Page 85 of Guy's Girl
“Does that feel untrue?”
“Quite the opposite. It actually feels like it explains something that has been bothering me since the moment I started bingeing.”
“What’s that?”
“Whenever I overeat, it doesn’t feel like I’m the one deciding to do it. It feels like my body has been taken over by another being—the beast inside me, that’s how I think of it—and that being now has total control over my decisions, my actions, the movement of my hands and mouth. I know it’s ridiculous, of course. No creature is inhabiting my body. It’s just me. I’m weak. I’m a glutton.” She sucks air in through her teeth. “But if... if you’re right...”
“You’re not weak, Ginny. You’re not a glutton.” He reaches out and takes the hand dangling at her side. “Your body is just trying to save itself. It’s trying to survive.”
She nods. Then she nods some more. Then, just as she is about to suggest they leave, Adrian says, “Here,” and holds up the sour cherry in his hand.
“What?” she asks.
“I’m going to feed you,” he says. “That way, you know you’re safe. The beast can’t come out if you aren’t the one feeding yourself.”
She swallows. She nods and opens her mouth. With his right hand holding hers, Adrian uses his left to feed her the sour cherry.He doesn’t let go of her hand. Not as she bites into the cherry and the first rush of tart juice fills her mouth. Not as she yells, “Oh my—” and spits the cherry out. Not even as he doubles over with laughter.
“What the hell was that?” she demands.
“It does have the wordsourin its name, Gin,” Adrian says through laughs.
“Does anyone actuallyeatthose?”
“Yes.” Adrian uses his free hand to cover his mouth. “But, in all fairness, you normally boil them first to make them sweeter.”
She whacks his shoulder as hard as she can, which only makes him laugh more.
“Come on,” he says, tugging her back toward the house. “Let’s go get you some more goat’s milk.”
***
Ginny used to care about calories. She used to count them, each one as precious as gold. She doesn’t, anymore. She can’t. Not after the bingeing. Not after putting away thousands upon thousands of calories in just one sitting, letting them slide into her body as easily as slipping into a dreamless sleep.
***
She’s been here for a week now. A week of eating her food and keeping it down. There have been a few more binges, too. She doesn’t write about them in her journal because she’s too embarrassed, even just to tell it to a notebook that no one else is going to read. She manages to keep the food down after she binges, but only by lying in her bed and sobbing her eyes out.
It’s a strange feeling, watching your body grow back without your permission.
Her body grows less childlike every day. Her boobs inflate to twin pillows of fat that bounce with every step. Her body—while perhaps only now, at twenty-four years old, filling out into the sizeand shape it should have occupied for the previous five years—feels as if it is growing with a mind of its own. Try as she might to flatten it back out, to push her curves back where they came from, her body says no. Her body says,Let me grow, let me blossom, let me sag and dimple in the places I desire.
She hates it.
She hates herself.
She hates this new body in which she lives.
But she refuses to run from it any longer.
***
Ginny is lying in bed, as usual, staring at the ceiling, when she starts thinking aboutsajtos.
Sajtosare heavenly little cheese pastries that Eszter makes with dinner sometimes. Tonight, Ginny ate about three of them—an eagerness that, if she wasn’t mistaken, actually made Eszter smile. Or, if not smile, at least look minutely less disgruntled than normal. After dinner, she tried not to think any more about the pastries.
Thus began the typical nighttime war in her head: to eat or not to eat.
The thing is—if Ginny eats onesajto, she’ll probably eat four or five. And then she’ll want to throw up. She always wants to throw up. And at night, when everyone else is asleep, the temptation is even more potent.
