All That I Can Say

📅  Spring 2011

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ᴅɪsᴏʀᴅᴇʀ sʏᴍᴘᴛᴏᴍs/ᴍɪɴᴅsᴇᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ʙᴜʟʟʏɪɴɢ】

Seth was worried. Athena knew she should have other priorities, but the biggest thing on her mind at first, despite everything, was that Seth was worried, and she felt bad about it.
It was her fault, after all.

Her older brother was so chronically prepared and put-together; impassive in front of their parents, able to smile and nod and say all the right things to assuage them of anything necessary even if he didn’t believe a word. 
And he was anxious. Distressed, even. 
She’d never seen him like it before—even in the hospital after his suicide attempt. Then, he’d obviously been guilty and sorry, and afterwards he’d periodically apologized about her nightmares and everything; reassuring her it was all over, never to be repeated. 
But he hadn’t been like this.

At first he was fretful about refeeding syndrome, after that first meal at his apartment, and he was much more careful afterwards. He kept a close eye on her and she didn’t show any symptoms, which was a relief even if some nasty voice in the back of her head told her that it meant she didn't have a “real problem.”
Seth definitely thought she had a real problem. He worried he wasn’t prepared enough; knowledgeable enough, to solve it. He'd never been worried before about not being “knowledgeable enough” for anything, at least not to Athena’s awareness. He’d always been too…well, knowledgeable, for it. Suddenly he seemed insecure, though, and stayed up entirely too late multiple nights in a row doing more research than she thought necessary. He fretted about whether she ought to be in hospital, which she shot down—so then he wanted to find her a dietitian, which she also tried to refuse, but he wasn’t willing to compromise on that one. He actually considered dropping his thesis right then and there, essentially at the finish line, because it made him so busy and he “knew that she needed him,” and the only reason he didn’t was because she yelled at him that if he did all that, it’d freak her out and she needed life to just feel normal. 
“I don’t want a doctor person telling me about how to eat, I don’t want you blowing up your life and making everything feel like a disaster, and I definitely don’t wanna be in a unit with a bunch of other girls whose parents are all fussing over them!” she said forcefully about all of it; “That’d just make things worse because they’ll tell mom and dad, and they’ll care or they won’t, and I’ll be, like, comparing myself to all the skinniest people there. I just wanna be normal, okay?! Can’t we just pretend like everything’s normal until it actually is?”
“Probably not entirely,” Seth said softly, extending a hand to sympathetically brush her shoulder. “But I understand your feelings about going to hospital. It would not be a disaster to pause my studies, however, and I—”
“Seth! Stop! It’s like, two months ‘til it’s done anyway, just finish the fucking thing.” Athena put her hands to her face. “I just need to feel like everything’s gonna be okay, and I’m gonna flip out if you make this a whole thing, and mom would definitely make it a whole bigger thing if you did! So just…just chill out.”
“...Okay,” he murmured. He tapped her knuckles to get her to stop hiding in her palms; when she dropped them, he offered her a small smile, even if his eyes stayed worried behind his glasses. “I will endeavor to chill out. Would you help put my mind at ease and give me Julian’s number, and vice versa? I would like to ensure that I’m reachable, should anything happen.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen,” she mumbled, dutifully punching Kato’s number into Seth’s phone, certain that despite ostensibly being something ‘for emergencies,’ the two of them would likely be in agreement that keeping tabs on her lunch-eating habits qualified as one.
Whatever…I’ll just get better.

“Just getting better” proved harder in practice than she thought it should be. It seemed simple, and Kato made it sound simple—just eat food. She wanted to just eat food. But at the same time, it felt impossible. Finish a whole plate? Didn’t that seem excessive? Surely she didn’t need that much food. And she was supposed to have snacks in between meals, too? Even when she was eating them?
The dietician Seth found for her drove her up a wall. The lady seemed totally oblivious to the fact that she was being unreasonable, and that Athena wasn’t even that hungry, usually, and wasn’t she supposed to eat “intuitively” anyway? The dumb woman would just blandly repeat that food was fuel, and that Athena could listen to her body again when she wasn’t “at risk.” Also, the answers to all her questions were repeated, tedious takes on, ‘No, it’s not excessive to eat meals,’ and ‘Yes, snacks are intended to be eaten between meals, not instead of them, which is why they are called ‘snacks’ and meals are called ‘meals,’’ all in the same infuriatingly sweet tone.

“This is all so stupid,” Athena grumbled to Seth at dinner, when he pointed out that she was mashing all her food up and piling it up around the rim of her plate, and she wasn’t, per treatment guidelines, supposed to be doing that.
“What is the purpose of mincing it?” he asked, instead of correcting her with something annoying, like ‘recovery isn’t stupid,’ which always drove her nuts. She looked down at her plate.
“...I guess to avoid eating it,” she mumbled. “And make it look like I ate enough.”
“What are you afraid will happen if you eat it?”
She pushed a broken broccoli stem around with her fork and sniffled. “I’ll get fat. And then…you’ll realize I’m annoying to have here, and you’ll send me back and never wanna talk to me again and mom will tell me how gross I look when I see her again and everything will be worse than it was before.”
Tears had escaped her eyes before she finished the sentence, but she’d only just barely realized her cheeks were wet when Seth was already out of his chair and bending down beside hers, wrapping her in his arms.
“I love you,” he murmured; “I loved you since the moment you were born. Never have I once found you to be an annoyance. Now, isn’t that abnormal?”
Athena sniffed and leaned into him, wiping her eyes and trying not to have a whole stupid meltdown over pasta and veggies again. It seemed like she’d done it enough. “I guess.”
“It is. Siblings are supposed to get on one another's nerves, at least on occasion. And yet when I was younger, what could I have adored more than when my little sister would run up, smiling like the sun, and hit all the wrong keys on the piano when I played? Nothing. Nothing in all the world, in those moments. You will never be an annoyance to me. I should have brought you with me when I moved out initially; that house has never been good for you. If mum called me up this instant and told me to bring you back, I would refuse. And if she calls me in a year, when you have put this all behind you, I will still tell her to sod off.”

Athena laughed and lost the battle against crying in the same moment, resulting in a torn, watery sound that she stifled in the crook of her brother’s neck. He rubbed comforting circles into her back.
“I’m sorry I interrupted your piano playing,” she eventually said when she felt stable enough to sit back up.
“I am not,” he answered gently, his hand still on her back. “I was always simply delighted that my sister wanted to play with me. When you are better, though, perhaps I will come in and give your cymbals a wallop while you play, if it will make you feel better…though Julian may not appreciate the interference.”
Athena giggled, imagining Kato’s expression. “No, he’d have your head.”
“Alas. We will have to work something else out.” Seth blinked kindly at her. “Shall we brainstorm after dinner?”
She nodded and determinedly picked up her fork. “Yeah, okay.”

Athena was glad that Seth didn’t drop his thesis for her sake, but she still felt rather guilty about the impact she had on his life despite. It took a little while for them to actually rearrange his “study” into a proper second bedroom, between her relative frailty and his poorly joints and nerve-damaged hands. She kept worrying that all the trouble wouldn’t seem worth it to him, especially with her eating and therefore negating all the reason for it. He seemed happy, though, which confused some of the murky disordered thoughts, because her brain would be hissing that he was going to end up resentful over having to assemble a bed frame for a supposedly-sickly sister who wasn’t even avoiding dinner—but then he’d be humming, a serene sort of smile on his lips while he paged through the assembly instructions, and when they finished, he pulled her to his side to survey their handiwork and said, “It really is feeling like a home rather than a university hall, now, no? It will be wonderful having you here.”
The guilt still swirled around at the back of her brain, but he kept genuinely appearing excited to move her in; asking if she wanted posters, or a different color comforter, and his blatant contentedness over amending the lease to reflect her status as an occupant and transforming the apartment to reflect her new permanence there did help in quieting down the voice in her head that said if she got better “too fast” he’d just send her home.

School still sucked, though. It took ages to even get there, whether she took the train or let Seth drive her, and so she’d have to choke down breakfast while only half-awake and then spend the hour or so that she’d otherwise use to properly wake up just dreading first period. She’d never worried about being late to class before, but when traffic was bad she found herself preoccupied with anxiety that she’d have to walk in late and deal with all heads turning her way.
She wore the baggiest clothes she owned to hide her weight gain, which she swore she could feel, just walking around—and even though she found the old bag insufferable, Athena was relieved when her dietician forbade her from continuing her sports for the time being, because the last thing she wanted to do was have to use the changing rooms with a bunch of girls who’d already proved mean as shit.

Seth did ask if she wanted to transfer to a closer-by school, but that much change all at once seemed overwhelming, and besides…she couldn’t bear the idea of walking into it without Kato, or of leaving him behind to deal with their crapshoot high school all on his own. He’d basically saved her life, after all. He didn’t seem to think his work was quite done, because he kept getting her things from the vending machines, which was equal parts sweet and annoying, and if she felt too freaked out to go up and get a tray at lunch, he’d get it for her and run the cafeteria gauntlet twice, which she knew was about as fun as being lit on fire.
“Sorry I’m so useless,” she told him one day.
“You’re not,” he replied; “You’re just getting your strength back. Here.” He tossed her an apple. “...Keep the doctors away.”

In spite of the irritating “ED voice” in her head that whispered mean shit about how everyone was sure to drop her if she dared think about getting better, she’d been able, somehow, to count on Kato’s support; maybe because she’d seen him go through it all himself. What surprised her was finding out it wasn’t just him and Seth in her corner.
“You’re looking better. I was worried ‘bout you,” Gabe offered at the end of class one day.
“Oh. Thanks,” Athena responded, frowning; vaguely unnerved by the idea that she’d plumped up enough already to look noticeably ‘better.’
“Sorry, I don’t wanna be an ass, like, whatever’s up. I didn’t wanna ask anything ‘cause it seemed like you were going through it for a while. My mom died of cancer, though, and you were lookin’ real sick, so I was kinda freaked when you disappeared for a week or whatever a month ago. You seem like you’re doing better now, though, so…Yeah.” He shuffled his feet.
“Oh! Um, I’m sorry,” Athena said, immediately guilty that she’d been fretting—and feeling somewhat offended—about apparently no longer looking so much like a cancer patient. “I…I don’t have cancer. I, uh, I had an eating disorder.” 
“Oh, shit! Well, kick its ass anyway, then,” Gabe replied, giving her a self-conscious sort of smile, which she returned.
“Doing my best, Gabe. Thanks.” She punched him lightly in the shoulder. 
It seemed like despite the crazy autumn and her prickliness during winter, the two of them had still managed to become, in some small way, friends.

The interaction still ended up preoccupying her more than she would have preferred it to. On one hand, it was validating to know that people actually had noticed her being ill, and had worried, and cared. On the other hand, that made her all the more self-conscious about how visible her recovery from said illness was or would be. She ended up so split on it that she couldn’t hold it in anymore, and knowing already the kinds of platitudes Seth would offer over her voicing any kind of ambivalence about “getting better,” she instead went to Kato about it, frustratedly tugging at her sleeves and half-arguing with herself about if she was screwing up or not, and if she was, what part of it she was screwing up.
“The recovery part, right now,” Kato said evenly. He grabbed her sleeve to still her hands. “You’re inspiring,” he said, looking her in the eye. “You’re inspiring when you’re strong, and that’s what you want, Athena. That’s who you are: Strong. Your ED wants you to be pitied. Don’t tell me there’s no difference there.” He dropped her sleeve and leaned back to take a drag from his cigarette. “Imagine all the bullshit anorexia thoughts are in your mom’s voice. Do you really want to keep listening to that cunt?”
 She laughed. He was right, after all.

The unfortunate thing about living at Seth’s was that it did make it more difficult to hang out with Kato. It would take almost 2 hours for him to get home from there, unless Seth drove him, which Kato didn’t usually take him up on. When she voiced that it was sucky, though, he just replied with “Sure, but I'm glad you’re there,” apparently unwilling to describe the situation facilitating her healing as any sort of inconvenience. It still was, though: They couldn’t even play music properly because her drum kit was in a storage unit while Seth figured out a better solution. Still…Kato was there for her, and bent on making sure the music would be, too. He started teaching her how to play his guitar, which felt to her like it required more finesse than drumming, but he told her the instinct would come once she got the hang of it and then she wouldn’t even need him anymore to make their music, so maybe he should watch out, actually. 
“I can’t write songs, though, so you’re not out of a job yet,” she joked.
“You’ll get there,” he said, then added, rather sheepishly, “I wrote you one in the meantime, though.”
“To play? Or sing?” she asked; “I don’t sing, either.”
“To hear,” he said, and took back his guitar, which he fixed his fingers on and looked at instead of at her, while he started, softly, to strum and sing:

“Hey rabbit, where’s Alice?
She’s eyeing this looking glass 
like a funhouse mirror 
The things she sees inside it 
aren’t the same as they appear

Hey rabbit, where’s Alice?
Fading away, I fear
This label says ‘eat me’ 
so why is it still here?
Forget wonderland, let’s flee
Begging you to see
Those red roses wear blood veneers
Take my hand, break free
Please don’t stay empty
I want more than your memory
To keep with me

Pocket the watch before it’s too late
stop watching the numbers counting down your life
Cheshire Cat, both your body and  
Smile will fade
Wonderland’s killing you, please leave it behind.”

She ended up grateful for his averted gaze; her eyes welled up and she had to dry them with her shirt by the time he was done. “When did you write that?” she asked, rather thickly.
He glanced up at her through his hair and then back down; he plucked a string. “After we came here to tell Seth…It took a couple days,” he murmured. “Then I wanted to make sure I could play it good.”
“A couple days?” She nearly laughed, but had to wipe her eyes again. “You’re crazy. If we ever do start a band, we’ll be releasing albums every week, with you working like that!” She reached out to touch his hand. He looked back up at her with a sad sort of smile.
“Well…I had to do something to make it up to you.”
“Make what up to me? Getting me help?”
He shook his head. “Kinda feels like it’s my fault it got so bad in the first place…isn’t it?” He swallowed; his broken smile wavered. “I think I sort of ruined your life.”
“Kato. You saved it,” she said.

Despite stubbornly shouldering a disproportionate amount of blame for her illness no matter what she told him, Kato at least didn’t take full credit for it. In addition to voicing his opinion that both of her parents—although especially her mom—were “borderline braindead, narcissistic, chuckle-fucking wastes of breathable air,” he also seemed somehow even angrier with their school than he had been before. 
“They’d have killed you,” he said darkly at lunch one day when she’d asked what was up with his especially intense glower towards the building’s windows. “They would have stood here with their blind eyes and let you die after pushing you into the grave. Just for knowing me. They don’t realize how incredible you are.”
“It’s not on you, Jules,” she responded, touching his shoulder. “It’s just what I said before…people see what they expect to see.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway, with me…I don’t buy that they ‘didn’t see.’ You couldn’t not see it. They fuckin’ saw, the same way they’ve seen every black eye I’ve ever gotten. They saw. And they were willing to watch you die all the same.”

She caught him glaring more often. Or staring, maybe, since he didn’t always have that amount of rage in his eyes. Or—well, maybe ‘staring’ was the wrong word, too. Studying. She caught him studying, more often. Sometimes it was her that he seemed to be studying, which made her wonder about that moment they had, after the movie, in her parents basement, before he flipped out and got Seth involved in everything. He’d said not to draw any stupid conclusions. She wasn’t sure which conclusions were the stupid ones. Sometimes his eyes were so gentle—only on her, though, only on her. It was the same with his voice, which when aimed at her alone, sang quiet songs about not disappearing and asked if she needed to talk about anything, or if she really was just tired today. With everything else he’d been a fighting dog, barking and snarling and baring his teeth, complete with the spiked leather choker around his neck, but with her he was so…gentle. The only exception being when he’d been so terrified that she wouldn’t get help.
Sometimes it wasn’t her his eyes were fixed on, though; sometimes it was just…his surroundings. He'd have looked like he was spacing out, but his gaze was too intense, which was why it came off more like glaring when it was the building or the parking lot or the cafeteria he was so focused on. He seemed more focused in general, really, even though he was still selling his meds. 
“What are you even buying with all that money?” she asked him.
“I'm saving most of it,” he shrugged.
“For what?”
He rolled his eyes. “School supplies,” he said sarcastically.

Despite rage being etched into nearly every glance, every muscle, at school—he didn’t pick as many fights as before. He seemed like he was laying low. She thought at first maybe it was just because he didn’t want his dad to jack his guitar again, but she told him to just leave it at Seth’s place, and still, it was like he’d given up. When she finally asked what the deal was with being a doormat again, he said he just didn’t want her getting “dragged into shit” anymore, and it honestly made her want to get better faster, because what the fuck—frailty wasn’t a trait she particularly wanted to have applied to her, like, at all. She supposed that counted as progress, so maybe it was some sort of mind game to bait her into being “inspiring and strong” again, but if it was, he was a bit too committed to it, in her opinion.

He couldn’t shake the target off his back by rolling over, and it wasn’t like any of their adversaries at school gave a shit about her personal life crisis and the fact that she needed her best friend intact. Hell, if they had known, they probably would’ve been even more committed to breaking them both down. Admittedly Athena was trying to fly under the radar a little bit, too, because she didn’t want to deal with any enemies noticing what was going on with her and making comments that would actually hurt—and armed with a tactical doctors note that exempted her from gym, plus careful path-finding in between classes, she’d been managing.
Kato wasn’t so lucky, maybe because he’d been too much “fun” to fuck with in fall, when he’d been more reactive than nitroglycerin, or maybe just because he’d been a standard punching-bag for so long that it was some sort of mob-mentality-muscle-memory. While she shied away from the rest of the student body and largely dodged their ire, or at least any new ire, he got spat on. He got laughed at. Someone yanked his ponytail while he was walking down the hall and slammed his head into the lockers. And still he dusted himself off and said nothing, despite his steely eyes. 
At one point while they were stopping by his locker, Trent passed by—his arm across Savannah's shoulders, which made Athena’s stomach roil—and said some shit about how Kato must have gotten scared: 
“I’d be wondering where your balls went if I thought you had any to start with, Dave,” he practically guffawed.
Athena wanted to punch him in the mouth again, but while she was weighing her options, Kato turned around and put on a positively chummy expression and asked Trent what electives he was thinking about taking next year, buddy. 
Trent seemed as confused as Athena was herself, and answered the bizarre question by—predictably, at least—calling Kato a “weird queer” and shoving him over.
“What are you doing?” Athena asked as she helped Kato to his feet.
“I’m giving peace a chance,” he said, through a smile like a knife.

He stopped filling his scantrons out with curse words, too, and even if his insane father wasn’t eating out of the palm of his hand, it appeared that maybe he was gunning for as much, because he’d become suddenly studious and from what he went over with Seth when visiting, seemed to be averaging a high B across the board, even when taking math and gym into consideration. He even actually bothered to do his homework when coming over. 
“Don’t wanna get held back a year, do I?” he responded when she asked what the deal was all of a sudden. “Then I wouldn't get to be in the same classes as all my friends.” 
She had exactly zero idea what to make of the comment, and asked if he was sure that tobacco was the only thing he was smoking, to which he just laughed. 

Finally she got so perturbed by his behavior that she cornered him around the side of the school, having finally persuaded him to skip class with her—which, again, was nuckin’ futs, because he never used to need persuasion for that.
“I think you’re losing it,” she told him, seizing his jacket sleeves in her hands and giving him a little shake so he’d have to look at her instead of staring up at the second-floor windows. “What's going on with you? You’ve been replaced by a pod person. You’re, like, all responsible now.”
“It’s nothing, Athena, really,” he said, waving his hands soothingly. “I just don’t want to rile people up and make things harder on you, that’s all.”
“Well it’s backfiring, Jules, ‘cause you’re being fuckin’ weird and that’s making things harder on me.” She chewed on her cheek. “I’m not fragile anymore, okay? I’m, like, basically better.”
“Sorry.” He dropped his eyes and scuffed the dirt with his shoe. 
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m right here.”
She grabbed his hand and met his eyes again, searching them for answers. “Then be here.”
His gaze flitted down to her hand for a brief moment and she wondered if it was the moment, the one with the ‘stupid conclusions,’ that had changed him somehow, and if she should bring it up—but the impulse faltered, because she still hadn’t managed to draw any conclusions at all, and so she dropped her hand, uncertain if he was being too docile and responsible because he felt…some kind of way, and actually wanted to make her life less hectic, or if maybe he really didn’t feel some kind of way at all and that’s why he wasn’t willing to stir the pot with her anymore.
“...I’m just tired of all the attention, I guess,” he finally said, interrupting her indecision; “It’s been a rough year. I just want admin and everyone to stop thinking I’m a problem and scrutinizing me all the time. At least for right now.” He gave her an apologetic sort of smile. “Maybe I’ll stir shit up again next year.”
“...Okay, but I’m gonna hold you to that,” she relented.
He allowed a soft laugh as they turned to start back into the school. “That’s fine.”

They both reached for the door at the same time on the way back inside, bumping hands briefly and then trapped for a moment when they both withdrew and false-started again. Athena pocketed her hand; he gave her a swift smile and then looked just as quickly back to the door, which he held open for her.
“Thanks,” she mumbled, willing herself not to flush too badly.
“Good thing they don’t lock these during classes,” was all he said. 
He, maybe fortunately, seemed a little off-kilter, too.