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Allison Reynolds had to be perfect.
She can’t remember a time before weekly hair appointments, her mother in the chair next to her getting her golden hair carefully touched up so no one could see a hint of grey shining through. When she turned seven mom hired a her a personal makeup artist that came along with the barbie doll she wanted, and at ten she’d quit her baseball little league when mom got pissed she kept chipping her nails.
She was good at that kind of perfect. She’d liked it even, the way her dad called her darling and toted her around at parties, showing her off to his friends the way mom showed off her diamond earrings. She was a pretty ornament, a beautiful doll, the perfect evening accessory. As adored as it was possible for an object to be. Even back then she’d understood she was more beloved to her parents as a puppet than a person, but she was young enough and pampered enough that she didn’t care.
The problem with that kind of pretty though, was that she very quickly learned it came with conditions. She could play sports but she couldn’t look like she played sports. Her hair could be short but not too short, could be dyed, but only natural colours. She could pierce her ears but not her nose. And she always, always, had to fit what was in her closet.
She was fine until she turned twelve. Years ago she’d traded softball for exy, swapping muscular arms for toned ones, and managed to keep her sculpted thighs even as sinewy muscle built under the small cushion of fat. But the second her zippers starting getting tight around her waist, harsh lines digging into soft skin, mom brought a scale into her room and hired a personal trainer.
“You have to stay at a healthy weight, darling. You want to stay my beautiful girl, don’t you?”
Allison did.
After the trainer came the nutritionist, and after the nutritionist, the diet plan. Allison looked at her mother, beautiful and golden, at her father’s proud smile that had started to slip, and promised herself she’d get back to perfect.
And she did. Three weeks of rabbit food and hours of running and pilates meant her jeans went back to fitting comfortably around her waist. She was perfect again. Dad’s smile was back full force, and as he tucked her under his arm she promised herself she’d never be anything but pretty and perfect ever again. Mom took her to get her nails done, and dad bought her a brand new cell phone and a pair of Jimmy Choo heels she’d been eying for weeks, and Allison spent that night memorising her diet plan and findings ways to cut just a little bit more.
Things kind of spiralled after that. The smaller she stayed the bigger dad smiled. The tinier she got the more time mom spent with her, the more gifts she got. She learned to count calories in her sleep, to skip breakfast and eventually lunch. She bought push up bras when her cleavage started to shrink, and didn’t mind it in the slightest when it meant she cinched her belt another notch tighter that same week. When exy practice started making her lightheaded, her attendance dwindled until she quit altogether. Some nights she’d look at her racquet and miss the court so much it felt like a bruise, but then dad would buy her a new car or some magazine would invite her for a photoshoot feature, and she managed to ignore it.
And it became normal, the tally in her head and the constant headaches and the dizziness. It became normal when she was so hungry she felt like she could eat the entire kitchen, and then it became normal when she forgot what it felt like to be hungry at all. The world was diamonds and champagne that was fine so long as she drank enough she’d throw up all those calories anyway. She was pretty and perfect and poison, a beautiful product, nearly a person, and she was fine, fine, fine, until the day she woke up in the hospital with a tube feeding into her stomach.
She’s seventeen years old and she weighs 93 pounds. The doctors say she’s weeks away from starving to death, and she isn’t allowed to leave.
When she opens her mouth, the first thing she asks for is a mirror.
Allison stares into the blue eyes of a girl who’s thinned out hair doesn’t show through the extensions woven in, and who’s sharp cheekbones look artful rather than starved. Even without makeup, her tattooed eyeliner makes her eyes pop and her clear skin somehow glow. She’s the most unhealthy she’s ever been and she’s still beautiful. She’s less than twenty pounds from being a corpse and she’s still the most perfect doll to ever exist.
Allison Reynolds throws the mirror across the room and gives up.
They won’t give her proper scissors but she manages to sweet talk one of the nurses into giving her a tiny pair of manicure ones and she spends all night hacking her hair into a messy bob just below her chin. Then she claws at her face until the nurses pin her down, arms flailing weakly- so weakly, too weakly, and she was never weak before, has never been this kind of frail.
Her mother gasps at the sight of her when she deigns to visit, and Allison takes savage pleasure in throwing her out. She repeats the process when her father comes a day or two later, tells him to go fuck himself and throws a half empty cup of smoothie at his head, watching with glee as 400 calories of banana and strawberry drip down the front of his Armani suit.
She will not kill herself to be perfect. She hates they convinced her to try to in the first place.
She works, and she tries, and she gets better. Rehab ends, and her hair grows out again until she can cut it into a more intentionally messy look and cover the silvery scars on her face under layers and layers of makeup.
Her cheeks are rounder by the time she steps back onto the exy court, with shaky hands and fresh determination. By the time she finishes high school, her muscles are more defined than they’ve ever been and she can fight her bigger teammates well enough to be a contender for university pro scouts.
Her eyes are colder when she looks in the mirror these days, but her hands are warmer and her hair is thicker and she’s still so fucking pretty, even if she's not properly beautiful, only now she's pretty and healthy.
She has a stomach now, and thighs with no gap in between them. She’s a far cry from perfection and she loves it.
Exy leaves bruises on her skin and a dull ache in muscles that somehow exist, and she loves this stupid sport more than she has managed to love anything in a long long time.
Dad doesn’t smile when he looks at her these days, and mom starts bringing up diet plans again even though there is still not a single day that passes where Allison doesn’t count every calorie that enters her body and feel sicker and sicker as the tally that keeps her alive ticks upwards. Allison is done.
She finds a team and she moves away. Dad screams at her retreating back that if she leaves now she better never fucking come back, and she flips him the bird and leaves the Allison Reynolds behind in that house to live the life of a doll while she lives the life of a girl.
Just like that, she’s just Allison. Just like that she’s a fox.
It’s a chance. A second or third or twenty third chance to live some sort of life instead of just going through the motions. And she is many things but she has never been a quitter so she throws herself into it headfirst.
It’s good- sometimes. She loves the burn in her legs and the bruises on her skin after a long practice. Loves the satisfying crack of Damien’s nose when she hits him with a well timed ball during a scrimmage, and the looks she gets when she struts into the locker room in six inch heels and full makeup, because the boys don’t know what to do with a girl like her.
Perfect was poison, but pretty is protection, and she doesn’t feel very safe with the foxes, so pretty is her only defence.
Even still, pretty doesn’t come without a price. Neither does her pettiness, so on nights like tonight, when the team is partying and expected to show up all together, she spends a lot of time hiding out in corners alone. Well, alone as you can get as a pretty girl at a house party, meaning mostly left alone after she’s shot down an embarrassingly high number of inebriated frat guys.
Right now she’s leaning on the counter in the kitchen, sipping on a fizzy water and trying to ignore the divine scent of the pizza someone had just brought in.
570 calories of cheesy, saucy goodness are tantalising her. Her stomach is rumbling. She hasn’t eaten since her chicken Caesar salad at lunch. She could still-
She could still eat it even if she’d had dinner already. She’s allowed to eat food. She can eat junk food. She can eat and the world will not crash down around her, no matter how much it may feel like it.
She still can’t bring herself to reach for the pizza.
“You gonna eat that or just glare at it all night?”
She scows. “Shut up, Seth.”
“What’d the pizza ever do to you anyway?” He sidles up next to her, a paper plate with a small mountain of pizza slices balanced in his grip, very much not shutting up. Not that she expected him to. Seth Gordon had outed himself as a monumental asshole the second she’d met him, and had been further earning that title ever since.
“The pizza’s fine.”
Snappy. Snappy and rude. Not that she ever goes out of the way to be polite to Seth, but even to her own ears she sounded too defensive, too weird, over the stupid pizza. He was just making conversation but now she’s made it a thing.
“Oh,” his eyes light in recognition, “right. I forgot about the whole anorexia thing.”
“I don’t have anorexia.”
“Right. Just like I don’t have a heroine addiction. I forgot it doesn’t count when you’re in recovery.”
“I have bulimia, not anorexia, dickhead,” she spits, “not that it’s any of your fucking business.”
“Geez,” he grins lazily, “sorry princess, must have touched a nerve.”
“Fuck off.”
“For the record, I don’t get it.”
“Get what.”
“The whole eating disorder body dysmorphia thing.” He shrugs, “You’re pretty. You’d still be pretty if you were fat.”
It’s not supposed to be a backhanded compliment or some sort of consolation: it’s nothing but the cold hard truth. Seth is a douchebag junkie with a temper worse than hers, but he’s honest, unflinchingly and brutally so. It’s the reason she can’t help but trust him: he doesn’t play the games of half truths and deception she was weaned on, the kind that twisted her into monster and squeezed her until she broke.
“It’s not about that.”
“Whatever. Just eat the fucking pizza. I can tell you want to.”
“Seth-“
“It’s just pizza. What? You gonna be defeated by shitty junk food? C’mon Reynolds, you’re better than that.”
He’s right. She hates that he’s right but he is, because she is better than this. She is better than being defeated by a slice of pizza just because she’s feeling uncharacteristically shy.
“Here.” He unceremoniously dumps two slices of his small pizza mountain into her hands, “take it.”
She lifts a slice to her mouth, sighing at the taste of warm cheese and tangy sauce and ignoring the swirling scale in her head that’s still tallying up calories she keeps trying to convince herself she doesn’t care about.
“See princess? It’s not that hard.” Seth gives her one last look like are you fucking for real and drifts off to play beer pong with Reggie. The next time she sees him he’s stumbling drunk and asking her for a blowjob.
She hates him so much.
She hates how badly she wants to fuck him even more.
He’s a terrible idea, the biggest mistake she could make. Perfect girls don’t make mistakes.
It’s a good thing she’s not perfect anymore.