The eating infected her. The fat curled up in her mouth and slipped under her tongue. Choking her and her sad little mind / Cat-centric.

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[warning- potentially triggering material]

I've wasted the past six years on a notion that I thought to be true. I'm a perfectionist and an obsessive, and thanks to the conjunction of those two qualities, clinically underweight. Since the age of eleven I've gone through consecutive cycles of restriction, purging and near religious punishment, which finally culminated in me being hospitalized in july. Choking on my own vomit as I slowly blacked out on the floor of my bathroom, was never the way I intended to pop my clogs, especially at the tender age of seventeen, but this disease that has riddled my body, made me lose my teeth, my hair and my sanity. I'm seventeen and I have dementia, eroded molars and a fucked up digestive tract.

It's a lousy excuse as to why I haven't been writing for the past six months, but in July my parents dragged me kicking and screaming to an eating disorders unit where I was clinically diagnosed with anorexia nervosa. I guess not many people like it when you try to kill yourself. So after nearly four months of being locked up and then painfully discharged from inpatienting, life still sucks. I've been forced to gain over a stone and a half and still have so much more to gain, threatened with a section and a naso-gastric tube and been feed on a diet of liquid supplement.

Sorry if this seems pathetic, laying all my cards out on the table to complete strangers, but there's a nameless solitude in that. It is what it is, and perhaps the more I talk about it the less ashamed I might be. This is perhaps my own sad little way of divorcing myself from this illness.

It also might make reading this a little easier. These aren't constructions of fiction, but moments plucked from my own experience and those of the girls I lived with at the EDU. Genuine thoughts and feeling that hopefully flesh out this sad mess of words and phrases.

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The content is mine, but the characters are the property of others.

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CHAPTER 1

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It was Jade who taught Cat how to disappear

It was Cat who taught Jade to reappear.

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She's young; she's tiny.

She's viewing the world from lash-laced eyes,

Her mum stands before her, twisting the lid of the milk carton. She shouldn't be doing that.

They're in the middle of the isle, shopping for groceries.

Both have their hair tied up; they always style it the same. Her mother's chaos of burnt red curls bursting from the flimsy ribbon that fastens them to the base of her neck. Her dad kisses that neck. Her dad kisses her neck.

She's full on the ice cream and pancakes from that morning.

The pancakes her mother made her. Pancakes made with love she told her.

She remembers the sticky mess she made, eating with squirrel bites to make each one last. Her mum wouldn't let her but she wanted more. She'd stuck her fingers in the batter for one last taste, but stuck them too far back and felt her abdomen lurch.

She's sniffing the milk. They're alone in the isle. She's swinging her legs. Arranging jars, label forwards.

Just her, her mum and her stomach, full and warm and round, seven years of comfort, seven years of timely meals, never late, never missed.

She's drinking the milk. Having decided it's not off. A dribble slides out from her mouth.

The carton falls from her hands.

She turns round. Her hands are shaking.

She's watching her mum collapse to the ground through tiny lash-laced eyes.

She on the ground, splayed out. The milk runs free from the open mouth of the carton, spilling out across the lino floor of the isle, freely mixing and soaking into the woman's clothes, two patches, a stain between her legs from muscles loosened by spasms and the growing spill, as the sea of crisp white envelops her mother like a wedding silk.

She watches later as the paramedics cut open her shirt and pronounce her dead. Someone has a hand on her shoulder, heavy, like meat.

They failed. She failed. They all failed to bring her back from the brink. Failure, failure of the heart killed her mother.

Why isn't she crying? All she can feel is her food.

They failed. She failed.

Her reaction comes at last outside the supermarket as the contents of her stomach splashes out across the tarmac floor

The food, the love, the feelings all spill out of her, and she is quietly complete at last.

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She doesn't know how it begins, and she doesn't know how to stop.

Within her is the integral sense of wrongdoing.

She clings to the festering; the comments that slip from rotten mouths, through tombstone teeth, to curl in the air like ugly smoke. Like fish hooks, they slid under her skin, splintering off, and though retracted, their barbs remain, still sunk into her flesh.

Perfection was an attribute she knew she'd never attain, but was a tantalizing siren call, that would ebb and flow on the shores of her mind.

The thoughts crouched inside her, like a figure, hazy and undefined, voiceless as of yet, but a constant presence that had been there for longer than she cared to remember

It was part of her, a fragment that she chose not to isolate, but to cherish and attempt to connect to. A lost piece to her disposition that she was desperate to find, to fill that stain shaped hole that her mother had torn from her as she had collapsed on that supermarket floor.

She wasn't looking for perfection. She was looking for completion.

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To Be or Not To Be

Cat just didn't know

The script is slammed down on her lap, it having apparently being lobbied from quite some distance.

Her dialogue has already been highlighted, sickly yellow dashes up and down the page, entitling her to the role of Elizabeth. The anorexic. The violin play, trophy winning, obsessive religious anorexic.

She's happy about it though. A two act, three-woman play, with Jade and Joanna too.

Jade is not happy. Naturally. Apparently Sikowitz has deemed her to be the underachieving fat sister.

The word of 'type casting' spreads round like wild fire. Cat doesn't know whom it's meant to be aimed at. Her or Jade.

Well it can't be her.

The comment shouldn't bother her really, but it sticks to her, rests upon her back, clinging to her by the spine.

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She's eight.

Her mother's been dead for just over a year now. The anniversary was spent packing boxes and filling black bags.

Her father's a silent wreck. He doesn't let it show, but loosing his wife has greyed his soul, as well as his hair. He has no idea how to raise a child by himself, no clue in hell. He's twenty-nine and newly widowed. He'd thought life would be like a script, prewritten and as smooth as paper. But he'd been a fool. A fool to marry a woman a decade older than him. A fool to marry his teacher and a fool never to try and grow up, to let the woman he had a mother complex with raise their children and be the only adult of the house.

But she's dead now, and he has an eight year old daughter and a six year old son, and so he's packing up and moving across the country.

Moving to a state that's lurid and bright, and that'll wash down the sorrow with orange juice and gin and make dulling his feelings quicker and help him forget the only woman he's only ever truly loved.

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Healthy, there's nothing healthy on the menu.

'You okay there Little Red?' Andre questions, out into the hot, hazy sun.

'Yeah,' she glazes, 'They've run out of turkey.'

'Cat I swear you eat enough turkey to wipe out a whole species,' Tori calls from behind.

'Not that much,' She whispers. Good lord does she? 'I eat a healthy amount. I do right?'

She turns to Andre and he nods.

Tori swings up towards the counter, twisting her tight abdomen at the same time to turn to Cat. 'You need to eat some shit every once and while, beat that dairy dread!' She pokes the girl's shoulder, and Cat flinches slightly.

She looks to the menu again, and blanches. With turkey gone there's no lean meats left, and the canteen doesn't sell fish.

'I'll have a green salad please.' She hands over the money, and receives back a clear plastic box filled with vegetation and moves away, following Andre to find a table.

She's safe, she hopes. There wasn't anything dairy in there, which she might react badly from, and nothing crunchy that she could choke on and the dressing in it's little pot could be avoided so she didn't have to worry about cholesterol. She was safe, and the salad, she was sure, wouldn't kill her.

Andre breaks through her reprieve. He leans towards her, his face so close she can feel his breath, 'You good?'

'I'm always good Andre,' she smiles back with courtesy.

He gives her a long quizzical look, and for a second she feels like she's going to break in half for lying to him, but his interest doesn't seem to linger and soon his gaze passes.

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She's thirteen.

Never a gangly child, but always lithe and limber. She prides herself on a neck that is long and tanned like a giraffe. She likes the way that if one were to decapitate her, her neck would be the perfect slate on which a knife could slice.

She doesn't often think like that. Of decapitation and mutilation, those thoughts suit the dark haired girl who lives over the fence better, but sometimes thoughts float up to surface in her mind. Morbid thoughts. Of dying and death.

It's her birthday, and she's alone. Later her father will pull a cake from the fridge and the candles, lit with his novelty nirvana lighter will illuminate her steadily aging face with an flickering, orange glow.

She's alone in the vast crowd of the canteen. Since moving to California, her family have travelled like gypsies, never sticking to more than one place for longer than the gestation of a child. Sometimes they move because her father looses a job, sometimes, less often though, he gains one, and they'll uproot and move a few miles. She's been introduced to far too many people, and had to say goodbye to even more. She is eternally the new girl, forever in front of new faces and classes, listing off her name and age, her likes, her dislikes, to rooms full of bored students who have no care for who she is, their glazy eyes reflecting off her short life story.

She goes unnoticed for the greater part of her early life, but occasionally a girl or a boy might approach her, and her heart might leap at the prospect of a companion, only to have it dashed when they might pull at her hair or elbow her in the ribs and spill her lunch.

She's gained a tainted vision of the world and her view of herself slowly wanes. She wishes to be washed away, to escape to the sea and live with the mermaids, but she knows that she's too balloon-like in her pubescence to ever be able to dance into the depths.

It's her birthday, and she's alone. She's alone in the vast crowd of the canteen, a new school she's been at for nearly a month now. She sits a little a part from everyone else, her hair newly dyed to mark the move, and hopefully, like a bizarre peacock, attract a similar soul.

Her father's forgotten her lunch again, so the little change in her pocket is spent on the canteen's only offer of hot food; a chicken burger. It's slimy, clammy with grease, but she's too distracted with doodling on her bag to care for today. She hasn't been caring for months now, her father hasn't been either, and so for her, at lunch each day, a chicken burger is repeatedly consumed.

She knows she shouldn't. Her mother's death, apart from anything has left her with a steadfast dissatisfaction with consumption, and a vigilant health streak, a strict obsession with eating healthily; lean meats, colourful food; whole grains and polyunsaturated fats.

But this concept has been escaping her recently, and she feels herself slipping into something. She's been sleeping a lot. Perhaps she's depressed.

The clack of heels against the lino catches her attention and she looks up. A tall, blonde girl, one that she's seen around the halls, her speech always delivered like a question, an uplift of a home ground californian pitch. The girl is underdressed for the september sudden chill. A diamond belly piercing peaks out of her pink crop-top, a sugary façade, as tacky as she is desperate.

She parts her frosted lips, and utters those immortal words.

'You know if you're going to eat a burger every single day, you're going to get really fat.'

Cat's not frozen, she just chooses not to move, her eyeballs roving in their sockets, from the outline of the girl's plump mouth, out across the blurred room, down, down, down to the flat patty splayed out on it's crinkling pinstriped wrapper.

She sits there for so long she doesn't notice the girl leave. It's both the first and the last time she'll ever see her. She sits there as the cogs of her brain, rusted from the pain and sacrifice and the misery and the god damn chicken burgers finally begin to turn again.

She had changed herself so thoroughly for this fresh start. She'd dyed her hair and brought straighteners and brand new sneakers for this school, in a vain attempt, like honey to bees to attract a friend.

She tried so desperately to fit in, to scrub always all blemishes, all faults that would lead to taunts, but here, they'd found it, a reason to despise her.

They didn't like her. They hated her. They'd found their fault.

Eating was a fault

And faults make you incorrect, they make you ugly and incomplete.

Faults were the pathetic companion of punishment.

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She blames the salad dressing. It must have leaked out into her salad, because three days later she hunched over the toilet puking up her guts.

It's the middle of the night, her brother and dad asleep in their separate rooms and she's alone, sitting on the cold bathroom floor, orange goop hanging in slick strings from her gaping mouth. She tries to call out but her throat is clamped shut and the room shifts every time she moves her head.

She resolves to stand, and grasping the sink with two hands lifts her heavy, leadened body from the ground.

The room spins in a plethora of colour, and she begins to see lights, tiny flickers, astral spectres that sparkle in her vision. The room a sea, these specks of tiny bioluminescent plankton illuminating the early morning blues.

Standing up was a mistake, her stomach violently contracts with the shift in gravity, the bile in her tummy boiling in it's raw flame, spewing up and out again, spraying across the tiled floor, dripping through her fingers as she tries to cup the outpour of churned up chime.

The darkness consumes her, she vaguely feels the slap of the floor against her back on then later the touch of hands; neither rough nor soft, just present against her sick slick skin.

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She looses seven pounds when she's fourteen, but no one notices.

She gains it back and a comment is granted with every pound regained.

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She has food poisoning

They prattle off latin names and lists of symptoms and blame uncooked this and uncooked that, but deep down in her heart she knows it was the oil that caused this.

The oil that slipped from it's container, to bleach and soil her salad and crawled down into her throat, over her tongue to push it's way down into her stomach. To sit there, droplets of oil, thousands and thousands of tiny golden goblets, lying in wait to be emulsified and set free, free to settle on her hips, her thighs and arms.

The butterfly is unpinned from her arm and she's sent home from hospital with only a thin white wristband and a course of medication to mark her briefly interrupted sleeping patterns. She's made to lie in bed all day long, the covers pulled up tightly to her neck, so underneath she's hot and sweating. She lies there, pouring over her script, her eyes roving the pages, tracing those little black marking that command her to speak with the soft pads of her finger tips.

This illness won't mean a thing. She'll learn her lines and then recover and return to school, prising open the doors of the black box to take her rightful place on stage. She'll be perfection, her delivery pitch perfect, her intonation well placed, and at last she will become spectacular.

These lines will burn into her mind. She'll make it so.

She hasn't eaten in almost thirty-three hours. Five grains of shredded wheat this time yesterday were promptly swallowed and then with a lurching wail, regurgitated; back into the light. Her stomach bubbles with a ferocious pain that she can feel scattered across her body, her jaw aches; as though a hot white flame were being passed across the lining of her throat. She needs to eat, but that involves movement, and sound too, if she wishes to call out for her father. No, she decides, it was better not to move. If she were to throw up again that meant another day missed, another day absent from the stage.

She'd rather lie there, clammy and cold, both juxtapositions settled together across her skin, and learn her lines, as though the dialogue were her only anchor amongst the raging waves of nauseation that crashed within the liquids of her stomach. No, she'd stay in bed, stay and learn her lines; to stay well placed, in her little sanctuary, stay firmly in the seat of control over her body and mind.

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It's night and the whistling bugs outside serenade her discomfort.

She feels clammy. Ever so clammy. A creeping sensation travels up her spine, but she won't let go of the duvets edges, pulled firmly over her head.

She's out of her mind. Beyond it now, travelling light-years away, past spectral planes, past layers of heaven, chiffon breezes in space that float between her limbs, making her cool and warm all at once. She's travelling, but she has no inclination where. There's an assurance that she'll meet her mark; she has no ability to waver from this path, she is simply carried, weightless and wan. Her hair ripples, but it is only the faintest of feelings. Does she still have hair? Does she still have a face? Arms? A body even? She feels so loose. As though her ligaments have unravelled and now restlessly squirm away, like ghostly worms, out into the sands of space. Has she flesh and bone? She can't say. She is a traveller, and nothing else. Likened to a jellyfish. Pure water; encased in membranes that through some unseen, unspoken predisposition create the constructs of her figure.

She has arrived. A placid lake stands before her. She has no notion of what colour, or size, or depth it might be, as no interest lays there, so it simply does not exist.

A voice, as still as glassy water, calls, resurfacing from across this hidden lake. From the opposite shore, a voice quietly beckons her. She is drawn forwards, like a sailor to a siren; she swims out with flaccid arms, or rather the notion of arms, for she cannot see any about her.

This voice plucks a familiar tune on the chords of her mind. It had been seated there, in the caverns of her cerebrum for quite some time, and in this roost of her mind, this voice plays king, or perhaps queen, it's sex having not yet been divulged. The voice was taught and tiny, commanding a cold and lingering line. It had always been there, she was quite sure of it now, as she surfaced on the shore, it had just always resided in a different part of her mind.

And there the voice lay before her. A woman, or rather parts of one, lying scattered out across the sandy shore. She gathers the parts to her chest and at once she knows who and what the voice is. It was the gap between her legs; it was the crease in the folds of her stomach, the ragged joint of her elbow and the press of flesh between her arm and chest. Insignificant significance in the smallest of details that solemnly wrapped it's self around her waist. The arms of a woman laced loosely around her middle, with every breath, she could feel this new embrace tightening. She turns.

The owner of the arms, a woman, willowy and slight, has the face of a clock, or rather the hands of one, numerals floating above where her nameless face once was. 89, 88, 87, 86.

The hands slowly turn with an exquisite delicacy, before softly settling on the number 72, distinctly smaller in size from its previous sisters. With a sigh, the woman's chest inflates, and deflates, hands rotating with a greater speed to now indicate the number 106. The number is clunking and obtuse, and somehow threatening; enough to make her recede back into the water. But like sunlight on her retinas, the number lets a white hot imprint on the fluttering fabric of her mind, glowing in the murky depths of the water she now sinks into.

Slowly she resurfaces into consciousness.

The seed is sown.

The time is set.

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She walks into the black box after nearly a fortnight of absence. The rows of seats stand solemnly empty. Jade, Tori and Joanna, are on stage together, Cat's dog-eared, brightly highlighted script clasped tightly in Tori's hand. Her fingers rake the lines that once were Cat's, but no longer, lost now to the whispering and ill timings of Tori's supposed talent.

The three girls, alone in the room apart from the three harsh spotlights settled on their shoulders, turn to face Cat, at the call of the door as it closes.

She's standing there with her knees knocking together, waves of wooziness retuning to her. Jade looks pissed, Joanna indifferent, but Tori, Tori looks frightened.

Jade wordless walks towards her to envelop her in an embrace, whispering in her ear 'I'mgladyou'rebetter,I'llsortthisout.'

Jade whips round, breaking their bond as Tori manoeuvres towards them.

'Right, Vega, shift it.'

Tori stands solidly, her hands rolling the script into a tight cylinder. Joanna, in the background, picks at her nails.

'Give it over Vega, or do I have to call you dumb-ass again? Cat's here, so you're done.'

Jade's hand extends, a command at Tori to lay the script out in her splayed palm; but it remains empty.

'I'm not done. I'm sorry Cat, but Sikowitz gave me the part.' She looks down, avoiding Cat's eyes, avoiding Jade's glare. To cement her statement, she twists the script a final time and squeaks 'Permanently.'

Cat leaves as quickly as she entered, a brass blush of embarrassment plastered across her face. She doesn't know what to do with her self. She feels washed away and still a little sick.

She'd lost the part. She'd be fool to deny that it didn't mean anything to her, but as she slumped by the bins, round the back of the redbrick confines of her school, she feels as though it's just another dashed dream to add to the growing pile. She wishes to dissolve, right there and then, to be washed away so she no longer have to face the shame. She feels so stupid, but all the most, ever so lost. What would she do now? Her life had taken an altered course, no matter how small, and she hadn't been there to witness it. She felt so sparse, so horrifically out of control.

Toris legs, spidery and sparse hurriedly pass her by, not even bothering to turn towards her in acknowledgement.

She feels the familiar lurch of her stomach. That prickle of unease. She tries to wash it down with large gulps of water, but ripple of fluid down her throat pools in her stomach and only fills up the feeling.

Trace back the feeling.

She was a failure. Those were the spoils of her war.

She was a failure.

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She's home again. Pressed upon sheets, she swallows down tears as she wallows in cotton confines. The wet waters of her dream still lap across her skin. The nerves in her skin feel alive, writhing beneath her skin, as though slippery eels course through her tight veins. She needs to do something with herself. She'd been uncharacteristically feigning prolonged sickness for the past few days to avoid having to breach out into school. That dream, days old, now provides the only source of sense, even though it plagues her mind as she tries to dig deep enough to resurface any recollection of who that woman might be. Facets of the dream slowly slip from her memory, the grains of remembrance draining away to construct newfound thoughts. But one detail still sticks in her mind. 106.

Mopping away her tears with the corners of her limp pillow, she swings herself out of bed. With new conviction she marches to the bathroom and pulls out a dusty metal square from beneath the sink. It makes an awful squealing sound as it settles itself upon the white tiled floor. She composes her self, and steps forwards onto its face. With a sigh of compression, the scale breathes out the secret of her stature.

106 pounds.

She blanches at the site of it.

That can't be right, can it?

She'd always been small, tiny, petit, elfin, but now, she was deemed a triple figure. Perhaps she was still stuck on the idea that her body remained, frozen in time, as boyish and hipless as the girl that had stood in that milk soaked isle of all those years ago.

The slow red number dribbles in her mind with a disgusting trail.

No, no, no, no.

Wrong. right.

She'd let herself go. All that milk, all those chicken burgers and spoonfuls of oil, had collected inside her, swelling up over the years to push her past her preperceived boundaries. She couldn't have this. How could she let this happen, and more importantly how could she let this continue? The clock-faced woman of so many nights ago resurfaced in her mind.

Tick, tick, tick, the numbers slowly drain away, revolving, transforming, shivering away. Whittled down to the bone, those numerals heralded the secret of her new construction.

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A key clicks in the lock.

And the fester begins to grow as an ugly curl of flesh,

Slowly in her saturated stomach.

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Comments and reviews would be nothing short of perfection. I've written the majority of this story out already, it's just a matter of adding flesh to the bones, and any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Of course if anyone has any questions or opinions on the subject matter, don't hesitate to message me.