Page 38 of Guy's Girl
She regrets the move as soon as she does it. She and Adrian never display affection in public. They kiss only in the privacy of his bedroom, and almost always at his initiation.
But if the kiss bothers him, he doesn’t show it. He licks his mint chip and asks, “How’s the writing coming?”
“Oh...” Ginny trails off, watching ice cream drip down her cone. “I haven’t really been writing much recently.”
“You haven’t?”
“Nah. Too busy at work, climbing the ladder and all.”
“Oh.”
Adrian looks strangely dismayed by this news. Ginny feels a jolt of shame and quickly steers the conversation back to Disney: “When is the interview?”
“Next Wednesday.”
“Well, I’m sure you’ll nail it.” She pauses. “If you get this job, you’ll have way more free time than you do now, huh?”
“I suppose I will.”
A spark of hope flickers in Ginny’s stomach. Right now, he’s far too busy for a real relationship. But if he gets this new job...
She stops that train of thought before it can go any further.
“What will you do with all that free time?” she asks.
Adrian takes a bite out of his cone. “Sleep.”
Ginny laughs. “Besides that, I mean.”
He looks out across the park, watching the jets of water shoot up from the fountain at its center. “Read,” he says at last. “I would read as many books as I can.”
“Really?” She shifts on the hard wood of the bench. “Like what? Novels?”
“Definitely. Or short stories. Those are what I usually go for, anyway.”
“Oh. Well.” Ginny looks down at the melted cookies ’n’ cream now pooling inside her waffle cone.Do it, she tells herself.Just tell him.She takes a deep breath, then looks back up. “You could read mine. If you want, I mean.”
Adrian turns to her, eyes wide. Loose waffle cone clings to one corner of his mouth. The effect is that of a startled child. “I could?”
“Of course.” Embarrassed, she turns away and speaks to the park, to the hot dog carts and the old men sitting at stone chessboards, challenging tourists to a game. “I mean—only if you want to. I don’t mean to assume that—”
“Yes.”
Ginny’s eyes dart back to Adrian. “Yes?”
A rare smile tugs at his lips. “Yes.” He reaches up with his free hand and grazes two fingers along her temple, sending quiet shivers along every inch of her skin. “I would love nothing more than to take a look inside that brilliant mind of yours.”
***
On her walk home, Ginny’s ice cream comes up in little burps, like a child. She pushes with her throat, and the watery, half-digested ice cream floods into her mouth. She holds it there untilshe reaches a block free from pedestrians, then leans over the curb and spits it out onto the street.
She repeats this act as often as necessary, leaving black-and-white splatters throughout the city, in bushes and street corners, in puddles, behind parked semis. The splatters mark her path home, bread crumbs that anyone could follow, if they knew where to look.
Voluntary purging is nothing like getting sick. Nothing like throwing up because of a bug, because you ate expired sushi, or because you drank too much alcohol. In those instances, something genuinely wrong, genuinely dangerous, swims within you. Your body does whatever it must to be rid of it. Sprints its insides up your esophagus and ejects themselves of its own volition. Your body is fighting to save itself.
When you start to voluntarily purge, your body is confused. Why are we acting like we are sick? Why are we acting like there’s poison inside us? There isn’t. There is just food. Just sugars and fats and proteins. Nothing wrong. Nothing dangerous.
Yet you have convinced yourself that foodiswrong. That itisdangerous. That it carries some inherent threat against your well-being. Food is a disease. In order to get better, you need to get it out of your body. You need to be empty.
