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All-Consuming

by Taryn Rose Frazier

My sister walks in on me as I contort myself in bed, trying to take a bite of my inner thigh—the fleshy part that’s rubbed against the other thigh ever since I got curves. I sit up so fast my head hits the underside of the upper bunk.

Avery’s eyes are wide. “Rowan, what are you doing?” she hisses. Avery gets angry when she’s scared, because she hates being scared.

“Nothing,” I say. I tug my jeans up over the offending thighs and fumble with the zipper. Avery’s only two years younger, but I’ve always felt motherly toward her. Mom always lies to me when she doesn’t want me to worry—Dad and I are just having a loud discussion, or of course Grandpa is going to get better, or you’ll be fine—so I do the same for Avery.

Avery crosses her arms and waits. After fourteen years of sharing a room, she knows me well enough to tell when I’m lying. She also knows me well enough to tell when I’m not going to talk, so when an awkward minute passes and I’m still picking lint off my comforter, she throws up her hands and leaves.

That’s where it starts.

It starts with curiosity. How would it feel not to have my legs rub against each other, not to jiggle like Jell-O when I run, to have angles instead of parabolas in my geometry? It starts with one bite, taken with the sound of my sister’s angry footsteps in my ears.

Once, when I was eight, I smuggled a bag of gummy bears into bed, passing them up to Avery through the gap between wall and mattress. Secrecy gave those forbidden candies the sour-sweet flavor of guilt mixed with adrenaline. Now, when I peel a strip of flesh off my hip and consume it under the covers, I taste that secret excitement again.

That first week I eat only small pieces of myself—a little stomach roll, a mouthful of soft tricep, only what people won’t notice. Peach-fuzz skin, pillowy fat, pearly fascia. It comes off beautifully, clean and bloodless. I consume myself in the school bathroom, in the basement at home, in the changing room at the store, then I make a big show of pushing food around my plate when I’m with people.

I’m high on the discovery that I don’t need to eat food like other people. I can just live off my body, a body I never really liked anyway. I almost tell Avery, but she’s going through a weird phase—avoids me at school, won’t talk to me at home, always glaring at me. Whatever. I don’t have the bandwidth for her issues.

Each mouthful I take makes me hungrier, and soon I can’t get enough. After a month, my clothes sag on my diminishing limbs, and I wear baggier things to compensate. I skip Homecoming because my dress would show the exposed muscle of my newly-thin arms. My mother, with the awkwardness born of love, cooks my favorite foods at dinnertime, then tries not to look hurt when I leave them uneaten. My dad pretends nothing is wrong and talks too loudly and too cheerfully. Avery watches me across the table through narrowed eyes.

I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror planning what I’ll eat next. It becomes a game to see how much of myself I can eat, and the tremor in my hands and the spots in my vision tell me I’m winning. I’ve stripped most of my skin and fat away now, which means I’m cold a lot, so I wear layer upon layer of clothing. My slowed heartbeat makes running laps for P.E. hard, but at least I don’t jiggle the way I used to. The other girls stare at me in the locker room, at the places where white bone flashes in my legs and at my sternum. But I don’t care about any of that. There’s something so architectural about naked bones. If I could just see every one of mine, maybe I’ll finally feel like I’ve won.

Still Avery watches, frowning and silent. The jeans we used to share slip down my fleshless pelvis now, and the belt I stole from her last year doesn’t have a notch tight enough to cinch them around my spine.

We used to get along, used to wear matching dresses and tell each other our secrets. When she was four, she’d climb up into the top bunk and kick her heels against the wall whenever a storm came through, and I was the one who figured out that all she wanted was for someone to slip a hand up between the gap between the bed and the wall and hold hers tight until the thunder stopped. We’ve been best friends and worst enemies, the way sisters close in age usually are, but we’re nothing now. When I walk into a room, Avery walks out.

I don’t have the energy to think about why this is. I don’t have the energy for anything these days. The highs I used to get feel flat, and I try to ignore the fact that there’s not much of me left to eat—that I’ve picked my bones cleaner than the carcasses on the side of the interstate. My sluggish heart is visible through my exposed ribs. My nerves are raw and exposed.

I’m trudging out of our bedroom one morning when Avery blocks my way.

“Move. I’m going to be late,” I say, stepping around her.

She braces her hands on the doorframe. “Tell me why you do it.”

“Do what?” I ask, not meeting her eyes. Avery waits, unmoving. I know what she means, and she knows I know. I try to shove her with one skeletal hand, but I don’t have enough muscle left to make my bones do what I want them to do. “I don’t know why,” I snap.

She shrugs. “Looks like you’ll be late, then.”

I try to roll my eyes, but I’ve eaten my delicate ocular muscles. “Fine,” I say. I slump down on my bed and grope for the words. “I’ll never be enough, but at least I can be less.”

Avery’s scowl deepens. “That makes no sense.”

I rub my upper arms, and bone grates on bone. “It’s like, no matter how much I eat, I still don’t like myself. So I keep going because at least there’s less of me to dislike.”

Avery comes and sits on the bed next to me, but she doesn’t look at me. “Are you happy?” she asks quietly, but her voice isn’t a gentle kind of quiet; it’s low and tight, like she’s barely keeping a lid on her anger.

I was expecting screaming, maybe accusations, definitely arguments. Her question disarms me, like we’ve been pulling on opposite ends of the rope and she’s suddenly let go.

I flop back on the bed and cover my face. “No,” I whisper through my hands. “These are supposed to be the best days of my life, but all I feel is scared—of growing up, of never belonging, of failing. I just wanted to have control of something.”

Saying that aloud strips away the last shred of self-deception I’d wrapped myself in. I’m crying and Avery’s crying, but it’s a good kind of crying, like rain after a storm.

After we scrape the tears and snot off our faces, she curls up next to me and rests her warm cheek against my jawbone. “Rowan, do you want help?”

No, I almost say. I don’t want to give up control. I don’t want to live in my own skin. I’m so tired that dying sounds easier than living, and I close my eyes and drift. A pain in my hand drags me back.

Avery is gripping my hand like it’s a lifeline—or am I the one hanging onto her?

“Please stay,” she says, not angry, just plain scared. “You’re almost gone.”

So tired. “I’ll try,” I say.

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My therapist tells me pain is normal, that it hurts to regrow the parts of me I consumed. Sometimes I stand in front of the mirror and think about eating the new skin and muscle and fat covering my bones. I lie in bed and put my fleshed-out forearm in my mouth, trying to remember what I taste like. My therapist tells me that’s normal too.

“Rowan,” a voice says from the top bunk. A hand appears in the gap between the bed and the wall. “What are you doing?”

I take Avery’s hand. “I’m staying.”