Page 89 of Guy's Girl
***
Ginny makes it seventeen days without vomiting. Not long ago, that was unthinkable. Not long ago, she was shoveling candy into her mouth with all the joy and satisfaction of a starving zombie, then running up to her bedroom and puking it all back up.
Recovery is not fun. It is not relaxing. It is to feel consistently like you are three breaths away from losing your mind.
But she’s trying.
***
The first time she thinks it is on their walk.
They go up that day instead of down. Adrian wants to take her to Kada csúcs, a lookout that’s a short hike up the hill. They load sandwiches and potato chips into a backpack that Adrian carries, and Ginny takes pictures of the wildlife they pass along the way: purple flowers, yellow rosebuds, a stream carrying just a trickle of water.
Kada csúcs itself isn’t much to see: a small clearing with one bench, barely large enough to hold both Adrian and Ginny. They have to balance their sandwiches on their legs, prop the potato chips up against the bench.
But none of that matters because the view from Kada csúcs is the second most spectacular Ginny had seen in Hungary, surpassed only by Buda Castle. It feels as if she can see the entire countryside: undulating waves of red rooftops, long green stretches of farmland, the spires of church towers, the winding Danube.
Ginny is picky about food. Almost everyone with an eating disorder is. They have preferences, rituals, safe foods, unsafe foods. The rules and regulations are part of what keeps them intheir disorder. For example, Ginny never eats the crusts on her sandwiches. She doesn’t like them. Today, she peels them off before even starting to eat. On the one hand, it’s fine, because she doesn’t like how they taste. But in the back of her mind, she also knows that it’s an excuse. A way to cut out calories in a manner that doesn’t look suspicious.
Adrian doesn’t fall for it. When he looks down at the foil on her lap and sees a pile of jagged crusts, he says nothing, just reaches over and picks them up, dropping them onto his lap. Then he rips off a crust-less slice of his own sandwich and places it before her. No questions. No reprimands. A simple act ensuring she eats a full meal, no cheating.
God help me, she thinks as she looks at that slice of sandwich. I think I’m falling for him.
She keeps her face very still, as blank as she can, nodding at all the right parts in his story. When he finishes talking, he smiles expectantly. She opens her mouth and laughs, even though she doesn’t know if he just told a joke. She needs to do something, anything, to smother the words echoing inside her head.
She knows, then, that it’s true. Sheisfalling for him. No—if she’s honest, she fell for him long before that. She fell for him a year and a half ago, on the night he held her in his bed for the first time. All the bullshit with Finch—the crying, the drama, the addictive back-and-forth—that was all a distraction. A lid to cover up the truth.
But how can I know?she wonders. Two weeks ago, I believed I was in love with Finch. How can I possibly trust that what I feel for Adrian is real?
The answer is that she can’t. No one can. You can only follow whatfeelslike the truth of your emotions, trusting that, eventually, the rest will become clear.
***
Two nights later, she accidentally falls asleep in Adrian’s room. By the time they wake up, it’s already 8 a.m. the next day, well past the time his grandparents normally wake up. When they register the sun streaming through the blinds, they look at each other with wide, panicked eyes.
“Shit.” Ginny scrambles out of bed, pulling on her pajama shorts. “Shit, shit, shit.” She turns around and points at Adrian, who hasn’t moved. “Okay. I go out first. God willing, they’re out for a walk or something. If not, if they’re already in the kitchen, I’ll take down a towel and say I was in the shower.”
“But your hair is dry.”
She waves an impatient hand. “I’ll figure it out.”
When she cracks open the door and shimmies outside, she finds no one on the landing. She sighs in relief and shuts Adrian’s door.
Then, just as she turns around, the door to Adrian’s grandparents’ room opens.
Out walks Imre.
They both freeze. For a moment, they just stare at each other, his hand on one doorknob, hers on another. He takes in her messy hair, her wrinkled pajamas. Her back seizes up. She waits for his reprimand. For him to call her a trollop and tell her to get out of their house this instant.
Instead, without a word, his face stretches into a grin. He winks and walks down the stairs.
I’ve been researching my disease. Did you know that throwing up isn’t the only way to purge? Some abuse laxatives instead, draining themselves of food before it can be absorbed into the body. Still others have the “nonpurging” subtype of bulimia,where they fast or overexercise to rid themselves of excess calories.
I found this on WebMD:
“In bulimia, also called bulimia nervosa, you usually binge and purge in secret. You feel disgusted and ashamed when you binge and relieved once you purge.”
I must have reread that paragraph five or six times. It felt so true, my eyes welled up.
