“Are you hot? I’m hot,” she itches at the neck of her plum turtleneck. Her neck resembles mine, although the thick skin below her chin protrudes over the starched fabric of her turtleneck, while mine shrinks behind the outline of my sweatshirt, the cotton gaping around my collarbone. I haven’t been hot in months, and she knows this. Her questions are always intentional but strategically strewn throughout a conversation as if they are mere nonchalant arbitrary comments, seeds cast into a field by a blind farmer. I know this, and I think she knows I know this. But she continues to do it anyways. I shake my head, but she still rolls down the window. Sometimes my face grows hot, prickling down the back of my neck, but my arms are always cold. I try to rub some heat back into them, but my hands are even colder. 

“What are you doing, are you cold or something?” she turns down the radio as if she finds this conversation more important than the flat words of the pastor on her Christian radio show. 

“Here, have some peanut butter crackers,” she pulls a package from her stache in the center console reserved for when she feels the sudden urge to ‘put some fat on my bones’. 

“I’m really not hungry.”

“Yes, you are,” she opens my fist and presses the package into my palm, like a sage grandfather to his grandson with a lucky coin, crushing a couple of the crackers. I really am hungry. She looks out the window as she drives, glancing over her shoulder to change lanes. I bury the crackers in the bottom of my backpack and take a sip of water. I’ve always loved the feeling of water pooling in an empty stomach like an acid raindrop in a birdbath, closing my eyes as the cool trickles down my chest until it settles in its little pouch between my ribs. I take a few more sips until I’m no longer as hungry. 

“Do you know where we’re going?” she clenches the steering wheel like she does my wrist at the dinner table, as if she’s afraid of letting go, because I might just disappear. 

I shake my head again. 

“I’m taking you to an eating disorder support group.”

I know I have anorexia. I’m not in denial. I’ve known for a while. I didn’t at first, it took me a few months to catch on to what I was already doing to myself, what the monstrous being behind my yellowing irises was doing to me. By the time I realized, it was too late, I couldn’t stop. It couldn’t stop. Addicted to empty. The monster hated food, and it hated me. The number of nights the gaunt shadows of my feet cast on the scale steadily increasing each week. Warm fingers clenching my cold bones tighter and tighter, but careful not to crush them. I just never wanted her to know. The monster likes hiding, that’s why he hides inside of me. He can’t face the world, all of its judging faces. Eat. Just eat. It’s just food. It’s not that hard. 

“Hi, what’s your name?” she has the voice of a dentist office hygienist, and she looks like her name might be Danielle. 

“Hope,” My voice has always been smaller than me, and I keep shrinking to match it, but it keeps getting smaller, and I can’t keep up. 

“Michelle.” I was close. They both have an ‘elle’. 

The chairs are short, plucked in all their rough maroon glory from the elementary school across the street. My feet lay flat on the carpet, and I rest my elbows on my knees, leaning forward into the circle, bracing myself. But my sharp elbows pierce my knees, and everyone’s looking at me, so I sit up, scan the crowd. I’m the biggest one here. But they all look sick. One is perched like a mockingbird on her chair. She’s the thinnest out of everyone, looking down upon us all from her high place of “Well, the only thing I ate today was a cup of grapes.” She sits on her feet and hugs her knees. She looks cold, and she’s definitely hungry. Her ponytail is thin, strings of fallen-out hair resting on her shoulder like a nest. But I wish I was her. 

“I want everybody to challenge themselves today,” my mom’s hand is on my thigh, and she doesn’t remove it until Michelle finishes speaking, as if I might get up and flee the room at the mention of a challenge. 

“Eat something you normally wouldn’t. If you haven’t had ice cream in a while, have some ice cream. If you haven’t had pizza in a while, have some pizza. And make sure it goes all the way down, and stays down,” with that, she rubs her muffin top, starting at her chest, motioning all the way down to the line of her pants. I don’t think it’s that easy. I’ve never been a puker. It feels too much like giving up. If I had to feel the guilt going down, I don’t want to feel the sour taste of regret on the way up. Maybe that’s why I haven’t had pizza or ice cream in over a year. I convinced myself I don’t like them, but saliva floods my dry tongue at the mention of the forbidden foods. 

My hand is shaking. I ball it into a fist, and pinch it in as small as it gets, imagine I’m squeezing the sweat clinging to my palms out the hole the crease in my pinkie makes, wiping the residual moisture on my jeans. I then reach a tentative slightly steadier hand into the pit of my backpack and retrieve the package of crackers. I shove one between my lips, chew, swallow. I don’t even pause to taste the slivers of sweet filling. I wash it down with a sip of water from the refreshment table behind me. The mockingbird gapes at me, and I think for a moment she might fly out of her seat into the ceiling, dissipating as if she were never here. But she reaches into her purse and pulls out a Rice Krispy Treat, the teal plastic glinting in the dull rec room light like a beacon, perhaps stashed away from a well-meaning lunch-time offering. She nibbles at a corner cautiously, as if she hasn’t quite figured out how to chew properly yet. I watch her finish the sweet bar, and it’s quite a powerful thing. I glance around the room, and everyone is eating. A bag of Doritos. A cheese stick. A chocolate bar. Bits of plastic envelopes filled with various indulgences, taken from their previously permanent place shielded by books in backpacks to hide one’s own mind from the gnawing urge to eat. 

Daylight savings time is my favorite part of the year. When we return to the car after the meeting, the doors are frozen shut, and my mom has to pry them open. The sky is dark, a black tablecloth peppered with dandruff. The road is deserted, and her high beams monopolize the entire strip. They start thin at the car’s hood, a shy smile at the tip of a lip, spanning outwards the further away they get, eventually vanishing into the horizon. This is the moment I realize there’s nothing wrong with big things. In fact, they’re quite mesmerizing. Something to get lost in, lose yourself in, and find it much more rewarding when you discover yourself again afterward. So, what’s so wrong with big bodies? It’s just the skin that carries us through these realizations.

“It was really great, what you did in there.”

I nod.  

“You were the thinnest one there,” she adds, her face slack under the car’s ceiling light. She means well. She always means well. 

“I was?”

She nods. 

“But the others,” I pause, thinking of the mockingbird, “They looked sick.”

She doesn’t say anything.

Sometimes I wish the roads could talk. Then it wouldn’t be so silent. She doesn’t say what she’s been holding behind pursed lips for months. I say it to myself. You are sick. I’m hungry. At first, I relish the feeling of being empty. What am I so scared of? Being fat? No, I’m scared of losing control. But the truth is, I’ll never be in control. Someone else is always at the wheel. Cold hands. An empty road. An empty stomach. The crackers only made me hungrier. I think that when I get home, I’ll eat. I’ll get in the shower and look at myself in the mirror. I’ll see myself for what I am. I’ll be full. My mind will be full. Full of the future. A big future, a full future. And the monster will creep along the windowsill and slink into the night. I won’t look down, or pinch at my waist. I’ll close my eyes, feel the water envelop me like a blanket and bathe in the thought of everything I can be.