At the Central Square T-stop on an icy morning, I tripped on the long steps leading underground. I’d been dizzy because I was always dizzy. I only felt stable when I was lying down. I felt the crush of bodies and then I felt my own body, surging with darkness like syrup, and I tasted something sweet, like saliva before vomiting, and felt the hard edge of the step, the bruising pain across my cheek, the metal tang of blood in my mouth. I heard someone say, “Her foot’s twisted.”

I closed my eyes. I wasn’t dizzy anymore. I was lying down.

I opened my eyes and saw a pair of white sneakers, then a woman’s face. “Listen to me,” she said. “Your mouth is full of blood.”

She helped me to a coffee stand near the turnstiles. My ankle was already starting to swell. I was wondering how I’d run the next morning.

The guy behind the register was a balding man with braces. How did that happen to a person, both at once? It didn’t seem fair.

“She needs a bathroom,” the woman told him.

“Bathrooms aren’t for the public, ma’am.”

The woman whispered in my ear, “Smile.”

I smiled.

“Go ahead,” he said. “It’s right in back.”

I lifted one hand to my lips. When I pulled my fist away it was smeared red. Years later, I’d sit in front of Lucy with her wool skirt, prim and proper despite the way age had turned her body into rotten fruit. Strangers being nice never make anything better. They just make me feel alone.

The woman bought me coffee and a chocolate doughnut. She wanted to get my blood sugar back, she said. The coffee was hot against my hurt lips. I picked at the doughnut with my fingernail and sucked the crumbs off my finger. I did that a bunch of times, until there was a row of little nicks across the top. The woman watched me quietly. She pursed her lips. “I see,” she said finally. “So that’s what this is about.”

I broke off a little chunk, placed it on a paper napkin, broke off another chunk and placed it on another napkin. I actually did things like that. It’s funny to remember. Not funny, so much. Something else.

I knew that lots of girls with my problem needed to be convinced they had it, but I’d known from the beginning. I felt I’d chosen it, wanted it, though I knew I could never admit this to anyone. I watched my collarbone getting sharper. I counted my upper ribs obsessively, like tapping piano keys to play scraps of song. I kept a fat black book where I recorded the number of calories I’d eaten each day. Years later, when I came across that book and threw it in my mother’s trash bin, I felt a sense of pity. It contained the worst parts of me, and now they didn’t belong to anyone.