It’s a routine I know well, and it’s scary how quickly I find my rhythm. But the more I purge, the less I think about Jack. It doesn’t matter that all this—spending hours a day at the gym, purging my meals, taking laxatives—increases the hate I have for my body exponentially. Because, really, the one thing I’ve learned from all this is that my body isn’t enough. I’m ugly and fat and misshapen, and I’ll never be desirable. Not for Jack. Not for anyone. I’ll never be enough. I’m useless and miserable, and I hate every square inch of the skin I wear. I want to rip it off and start over, slip into anything else, be anyone else as long as I’m not me.

Because I am nothing.

I’m not beautiful or handsome.

I’m not skinny.

I’m not someone worthy of love.

I am nothing.

I pop a laxative.

Because I am disgusting and disgusted with myself

I overeat.

Because what’s the point? I’m fat, a word that grows teeth and bites me every time I stuff my face with carbs.

I just want the pain to go away.

Every day is a week, a roller coaster that never ends, just loops and curves around the same bends, over and over. I’m not strapped down, but I’m also unable to exit the moving cart. I’m screaming for help, but nobody can hear me.

Because I don’t actually speak up.

When I look in the mirror, I see something hideous, something so deformed that I don’t recognize it, and it haunts me. It lives in my shadows and stalks me in the reflections of windows I walk past, taunting me. Wherever I go, It follows. It swallows me. Whole.

I float across campus like a ghost.

Even if I’m around friends, I feel alone. Hollow. A void that can only be filled with food, which slides into more depression and more laxatives, more chronic exercise, more, more, more just to feel more, more, more than nothing.

At dinner with Benny and Rhett, who have quietly become a thing, Benny looks at me with serious eyes.

“Chase, you need to get help.” He grabs my hand. “I’m worried about you. We both are. What’s going on?”

“I’m fine,” I say through a smile so forced, it hurts my cheeks.

Benny and Rhett exchange glances. Then Benny says, “I hear you. I saw the laxatives. Rae told me—”

“Rae told you?” I wish I were shocked or that I can at least pretend to be mad, but I’m not. I didn’t know Benny and Rae talked, but like everything else, I don’t care.

“I was worried. So is she. You’re like a zombie and—”

“I wish. Being dead wouldn’t be so bad.”