The girlies are eating again! Gathered around the conference room table in a room that's not for conferences it's for therapy. Each of us in turn presents her woes to the woman who asks after them. Why were potatoes particularly difficult today? The eggs? Why are you so afraid of oatmeal?

Emily growls like a dog at any form of ham. When Donna eats oils she drags her jagged fingernail across her arm until she bleeds. Anissa hides blueberries in her braids so the plate check woman can't find them when she scrapes our plates into the trash. If anything comes off we have to drink one of those protein shakes made for hangovers or malnourished babies.

For one hour after Meal Support we're not allowed to go to the bathroom alone. Bathrooms are where we do bad things to ourselves. We have to count out loud for the social worker assigned to listen to us piss, so she knows there aren't fingers in our throats.

The facility is in a converted strip mall in midwestern suburbia, tucked between a dentist's office and a Chuck E. Cheese. Our room has a table and a charmless couch and tinted windows and a kitchen. We go here during the day and home at night because the social workers are not our babysitters, we are grown ups, kind of. A lot of us are low twenties. Gretchen is forty-something. Batul is seventeen but she comes to Group with us instead of the teens because she has an adult life. Her mom's kidneys are terminal, her brother has cerebral palsy, and Batul had to drop out of school to help her aunts take care of them. Her father doesn't know she comes here. Just eat, he says, as if it's easy.     

This bitch Kelly makes us eat pasta. On Thursdays we have to cook together, to build community and establish a nurturing relationship with our food. Kelly has blonde hair and an engagement ring and she is kind of stupid. Gina's like I can't eat gluten and Kelly's like is there gluten in pretzels? This bitch is a dietician.

Batul lines her noodles up in rows on a napkin, we all know she's not going to eat them. It's the third week of her third time here this year. Most of us are ten to fourteen days. Check in, check out, always a fluxity of girlies. But Batul can't afford Residential and home is a graveyard so this is the next best thing. It really looks like she's trying today. Her face scrunches as she fights with Edgar, which is what she's named the anti-pasta voice in her head. In Group, she tells us Edgar is greasy and a pedophile, there's nothing good about him.

After pasta the girlies are a wreck. Anissa does furious yoga on the crusty rug. Bianca pulls her eyelashes out with her fingernails. Gwen cannot stop drinking water, which is admirable at first, but Kelly says there is such a thing as too much water. Haven't you ever heard of drowning? Water can be bad. Our bodies are sixty percent water, we say. Our bodies can be bad. That's not what I meant, Kelly says, folding her arms over her stomach.

We're supposed to clean up after ourselves on cooking days but we can't agree on who has to wash the pot the pasta's been in, because what if the extra comes off on our fingers and gets into our skin and makes us the F word. In the end Kelly breaks, says she'll do it. This makes us like her less.

Dr. Alam peeks her head in and Batul has to go with her. She's gone for a long time. We talk about fiber and make Fiber Plans to take home with us. Shanae comes in to practice distress tolerance. Shanae is our favorite, she always shows us pictures of her Chows. We fill ziplock baggies with very cold water, place them across our eyes and upper cheeks, and hold our breath so our brains think we're diving underwater. Our hearts slow down. Blood flow redirects. Crisis emotions burrow back into our amygdalas. We clarify—so, drowning can be good?  

The problem is Dr. Alam won't let Batul keep her laxatives in Shanae's office. Batul is crying because if they are at home she will use them, and if they're in the trash she'll buy more. Shanae is kind. She pleads Batul's case by the microwave. But Dr. Alam won't budge, it's not even an option. When she leaves we tell Shanae do it anyway but she can't, she says, there are rules, they have to keep that government money coming in. Batul cries and says she is going to die from this. Batul says she is almost certain she is going to die. The girlies are quiet. We don't even know her last name. We would have no idea where to send flowers. 

When we're allowed to pee by ourselves we savor it. Sit on the toilet for four minutes, or maybe six. Leanne releases her bladder in slow spurts, Donna all at once. Anissa does a morse code combination of the two. We hold our hands against our stomachs to feel them contract. We try so hard not to want to contract and contract until the black holes of our belly buttons swallow every soft pasta part of us.

Batul stays in there longest. All through Safety Checks we duck out to go listen to her, avoiding the social worker's end-of-day questions. What is our plan for chicken casserole? What is our plan for bean soup? Batul strains to get rid of things she hasn't even put inside herself. None of us has seen her so much as drink a glass of water. Still, every so often, a drop, and a breathing out. What is our plan to get Batul off the toilet? We are afraid of her and we want to be her: empty, empty.



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