I’m almost fourteen years old when the ghost wakes me for the second night in a row.
A cold breath at my chin, a lapping of something that should be wet, leaving my skin hollow. I swat it, but the licking persists, my fingers finding soggy poundcake crumbs left on my chin from the slice I stole after my parents went to bed. The one Mom refused to eat. The one I regretted eating.
Half my chin is licked clean of crumbs. The skinlike ice.
✱
In the morning, I hover at the refrigerator reading the weight loss chart Mom recently attached to the door.
Motivation, she had said.
The treadmill whirrs in the basement along with the near shouting volume of the morning news.
I open the fridge, rifle through bottles of fluorescent drinks boldly labeled Fat Burning Water!, push aside the skim milk and Diet Coke to find the fat-free cream cheese for my bagel. As I eat, the tongue returns, licking the cream cheese on the bagel-half waiting on my plate. A long white thing flicking in and out of nowhere.
Schliick. Schliiiiiick.
The cheese melts into globs that settle into the bagel’s air pockets.
I toss that half in the trash.
✱
I wear my new JNCOs to school, the black ones with white stitching, so long they rest like puddles at my feet.
The girl I sit with at lunch eyes me as I sit at our table. She’s my only friend. She mutters thunder thighs to the girl next to her. They share a sly grin, as they share the childish, stick-straight body I no longer have. Her sense of humor is sometimes cruel. I pretend I don’t hear.
She had saved me from the bullies in middle school, the group of girls who used to be my friends suddenly, collectively, giving me the silent treatment, stealing my things and throwing them in the toilet. She told me happiness is the best revenge. I can pretend when I’m with her. I don’t want to be alone again.
Eating Gushers for lunch, my friend and the girl next to her read an issue of Cosmo featuring a skin-bearing model on the cover. I nibble at the corn on my tray, one kernel at a time, unable to focus on the table gossip—head spinning, too engrossed in my mini-pizza disappearing bite-by-bite, the slit of pale lips that opens and closes, the nothingness within.
✱
It’s been weeks since the ghosty tongue first woke me up, my JNCOs baggier and needing a belt. I’ll cover the cinched waistband with a long sweatshirt, but Mom knocks and enters my room before I can.
“I’m getting dressed.” I tug my t-shirt over my head.
“Breakfast is… oh, sorry.” Mom peeks in then swings the door wide open.
“Mom!”
She lifts the hem of my t-shirt and tugs at my waistband while not-so-subtly eyeing my body. “When did you get so skinny? What size are these?”
In the mirror, the ghost swells my flesh so the shirt is too small, spills my skin over the waistband. I shiver.
“Ugh, stop! I like them like this. They’re supposed to be big.” I shake her off and head to the kitchen.
We sit at the table—me with bacon and a Toaster Strudel, Mom with a Slimfast. She watches me. I take a bite, but the ghost tastes it for me.
“Aren’t you eating?” I nod to the plate of bacon.
“Too many calories.” Mom grimaces and downs the rest of her shake. “But you need to eat. You’re skinny as it is.”
I nibble the smallest bites I can until she leaves, then let the ghost’s tongue slip into my mouth, reaching down my throat like a slushy snake, satiating me with frigid dread.
✱
There’s a pizza party in math class. A girl with a rope-like braid smiles when she sits next to me.
“You don’t like pizza?” she mumbles, mouth full.
A pool of grease shimmers on the untouched slice. The ghost’s hovering face floats down and bites it for me.
The girl’s brow creases.
I go to the bathroom and take the slice with me. The ghost follows, gobbling away, lips slick with grease. I toss the crust in the trash when the girl walks in.
Warm fingertips brush my shoulder as I run into the stall.
My only friend ditched me weeks ago.
✱
I glide to the living room when Mom calls me. Walking feels like flying. She’s on the couch with a glass of iced Miller lite. I sit in the tweed recliner.
“Your teacher called.” Mom’s bobbed hair sashays under her chin as she talks. “Said you threw away your slice of pizza in the bathroom.”
Aren’t you proud? I want to say. The self-control. The motivation.
But the way she eyes me—jaw set, cheeks flushed—leaves me crumpling in the chair.
Pasty arms wrap around me, through me. A promise the ghost will stay.
“Just stop it. Stop it right now.” Mom’s words suck like a leech at my ear.
✱
Mom serves Lean Cuisine for dinner in front of the TV. She watches Seinfeld over the top of an Atkin’s diet book. I watch myself eat. Watch my ghost. Thin faced, eyes buggy and shadowed. Blue veins flow like rivers under our skin.
The ghost is fully formed now, a month after Mom said to just stop. Her final word. I’m better at hiding her now.
Looking at the ghost is like looking in a translucent mirror. Which is the ghost and which is me? I can’t be sure.
No one sees me. No one sees her the way I do.
My body aches from trying to stay warm, from hunching over my stomach where the ghost curls up like a freezing mist. My body, her home.
She intrudes my thoughts, sucks on blood and bile, sinew and spirit. I move as if I were mist too.
I arrive early to school, so I don’t have to talk to anyone. I expected it to be empty, but some kids are hanging out in the hallway, happy and cheerful, joking and hugging, their way of being a distant memory.
The girl with a rope-like braid from class waves me over, hands me a sprinkle covered donut. “You don’t have to eat it, but you should sit with us anyway.”
She stands so close, I feel her body heat.
Goosebumps flutter across my arms, downy hair stands sentry, a spectral forest across my skin. I flatten them with a swipe of my hand.
As we sit, the ghost twists my stomach into knots, but I don’t let it satiate me. I take in the sugary donut scent.
The girl takes a bite of her donut and sighs. “So good.”
Lurching from me, the ghost’s eyes are wide as moons. The scent of sugar is intoxicating.
Laughter fills the hall when someone gets frosting on their nose. Kids help themselves to second servings.
The ghost’s mouth widens, tongue stretching, flicking, twisting for my donut.
But I don’t watch her. I ignore her chill, the way she makes my skin feel flabby, the sucking sound of her licking her ghostly lips. Everyone here is so relaxed and happy. No cruel jokes about their bodies, no thoughts of fat and carbs and calories. A long-lost taste. A joy that had left me.
Do I dare try?
The ghost thrashes, jiggles my flesh, makes her haunting moan, but I carry on.
I swallow hard, pluck a sprinkle and set it on my tongue, closing my eyes at the ghost’s sharp toothed snaps, clenching my fists when she moves through me with a wintry chill. The sugar melts on my tongue, the sweetness I used to know. I pick off a few more sprinkles, and don’t give the ghost a single crumb.
✱
After all these years, the ghost doesn’t haunt my every move anymore. I eat without her, bound through my days instead of drifting. However, she still visits as lips and teeth, as a disembodied finger waiting to peel away the frosting on an indulgent piece of cake; still squishes flesh I don’t have in the mirror. But most of the time, it’s that same lapping at my cheek, a ghost’s tongue searching for crumbs, cold and wet, but not. Sometimes she lingers, makes me hollow, skin like ice. But now when I shiver in that familiar way, feel the urge to drift and float, I take a deep breath and tell her to go.