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It starts the year she turns nine. It will get worse She will get better and better at it, until her senior year, but it starts the week after the thing with David.
Her parents sit her down at the kitchen table. Her mother tries to explain: it isn't her fault; no one blames her for what happened, really they don't, but it will be so much better for her to start over at a new school. Her father says hardly anything and – when he looks at her at all – watches her like she's become some unpredictable, inhuman creature right under his nose.
They name a date for Moving Day. Her mother encourages her to mark it on her calendar in pretty ink. Her father says he will bring home boxes for packing tomorrow. She has questions – lots – but when they ask, she denies any need for answers, and they leave her alone in the kitchen.
Upstairs in her room, she tells Pinky what's happening, a new package of Oreos crinkling in her grasp. Her throat is thick and tight from the need to cry, but she swallows cookie after cookie past the lump there, chocolate and the thick sweetness of the icing masking the salt taste of tears and snot.
Later, with the paper and cellophane package torn into dozens of pieces and hidden at the bottom of her trashcan, and the tile cold against the backs of her legs, she feels better. Maybe not good exactly, but lighter, cleaner – even though she got some of it in her hair. It's almost like the black slime in the bowl is not just cookie parts, but every other embarrassing, dirty thing inside her, too.
If she could get rid of all of it, then maybe everything would go back to the way it was before. But even as she thinks it, she knows it's dumb. Time doesn't work that way, and even if did, she's too late. Every bad, stupid thing she's done is already a part of her, worked into muscle and bone and the fat around her belly and thighs.
Moving is better, mostly because of Lia. When Lia is over and they watch cartoons and eat Lucky Charms – Cassie usually eats her own bowl and most of Lia's, too – and read the Enchanted Forest Chronicles out loud, with Cassie acting out all of Morwen's parts, she feels like a regular girl and not some changeling monster Principal Parrish and his wife got saddled with. Her parents are glad when she looks like a normal girl with normal friends.
Lia doesn't understand all of it. For one thing, her parents are different. Doctor Marrigan is always in her business, it's true, but where Cassie's mother is always afraid that she'll do something badwrongshameful again, Dr. Marrigan mostly seems to worry that Lia will be ordinary when she could be extraordinary. It's a shame they have to keep the food things a secret; Lia really is the best at emptiness. Dr. Marrigan would be proud if she understood.
Lia doesn't understand everything – she's always been strong enough to stop herself from stuffing her traitorous body with all the sugar and grease it demands – but she understands enough to guard the mall bathroom, keeping the faucets running to disguise any of the noises that might give away Cassie's secrets. She understands enough to listen when Cassie returns from camp with tips from the older girls in her cabin and to follow her through links to websites, message boards, secret blogs. A sisterhood of girls just like them: struggling to stay strong and regal and pure in a world that only wants fat, docile cattlegirls who go only where they're led.
In eighth grade, the boys start paying attention to her again. No matter how careful, how quick she is to purge, she can't keep off the padding of fat, but at least some of it has shaped itself into a curve at her hips, and boobs that Clay, who always get the lead in the Spring play, and Tyler, with his yellow pickup, and Adam, who could always smuggle rum out of the cabinet in his mom's basement, would do just about anything to get a look at. At a Halloween party, she even lets a girl from another school kiss her. There's a kind of power in knowing that other people want her, deciding how much of her they can have, but it never lasts, and when things end, they always end badly. Other people are unpredictable, and she has enough trouble keeping her own body in check.
That summer, Lia shares her own new tricks: tiny cuts, delicate and raw and beautiful. She says they clear her head, give her focus when she feels her life and her time and her choices being jerked out of her hands. Cassie traces the fine red lines with her fingers and wishes she could stomach the sight of blood.
The accident is not that bad, but once the doctors have Lia, they can't wait to dissect her and put her pieces under a microscope. It's weeks before they see each other again, Lia with a fresh ten pounds of sugar-water pumped into her veins and Cassie with the memory of ice cream and cheesecake and chicken nuggets and barbecue chips and macaroni-and-cheese and blue raspberry popsicles on her tongue. She hauls still-skinny Lia into her arms and tells her how proud she is of her refusal to break.
She doesn't want to cut Lia out; no one else understands so well, and it leaves a hole in her life – one that feels bigger than the space Lia's real body takes up beside her. But when Lia's parents check her back into the hospital, suddenly all Cassie's parents seem interested in is scrutinizing her habits, weighing in on her choices. One night, when they're talking about her too loudly in the den, Principal Parrish calls Lia a “toxic influence”, and Cassie sees the way to save herself.
It takes an entire box of pop-tarts and half a jar of peanut butter to work up the nerve to call Lia's cell.