“Your father couldn’t make it today.” Mum said after ten minutes on the phone. Shocker. After five years of being a deadbeat Mum still had his back. He’s really busy with work/got caught in traffic/is trying/will be there next time. None of us talk about the real reason he’s not here. None of us discuss how he chose alcohol over being a decent parent. A decent husband. A decent architect. A decent anything. Couldn’t even make it to Christmas. Couldn’t even spend one day not drinking himself to death.   

“So how does it feel to get out of Saint Margaret’s?” Aunt Caroline asks in an awkward attempt to break the silence.

Everyone’s heads turn towards me; five pairs of beady eyes cutting me open. 
I inhale deeply: breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth the way they taught us back at the hospital. Exhaling at a pace that would make a candle flicker but not go out. Imagine that candle Cassie, flickering from your breath but still there, always there. 

“Good. I’ve never felt better.” I lie.
The truth is that I felt like shit. Once you’ve been hospitalised people look at you differently; treat you like you’re made of porcelain or a ticking time bomb that could go off at any minute. You’re no longer Cassie the scholar or Cassie the violinist or “My daughter Cassie who we’re all so proud of.” You’re Cassie the broken. And people tell you that you’re not. They tell you that this event will not change the way they see you. But they’re lying. It does. They stop asking you for diet advice for a start. But they also tiptoe around you. Treat you like you’re some kind of plague. You become contagious. 

The first day I got back to school the class went silent. “Cassie has come to join our class,” Mr Jefferson said. No response. No one dared look at me. Probably thought I was poisonous or going to going to turn them all to stone with one look like I’m some kind of fucking Medusa.
“Cassie!” Mum says, snapping back to reality. “Aunt Carol was just saying how much healthier you look now.” She says with a huge grin on her face.
“Oh. Um. Okay?” I say.
“Thank you Aunty Caroline.” She says in that sing-songy voice that made me want to reach over the table and strangle her.
“Thank you Aunty Carol.” I say quietly.  

Healthier. The word hung in the air like a dark shadow. Healthier meant bigger and bigger meant fat. We all knew that’s what she meant. 

“Cassandra.” Mum says through gritted teeth. “Eat your dinner before it goes cold.”
Anxiety spikes through me. It’s like this every time. The increased heart rate, the shortness of breath, the feeling that you’d rather be anywhere but here. Eating will get easier with practice they told us at the hospital. Eventually listening to your body’s cues will become second nature. 

I shuffle my food around nervously. An old trick I used to do to make people think I was eating. But old tricks like these only work on untrained eyes and my mother had made it her responsibility to make sure she can spot these kinds of things. Fucking bitch. 

She watches me as I eat. This is a performance. I pretend to be a perfect daughter and my mother pretends to give a shit. I play my part. I shovel down mouthful after mouthful after god awful mouthful of mashed potatoes. 237 calories. I feel my thighs inflate. I ignore the voices that call me pathetic and disgusting and fat and worst of all a disappointment. I choke down enough chicken to feed an army. 188 calories. I want to be sick. I imagine throwing up calories all over this fucking table. Mum smiles triumphantly. Like this is a game and she is winning. I bite my tongue and try not to cry. Fatbitchdisgustingwhoremistake my brain screams like it’s a house on fire. But there is no fire brigade. There is no one coming to save me. 

I hear Dr. Sighn’s voice in my head. Calm down. Deep breath in, deep breath out. So I try that but the thoughts keep coming. An avalanche of self hatred. The thing about avalanches is as soon as you realise it’s happening it’s too late. I’m stuck, a wave of snow threatened to bury me. 

“Oh my gosh.” Says Aunt Carol. “You’re eating. I’m so glad you’ve recovered.”

Ha. Recovered…yeah right. Recovery’s bullshit. It’s the lie they tell you to trick you into slipping. Into losing focus  Into giving up and becoming fat again. 

But it’s the lie they want you to repeat back to them anyway. They don’t want to hear the truth. They don’t want to hear about the demons that still creep up inside of me. They don’t want to hear about how my brain catches alight whenever I eat. They don’t want to hear about the thought spiral of Stupidfailurestupidfailurestupiduglyuselessfailure. So I tell them a lie. I tell them the story of recovery. I tell it like it is a story of bravery. Of victory. Of slaying the dragon. They only want to hear that you’re healing, you’re in recovery, taking it one day at a time. And I wanted to tell them that. Because that was supposed to be the narrative. If you’re locked into sick you should stop wasting people’s time and just get dead.

I wish I had cancer. I will burn in hell for that but it’s true. At least then I’d have an excuse. Cancer is so much easier to explain than all this is. People yell at me to eat. They yell at me when I call myself fat. They yell at me because I cannot see what they see. No one yells at people for having cancer. No one yells at them when they don’t recover. I don’t want to recover anyways. Do they know how many years it took to get to where I am? I am not sick. I’m strong.

They all make small talk and I nod along like I’m listening. Mum never knows the difference. She thinks I’m looking right at her. But I’m not. I’m looking through her at the cold day outside. Winter has always been my favourite season. I love it when it gets so cold you can feel ice bore inside you and making a home in your belly. It always gets cold here. Real cold. So cold frost grips the sidewalk and frozen spiderwebs hang from the trees. So cold you feel like your nose is going to fall right off. 

Before I got sick Wes, Mel, and me used to take great big sleds up to the top of the Mount Pike, the biggest hill in town, every Winter and ride all the way down. Them all screaming and hanging off for dear life. And me, smiling wide with euphoria, bright eyes that lit up, long hair trailing behind me. Back when I sang offkey into my hairbrush and didn’t care who heard. Back when I thought I could touch the sky. Back when I believed in things like Santa and the tooth fairy and my parents. Back when I was happy. I was so good at being a kid. And so terrible at being whatever I was now.

We don’t go sledding anymore. I’m not even allowed to leave the house in this kind of weather. Whenever I do Mum goes off about how the doctor said your heart can’t take it and the doctor said you’ll die and the doctor said and the doctor and the doctor said. I don’t care. I still wish for snow every day. 

The conversation moves to talking about Wez’s swimming scholarship for Princeton.
“That could have been you, Cassandra. If you haven’t gone and thrown away all of your potential”

“Mum…” Wez starts.

I shrink into my seat. 

“Oh c’mon dear. I’m sure she can still get into an Ivy League. What, with all the community work, her grades, and all her past achievements. They’ll let her in somewhere” Grandma says.

Mum bites her tongue. I know she wants to say more about how amazing I could have been and how much of a disappointment I’ve turned out to be. But people are watching. It’s Christmas dinner. And I think even she knows not to make a scene today. Besides, no one ever wins an argument against grandma.

I like to think Grandma and I have a lot in common. Despite her age and size Grandma’s full to the brim with a fiery attitude that will not stop for anything. Grandma: all quick wit and loud mouth and swearing like a sailor. It was surprising that someone as cool as her could give birth to someone as boring as Mum. 

“She could always become an artist,” says Mel smiling. Not now. I think to myself. Despite being three years younger, she was always sticking up for me. Sometimes I wish she didn’t.
“An artist?” Mum asks, voice dripping in disdain.
“Yeah. Like a painter or something. She’s real good. Could be the next Picasso or Frida Kahlo or something.” She says enthusiastically. Wez and I lock eyes. We both know how badly this idea was going down.
Mum’s face twists in an expression that says I did not waste all this time raising you just so you could be an artist. You’re getting into Princeton like your brother and that’s final.

I go bright red and wish for the sweet release of death.

“But Cassandra I thought we talked about you becoming a lawyer,” she says calmly, making sure to smile sweetly so she doesn’t look like the psychopath she truly is. The thing I hated most about my mother wasn’t her quick fuse and lack of empathy. It wasn’t even that she didn’t love me. It was that she was so damn good at pretending. From the outside she almost looked normal. Like a mother that cared about her children instead of a cold blooded reptilian dressed in human skin. She didn’t care about any of us. She just needed perfect children and the illusion that she was the perfect parent.