Still, a guard called me over that day and instructed me to hand my luggage to another guard on the opposite side of the fence, who took it and tossed it into a tube that looked like an MRI machine. He placed no tag on the bag, no receipt was printed, and no record existed to show that it belonged to me. The look on my face must have signaled worry. “Calm down,” he said. “You’ll find it once you get through security.”

I was the last person to get through that day, likely because of my twentysomething, volatile, and presumably rebellious age. The Lebanese stamps that decorated every other page of my passport didn’t help, either. When I finally got to the luggage area my suitcase was gone.

•

“They’ll go in a safe,” Nancy assured me, “in a plastic bag with your name on it.” She handed me a roll of masking tape and a thick red marker. I ripped off a piece and wrote my name in all caps, and then pressed it onto the Ziploc. I was about to ask if I could at least keep my iPod when a man with a soft brown beard, bulbous red nose, and topaz-colored eyes walked into the room. He wore khaki pants with a hunter-green polo and Merrell shoes. He looked like one of those doctors you see in the movies, the kind from the 1950s, like he could administer shock therapy on you and make it home in time for a TV dinner and the six o’clock news. He knelt down beside me and spoke quietly, smiling. “Hi, I’m Richard. I’m the psychiatrist here.”

I looked into his eyes and saw it, that familiar thing. Rage. I could tell he’d acted on it before, a number of times, but had since built his career on repressing it. I smiled back at him. He stood and patted me on the back. “Glad you’re here,” he said.

“Well,” Nancy interjected. “It’s four thirty now, so dinner’s in half an hour. Why don’t you go out into the living room until then and meet some of the other clients?”

I looked over my shoulder and into the other room. “Just go out there?”

•

On my first day in treatment for anorexia, nearly five years earlier, I walked in with my hoodie pulled over my face. The center was just a few blocks from my summer sublet in Porter Square, and I was afraid I might see someone who recognized me. It didn’t matter that I’d only been in Cambridge a few weeks and knew practically no one. During dinner a counselor tapped me on the shoulder and told me I’d put too much food on my plate, a move that propelled me to enact an independent seventy-two-hour hunger strike. Across the table a woman started crying onto her burrito. “Will I ever escape this?” she wailed.