TW: Eating disorders & some abuse

We met in high school dance class. I was just learning how to not be anorexic. You were beautiful and full of muscle. The dance studio had three walls of mirrors. Three of you said “hi” to three of me.

You invited me to the pool. Your dad was a hunter — the deer he’d shot was sliced atop a grill. A picnic table’s metal bench burned our thighs; the sun sucked water from our hair; the towels shawling our shoulders dripped with chlorine; your dad passed us paper plates bent beneath meat. I chewed and listened to you two argue.

Your dad said there were wolves in the woods. You said so what that’s where they live you’re the one intruding in their home. Your dad said the wolves deserved to die. You cried, boiling tears, anger leaked. That’s what I first learned about you, your rage. I noticed also, you were so upset, you didn’t touch your food. I was just learning how to stop noticing things like that.

I first came to your house in July. A shotgun house half a mile from the high school football stadium. Friday night games made the panes shake, marching band brass rattling your bed and dog. You loved that dog. Daphne, old puppy, shagged hair curling into her cataracted eyes. Her bonehips swayed when she walked. Her drool bloomed in our laps. She sat by your feet and stared at you, only you, you were her sun her moon her stars everything she ever loved squeezed inside a tall blonde teenager with a dancer’s roped calves.

Your yard was tangled. Waxy ivy leaves knotted atop dog shit. No one bothered to mow. A shed rotted against the fence, brown wood splotched with sick spots of green. We were in your kitchen: you sat wide-legged right on the grimy tile floor, feet curved into perfect pointe as you painted your toenails in long straight streaks of Moondust (black lacquer with specks of silver, purple, blue) and I sat too, knees gathered between my elbows, staring out the finger-greased sliding glass door and into the backyard. I did that a lot, let my eyes unfocus, brain go to static. I was eating again, somewhat, but my energy levels hadn’t yet balanced out. I napped, a lot. I missed things, details, whole snips of conversation leaking out from a brain still stingy with its synapses, still living in survival-mode. I didn’t talk much there on the floor. You talked enough for us both. I was happy to let you do it, my blank gaze on the black patch behind your house.

At the party, all they talked about were your toes. A boy whose parents came from somewhere in Eastern Europe where the philosophy said it was better for the kids to drink at home than in some secret deadly dangerous spot, we were in this boy’s basement, and his Eastern European mother ran a daycare from that basement, so seven white-sheet sleeping mats covered the floor and the air down there stunk of babypowder, and maybe ten teenagers drowsy on beer bought by parents lay on the mats and tapped their knees to Kanye crackling from a cracked JBL speaker. You sat straight up though. You’d claimed the basement’s single rocking chair. Your bare feet spread beneath you like the paws of a big proud marble lion statue. People would peel away from their drunk clusters and every single one of them came to talk to you and said something nice about your Moondust toes. I sat by your feet, like Daphne the dog. Like Daphne the dog I looked at you and felt only love.

It was like that at every party you and I went to. No one looked at me. No one talked to me. That was fine. I let the warmth of your big beautiful sun warm the bones still pressing too close to my skin. My disease ate my personality and hadn’t yet spit it back out. When girls with glitter rhinestones glued on their eyelids came to talk to you, to touch your hair, to rub the frayed denim of your shorts like you were Jesus and they were the sick woman reaching for his sacred garment, I had nothing to say to those girls. All I felt, still, was a dull hum, like a lightbulb soon to burn out.

They brought you offerings at these parties, little gifts for a high school deity. Paperbacks inked in the margins. New nailpolish colors. Once, someone pressed a sweaty tub of half-eaten gelato from their fridge into your hands after you mentioned how much you love fake pistachio flavor. You were to drop me off at home after that party, but we stopped by your house first, to leave the gelato somewhere cold. You went inside; I stayed in the car in your sloped gravel driveway. I picked my ragged nails. My insides went grey as my eyes unfocused against your Subaru’s cracked dashboard.

I heard screaming. Atop the driveway, where the streetlamps couldn’t see. Inside a gnarled tree’s cast darkness. The car’s headlights made your face go ghost-pale when you ran out from the house’s shadow. You slammed the car door and cried hot tears into the steering wheel.

Your dad had kicked Daphne in front of you (he didn’t care for that dog). While we’d been gone, Daphne, being old, had peed on the kitchen floor. His foot, her rib, a howl. You hit the wheel thrice. You sobbed and couldn’t breathe. You asked me again and again, you didn’t see him out there? You didn’t just see him kick her? You didn’t hear him yell? I shook my head. I’d missed it all.

By Spring Recital, we’d been friends for six months. Our studio organized a year-end showcase at the catholic church. In our dance, the teacher put you center-stage. I was three rows behind, watching your gold glorious head spin. I couldn’t see the audience — the stagelights blinded, made blank every face. I knew, though, they were only watching you. After the show, we stood in the lobby, faces painted for the stage: burning circles on our cheeks, eyebrows lined thick, lips rouged like blood. Your arms strained with bouquets. People kept piling them on, dripping flowers in grocery-store plastic. You smiled with your smeared lipstick at each fan offering a new gift. Your dad hadn’t come. He was away on a hunting trip. I watched my sneakered toes stack atop each other and when I looked up you were crying, mascara sliding blackly down your nose. You must’ve been crying for a while before I noticed. I asked what was wrong and you said Daphne had been missing for a week. All I could think about was why you didn’t tell my when it first happened. Did you tell someone else first? I told you I’m sorry she’s missing and picked at my pilling tights. I helped you print posters and tape them to streetlamps and posted on my instagram story but we never did find Daphne.

Summer, school was out. It was hard to be in my house where the fridge was. It gurgled and clanged and buzzed and each time I unsealed its popping door I felt like I was entering a long and tedious debate where all sorts of calculations and arguments had to be considered. One June day, I stared into its glowing white guts and I felt a sudden surge of anger travel acidly down my throat into my stomach. I hated the feeling of food in my mouth. I hated the heavy paste of it bloating inside my guts. I didn’t want to fucking do this anymore. I slammed the door and left the house and I walked and walked and walked on asphalt shimmering in June heat under a sun so big and white and unrelenting and even water felt like it would take too much space inside me and when I returned pink-faced and tender-skinned some hours later my eyes dotted with small spots and the spots didn’t go away the way they usually do and I felt my brain teeter on a cliff and threaten to lurch somewhere dark and inaccessible and so I laid down in bed and slept and slept and slept and it must’ve lasted days and of course I hadn’t bother to charge the phone now drained by my fingers and when I hooked up the iphone’s umbilical cord and the screen lit up, I sat up straight. Many missed calls and texts. Most from those girls with the glitter rhinestones glued on their eyelids I kept seeing at parties. The boy with the Eastern European parents. Numbers I didn’t recognize. One text from your dad. You’d not been seen for days. I checked to see if you’d called me recently. Texted me. You hadn’t.

They never did find you. High school still trudged on. I quit dance. I gained a bit of weight. I graduated walking with the kids whose basements I’d once been invited to out of politeness because I was your plus-one, and, later, out of pity because I had a cold-case-missing best friend. After you disappeared, I’d stood in those basement corners and still didn’t talk to anyone, shivering in the damp dark babypowder air.

After high school, I got a job flipping burgers. The grease seeped into my shirts and hair. My feet hurt from all the standing. We got one free meal per shift, which was nice. I always ate on the corner bar, meat juice dripping down my chin, fingers shiny from fries. The old people who loitered for hours over empty plates and crumbed remains at the bar would talk to me sometimes and sometimes I even had something to say to them. The regulars brought me little trinkets: hard caramels, broches of bedazzled butterflies, Jesus pamphlets folded into neat squares. They read real newspapers still and pointed out the interesting stuff to me. Like this: decrepit house, overgrown yard, the owner an old and lonely hunter dead last month of a heart attack. They razed the house and plunged the ground. The developers halted their nervous workers when the hard dirt yielded a skeleton. They called the police. But work soon resumed, the bones dug up and thrown away. They were only a dog’s.