breaking nia ~n.f.~

Chapter 8

Things picked up.

Summer flew into their grasp.They told everyone of their relationship and plastered on smiles. Nia and Josh still hated themselves, throwing up every inch of food that made its way into their stomachs. They held each others hands as they cried about how tired they were.

Abby sung songs of praise to all the other girls, sprinkled them with solos and trios and duets, and gave them beautiful costumes that flattered their tiny bodies. She gave Nia corrections and shouting, sprinkled with hurt, so much hurt that after dance it sent her straight into the shower to cry and straight to the toilet to purge - it didn't even matter if she had binged. She needed everything that could ever make her fat out of her body, she said, because she was an obese shit.

She would call Josh and sob into the speaker; he would beg her to stop, she'd refuse, and he would shower her with compliments.

It was the same thing when Josh purged, and this time she was the one to beg him and plead him.

Every time her parents and brothers were away, Josh would say he was sleeping at a friend's, and he would sneak over to her house in the thin darkness of the night. She had a drawer of his things in her bureau.

They held each others' frail bodies, staring at glow-in-the-dark, stick-to-the-wall neon stars. Sometimes they slept outside and saw real, glowing, stick-to-the-sky stars.

"Do you think we'll ever be that beautiful?" She asked, pointing to them.

He nodded. "If we stay skinny enough."

If we stay skinny enough.

The day she saw him at his thinnest was an unusually cold July day. He had smiled at her wide, as she drank in the ribs and arms and legs and stomach: "B-baby," he stuttered, his brain whacked up because of all the food he hadn't eaten, and all the bile he had retrieved through a fingered throat, "I made it." She hugged him and for the first time, said she loved him.

It was a wrecked romance from the start. They wanted to stop, but couldn't imagine being any other way.

Nia stopped binging and purging on August 6th, 7:09am. She swore it to herself and made a nick into her arm with her shaving razor to prove it to Josh. Never again. She still had bits of hatred woven into her soul, but most of it had vanished.

She was too scared after that cold July day, seeing what she could've possibly gotten herself into.

He continued. She asked only one thing of him: to brush his teeth. She knew it was hard, hard, hard to stop, and it was his choice to be stuck in his state of mind. They still told each other the other was beautiful. She constantly snacked on fruit and he ate it but threw it up afterwards, because he couldn't even be fattened by strawberries and mangoes.

His family asked him what he was doing. Paige's bedroom was next to the bathroom. Josh didn't know that every night she cried for him.

He still snuck into her house with her parents away and brothers gone to their girlfriend's houses, but he was the only frail bag of bones to be held; she grew stronger, quit dancing at the ALDC, and hitched a ride on the Hyland train to another studio, where the teachers didn't break you down to sculpt you up.

The day they hauled him off to the institution was September 1st, 11:59am. She held his mother, who had seen her son sticking a finger down his throat only a day earlier.

They cried in unison.

He was damaged. Breaking. She used to be the breakable one. Why did she stay strong when he collapsed?

(author's note: worry not, this isn't the last chapter :p - colleen cosette♡)