Page 33 of Since She's Been Gone

“It’s nice to see you smiling again,” Dad said.

I hadn’t realized I was smiling and made sure to drop it quickly and scowl at him.

“Can you leave?” I said. “I don’t want you here. I want to be alone with Rascal.”

“No,” Dad said.

I rolled my eyes at him while Rascal kept licking my face.

“I brought you something,” he told me.

“It better not be food,” I said.

“It’s not,” he said, handing me a large handmade card that all the girls from my former high school soccer team had signed. I quickly glanced over at the various messages:Get better! We miss you. Hope you feel better soon!

I was livid. There was nothing wrong with me. The problem was Dad, Dr. Larsen, and everyone else.

“How do they know I’m here?” I interrogated Dad.

“They don’t know where you are. They just know you’re not feeling well,” he said.

“I’m feeling fine,” I said. “You’re the one with the problem. I can’t believe you made me come here. They won’t even let me wear my shoes.” I pointed to my feet which only had socks on.

He didn’t respond.

“Well?” I said. “You don’t care that I’m walking around barefoot? Because it’s abuse. If I had access to a phone, I’d call the police to report them.”

“You tried to run away,” he reminded me. “That’s why they took your shoes away.”

“I ran away because they’re abusing me. I hate you for making me be here,” I told him. “And if Mom were alive, she’d hate you for it too.”

He closed his eyes, wincing, before opening them back up to look right at me. “ED is trying to push me away from you, but you’re not his daughter. You’re mine. And he’s not going to succeed.”

Later that evening, while I was in the shower, I was in a rage, thinking about the card Dad had brought from my former teammates. I grew angrier and angrier thinking about howthey all got to play soccer while I had to eat to earn the right to see my dog.

I also had ED in my ear, beating me up, telling me I was a failure because of the hamburger and fries I’d eaten the night before so I could see Rascal. I had infinite calories to burn and no way how. I wasn’t allowed to exercise. I didn’t even have my gym shoes.

As I lathered shampoo in my hair, a thought popped into my mind: Why not exercise while in the shower? Even though the bathroom door had to remain slightly open while we bathed, there was a curtain that could conceal any activity I did behind it.

I quickly dropped down into the tub and started doing push-ups. Before I knew it, I was jogging in place. The shampoo was getting in my eyes, making them tear, but I didn’t care. I was burning calories, and ED was back to being proud of me.

I started brainstorming about where else I might be able to sneak in exercise—the ranch had two floors, so during the day, I could make excuses about why I had to go upstairs to my bedroom, giving me a reason to run up and down the stairs. I could also exercise in bed underneath my comforter during the night between staff check-ins.

“Beatrice?” Dr. Larsen said, knocking on the bathroom door. “You’ve been in the shower for a while. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, just finishing up,” I said.

Late that night, I started my covert exercise operation. Between the hourly staff check-ins, all through the night, I did hundreds of sit-ups and butt-tightening exercises beneath my blanket.

Over the following week, my evening showers grew longer and longer as I transformed the bathtub into my own personal gym. Any exercise I could do in a sixty-inch space—lunges, squats, calf raises, push-ups—I did.

During the day, I made up all kinds of excuses for why I had to go upstairs—I forgot my sweater in the bedroom, Ineeded to brush my hair—whatever I could come up with that allowed me to run up and down the stairs.

Staff members occasionally asked us to do errands for them, requests that I had always turned down since I was so bitter about being there, but now I was the first to raise my hand, eager to help. I turned the most mundane errand, like mailing letters in the mailbox in front of the ranch, into an Olympic sporting event, moving my arms up and down as if I was lifting a two-handed barbell in the air.

I began eschewing sitting down when we wrote in our journals in the living room. Instead, I wrote while standing up in the corner. Eventually, I could no longer stay seated during mealtime, claiming my back hurt and that I needed to stand up. I was tempted to jog around the dining room table, but I knew that would draw too much attention and risk exposing my covert exercise operation, which had rapidly become a compulsion.

Whatever exercise I did on one day, I not only felt compelled to do the next, but ED kept telling me I needed to raise the ante and do more and more.

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