DISORDER

gods

[atypical anorexia]

Everyone is controlled by something.

For Alicia Kites, it was the God she prayed to every night. Her knees bent, fingertips resting on her comforter, she asked him to let her live another day, to keep the thorns scraping at her ribcage at bay for another hour, just so she could see her son again. Her anxieties overwhelmed her, and so she brought them to heaven and laid them down at the feet of the angels. She never knew they laughed behind her back when she opened her eyes again.

For Matthew Kites, it was regret. Regret that he couldn't do better, that his words hadn't been kind and honeyed, but sharp like bullets, digging into the skin of the family he was supposed to love. And now he drowned that regret in whiskey, never noticing it was tearing him apart from the inside just like the misery he fostered every night as he lay awake in bed.

And for their son, Cameron Kites, it was the scale. He'd hidden it in his room, a secret underneath his bed, counting away the pounds as he counted away the calories. It didn't matter that he had half a gallon of water for his dinner, didn't matter that he never ate breakfast. It never mattered because it never seemed to show.

140 pounds and he was still too heavy. Too much of a pig, too worthless to get out of bed in the mornings and too weak to endure school without sticking two fingers down his throat and sobbing in the men's bathroom.

He was a boy. Boys weren't supposed to do this, to cry over thirty extra calories and a pound gained. He was supposed to be living his life to the fullest, fit, handsome, the king of the gym. He couldn't be weak.

But every time he looked in the mirror, he saw a monster staring back at him. And every time he slept, that monster rose from his ribcage and settled on the scale.