might react. When I wrote the words down, they were a blur in my mind, intermittent thoughts of anger, depressing, and apathy coursing through my mind. The words were there now, engraved in the page with black Bic ink, and I couldn’t take them back. I tried not to think about the letter. I finished it the morning of the meeting, and I distracted myself by doing laundry, cleaning my room, and having an hour conversation with Molly about a pair of shoes that she thought about buying from ModCloth. Miscellaneous, material things invaded my mind. I put a road block up for emotions. They had to wait.

The hour before the meeting began I smoothed out my hair, brushed my teeth twice, and changed from a semi-baggy shirt to one that might have been considered a dress. I repeatedly checked my eyes for specks of sleep, and I applied a thin layer of foundation evenly around my face. Nerves lingered at the back corner of my mind, waiting to pounce the second I let my guard down. I didn’t let my guard down. I couldn’t let my guard down. Letting my guard down might kill me. The thought of getting in front of all of these people - people that I, to be honest, didn’t like all that much - and expressing to them some of my deepest feelings killed me. I was a wreck. My palms were shaking, my hair was sticking to my face, and sweat was gathering at the back of my neck.

I drove the two miles from my mother’s house to the community center in ten minutes, my speedometer matching perfectly with the limit. I drove cautiously, carefully, prolonging my time before I entered the room as much as I thought possible. My stomach was doing back-flips, summersaults, aerials. I thought I was going to throw up. No, wait, I knew that I was going to throw up. It was going to happen, and it wasn’t going to be pretty, and for once, I was going to get my stomach acid to come up and out without the need of a toothbrush or my index finger or a fork.

I tried to tell myself to breath. I thought of the calming techniques that I learned in a yoga class once, but they weren’t working. I counted to a hundred in my head. I cleared my mind. I repeated a chant. The anxiety was still there, and it was pitching a tent and starting a fire and I had a feeling that it was going to remain there for quite some time.

I parked at the last stall in the farthest row from the building. I took the keys out, put them in my purse, locked the door, and got out of the car. I used the reflection in the window to straighten out my hair. I readjusted my purse strap on my shoulder. I looked in between my teeth, and did a booger check. I felt like I was about to give a speech to my class, rather than read aloud a letter about my feelings. I counted the steps from the car to the sidewalk (34), then the ones from the sidewalk to the door of the building (13), and the ones from the door to the building to the door of the room (107). When I reached the almost-full room, I hesitated before entering. I paused, took a deep breath, and stepped inside. Lipstick was calming a girl down in the corner, and there was a package of store-bought, sugar-free, fat-free, chocolate chip cookies on the counter, next to bottles of Safeway-brand water. I skipped the cookies, grabbed a water - my throat was already starting to dry up - and took a seat in the back right corner of the room. I didn’t have to see the door.

Ten minutes after five Lipstick clapped her hands together excitedly.

“Hello, everyone.” She smiled. Today, miraculously, she didn’t have anything smudged on her teeth. She looked somewhat composed. I wondered if she was doing that for us, or for her. I didn’t really care, but it gave my mind something distracting to think about.

“I know that a lot of you are probably very nervous about today, but I just want you to know that we’re all very proud of you, because it takes a lot of courage to get up there and talk about yourself like that. We’re all excited to see what everyone else has to say in their letter, and I want to remind you all that this is a therapeutic exercise. It might seem silly, but in the end, it really is for your own good.” She attempted to smile reassuringly. Most of us were still squirming in our seats.

“Okay, now that we’ve got everything settled, I’d like to remind everyone that we are all going to be reading our letters today, so we might as well just volunteer and get it over with, because waiting will not save you from anything.”

I glowered at her. A few other people glared. It seemed like the majority of the class was almost as uncomfortable as I was about this assignment.

“Any volunteers to be the first reader?” She asked. No one raised their hand. “C’mon,” she prompted. “If no one volunteers I’m just going to start calling names randomly.”

A tall brunette raised her hand. She didn’t look especially eager, but I figured that she was taking one for the team. That was nice of her. She had a nice face - prominent cheekbones, pretty hazel eyes, and full, pink lips. She wasn’t extremely skinny, but she looked to be about on the verge. Maybe her parents got to her early.

It was weird, all of these people having a different variation of the same story. I had read about these kind of things, in magazines, health books. I’d seen a few documentaries on television. Most of these girls had a mean mother, or too many subscriptions to magazines like Teen Vogue and Glamour. All they saw was skinny, skinny, skinny. They spent hours lurking Xanga for ‘thinspo’ and they probably had a printout guide of calorie content of most foods in their purse. They were really bad. I wasn’t that bad - no, I couldn’t be.

I counted calories because I wanted to be healthy. I wanted to prolong my life, is all. That’s it.

I listened loosely to Brunette’s story. She used to be a beauty pageant contestant, but she was never winning and her coach blamed it on her weight. What was supposed to be a temporary diet turned into a life-abolishing habit. A disease, Lipstick called it. By the time Brunette’s letter was finished (it was to her coach), tears were streaming down her face, and snot was beginning to drip down her nose. We all applauded as she blew her nose and wiped her face.

Two other girls went up - both were influenced by the media, apparently. They also finished their letters, sobbing messes as they stumbled back to their seats. I was zoned out, focusing on the pattern of the cheap carpet.

Lipstick saying my name broke me from my trance. “Emilie?” She asked. “Emilie? Would you like to go next?”

She looked over at the doorway for a second, and then back to me. I gulped. “Um…” I said. My stomach started up again. “Not really.” I answered honestly.

She gave me an encouraging look. “You can do it.” She said, motioning to the front of the room. “You can even face the wall, if you’d like. That might make you more comfortable.”

“Um, I-I….” Everyone was looking at me, so I reluctantly plucked my letter from it’s place on top of my purse and stood up. I kept my eyes straight ahead, targeted on the wall before me. I walked to the front of the room, but I didn’t turn around. Talking to the wall was infinitely more appealing than talking to these people.

“I guess, if we’re going to narrow it down to a when and a who, I can do that. If I have to.”

My breathing was jagged, the words coming out in short gasps. I tried to comfort myself. Tried to make myself not so awkward in this situation.

“There are a lot of things, I guess, that influenced it. Everyone I ever talked to about it always pointed the finger at today’s media. The models, the commercials, the magazine covers - it was all a struggle to become thin. They think that’s what happened - I was just buckling and crumbling under the pressure of today’s society. No one was particularly to blame. That’s what they said. While I agree - there is no one to blame but myself - I had a trigger. I had a trigger, pulled fiercely in a time of unexpected pressure.”

There was an awkward tension in the room. Everyone was completely silent, as if they were hanging on every word that I was saying. Maybe they weren’t. Probably half of them weren’t even paying attention to me, but rather staring at something and zoning out and thinking about what they would look like after they lost just five more pounds.

I took a deep breath. It was the sentence. My sentence. One that I couldn’t believe I wrote, simply because it was the harshest truth I’d ever known.

“His name is John O’Callaghan, and it happened during sophomore year.”

I paused, my voice cracking slightly. I could hear the hesitation in my words, the anxiety in the undertones. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to think about it. But it was true.

There was a gasp in the room, from who, I’m not really sure. Someone was probably surprised that all of this was because of a boy. A stupid little boy. Maybe they thought that I was being overdramatic. Maybe they thought that I was lying. I don’t know. I knew that I was telling the truth, and that hurt more than their judgmental views.

“It started over a French fry.” I closed my eyes briefly, remembering the moment in my head. I didn’t want to live that over again. That was too emotional. “He didn’t even say it, really. He implied it, but he didn’t say it. That was all it took, though - the tip of the iceberg, if we were going to get cliché. It started small, at first: skipping lunch, walking to school, not eating after seven. I thought I was just doing it to get healthy. That’s what I told everyone - I was just getting healthy. When you say you’re getting healthy, they don’t mind. They embrace it, then.

“Then I started jogging. And fasting. And then I started running five miles a day and not eating. It happened really fast, even though I felt like it was so slow. The minute I started seeing results - it was exhilarating. My body was on a high. I felt amazing - fantastic. I remember showing up one day, dressed in this amazing, form hugging dress, my hair curled to perfection. I just wanted him to notice me.”

I was ignoring the tears that I knew wanted to start dripping. I couldn’t let them start. I thought that maybe I had to be strong. I needed to be strong. I needed to show these girls that I was different. I wasn’t like them.

“But he never did.”

I gulped down, and I closed my eyes. There was a part of me that knew that I didn’t need to read that letter, held in front of me with trembling hands. These words were engraved in my mind. These words had been a part of me for a while, and I was finally letting them hang out in the air.

“So I tried harder. I got so thin. I got so many compliments. So many people noticed. But he never did. So I tried even harder. By the end of my senior year, I was down to under a hundred pounds.”

I heard people shift awkwardly in their chairs. People were breathing softly. I focused on how I felt - I was scared half to death, but there was something liberating about knowing that I wasn’t the only person who knew this now. Sure, my mother probably knew on some degree, and Dr. Meyers, with all of her doctorate degrees and masters had probably deduced it a long time ago. But I was finally saying it aloud. And that was kind of important.

“But he never noticed. So I left, hoping that the feelings of rejection and insecurity would fade. They didn’t. I just started working harder, spending more time at the gym and out and not reminding myself of what it felt like to put a piece of food in my mouth. I think…I think that John was the reason that I started, but he wasn’t the reason that I kept going.”

There was a lump in my throat. I tried to swallow it but it stayed there. My hands were clammy and wet. I felt too hot. I had to continue talking, though. I had to finish my letter. If not for my mom or for me, for John, because I told him that I would try my best. I told him that I would get better. Even if I wasn’t really sick.

“I just wanted to be noticed. I just wanted him to open my mouth and tell me, for once in my life, that he thought I was pretty or beautiful or something. I needed that, but it never happened, and I just kept on trying and trying and it felt like I was never succeeding.” I was rambling now, the words rolling off my tongue in a haphazard mess that just fell to the floor.

“And I don’t know when I am ever going to succeed, or when my thoughts are going to end, but I kind of hope that it’s sometime soon, because I might just be in a good place right now. And John might just be closer to telling me that I’m pretty.”

I closed my mouth, feeling like I had already shared too much. There was a collective movement, and then the sound of a chair falling back. I turned, surprised at this, but I just saw Molly standing there, her eyes wide as she looked at me.

“What--?” I started to struggle out, and then I heard a loud collision - a fist, a fist against something.

“I’m sorry.” Molly whispered. “I thought--,’ she struggled to say something, but I didn’t know what it was. “I thought that it was going to be different. I didn’t know that he was the reason. I would have never told him if I knew that he was the reason.”

“What?” My mind stopped working. I couldn’t put the thoughts together. What was she talking about. Why was she apologizing? “What are you - what are you talking about?”

“I’m so sorry.” She kept on saying, repeating the words like they were the only things she could pronounce.

I moved. I needed to see who was out there. Because I thought - I thought what she was saying was something that I wasn’t believing. No. No. She had to be wrong.

I stepped out of the doorway, the setting sun hitting me directly in the eyes. I angled myself towards the end of the hall.

All I saw was legs. Long, long legs, pacing back and forth.

“I-,” I made a sound. I don’t know what it was, but it got the person’s attention. I stepped closer, trying to see who they were.

I saw him, as he punched the wall again. I had never seen him so angry. He looked so angry, like he was about to kill someone or punch through a window.

“What? What are you -? Why are you-?” Sentences. They were lost on me.

“How dare you blame me!?” John’s voice echoed off of the walls, his glare piercing through me.

“You think this is my fault?” He was yelling. He was yelling as he walked closer to me. I had never been afraid of him before, but I was afraid of him now. “You’re blaming this - this sickness, your illness, on me?”

“John- John, I--,” I stuttered out words that didn’t make sense. I was so sick of talking.

“This isn’t my fault!” He said. “I didn’t do this! It was a fucking French fry, Emilie! I can’t fucking believe you! Only you would take that too far, and blame it on me. I can’t believe you! I can’t believe that I - I wanted to help you, and you blame it on me!?”

“John! John, stop, please-,” I tried to get him to stop, but he wouldn’t. He was standing less than a foot away from me now.

“I can’t believe you.” He kept on saying.

“Please, just let me-,”

“No! No. You don’t get to talk any more. You don’t get to talk to me ever again. You’ve done enough, don’t you think?” He turned, his face so harsh and cold, and he walked away.

And I was going to call after him. But I couldn’t. My voice wouldn’t let me. I didn’t think - I had no idea that he was going to be there. John. I wouldn’t have said it if I knew John was going to be there.

He was never supposed to know.

Even if it was the truth, he was never supposed to know.

I wanted to go after him, reach out to him, and explain. But I couldn’t. So I just stood there.