They found us, he’d say. Get dressed.
For Story, anxiety had come into her life in the form of an eating disorder. A devil that penetrated her brain, telling her not to eat. A demon that stank of bad breath, who refused to let her drink anything, even water. A devil who forced her to exercise all day and pace her room at night until she had burned off each calorie consumed and more. It spoke its devil tongue in her ear, telling lies. Such a fat, hateful creature, it said. No one will love you until you disappear.
In those days panic kept her awake, an electric terror filling every daylight hour. She was a thirteen-year-old girl, wasting away. For months she hid her condition under oversize sweatshirts. Her mother, busy at work, and her stepfather, preoccupied with her toddler stepbrother, noticed only that she had become more finicky in what she ate. Not that she had become an expert at cutting her food into small pieces and rearranging her plate to make it appear she’d eaten. Not that she had mastered the art of microbiting, outlasting her parents, who wolfed down their meals and hurried to clear their plates.
This is what slow-motion suicide looks like.
When her mother finally realized that Story was a shadow of her former self, when she forced her daughter onto a scale, the number she saw was so small it nearly made her faint.
Oh my God, she said.
And somewhere deep down inside, Story’s demon smiled.
She had become a fourteen-year-old skeleton.
What followed were months at an eating disorder clinic, followed by intensive individual and group therapy sessions. Zoloft became Celexa. Slowly she fought her way back. But the demon lives inside her still, in the marrow of her bones, in the whorls of her fingerprints. In high school she joined the track team, hoping to outrun it. She threw herself into her studies, hoping to outsmart it. She loaded up with extracurricular activities, hoping to outlast it. She listened to loud music and books on tape when she ate, trying to drown out its voice.
But deep in the cerebral cortex, she could still hear its demon creak, casting spells.
The spell of starvation.
The spell of regurgitation.
The spell of ex-lax, two fingers down the throat.
She met Felix last year at a bar. He was a skinny, mop-haired boy up from San Marcos with haunted eyes. He wooed her with strange animal facts. The Texas horned lizard, he said, shoots blood out of its eyes when threatened, up to five feet. He was a fount of facts like these. Did you know, he would say, that when the hairy frog is attacked, it breaks its own toe bones and forces them through its skin to make claws?
At night he would put his arms around her and hold her for hours, the way animals huddle together for warmth in winter. There were things in his past he glossed over. Did he have any cousins? A favorite uncle? It was clear he was running from something, and yet he was also running toward something—a career, adulthood, love. Her boyfriend was no man-child. He seemed obsessed with grown-up things. Savings accounts. Car insurance. On the weekends, he’d help her balance her checkbook. He taught her how to change a tire, where to pour windshield wiper fluid.
The last time Story had been home in New York was for Thanksgiving. Must be two years ago now. She doesn’t know for sure, because she doesn’t like to think about it, and her family definitely doesn’t talk about it. They don’t talk about it because just as every family has its myths and legends, so too do families have their taboos, the subjects they won’t discuss, the fights they don’t revisit. A mother walks in on a child masturbating. A daughter who spent her adolescence trying to eat as little as possible, who was hospitalized, a feeding tube inserted, who went to four residential treatment programs in five years, comes home for Thanksgiving with arms like sticks and eats a sum total of two forkfuls of cranberry sauce, and then—when her mother confronts her about it—proceeds to scream that she is an adult now and doesn’t have to listen to this shit and can make her own decisions, then gets in her car and drives too fast over the yellow line and skids sideways into a set of highway exit barrels, because the truth is she’s been dizzy for weeks, light-headed, trapped in what her doctor calls starvation brain.
This was between college and law school. What she calls her lost year, before she met Felix. She spent the night in the hospital. When the nurse asked if there was anyone they could call, she said her mother’s name, because she was scared, because she was sorry, because back there in the car as it slid toward the off-ramp she thought she was going to die. When her mother arrived, she stood looking down at Story in her short-sleeved hospital gown, her arms like sticks.