Page 34 of Guy's Girl
They do not shy away from the painful, the uncomfortable. They discuss every relationship, every heartbreak, every moment they wish they could take back. They know the names of all each other’s exes by heart.
“Was Cara the one who tried to punch Hannah in the face?” Ginny asks.
“No, that was Miranda, the girl I dumped the week before homecoming.”
For years, Ginny would have called Clay and Tristan her best friends. But things are changing. Thingshavechanged.
“You know what’s so easy about hanging out with you?” Finch says that Monday as they make a loop around a fenced-in greenspace, where a man with punching mitts lets a woman in boxing gloves rail against him. “I see myself in you. Looking at you is like... like staring into a clear pond.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean—it’s different from looking into a mirror. I see myself, but I see other things, too. Things beneath the surface of the water. It’s like—you help me see parts of myself that I didn’t even know were there. Does that make any sense at all?”
“It does.” Ginny averts her smile. “And I feel the same way about you.”
“It’s so stupid, isn’t it?” Finch chews on the end of his straw. “That we wasted so many years semi-avoiding each other when things could have been like this all the time.”
“It is stupid.” They round another bend, headed back in the direction of the Flatiron Building. “But at least we aren’t wasting any more time, right?”
“Right.”
Ginny knows it’s wrong, how much she enjoys being around Finch. It’s wrong, the way her heart flutters when she gets her daily lunch text. The way she leaves their interactions feeling energized, pumped full of adrenaline and endorphins, like his very presence is some kind of drug. He has a girlfriend, and she’s seeing Adrian. It’s wrong.
But it’s not like they’redoinganything, right? They never hug, never kiss, never touch each other at all.
Maybe this is what it’s like to find your soulmate, Ginny thinks. The platonic kind. The best friend whose mere presence can lift you from the blackest pit of your mind and leave you vibrating with joy.
So what if, every now and then, they share a glance that lasts a second too long? So what if he calls her beautiful, always in thecontext of something benign, such as him telling her that she’sso beautiful that of course Adrian wants to be with her? So what? It means nothing.
They’re friends. Just friends, nothing more.
***
Dinner is always Ginny’s biggest meal. Even though she’s eating more throughout the day than she has in the last five years, at least half of it comes back up, and by the time she reaches nine o’clock, she’s fucking ravenous.
After dinner, Finch usually hangs around the living room, which presents a problem for Ginny. Going into the bathroom every time would be too obvious, so she develops a sneaky method for purging undetected: turn on the faucet, spit-up into her mouth, tilt her head to the side, and pretend to drink from the spigot. Then, with her head blocking anyone else’s view, let the mushy food trickle out the corner of her mouth and down the drain.
For Ginny, the best part about throwing up is how easy it has become.
Anorexia was hard; it took superhuman restraint, the total repression of normal human instincts. At first, bulimia was hard, too, but now? She doesn’t even have to try. She just stands in front of the toilet, pushes upward with her neck muscles, and the food reemerges, chunky and almost whole. Or she stands before the kitchen sink and spits into the drain while she washes dishes. Or she leaves the dinner table to go for a walk and dribbles into the bushes like a sprinkler. She’s inventive with her purging.
She doesn’t feel nauseous. She doesn’t taste copper or take deep breaths to quell the storm within her. Her body simply readies itself to vomit. The food presses up against her esophagus, readyto climb, a practiced habit. She knows the drill: everything that goes down must come back up.
She’s not full-on bulimic. Really, she’s not. Yes, she vomits at least once a day, usually twice, but she doesn’tforceherself to do it; it just comes up, easy as turning on the kitchen faucet.
And she’s not bingeing, not even close. According to the definition in theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—which she looked up shortly after the puking began—bingeing is one-half of bulimia: first you binge, then you purge. So, if anything, Ginny is onlyhalfbulimic. Bulimia lite.
***
Late one Saturday morning, Ginny’s phone buzzes with a FaceTime. She pulls it out.Heather.
For the first time in several weeks, she answers.
“Thereyou are.” Wavy blond hair. Bronze cheekbones. Face painted like a French portrait. Heather’s face, angelic in its beauty, cannot be dulled even by an iPhone. “I’ve called you, like, forty-seven times since you moved in.”
Ginny sits up in bed, shaking out her hair and tucking in her double chin. “Forty-eighth time’s the charm.”
“You’re such a hermit. Where do you even go?”
