Teen Eating Disorders

Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall
Teanne and Phyllis couldn't honestly remember a time when they hadn't been best friends. Almost from the first minute they met each other, they shared many of the same interests—soccer, music, and student leadership. When they went to the movies, they hardly ever disagreed on what to see. Without planning it, they frequently wore the same color sweaters. They were both excellent students too, students who liked some good-natured competition with each other for the best grades in their shared classes. Even though there were three middle schools feeding the high school, and they both had other friends, Teanne and Phyllis's friendship grew stronger and stronger. In a racially diverse school such as this one, it might have been no big deal that one of them was African American and the other white. Yet when you looked around campus, you didn't see many kids crossing over that border.

Just recently, Teanne sensed a change in Phyllis, and she didn't like it. It all began when Phyllis went on a diet because she was sure she was getting fat and wanted to shed a couple of harmless pounds—nothing much, just a couple of pounds. She said the clothes she liked to wear were now being made in sizes too small for her. Teanne thought it was kind of silly because Phyllis looked just fine to her—and evidently to the boys who hung around her waiting for a moment's attention, which they sometimes received and sometimes did not. But who was Teanne to argue about what her friend ate? It wasn't her body, and she figured that Phyllis's weight and what was squirreled in her brown bag were her own concerns, right?

Gradually, though, Teanne grew uneasy about Phyllis's so-called diet, especially when her friend stayed on it way past a couple of pounds. If she was looking to dress in the best fashions, this wasn't the route to take. If she kept this up, pretty soon she'd be forced to shop in the kids' section. Teanne couldn't say for sure, but the dieting seemed to have been going on—since when? Since before Thanksgiving, and here it was late spring already. Where did the year go? In the meantime, Phyllis's food act and routine was wearing on her. How many times would they go over the nutritional contents on a package? How many times would they interrogate each other on the number of carbos in a juice drink? At every meal Phyllis would tabulate and discuss the demons called Calories. It was exhausting. It was boring. All their conversational topics these days went back to stories of Phyllis Eating or Phyllis Not Eating. Not only that, it was getting harder and harder to go out to eat with Phyllis because the list of foods she wouldn't eat (she said she couldn't stomach anything green anymore) was getting longer and longer. It was also frightening, not to mention crazy making. Why, one time Teanne presented her friend with an orange; she turned it around in her hand and studied it as if it were a moon rock.

"Something wrong with an orange, too?" said Teanne.

"You eat it. I don't want to take your lunch."

"What are you looking at? An orange doesn't come with a list of ingredients. It's mostly water."

"There's other stuff, but OK, I'll save it for a snack," Phyllis said.

"Right," said Teanne, guessing that the fruit would be thrown away or handed off to some unsuspecting grateful soul who sea-gulled around the girls' tables looking for scraps.

Then came a stunner: Phyllis mentioned in passing one day that she was through with soccer and wouldn't be playing next year. Through with soccer? Phyllis? She was a star goalie and the whole team looked to her for leadership. She said that she liked long-distance running better now. "Team games are OK, but I think I'm done with them. I want to compete against myself. That's the ultimate challenge." Then she invited Teanne to come to her favorite step aerobics class at the Y, five o'clock weekdays, where she worked out after her afternoon run around the lake.

One afternoon, a guest speaker appeared in their health class. Lily Patterson was the teacher, and Phyllis used to like her a lot. Once, after a good class on race and identity, they sat down for a solid heart-to-heart. She was probably the youngest teacher at the school, and she seemed to know things Phyllis thought she shouldn't have known—or should have forgotten by now. In any event, Phyllis had begun to regard her a little bit suspiciously of late: Call Me Lily (as she begged them on the first day) was kind of nosy, actually, and she asked her too many questions and too many follow-up questions (a phrase she was famous for, "Let me follow that up with another . . . "), and she made a point of crowding Phyllis on campus, especially in the cafeteria. Who invited that woman into my life? she sometimes asked herself when she was irritated. Hey, follow this up, why don't you?: Why don't you have lunch in the faculty room where you're supposed to be anyway?

At first Phyllis was relieved that there was a speaker; at least she wouldn't have to hear Call Me Lily's voice or huddle in small groups and share or be sensitive or anything. From the start, the speaker seemed bright, successful, fit, and outgoing. She was a self-proclaimed recovering anorexic, there to tell her story firsthand. She had gone to the other high school in town, and after famously losing a year to you-know-what had graduated not so long ago. Phyllis could almost remember seeing her somewhere, at a dance or maybe a game. Or maybe it was someone who looked like her or someone who used to look like her. Phyllis resented that she was forced to take this health class (she knew the material already, as did all the other kids, she figured), and here she felt she was being manipulated by the girl with the sad story. But class was only fifty minutes long, and as the speaker went on and on, Phyllis's attention wavered and she settled over her sketch pad on the desktop.

As for Teanne, she was listening to every single word. One day the speaker's father had told her that she could stand to lose a few pounds for her health and well-being, "Just a couple of pounds and you'll feel different about yourself." That's what the woman reported that he said. Her dad actually thought he was being affectionate when he called her his little "chubbette." In seemingly no time at all, everything was going downhill—she quickly shed those few disgusting chubbette pounds, but then she had a kind of vision: "I had the power to lose many more. And if losing a few pounds made you feel so good, then losing a few more could only make you feel better. And if I can lose these pounds, who knows what I can prove to myself that I can do." What was most frightening to Teanne was the speaker's saying that as she descended deeper and deeper into her condition, she withdrew more and more from her friends, from her normal social activities, and from everything she would have identified as her former life. "Anorexia," she said, "became my best friend."

Best friend. To Teanne, the phrase sounded like a kind of accusation. By the time the speaker left the room, Teanne was shaking a little. She sounded so much like Phyllis that it was freaky. At one point in the talk, Teanne realized that she had been staring at the speaker without ever taking her eyes off her. Then she turned to the side. Phyllis was doodling on her pad with a red felt pen, and there were dozens of stick figures marching down the page in strict column formation.

Teanne resolved right then and there to have a talk with Phyllis soon, and the opportunity presented itself when they had a free period.

"T-girl, what did you get on that hard quiz?"

"What did you get?"

Teanne told her. Each girl got the same score.

"That's not fair," said Phyllis, facetiously, faking a pout, something she was good at. "We have divided up the school day. You're supposed to be weak in math and strong in science. I'm the Quadratics Queen, or did you conveniently forget, once again?" They began walking down the hallway to the library.

"Right," Teanne said, in a tone that failed to convey the lightness she wished she could feign. "Hey, I wanted to ask you. You know, the health speaker?"

"Man, I know what you mean. Oprah-lite. Wasn't that gross?"

Teanne didn't know exactly what Phyllis thought was gross, but she couldn't get the question out fast enough, and the moment passed.

"Plus," Phyllis said, and she came to a full stop, as if for emphasis. "Plus, she was so full of herself. But you know what the absolute sorriest worst part was?" She waited for all of a second for a response that did not come.

"My opinion? The girl could still stand to lose a few pounds!"

"What are you talking about? That's the whole point. I respected her showing up and talking to us. She seemed perfectly normal to me. Little too normal, actually."

"Excuse me. But she was pathetic."

Teanne then said something that she might not have if she had thought about it some more. But the words just tumbled out: "You know, she kind of reminded me of you."

Phyllis was sneering in the way she often sneered when sizing up a soccer opponent taking a penalty kick. "So that's what you think, that I'm some sort of weirdo-anorexic? That I'm like that girl?"

"Liss, you've lost so much weight in the last couple of months. I'm starting to get scared."

"Get out of here. I'm fine. C'mon, don't turn on me now. I'm fine."

"Turn on you! I'm worried about you, Liss."

"I have never felt better, thank you very much."

"Could have fooled me."

"This your idea of being my friend?" Phyllis was whispering and shaking her head.

"That's exactly what friends are for. Listen, just start eating a little bit more and I'll stop bugging you."

"I've never seen things so clearly. I can almost see through people these days." At that very moment, she felt that she was seeing right through Teanne, in fact. "I'll bet you and Call Me Lily probably arranged for that speaker."

Teanne was now convinced. "You see things clearly? Do you see how you've got me worried sick?"

"What I eat, what I don't eat, that's my business. That means it isn't your business. In fact, I eat better than most people—and definitely better than you. You've changed a lot lately, haven't you? You should go visit the counselor or something. I've got to go now. Don't worry, no need to put a narc on me, I won't be sticking my head in the toilet bowl today."

"Liss, come on, don't. Don't walk away like that, would you," she said, but she was talking to herself.

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