Misfit by Charli Howard

Author:Charli Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241329313
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-12-12T16:00:00+00:00

I recognized the handwriting straight away and my stomach dropped. It was from my housemistress, who was the scariest teacher in the entire school. Since she had become my sixth-form housemistress I’d tried to stay out of her way as much as possible. To see an ‘X’ at the end of the note was the weirdest thing of all. Was she on crack?!

My anxiety yelled, ‘YOU’RE IN TROUBLE!’ Like everyone with anxiety, I began overthinking everything I could’ve possibly done wrong, jumping to the worst conclusion imaginable. My mind went into overdrive. Had I said something bad without realizing?!

But my biggest fear, as silly as it sounds, was having my bulimia discovered. In a place where it often felt there was no privacy, it was the only thing I had that felt secret – the one thing I kept to myself. I was conflicted between wanting to be saved from this daily torment and wanting to be left alone to deal with it. Thanks, bulimia, for turning me into a madwoman.

I reluctantly went to her office for 7 p.m., mainly because I didn’t want her to yell at me for not doing as I was told, and sat awkwardly on a spare chair. Her face looked soft and kind, but it didn’t make me feel any less nervous. Please don’t mention my eating, I thought.

‘I got you some biscuits,’ she said, offering me a plate of chocolate digestives and pink wafers. God, I wanted them. Biscuits had never looked so appealing. But my brain started to calculate the calories in each one, how hard I’d worked in the gym to burn the calories, and how long it would take me to burn them off. In the end, I figured it wasn’t worth it.

‘Take one,’ she said.

‘I’m OK, honestly,’ I replied, feeling a bit sweaty.

‘GO ON – EAT THE BISCUITS, YOU FAILURE!!!’ the Brain Deviant yelled, but I looked down at my lap.

‘Your friends are worried about you,’ she said sweetly. ‘A few girls have come to me and told me you haven’t been to any mealtimes and keep going to the gym excessively.’

Huh? What friends?! One girl knew about my eating disorder – if it hadn’t been obvious from my no-show at every mealtime this term, it was when I’d accidentally forgotten to turn my laptop off and left the pro-ana forum on the screen. A friend came into my room and saw it, and had confronted me in private. I lied and said I’d looked at it for research, but the notebook I kept with all the images of anorexically thin women and my calorie counting said otherwise.

I could’ve sought help then, but I didn’t. She offered me a lifeline but I refused to take it. When it comes to recovery you need to want to get better yourself, and I just wasn’t ready. I was too obsessed with fitting into a UK size-six pair of jeans and sticking below 1,000 calories a day to let go of it.

But now, as I sat in my housemistress’s office, I felt vulnerable.

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