[unfinished: i don't know where this is going.]

wanted to write a story about the cleaner you try to become, the more unclean you get. everyone wants her to die nicely. she likes the feeling of doing feel good bad things. real suffering is messy.

Unclean

My molars hurt. I’ve been gnawing on my finger for a week. I hate thinking I caused it to happen. But there is evidence that suggests otherwise: smoker, puker, ex-flosser. I can sing my vices to the tune of that Steve Miller song. I do when I’m home alone. This is all to say it’s getting harder and harder to pretend this was a lightning strike, completely out of nowhere. I don’t like doctors, and I haven’t seen one since I was forced to. Nothing concerning has happened to my body until now.

The final stage of learning about death as a little girl is learning that the world likes little girls more when they are dead. My mother didn’t care about herself. She scavenged and gathered food when somewhen placed a scrap of something on the counter. Flying by and clawing it up. We didn’t talk about it but I noticed how she never mentioned she was hungry, and the girls at school didn’t, either. It made sense: my brain told me not to bring it up, too. I learned it was better for your nerve receptors to remain idle. We were like persistent library patrons while everyone else seemed to leave the conditions of this eternal library whenever they wanted. Remembering an unwritten rule that you would be banned from the world of inanimate knowledge if you yelled, belched, drank sugary drinks or ate crumby food, because we were good at remembering things, because we were smart.

Everyone else seems to have a memory of when they were first called pudgy or fat or told they had gained weight. My mom and stepdad never did any of that. There was the absence of the word hunger, but also the words skinny and fat. When I told my mother she was skinny as she was dressing when I was a child she gasped and told me to hush. She took it as an insult when I was making an observation, as kids do. As I matured and grew several sizes bigger than her, I made it a point to never bring up our difference in body types again.

I don’t know where I got the idea to ignore my hunger as a child. I’ve never been able to pinpoint the jumping off point. When I decided it was a good idea. I don’t know if it was a decision I made. Maybe I had the same desire to refuse it as a baby without the brain power of a twenty-five year old to register it. Maybe that’s why I cried and cried.

I always liked puking. The feeling of rolling your eyes back and placing all your focus in the back of your throat to feel that wash of flavored hydrochloric acid, like a nicotine receptor built into your stomach. Ears ringing, heart racing. What could be better? It wasn’t a self-hatred thing. I preferred for the scale to go down, but I didn’t try to beat myself up for it when it didn’t. It was a form of mediation that was guaranteed to soothe me; something I enjoyed that people had deemed wrong before I was born.

I gained a lot of weight when I was fourteen. My stepfather got me an ice cream cake for my birthday and from then on I was hooked. The smooth buttercream frosting melted on your tongue before you could taste the sugar, even if you had a spoonful, and you would have to take another bite. Mom ate my chocolate-covered strawberry. I had my stepdad take me back a month later. ‘This can be our thing,’ he said. I felt strange sitting with him in the ice cream shop eating a slice of cake with a plastic fork. It felt like a bad date. I felt grown up in the worst way. I was with my stepdad and I was trying to snag a glance at the girl who decorated our ice cream cake. Happy 14th and 1/12 Mindy, the frosting read. The cursive chocolate almost ran off the cake.

She was the thinnest girl I had ever seen. Every angle she turned revealed a new bone, like a sculpture of single cut diamonds. Hips, ribs, pelvis. Her cheekbones jutted out like ears. She was purely unreal, like the monsters under my bed, like my dreams, like a macro cancer cell. Nothing was necessary to her. She bent down to wet the scoop like she was in slow motion, letting my eyes glide over her. I saw my step dad follow my gaze without saying anything and suddenly felt sick. I thought he could tell I envied her, but I didn’t want to seem shallow to him. I ate one piece and then another. He let me drive back home. When we got out of the car I was craving the buttercream and I took the box to my room without anyone seeing. Each time the cream coated my mouth it fell away and my throat pulsed for more. A different bite; a new thrust of flavor. There was something missing from me and my brain was saying this, that, dopamine hit after dopamine hit. I fell asleep with the cake melting on my bed. When my stomach rumbled I was dreaming and I thrust my pouch into the cream to cool it. I was rubbing up against it, almost humping the cake into my diaphragm until I woke up, bed covered in chocolate. I ran to the bathroom and heaved, cooling my throat with sugary gamey bile until all the toxins were out of me and my stomach was raw again. It felt just as good coming back up as it did going down. No—better.

I didn’t puke often; just when I wanted to feel so good that I couldn’t think. Three times a week on average. That changed when I went to college. My parents told me they would pay for a single dorm if I wanted—they knew I liked my privacy—but I had an idea that being housed with other college girls would be good for me. I took the roommate survey and chose the fun answers: extrovert, door always open, up past midnight girls. I wanted to meet people who didn’t hide the fact that they were going to college to try new things with new people in a place they had never been before, meaning girls who understood the unwritten rule that drugs with frat guys wasn’t junkie behavior for the next four years. I moved in with Shay and Portia the last week of August and didn’t puke once that whole week. We were drinking, not eating, and I could hold my liquor with my eighteen-year-old stomach. I’m no lightweight, I said with confidence, like it was a character trait and character traits last forever. When I puked for the first time in college it was because my mom sent me a care package. Astronaut ice cream and fudge from that dumb novelty shop in town where I would buy beaded earrings. I couldn’t sleep and ate all of everything. I had no choice but to puke. I didn’t want anyone to hear me in the girl’s bathroom. Anyone who was trying to piss in the middle of the night would know I was a puker. My roommates were asleep in their beds so I decided to just pretend like I had woken up sick and couldn’t make it to the bathroom. I stared at their eyes in the dark to make sure they weren’t moving before I leaned over and emptied my stomach into my Target trash can. The puke bubbled like a fresh two liter of soda. I looked up and saw Shay staring back at me. Or twin beds were joined at the end, hot-dog style with a barrier in the middle, like anti-homeless architecture.

“I knew you had some,” she whispered.

I wiped my mouth. “What?”

“Hard shit,” she said. “Where did you go tonight?”

“Nowhere,” I said. “Not tonight.”

“Then where’d you get it?”

I almost said my mom, but then I realized she was talking about alcohol.

“I’ve been seeing this guy in my class,” I said. “A sophomore.”

“I’m a good roommate. I can’t let you drink alone.”

It was a good thing I actually had a bottle under my desk.

I couldn’t share clothes with Shay or Portia. Shay was thin like a twelve-year-old boy or a flapper girl and Portia was busty like an apple on stilts. Portia had that photo from Time Magazine above her desk—‘The Most Beautiful Suicide.’ She was obsessed with it. “Not many people know her name,” she said. “Just the way she happened to fall. They only took her likeness when she had nothing else to say. Evelyn Francis McHale. I’d like to name my daughter Evelyn Francis.”

I thought the way she idolized her was crude. Sometimes I caught her praying to it like it was a poster of the virgin Mary. She elevated her to sainthood. Her holy beauty. So much taken from the world as she was at her ripest. It felt right for Portia to idolize her. Dedicate her work as a communications major to a shot of a suicide victim. I wondered what it would be like if she had a photo of an ugly person’s suicide on her wall. I couldn’t imagine it. Maybe that was what was really holy about beauty. It lets you transcend death. I couldn’t imagine my dead body on that wall. There would be no ofrenda because the image would be horrifying. For cold forensic experts, not a faithful congregation. If you were thin and landed from the great height of beauty you stayed beautiful as if still alive, your ghost the aesthetic preference of their nostalgic memories, the bedside lover giving herself over, her hand at her neck like she is thinking of undressing or choking, beautiful mystery that can’t think now, only her berry lipstick focal. You could wander the Earth in two-dimensional form like you had lived—you would be seventy-eight now—so people could pray to you.