66 ~ So, Annie, Are You Okay?-4

I scoffed, raising my eyebrows at her as I began to amble towards the stairs. I felt too tired to feel with the blossoming relationship that was Mikayla Rose and Louis Webber or listen to them as they awkwardly tried to explain that it had just happened, one night, after writing some romantic ballad or something. “Yeah, I can tell,” I muttered as I reached out one hand and dropped it on the stairs’ railing, treading onto the first step. “Amanda,” she said, and it felt as if my name was meant to draw me in from where I stood on the staircase, with my hand poised on the smooth and curved surface of the railing and the cushioned carpeting over the steps thick underneath my socked feet, and suddenly cause me to turn around and face them, to face her, and allow her to captivate my attention as she ambled around the side of the couch, her knee bumping against the corner of the end table and shifting a glass vase on the top, and Louis scratched the back of his head, somewhat uncomfortably, but I didn’t turn around to glance at either one of them as she continued, her voice taking on a faintly rushed tone, as if she was trying to cram as many words as she could before I would bolt up the stairs. “Orion told me. He told me that you’re—” Over, ugly, fat, codependent, a freak—these words swirled within my mind, crashing into each other and creating a mess of alphabet letters just waiting to arrange themselves into more thorny words to pierce my skin so I blurted out to stop her, “So are you guys a thing or do you normally have sex with people on the couch?” She rolled her eyes at me, as if she had been expecting this but had been hoping that I wouldn’t have gone there anyway, and even though both of them were fully clothed, with their zippers zipped and buttons buttoned, I still blurted out the accusation, and I fought the warm urge to blush as she retorted, “Yeah, we’re a thing and you know we weren’t have sex so stop trying to change the subject.” She sighed, impatiently at first but then as the breath drifted from her lips, it softened and her features relaxed into an almost sad expression as she looked at me. “He told me that you’re—” “It’s getting late so . . .” My voice sounded panicked, even in my own ears, but I didn’t want to hear the words spoken out loud, to hear the sharp judgmental edges of her voice as she would finish her sentence or the pitiful grimace her countenance would involuntarily take on as she stared at me, shaking her head inwardly at me and my lack of self-confidence. “Bulimic,” she completed, blinking as the word flew from her lips and entered the air surrounding us that thickened with intensity as the second past as she stared at me, blinking, with this glint in her eyes that seemed to resemble so many different emotions: surprise, sadness, confusion, all muddled together like the smears of paint streaking across the canvas of an abstract painting. I felt my breath getting caught in my throat as I heard the word, bulimic, as she said it and when it ricocheted in my mind, and I traced a finger down the cool surface of the railing. I wasn’t bulimic. I had seen pictures of bulimic girls on the Internet and in slideshows projected against a whiteboard during health class at school in order to scare away from the prospect of becoming like them, and they were so much smaller than I was. Their bones protruded in narrow lumps underneath their skin and there was an emptiness in their eyes as they stared at the camera, and the skin underneath their eyes was rimmed dark, and their hair was thin. They didn’t look like me or my friends. We just watched what we ate, limited our portions, and threw up occasionally what we had consumed, but the urge to do it wasn’t consuming us. I hadn’t thrown up at all that day—although, I hadn’t eaten either—and I could stop if I wanted to. I wasn’t being controlled by it. “I’m not bulimic,” I told her, shaking my head softly as I stared down at my fingers brushing against the railing beside me, and I felt a small stab of anger toward Orion and that he always seemed to be spilling someone’s secrets, either it was that his girlfriend ate chalk or that his ex-girlfriend didn’t eat at all. “I had some food poisoning and he thought that I was bulimic, but I’m not, okay? So just go back to your making out and we’ll both pretend that we didn’t see each other tonight.” She scoffed as I turned around on the staircase, catching a glimpse of her angling her gaze toward Louis as she raised one of her eyebrows at him, as if she were inquiring whether or not he believed this, and I saw the faint twitch of a shrug on his shoulders. I had fixated my eyes on the top of the staircase, praying to hear the sloppy sounds of their mouth kissing and pulling apart or their feet padding toward the door, but instead I heard the creaking of the stairs behind me, and then just as I turned around, I felt Mikayla’s hand latching around my wrist, her fingers overlapping her thumb, and this seemed to surprise as she glanced down at her hand around my wrist, and then she shook her head, almost pitifully at me. “So food poisoning did this?” she asked, holding up my wrist and then letting it fall from her hand like it was grains of sand. In her mind, it probably felt just as light. “You’re . . . practically gone, Amanda.” Her voice softened and for a moment, I thought I saw someone other than Mikayla with the crimped hair and dazed, distant expressions but someone with gentle eyes and lips that looked as if they could produce a kind smile, the kind of person I would have envisioned her beautiful, angelic voice emitting from. But the kindheartedness and warm, large brown eyes couldn’t change the fact that I wasn’t bulimic and I wasn’t practically gone. I was right here and I was turning away from her, focusing on the cushioned feeling of my socked feet landing on the carpeted stairs as I ambled up the steps and not on the fact that my sister’s sigh nearly sounded shaky or that my heart beat was pounding within my chest and my breath was thin and unsatisfying as I tried to restrain myself from running into my bedroom and jamming the door shut. After finally passing the threshold of my bedroom and quietly closing the door, I laid down on my bed over the navy duvet neatly placed over my bed, and I didn’t close my eyes until I heard the front door closing and the muffled sound of their car engine starting in the street.