He touched me and ignored me at the same time. I know because I opened my eyes, and saw that he was still staring straight ahead, nodding to the beat of his silent music. I closed my eyes again. I wanted to melt into the window, like my breath did. I wanted to disappear.

When the bus came to a shuddering halt in the vast parking lot of Colonial Williamsburg he got up, grabbed his bag and shrugged it over his shoulder before joining the line to get off. He didn’t even look at me. Amy was waiting when I climbed down the metal steps.

‘Well, what happened? I am so jealous! He’s the cutest.’

I shrugged. ‘Nothing much.’

‘You had to talk about something—it was two hours!’

‘Yeah, he’s nice, I guess.’

I couldn’t say what I’d let him do. How he’d touched me there and I froze. I spent the entire excursion watching blacksmiths, butter churners, musket makers and grownups playing dress-ups in a weird fog. It was my body’s fault for changing. Because it even felt good, a little, and that was half the shame. Not eating lunch helped. Denying myself the yellow cornbread muffins which steamed when you broke them open, the pats of fresh-churned butter melting into the coarse crumbs.

But on the way home—here’s the thing—I let it happen again. I don’t know why. And I didn’t know why again and again that year when he cornered me in the stairwell between classes, beneath the bleachers during PE—when he touched my body as if it were just a thing. He never looked at me. We hardly spoke. I’d always been agreeable to everyone; it was part of being perfect.

It takes work to become invisible. It doesn’t happen all at once. I wore more and more clothes. Sweaters with necks that swallowed my face. Sleeves that hid my hands. I had to roll the waistbands on my pants because I was losing so much weight. I started to keep lists. There was so much else I wanted to write in my diary, but this seemed safe. What I ate. Every. Single. Thing. In one of the clinics, later, there was a therapist who said: ‘When you let deprivation feel good, you let in the possibility of disorder.’ Did the deprivation feel good? It felt better than the alternative.