The ED Diaries

Fiona sits cross-legged on the stained, itchy carpet of an old record store, smacking her watermelon gum. To the public on the other side of the window, she’s just a willowy teenage employee wasting time on the job.

With her bony fingers hugging onto a Cosmopolitan magazine, and her cheap retro sunglasses hiding her gaze, she appears to be oblivious of the adolescent stuffing his backpack with Deftones on vinyl.

“My spidey-sense is tingling; it’s telling me there’s a pimply-faced fuck trying to steal records.” She pops her gum and tilts the glasses, revealing lovely jade eyes that remain locked on the greasy teen taking cover behind the shelves, “Put your hands up. You’re caught, douchebag.”

He sighs and emerges out of hiding, throwing his hands in the air enthusiastically, “Fine, okay, fair enough. Please don’t rat on me.” Fiona inspects him from across the room; studies the way his cobalt blue eyes widen out of desperation. There’s an honest intention behind them, but Fiona’s never been the sentimental type.

“Ah, well, isn’t that a shame, darling? If you were cute I’d consider it.”

Fiona watched as those cobalt blues slowly froze over, and the unidentified pubescent stomped in rage, “God, damn it! I have too much shit on my record. Please, just let me walk out of here. We can pretend nothing ever happened!”

Fiona groaned soundlessly under her breath, stood out of her spot on the floor, and contemplated calling the manager. Usually, she considered running this place by herself on Sundays a perk, but not when weeds like this bandit decided to show up.

“I’ve had it with you, shit-for-brains. Surrender the bag and flea. You have T-minus five seconds, or I’m calling the manager.”

The boy heaves the backpack her way, and as he tears out past the entrance doors he howls “Fucking fat bitch!” over his shoulder.

Fiona wearily peers up from chewing her nails, decorated the same black they’d been painted that evening in Hannigan’s Records, and stares desolately at the therapist sitting before her.

“That’s your favorite memory? Ms. Di’Angelo – I wish you could decipher the line between insults and respects.” Dr. Alice Martine glances dolefully at Fiona, her brows tight with concern, “Why is that your favorite memory from life outside of Seabrook, Ms. Di’Angelo? Wouldn’t it be a time you’d spent with your siblings? Or, perhaps a moment in your career as a young model?”

Fiona laughs likes it’s a joke. Like this entire building, and all of its skeletal freak-shows with no organs left inside of their ribcages are all jokes. Like when her mother used to force diet supplements down her throat and weigh her every morning was a joke.

Oh, yes. To her mother - renowned runway model standing six feet tall and falling twenty pounds under her recommended weight - she was a disgrace; 70 pounds was the perfect mass, but Fiona only ever got to 75.

That gauntly monster belongs in here, not me.

“Why is that my favorite memory?” Fiona reciprocates, and like a nut caged inside an asylum, her lips curl into a mischievous grin carved of perfect ivory, and she throws back her head with laughter, “Are you crazy? How could it not be? That was the moment I realized everything was true! Everything my mother had ever taught me about myself; that I was inadequate, pathetic, and fat, it was all confirmed by that one moment!”

Dr. Martine closed her eyes. Possibly, if she blinked hard enough, she’d be teleported elsewhere – where the teenage girls she’d treated within her two decades of psychology weren’t a body image or a display of self-destruction. Where Fiona wouldn’t have to be an object constructed of merely bones, skin, and hair.

Where Fiona wasn’t the carcass of someone who once encompassed normality.

But as Fiona sat across from a somnolent therapist, her eyes wide and glassy – collarbones swelling out of her skin and her cheeks sunken – it was apparent that, like everyone else, the old Fiona Di’Angelo was going to take time to appear out of the shell that was now her body.