cassie doesn't like mirrors.
she spends a lot of time looking at herself in them (narcissus, ensnared by her own reflection), though. what is she without the masochism? she examines her hair, bleached angel-blonde, makes minute adjustments to her carefully-applied makeup, scowls at her breasts and the fat she can just barely pinch away from her stomach. the picture never quite comes out the way she wants it to, static and plastic and airbrushed, like something on a magazine cover. when she peels off her curated outfits and stands in her underwear, goosebumps rising on her exposed skin, all she can notice is how her thighs still touch and her collarbone doesn't jut out enough and—
(fact: cassie wants things to be perfect.
fact: there is nothing more perfect than the number zero.)
stars are dancing in her field of vision, and it's not from the pretty white line she snorted last night, or the blue raspberry vodka she mixed with it. eateateat they tell her at the hospital, £££ ticking as they beg her to stop being a stupid little girl throwing a tantrum and wasting their time. eateateat, her parents sometimes say, when they remember they have a daughter between the sex and the paintings and the son with infinitely more potential. eateateat, sid implores, his furrowed brow and sidelong glances at the apple she's toying with knifing her deep but not nearly deep enough.
(sid is a nice boy, with his clueless, jerky motions of a colt trying out its legs for the first time. too nice. too nice for her. so stupid— look up if you like me. look up if you like me, sid. we won't even talk about love yet. look up if you can save me from myself, sid. look up if i can suck all the good bits out of you, sid.)
it's like eve in the garden of eden, she never tries to explain, applying kohl-black eyeliner with shaking hands. once you sample from the tree of forbidden knowledge, of just how amazing it can be to fill up your mouth with more than gum and ice cubes and feel your thoughts uncloud, you need to repent over a toilet until you've cleansed yourself of your sin. or maybe like icarus, who thought that he was too precious to stay away from the sun no matter who warned him, and even after the wax melted his wings he still didn't regret shit. cassie wants to be pure, that's the secret; perfection is attained when there is nothing left to take away. when nothing pollutes her body, no more fat pooling in her veins and weighing her down, she'll be powerful enough to—
die?
she's tried to explain this to a lot of doctors, her voice quiet and high and halting, and they told her mum and dad that maybe she's schizophrenic— but she's all right now, she's cured, she's seen sense. she doesn't put weights in her pockets before a doctor's visit or water-load or count on her parents being too wrapped up in between each other's legs to notice whether she's had a meal in the last week. no, that doesn't happen anymore. she can mold history however she likes for them, knows that what they want to hear and the truth are an irreconcilable dichotomy.
whenever she spends too much time here, her brain becomes one big mess of hume's theories on corporeality and how many calories she's eaten today and what it would take for sid to think she's lovely, scraping the marrow out of her bones with a spoon? she knows what cures the gap in her head, where normal people hear eat and she hears kill yourself already, and that's the 'unhealthy coping mechanisms' or whatever they call it— being fucked numb, being too high to remember her own name, being so hungry so often in an endless test of her willpower. she hikes up her skirt and picks up her purse before she can hesitate.
it's her body. hers. yes, she knows what she's doing. no, she doesn't particularly care.
(fact: cassie is not half as vapid as she pretends to be.
fact: it's really nobody's fucking business, is it?)
you're so goddamn worthless, cass. nobody's ever going to love you, thin or not.
it's dark. she's lying on her back, her skirt bunched up around her waist, and all she can think isn't where am I? or who the hell was he and did he think I looked good, did he say my name when he finished?, but why don't my hips stick out more? they're so nice when they stick out— like they're protecting her stomach from invaders, from the filth and the pain. she pinches the skin until she's sure there'll be blue and purple marks in the morning, but then it hurts too much, so she keeps doing it.
(there is holiness, in starvation. in the way her head grows so light she sees god when she stands up too quickly, in the way the sun shines through the gap between her thighs, in the way she's certain that one morning she will wake up to find there is nothing more that has to lose and that will be the end. in the way she stops eating and she has all the power in the world, she can make anyone do anything because she smiles so pretty, so helpless. in the way a bird flying into a window is holy.)
fuck. fuck. she doesn't have the words to articulate this right now, the cavernous pit in her chest nothing could ever make whole, and she never will. there's a white pill on the carpet next to her and she shoves it into her mouth without thinking at all, dry-swallows. she read, once, that you can burn a hole through your esophagus like that— she imagines how beautiful her corpse would look if she died right now, before she could decay or sag or grow old. she imagines how
blackout.