Taylor is the only one here with any pride! the other me shrieks. She knows there’s nothing wrong with her. The rest of you have been brainwashed. Weak! Pathetic!
To distract myself, I glance around and see that Cora has got some half-chewed muesli stuck to her lip, and my stomach churns.
See how disgusting she is? Do you think you look any better?
I quickly lower my eyes to my bowl. It’s best to try and block out the fact that anyone else is here. I know the other girls are doing that, too, which makes our mealtimes eerie and robotic. I eat slowly, the voice ranting the entire time.
After breakfast, we have group therapy, and we all shuffle into the therapy room and sit on the sofas. We have private sessions with a psychiatrist, but these group sessions are our opportunity to workshop each other’s disordered thinking. We’re meant to challenge each other on our assumptions in a non-judgmental way, and complete mindfulness exercises and various worksheets.
Everything’s the same as the last time I was here, which makes it hard to believe that it’s going to make any difference.
After lunch, one of the nurses calls out to me. “Lacey. Doctor Loftin is here. You can have your session in the group therapy room. It’s free for the next hour.”
I’d forgotten that Doctor Loftin wanted to keep seeing me while I was here. I go through to the therapy room and see her waiting for me in an armchair, cool and collected as always behind her glasses.
I glance around for the scales. “Where do I weigh in?”
She motions me over to the sofa. “We don’t need to do that. I met with your counselor earlier, and she updated me on your progress.”
I sit down, my hands tucked between my knees, remembering my deception with the weights. When I first started seeing her, she would make me strip down to my underwear before I stepped onto the scales, but over time, she started treating me with a little more humanity. A little more trust. And I betrayed that trust.
“How’s your recovery been since the surgery?”
“I don’t know. Fine, I guess.” I feel tired and wrung out, but that could be because of a lot of things. There are four small sets of stitches on my chest. They hurt a little, but I should heal quickly because it was keyhole surgery. The surgeon told me they didn’t have to replace my valve, only repair it. I’m supposed to rest, eat healthily, and not perform any strenuous exercise. Which is of course precisely what the people here expect from me too, so yay for me, I guess.
“Your counselor here says you’ve done well your first week.”
Eaten my meals, she means. Not hurled food at a nurse or thrown up in a corner or attacked another patient. I’ve seen all these things happen.
“A regular little duck to water,” I mutter. I see nothing to be proud of in the fact that the routine of this ghastly place is so familiar to me. I fold my arms and stare up at the tiny window overhead. Barely any of the sky is visible from this angle.
Doctor Loftin waits for me to expand on my week. I know from experience that if I barricade myself in a sulk, she’ll come up with some exercise for us to do together. I search around for something to say. “Everything’s the same, but also it’s not. As last time, I mean. This place is familiar, but what’s going on inside me isn’t.”
“How does it feel different?”
I shrug, picking at a loose thread on my sleeve. “I guess I’m angrier.”
“What are you angry about?”
I shoot her a poisonous look. “You lied to me. You said I could have a normal life, but the truth is there’s nothing normal about me and there never will be.”
“Is that what your anorexic voice has been telling you?”
I shake my head. “She’s screaming at me again, and I can feel her all around me, but this is something I figured out for myself before she came back with a vengeance. I think it’s why she came back.”
“What do you mean, Lacey?”
“I mean,” I say, over-enunciating every word as if she’s stupid, “that I’m a moron for thinking that I could ever be happy. When I realized that everything I wanted was out of my reach, she got her nasty little claws into me again and I wasn’t strong enough to resist.” Worse, I didn’t want to.
“What else do you feel, apart from angry?”
“Isn’t that enough?” I snap. Doctor Loftin looks coolly back at me. I don’t know why I’m performing for her. She’s seen me in a bitchy mood before and she’s not going to be shocked or argue with me. “Sad, I guess.”
“What are you sad about?”