I was writing poems about food, essays about food, doodling pictures of food. If people had blogged back then, I would have blogged about food. I did everything you could do with food except eat it. I liked the bit in Ulysses where the guy remembers getting fed: Softly she gave me in my mouth the seedcake warm and chewed. Mawkish pulp her mouth had mumbled sweetsour of her spittle. Joy: I ate it: joy.

This wasn’t a feeling but a remembered feeling. Me. And me now, he said. There was only the gap between, the longing. I could remember myself larger. Now I felt like a single point on a vast plain. There wasn’t another body for miles.

The third day Tilly got her energy back. The sweating was worse, but the shaking was better. “Now it just feels like the flu,” she said. “It’s coming out through my skin.”

Her appetite returned and I took this seriously, like a gift had been given to both of us. I peeled an orange for her. I bought a salad.

She watched a lot of TV. I could tell this was part of her usual routine, because she already had her favorites—reality shows about teenagers, about animals.

“Let’s go for a walk,” I said. “We need some sun.”

We walked from parking lot to parking lot. We must have walked a mile without hitting any sidewalks. The outside world smelled like tar and car exhaust. Everything was gleaming, hard light shivering off dirty metal hoods.

“Scenic,” she said. She wanted to go back. She felt sick. She wanted more stories.

About my disorder? It was just one story over and over again. Every day was the fucking same. I got the feeling Tilly understood that.

It was barely six. It wouldn’t be dark for hours. We had the whole night to dissolve. At first I’d thought she could sleep her way through the worst of this, but that was before I’d heard her nightmares. Maybe it was better, I thought, to keep her awake as long as I could.

I could tell her about boys, I said. I’d known a few.

In the beginning there was Josh, my tenth-grade obsession. I was obsessed with his Judaism, at least, the thickness of it—years and years layered around this ordinary boy, shimmering off his glasses and braces, onionskins of history and myth. He invited me to his seders and we dipped eggs into salt for the sadness of our ancestors, his ancestors, and I pretended to hate gefilte fish even though I didn’t, because hating was also part of the ritual, a dislike passed down through generations.