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rich girls are worse so it’s kind of a vandalized mess.
    If it isn’t obvious, I hate it here.
    I open my locker and well, awesome, that’s interesting. There are condoms filled with what-the-hell-even-is-that hanging off the hooks inside my locker, the hooks where I used to hang my aforementionedly-stolen disco clothes. I really need to change my combination.
    I wonder which of them deigned to buy condoms. They probably found some guy to do it. God forbid anyone in the world ever think they’re straight. (Or bisexual, I don’t know if you’ve heard of this? It’s a thing!)
    God. It’s just that I really thought stuff was going to go back to normal.
    One of the condoms is dripping onto my history textbook. Whatever. I give in and taste it. Ranch dressing. All right then.
    At lunch I make sure they’re looking at me at my new loner loser table (Rachel’s not there; I overheard her bio partner saying she has strep throat), and I squeeze a condom right on top of my salad. Titania makes this big show of gagging.
    â€œFat dyke,” this junior bitch Liliana mumbles as she glides past my table, and I ignore her, because yeah right, pay more attention, Liliana. She slips past me, and I focus again on the Dykes.
    I dip my finger into the condom and lick it clean. 148 calories and my daily value of screw you . Delicious.

3
    GROUP .
    We sit in a circle in flimsy desks, about exactly how these things are set up on TV, except crazy people on TV have this habit of not actually being crazy, because actual screwed-up people aren’t cuddly and relatable. We’re too busy leaning back in our seats so that our stomachs won’t touch the desk, and jiggling our knees and tapping our feet because any movement is better than nothing and body checking, fingers around wrists, thumbs on the sides of waists, our fingers knitted together, squeezing, our nails tapping against collarbones. Then there are the girls who won’t even sit down—who can’t sit down, because standing burns more calories and shuffling their feet really burns more calories, and maybe they want us to feel like they’re better than us, or maybe they don’t, or maybethey are just so, so past giving a shit what people think about them. We’re all here because it’s not fun for us anymore, but those are the girls who make you realize that this shit hasn’t been fun for a really, really long time. They’re shifting, shivering statues, and this is what you wanted to be . At some point there really was a choice. At some point you really did jump off a cliff, and we can sit here and cry about it all we want about how no , we were not expecting what would be at the bottom, and we just wanted to be skinny and we just wanted to disappear and be perfect and be noticed and to be in control and to starve and purge out everything that’s wrong with us, but at some point we decided we were going to do this and the thing is that you don’t disappear (and that’s really it, isn’t it), you linger around and wilt in the corners of community rec centers.
    I’m one of the bigger girls here, but there are actually a bunch around my size. One of them’s Taylor, who’s talking right now about how frustrating this whole diagnostic process is. You have to have a BMI under a certain ridiculous number and you have to stop getting your period to be diagnosed anorexic, so that rules out me and the two boys I sometimes forget are here. The diagnoses are something we’ve talked about a billion times, and it’s something our leader still lets us talk about because it’s still goddamn frustrating.
    â€œI just want that stupid label,” Taylor says. Taylor doesn’t curse. Taylor says “stupid.” “And it’s ridiculous because, like, the whole issue at school is stop labeling me, stop putting me in your stupid box ,and then here I am dying to count as anorexic