She’d driven around downtown, then made her way to the Pacific Highway until the gas light flickered. By the time Harper pulled up to the house, all the lights were out.

She kicked her shoes off on the front porch and tip toed to her bedroom.

On her bed was a stack of brochures and a Post-It note with Helena’s elegant handwriting. “I’ve been there,” Helena had written.

The brochures showed smiling, happy women behind bold fonts. ANOREXIA: THE SILENT KILLER. BULIMIA, NOT JUST PURGING. THE FACTS ON ORTHOREXIA. Each brochure carried a stamp at the bottom for in-patient and out-patient rehabilitation facilities in the area.

No way, Harper thought. There’s no way I’m going there. I’d definitely be the fattest one.

Still, something about it being the witching hour made her open them up, one by one. She’d expected them to be stuffed with stodgy information, shock material that had nothing to do with her. Instead, in each brochure, it was as if it was written just for her.

“Do you avoid social situations because food and drink are often involved?” Doesn’t everyone?

“Do thoughts about food or your size consume your thoughts to the point it interferes with relationships?” Well …

“Have you used excessive exercise as a means of burning calories? Although ‘bulimia’ is often synonymous with purging (forced vomiting), purging is only one way bulimia may present itself. Many people are surprised to learn that bulimia is any method of ‘erasing’ calories by extreme measures. However, a lot of people who practice one method of bulimi (such as purging) also utilize other methods such as excessive exercising. A lot of people with bulimia also exhibit symptoms of anorexia, orthorexia, binge eating disorder (BED)—”

Fuck.

Harper picked up the phamplet on orthorexia. “Orthorexia is a relatively new term in the eating disorder (ED) community, and not technically an eating disorder—yet,” the brochure started. “However, it will likely be added soon. Orthorexia is an obsession with clean eating or healthy living. It’s the eating disorder that can hide in plain sight thanks to societal approval. You might suffer from orthorexia if you use popular diet ‘lifestyles’ or fads such as the Paleo diet, unhealthy trainings to intense degrees (such as running several miles daily to lose weight instead of genuinely training for a marathon)—”

“Oh, my God,” Harper said aloud.

Of course she’d known. Deep inside, she’d known since she was a teenager. Reading Wasted, it was like someone had opened up her insides and turned it into a book. But there were all kinds of excuses to be made and lies she could tell herself.

“Not everyone with an eating disorder ‘looks it’,” warned another brochure. “Many people with an eating disorder might appear ‘normal’ or even overweight. You can’t judge whether or not a person has an eating disorder by their appearance.” Well, that’s just fucking great.

Harper opened up her laptop and went to her usual thinspiration sites. Hidden in the underbelly of the internet were pro-ana forums and message boards. Here, girls—well, mostly girls—could find a dark solace amongst their peers. There were times these starving girls were Harper’s only allies. On days where she was tempted to eat more than four Atkins bars, low-carb, low-sugar and totaling just 750 calories, she could pour her heart out to them.

“Don’t do it!” a poster would immediately respond. “You’re stronger than that.”

The forums were where she’d learned the fastest ways to make herself vomit. And the importance of purging outside when possible, especially in older houses with plumbing that might not be able to handle it. “Remember, proper purging is done when food isn’t anywhere near digested. It can sometimes clog the pipes, and when a plumber is called it’s not just expensive, but a surefire way to expose you to whoever you live with.”

She scrolled through the posts. Over twenty were posted in the past twelve hours. Girls shared their own thinspiration photos, photoshopped models with waists the size of their calves. Harper knew they were photoshopped, but that didn’t stop the desire inside her to mimic it.

Other photos clearly weren’t. She could tell when someone was skeletal. I’m not that bad, right? she thought. Some of these girls were seriously fucked up. I don’t want to look like a skeleton. Not totally. Maybe just the shoulder and collarbone area …

She’d always loved the look of the emaciated collarbone, deep enough you could serve soup from it. One of the girls in the house had broken her collarbone as a teenager. The result, in addition to being incredibly thing, was a collarbone that looked truly alien. It was beautiful.

Harper picked up the brochure again. “Sometimes body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) can accompany an eating disorder. Although BDD is a separate mental disorder with its own markers, common signs include being unable to self-identify your own aesthetics. Anoretics in particular, when asked to draw an outline of their body to scale, tend to drastically exaggerate their size.”

Huh. That might be true. There were days Harper was sure she’d become grossly fat. She could feel that her stomach protruded and the extra weight she carried in her ass. Yet as she double checked her jeans, that fit loosely, they were still a size zero. And numbers don’t lie. Do they?

Jeans can stretch. They enlarge to fit. And then there’s vanity sizing. That’s why Harper tended to trust her measuring tape over anything else. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror and swore she saw a double chin or rolls of fat, all it took was a few measurements to snap out of it. She’d look again, and suddenly she’d be a little more normal.

She groaned and fell back on the bed. Helena was right. So were the doctors—not that she’d gathered the courage to see them in months. Every time she went, there was the scale. It wasn’t fair. Even though she always scheduled appointments first thing in the morning, so she could go in without eating or even brushing her teeth for fear of accidentally swallowing water, they only let her take her shoes off. She’d watch the nurse inch the scale upward and want to scream to take off her clothes. Otherwise, the weight wouldn’t be right.

Then there were the doctors who looked at her chart, confused why she was “so tall and thin with cholesterol that increased with every appointment.”

“Does high cholesterol run in your family?” one doctor had asked.

“I … I don’t know.”

“Huh. Maybe lay off the junk food and we’ll see next time.” Lay off the junk food? Fuck. If a doctor just called her fat, it was official.

It didn’t matter that she’d researched “underweight and high cholesterol” only to find that it was a common side effect of anorexia. One that doctors didn’t realize unless they specialized in eating disorders.

But if I stop, if I go to one of these places … I’ll get fat. She’d heard the stories. Tube-feeding and those things had 1,500 calories. No exercise allowed. They even served pizza and hamburgers, not even healthy food.

I can’t do this any longer. She looked at the pictures of the smiling girls on the cover. No gaunt faces or biceps the same size as their forearms. She wanted that. That freedom, that joy, the ability to say yes to a dinner invitation from a friend.

I’ll tell Sean the next time I see him. I swear I will. Even if he dumped her for it. She might have already messed everything up anyway, running out of the restaurant like that.

Harper picked up the delicate collar and sat in front of the mirror. Engraved on the inside was, “For my sweetheart.” She ran her finger over the etching. It was stunning and fit snug. She wanted so badly to believe what he said. And the collar, it fit right. It looked right. She wanted to be his.

But what if he can’t accept who I really am?