Eat chew bite down you need food now in your mouth you have to be chewing something salty something sweet something anything…
Joe shivered despite the blankets, despite the arm Frank had protectively slipped around him as the two dropped off to sleep in the younger Hardy's bed. His stomach was staging a coup, overthrowing the mind and the will and seeking its own survival. Joe felt his resolve weakening.
Food. Now. Anything. Eat. Eateateateateateat…
Looking back, Joe didn't know how he did it. He dragged himself from the bed and stumbled blindly down the stairs, swaying and dizzy, and attacked the cupboards, shoving boxes of cereal in his mouth, bags of chips, crackers, pretzels, racing to the bathroom, downing Ipecac and getting rid of all of it, then back to the kitchen, through the fridge—soup chicken fish milk steak—back to the bathroom fingers down his throat vomiting over and over looking for markers—white is the milk and that was first and now its red for blood okay it's all out—back to the kitchen through the fruit, the vegetables onto the freezer—ice cream fishsticks bagels bread—back to the bathroom more Ipecac Ipecac Ipecac torrents of blood now back to the kitchen nothing left but a jar of peanut butter eats with his hands back to the bathroom.
Blacked out.
They told him later it was a miracle he survived the night, that he didn't experience the fatal gastric rupture that claims the lives of many bulimics, that the blood from his torn esophagus and stomach hadn't choked off his airway.
But Joe made it, and came to on the bathroom floor, dragging himself up, the room spinning and swirling, and stumbled from the kitchen to the family room, knowing that there would be no way out of this one.
He had eaten almost all the food in the house.