Page 68 of Guy's Girl
Ginny inhales. She feels the urge to press both hands to his cheeks, to pull his mouth down to hers. But she fights it and takes a step back, instead. “That’s not—” Her voice wavers. “That’s not fair.”
“But it’s true. It’s true, and I—” He runs his hand along her cheek. “God, I—”
Then he leans down, and he crushes his lips to hers.
Ginny gasps against his mouth. On instinct, her hands come up and knot themselves in his hair, pulling him tighter to her. The kiss—it’s everything she’s wanted. Everything she’s waited for.
Everything she cannot have.
She pulls away, gasping. Her hands fall from Finch’s face and clutch at her stomach.
“Ginny?”
The music has become too loud, the scent of food so thick shecould suffocate in it. “I can’t— I don’t—” There is too much she wants to say. Too many speeches she has written in her head over the last few days. None of it comes out. She feels empty, depleted. She wants, suddenly, to fill that emptiness in any way possible.
She spins on her heel and pushes into the crowd.
“Ginny—”
She runs until his voice is swallowed by the music. Until she reaches the very end of Karaván, string lights and potted plants dangling from the metal pagoda above. Only then does she find the rest of the boys—Clay, Tristan, Jozsef, Adrian. All clustered around a high top, a sea of paper plates spread between them.
Clay spies Ginny, waving her over. “There you are. We were just wondering—” He stops when he sees her face. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” Ginny elbows her way into a gap around the table. “I’m starving.” She picks up a sweet potato fry and pops it into her mouth.
The boys exchange glances. “Where’s Finch?”
“Who cares?” says Ginny. She picks up three more fries. Eats them all at once.
The boys fall back into uneasy conversation. They pick at the food on the paper plates. They appear to be sharing everything, so Ginny does the same.
At first, she tells herself that she’ll just pick, too. That she just needs a few bites, just enough to fill the emptiness, thenincsat her very center. Quickly, however, she finds that a few bites do not satisfy her.
Ginny doesn’t make a conscious decision to overeat. She simply tells herself that she needs another handful of fries, then another, then another, then another, and suddenly the tureen is empty. She simply tells herself that she wants another bite of the delicious deep-fried pancake on the table, the one she heard Adrian calllángos. Then another. Then another, then another, and suddenly theplate holds nothing but crumbs. She makes her way around the table, mopping up the boys’ leftovers. Food has become everything. She stuffs herself with it. She becomes the most deplorable species of glutton.
They’re watching me. They see me bingeing.
It consumes her, bulimia, the same way anorexia did. The same way anorexia told her to starve until all she could eat was her own body—taking whole bites of herself, the way one eats an apple, bite and bite and bite until only the core is left—bulimia tells her to eat until her body is so achingly full she misses the comfort of starving.
She can feel it, when the gluttonous part of her brain turns on. It’s a switch. It’s what she imagines a werewolf would feel when the beast within the man tears its way to the surface. It comes alive, this deep hunger, all instinct and animal, and it demolishes Ginny’s every impulse toward self-restraint.
We all have a beast. They might desire different things—some crave sex, some power, some chemically induced happiness. And Ginny? Well. After five years of feeding herself just enough to get by, just enough for the pain to be chronic but livable, and one more year of throwing up almost everything that went into her body—
Well.
Her beast wants to eat.
Adrian is the first to notice that Ginny is missing. Fifteen minutes earlier, she excused herself to use the restroom, and she still hasn’t returned. He’s starting to get nervous. He didn’t like the feverish look in her eyes when she showed up to their table. Didn’t like how she barely spoke a word, only ate and ate until there was nothing left.
At first, as he watched her dig into the food, Adrian was thrilled. He was glad she opened up to him about her anorexia, but, if he’s being honest, he didn’t fully believe that her illness is as far in the past as she claims. She’s sothin.But as he watched her take down a whole carton of sweet potato fries, he thought:She’s eating.She’s finallyeating.It filled him with a strange sense of elation. One that only grew the more she ate.
When she finished, Adrian watched out of the corner of his eye as she dabbed at her mouth with a paper napkin. He waited for her to settle into herself. To become wrapped in the comfort that accompanies a full meal.
Only it never came. Ginny did not smile. She did not pat her belly or settle back onto her heels. Her shoulders tightened. Her hands drew into fists. Her eyes stared straight forward, wide and unfocused in the way that indicates someone is far, far away, sunk into the unreachable depths of the mind.
Adrian wanted to touch her shoulder. To say her name. Something, anything, to bring her out of what he could only imagine was a place of fear and overwhelming panic.
Just as he was about to reach for her, however, Ginny came to.Her eyes snapped into focus, her neck straightening like a whip. “Bathroom,” she announced. Then she turned and vanished.
