Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

I wasn’t the same weight as everyone else around me. Well, maybe I was, but I was all boobs and hips while they were all collarbones and long legs. I didn't like the fact that they could eat plates upon plates of food and not gain weight at all, while I was the polar opposite. To no fault of their own, they made me feel not good enough.

Roxanne called it curvy. She'd tell me , ‘Lucy, you’re so lucky.’

She called it curvy. I, in a more pessimistic way, called it fat.

I didn’t like labeling myself fat, yet I could not think of any better term to describe myself. Perhaps that’s how it started. Perhaps I was simply looking for a better way to describe myself. A better label.

Although, to this day, I don’t know why I would consider bulimic a better label than fat.

It’s no secret that almost every girl wants to centre her life around being thin,. but most never do anything about it. Most say I’ll start tomorrow or I really shouldn’t but I will. but I was so tired of being most girls that I chose to differ in the most horrible way possible.

I skipped breakfast, most days. I'd make up for that at lunch, where I’d eat an entire plate and more. I ate things I didn’t like. (I hated shepherd’s pie, always will, and yet I ate an entire pie one day when I was trying to fill some empty void within me.)

‘Are you okay?’ Albus would say as I scraped the bottom of the plate only to go back for more.

‘Yeah,’ I would say, ‘just starving, we got murdered at Quidditch practice.’

He nodded. Accepted it quicker than I thought he would. I’d stay at the table long after he and Roxanne had left, and then quietly rush up to the bathrooms and get rid of everything I’d just eaten. I’d walk out and examine my face in the mirror. My cheeks would be puffy, swollen; my eyes would be red. I’d splash water on my face, reapply my lipstick, and walk out. Everything was fine.

*

I’d say it was all about food, but it wasn’t, not really. Of course, food is how it started, but control is how it ended up. Or lack of control, really.

I told myself I had total control over everything. My hands shook when I was trying to cast spells in Charms class, but I was fine. Just fine.Even when I ate (and eat I did, all the time), therefore losing control, I would go upstairs to the toilets in a mindless blur, and regain control by losing what I’d just eaten.

God, there’s no way to put this delicately, is there? Putting fingers down my throat, hitting the gag spot, waiting. There weren’t charms for this, or if there were, I didn’t know them. Perhaps it was better the way it was--an animalistic urge to do this to myself, to hurt myself. It was the pain, really, that made it happen.

When I did walk out of the bathrooms, knees shaking, knuckles ripped and red, I felt as if there was some sort of huge sign above me reading Fucked up. I was fucked up. More than anything I wanted someone to notice me, but more than anything I was scared that they would.

Roxanne noticed something was wrong. She was the first to come up to me and say ‘Lucy, are you okay?’

‘Fine,’ I said. I was most certainly not fine. I was waiting for Roxanne to disagree with this, to say no Lucy this is not how it works, to make me stop hurting myself, but instead she only nodded and walked away.

Throwing up is an addiction, I think. You start off with ‘just this once’ and then continue on with ‘one more time’ and then before you know it, your life depends on how fast you can get to the toilets. Then, entirely empty, you look for something to fill you. Devoid of everything you once cared about, food is the only thing you can find - and afterwards, you beg yourself for forgiveness before your knees buckle and your head spins and you can’t even remember how to breathe.

*

People asked me how it started. Hell if I know, I said, and shrugged. It was a lie. I knew exactly how it had started. I, after missing Every Single Goal in a Quidditch match, walked inside for lunch. I was hungry, and I did not feel like I could ever be full.

The Great Hall was the best place for a bulimic to hide. At least that’s what I learned during my sixth year. I’m not going to my seventh year. They won’t let me. I don’t blame them. Too easy for me to fall back into my old habits.

Anyway, the plates would refill because I would keep eating and keep eating. I knew that I shouldn’t--I could almost feel my ass expanding, touching the other girls--but I did.

The showers were the second best place for a bulimic to hide. Going to take a shower, I’d say, right after breakfast and after supper. Turned on the shower, but turned to the toilets next to it. Forced two fingers down my throat--the sound was drowned out by the water. I learned these things well. Lunch was a harder affair. I’d go to the lesser used bathrooms, the ones that people didn’t like, or if there were people in it, I’d risk being late to class because I had to get what I was certain was poison out of my system.

I don’t tell them this. Bulimia was simply formed on a foundation of lies. I think that if only I can keep this foundation, I will still be sick, and therefore I can still be thinner.

Even I know that this isn’t the case.

Hell if I know why I keep lying.

*

I used a system of markers. This is not something they tell you about. The other things, the things that you can’t find in books.

You eat the brightly coloured things first: that way, they come out first, and you know everything’s gone.

You drink a lot of milk. It counteracts the acid in your stomach.

You always turn the water on before you go to the bathroom. That way, no one can hear what you’re about to do.

You lie. Eventually, you find out that everything you have done is based on one big lie. I’m fine.

You refuse to admit the truth.

*

I’ve been in treatment for the last two months. I think, if I saw myself right now, I would laugh at who I’ve become. But then I think how is that even possible, because I’ve learned that bulimia is not something you laugh about. It is not something that you ever hope to be. It is something that you do once, and then, unfortunately, do not have the willpower to stop.

Still, though, I have no desire to stop.

Mum and Molly come every week. They do at first, anyway. They don’t like talking to me. They don’t say it, but they almost certainly think I’m insane. On Sundays, when they are here, Healer Patil makes sure to come in with my medicine. When they’re here, I have to take it without complaining. Wouldn’t want them to think I’m even more fucked up. Normally I scream. Complain. It surprises me, the extent to which I refuse to get well.

There are other girls here too, at least. The other girls have figured out that in order to get out (and therefore be themselves, and be sick again) they must pretend to be well, at least for a while. I can’t accept this yet.

I don’t know why I can’t accept this. I can’t decide whether or not it’s because I am not ready to get well, or if it’s because I am not ready to become sick again.

*

When I first got here, I refused to get well, but not in the unresponsive to treatment way that I am stuck in now. After meals, I would excuse myself to the bathroom again, try to throw it up. The Healers, they didn’t fall for this. They came and got me: they weren’t the mindless idiots that I had percieved them as. I didn’t try that again.

Most wizarding diseases have different names in the Muggle world. Bulimia does not. Quite literally, it means ox hunger. I did not, and still don’t like that name. ‘How,’ I asked Healer Patil once, ‘are we supposed to believe that we aren’t fat when even the name says that we are?’ She did not answer.

‘Come on, Lucy,’ Mum would tell me. ‘Just eat already.’ Mum didn’t understand that it was not that simple.

The food had charms cast on it to prevent me from throwing it up. Not like they’d give me a chance to leave the room long enough anyway. If I couldn’t throw it up, I reasoned, it would only make sense that I should not eat the food at all.

And Healer Patil says I’m recovering.

Recovering is a loaded word, especially over here. It is a process. It is here-we-go-I’m-getting-well-until-I-eat-those-candies. I realised, with a bitter taste in my mouth, that well and fat were synonymous with each other, at least in my mind. I did not want to be fat, therefore, I could not be well.

But I couldn’t throw up. I couldn’t. Even in treatment, bulimia was classified as something Less Dangerous than anorexia. I just had to eat a little food and not throw it up, and then I was well. That, to me, was not good enough. I was not good enough.

But I was not good at starving myself. So used to the animalistic tendencies of binging and purging, I could not immediately integrate myself into the much more cerebral form of disorder that the Healers call anorexia.

I liked the meaning of anorexia much more. Rather than reminding me of an ox, it meant lack of appetite, lack of desire. It’s pretty, isn’t it? Lack of desire. I no longer desired to do anything, not eat, not sleep. You could see my collarbones, now.

‘She’s getting worse,’ I heard Healer Patil say outside my door to Mum.

‘She’s not throwing up anymore, though,’ Mum said. (I didn’t know how Mum knew that.)

‘I don’t mean the bulimia.’ And I didn’t know how Healer Patil knew that, either. All that I could see in myself were the lines of my collarbones, the curves of my hipbones. I did not hear the hummingbird beat of my heart, nor did I see my dull lifeless eyes or feel the rock of walking that came with being constantly tired. We only see what we want to, us sick ones. That’s why I did not realise that Healer Patil was watching my every move. Why I did not notice the way that I could not stand up anymore without being horribly lightheaded.

Why I did, and still do, believe that I was fat.

*

Scorpius came sometimes. I liked Scorpius. He didn’t look down upon me for being sick, rather, he only wanted to help me. I didn’t mind when people wanted to help me. In a way, it was what I had wanted all along: someone to help me get better. Or perhaps just to notice that something was wrong.

‘You’re getting too thin,’ he told me. ‘Eat something. For me.’

I came to realise that the only times I ate anymore were with him.

We were, Scorpius told me, distantly related to those worth knowing. We were the children of the hungry shadows (a label that fit me particularly well), the son and the daughter of someone almost special. I told Scorpius his father was special - if not on particularly good terms with my own - but he only shook his head.

“He could have done something for either side,” Scorpius explained, “and he did something for neither.”

Then I felt quite a bit like Scorpius’s father. I was sure that I wanted to be well. I was perfectly willing to be well, as long as well did not involve having to eat any food or gain any weight. I did not want to die. I wanted to be so thin that I would no longer be limited to the hard, hungry earth. I wanted to be like a bird, lighter than air. Unlike so many people who simply wanted to sink beneath the ground and never return, I wanted to fly.