Authors: Hannah Harvey
‘Oh right – well’ he thinks for a moment, taking a few bites as he does, ‘I could take her with me.’
‘You want to take her to the hospital? Visiting the seriously ill patient you’re far too attached to?’ Amanda’s concern rises along with her voice.
‘Her condition isn’t contagious; you don’t have to worry about Tiff catching it.’ Oliver defends quickly.
‘So what is her condition?’
‘Amanda you know that I’m not allowed to discuss my patients, it’s against confidentiality.’
‘I don’t even know her name though, I don’t know her or her family, and if my daughter is going to meet her tomorrow, then I want to know what’s wrong with her, I think those demands are fairly reasonable.’ Amanda stares him down, until he finally concedes.
‘She’s got a few different things she’s dealing with, it’s not just one thing that’s affecting her, and there are multiple things which make her case more – complex.’ He replied vaguely.
‘What was she admitted with? Because I doubt it was so random, there must be something which stands out.’ Amanda persists.
‘She was originally admitted with anorexia nervosa, and the effects it was having on her health.’
‘What’s ano…what’s that?’ Tiff asks, stumbling over the words, Oliver glances at his sister, and seeing her small nod he starts to explain.
‘Anorexia is a condition where the person eats either very little, or nothing at all, they lose a lot of weight but they always feel big.’ He tries to describe it as simply as he can.
‘Is your friend big then?’
‘She’s not his friend Tiff, she’s a patient.’ Amanda replies with a sharp look at Oliver, who ignores her comment.
‘No,’
he shakes his head sadly, ‘she’s tiny, too tiny.’
‘Then why won’t she eat? I like to eat.’
‘There’s a part of her brain which tells her she’s big, a lot of stuff happened to her to make her really sad, and it ended up with her thinking she needed to keep herself small, so she could control something, and I think that part of her just wants to be invisible.’
‘Why?’ Tiff looks up at him with big sad eyes.
‘Well – Because she’s very sad.’
‘But what made her very sad? The last time I was very sad it was because I was sick, so I couldn’t go out and play in the snow, is that why she’s sad?’
‘No kiddo, she’s sad because a lot of people said some very nasty things about her, for quite a long time.’ Oliver replies.
‘You mean like mean girls in school? I saw Tracy Miller call another girl a pig before, is it like that?’
‘Yeah it is.’ Oliver nods, ‘Only with my friend she had a lot of people saying a lot of nasty things, it wasn’t just one thing from one person, which is why it got so bad, any bullying is hard to handle, but what she went through was awful.’
‘I bet I could cheer her up! My teacher, well my old teacher from my last school, she says that I’m a very cheerful person, I won a certificate for most smiley, I could take her a gift and cheer her up.’ Tiff slides off her chair, ‘What does she like to do?’
‘She likes writing, and taking photographs.’
‘Ok!’ Tiff runs from the table and over to Oliver’s bed, which has now been screened off by a wooden room separator.
‘Tiff you can’t leave your dinner.’ Amanda calls after her; Tiff runs back over to the table, picks up the plate of food, and takes it back over to the bed with her.
‘Sorry.’ Oliver smiles sheepishly.
‘That’s ok.’ Amanda sighs, ‘This girl, how old is she?’
‘Eighteen.’
‘She was bullied at school?
‘Yeah extensively, honestly Amanda some of the things that they did to her – and she didn’t have a safe place to hide from it, the bullying followed her into her home.’
‘What you mean her parents?’ Amanda’s eyes widen.
‘No, I mean they had a role I suppose, but mainly just that they weren’t there for her, but they didn’t ever bully her. They never set out to hurt her.’ He sighs deeply thinking of River’s relationship with her parents, which although it wasn’t terrible, could have been a lot better. ‘No, I meant that the bullying from school followed her home.’
‘Do you mean Cyberbullying?’
‘Yeah, she was receiving hundreds of emails each week.’
‘Poor kid,’
‘I still can’t handle some of the stuff they did to her,’ Oliver forces himself to continue, even though his eyes are welling up, and he hates to let his sister see him to vulnerable, ‘
it was just terrible.’
‘Like what?’
‘I can’t.’ He shakes his head, ‘She told me all of it in confidence, and I won’t betray that.’
‘But she won’t ever know you’ve told me.’ Amanda replies.
‘That doesn’t matter, I’ll know.’ Oliver replies, ‘I promised her I’d keep it to myself, so that’s what I’ll do.’
‘Ok.’ Amanda nods knowing not to push it, ‘Do you think it’s helping her? Spending time with you I mean.’
‘Yeah I really do, at first I wasn’t so sure it was making a difference, but now I can see that it is, she’s starting to heal.’
‘Ok then, just promise me you won’t get too close. I know you have a big heart, and you like to save people, but there are lines that can’t be crossed, and sometimes your goodness can blur those lines, so just – promise you won’t get too close.’
‘I won’t.’ He promises, thought he isn’t sure anymore what too close is, and if he’s already crossed the line.
Chapter Eleven
Letter 6
I think this is probably the part of the story you’ve been waiting for, because however much I try to deny it, I know that how I look speaks loudly about how things ended, about a part of the story I’ve been scared to write, but I can’t avoid it any longer, I have to get it out because this is where it started, and I feel like I can tell you now.
It wasn’t intentional or pre-planned, it wasn’t something that I thought about for a long time, and you might think that I did plan it, but I didn’t. I didn’t just wake up one morning and decide I wasn’t going to eat; there was nothing sudden about it. I think more than anything it was gradual, I know that it’s true to say that I wanted to lose weight, my exercise and my need to make my mother proud, is I think enough evidence of that fact. I would look at myself in the mirror and feel disgusted with myself,
all I could see as I looked was rolls of fat, and I realize now that it was just my mind playing tricks on me, and I’d like to reassure you, because I know you’ll be worried, that even though I still have issues with food, I don’t see myself that way anymore. I can finally see myself how I really am, too skinny with bones poking through my skin. I’m mixed in how I feel about that, I don’t think it’s entirely a good thing that I see myself that way now, because even though I hated how I looked when I thought I was fat, nothing much has changed, the image I see of myself has changed sure, but how I feel about myself has remained firmly in place, because now that I can see how I really look, now I see what I’ve done to myself, I am almost more disgusted with myself than before.
Anyway like I was saying, it wasn’t intentional. After what happened at the dance I withdrew from everyone, I was already hugely cut off from those around me, but now I took it to the next level. I didn’t really have many people who would have noticed, but I stopped talking. Not entirely, not at first, I still spoke a little bit of course, when I had to but for the most part I stayed silent, I didn’t want anyone to see how far I was falling, and so I stayed away from them, choosing to avoid any human contact. Nobody around me asked me any questions about my sudden withdrawal, so it turned out it was incredibly easy to slip into silence.
It wasn’t just speaking that I stopped though; I also stopped eating at home. I couldn’t stand to sit there at the silent dinner table, because my mother had become angry at me again, mostly because I was refusing to tell her about the dance, she thought I was withholding the details of my nice night, to punish her for changing my grades, so she decided not to reward that kind of behavior, by freezing me out as well. She was even angrier that I had ruined my dress by sitting in the shower for hours, until the specially dyed fabric ran and became faded, and if that wasn’t enough I had dyed my hair bright red. I wasn’t the daughter she wanted, she couldn’t understand what was going on with me and instead of asking me if I was ok she chose to believe I was just acting out to get back at her.
I realize that I could have tried to tell her, I could have told her or my dad that I needed help, but admitting that you’re unable to cope isn’t easy, especially in my family. I would
have needed to admit I was falling apart, admit to them that I couldn’t cope, and my mother had already decided I couldn’t cope with school, what would her response be if I told her that wasn’t all I was failing at. It was easier to just stop talking, but in doing so it made dinners at my house impossible, so I didn’t ever eat at home.
I remember that I used to feel so angry, because there were so many glaringly obvious signs that I wasn’t ok, and yet neither of my parents asked me if I needed help. They sat in their own bubble and pretended nothing had changed, that we were still a perfectly functioning family. I couldn’t sit there at the table and have them ignore me like that. So I took the easy option, and removed myself from the situation.
At school things had become much worse after the dance, it seemed like Jasper’s efforts to humiliate me, had renewed peoples interest in tearing me down. I was constantly being laughed at, stared at or shouted at in the halls, there was no safe place for me in that building. I couldn’t handle it anymore, each comment made me pull a little further away, so I stopped eating at school, in fact most days I didn’t turn up to school at all, I’d just wander round the city, exploring until I ached all over from walking. I would go to the pond in the park and try to escape my thoughts, or I would ride around on the subway for hour after hour. I’d do anything to avoid going home, and anything to avoid going to school.
While I was out in the city I didn’t think about eating, it didn’t even occur to me to stop and eat something, I just kept myself constantly moving, constantly busy, only stopping when I was at the pond, that was the only place I could be still, the only place I allowed myself to relax. I think that my mind knew I needed that one safe space, or I’d lose myself entirely, so I had that one spot where I could almost forget, almost.
I thought, well maybe I didn’t really think, but I certainly hoped that once I was out of school, because I really only went every now and then after the dance, just when I knew there was a test or something, just one or two sporadic days when my parents received calls, from concerned teachers or the irate new principal, other than that I wasn’t in school at all, so I’d hoped that people would forget about me, give up on me, but somehow even in my absence they wanted to torment me. The messages kept coming daily, more of them than before, and I still couldn’t stop myself looking at them, even though it would have been so easy to just change my email address, get a new phone number, and switch schools. If I’d done that I may have been able to pull myself back up a bit, get back to some semblance of normal, but I didn’t do any of the sensible things. Instead I took my phone with me everywhere I went, flinching as a new text or email arrived, then reading them over and over, like I had some sick need, because that’s what it was really, I didn’t want to read them, but I found myself needing to read them, needing to know what was being written. I couldn’t handle the thought of this stuff being out there, those words flying through the air about me, people forming these opinions of me, and me being the only one who didn’t know what was being said, that was something I couldn’t handle. I rationalized it, telling myself I needed to be prepared in case I ran into a kid from school, I told myself I couldn’t be out of the loop. In truth it just became too hard to look away, like when you’re driving and you see a car crash, some morbid fascination sets in and you just have to look, it was like that with me, I just had to look.
Everything was spiraling out of my control, I thought that leaving school would be a way of controlling the messages, but it wasn’t, the saying out of sight out of mind had never been more wrong, and then it hit me one day, I was walking down the street and suddenly spotted a street vendor, trying to sell hotdogs to the passers-by, I just stopped moving in the middle of the crowd, people around me were not pleased by that, they started bumping into me and getting annoyed, telling me to move and shoving me aside,
but I didn’t move, I couldn’t, because it was at that moment when I suddenly realized that I hadn’t eaten a meal in over a week. I’d been drinking lemon water and cucumber water at the gym, I’d had a few pieces of fruit each day, but other than those tiny amounts of sustenance, I’d had nothing to eat, and as I realized this I just knew I could finally control something, it just clicked for me. To me it felt better than just being able to control something, because as I looked at my reflection in the window of a nearby store, I figured out that I could control the way I looked, I could shrink into invisibility, and the thought was more than a little appealing to me.