This is not America’s Next Top Best Friend. My eating disorder has no friends, so this is easy. She stays in the kitchen and sits on the counter, eating only sugar-free yogurt and blueberries, and hisses when someone tries to get into the kitchen at the same time as her. She eats exactly enough so that she won’t faint (think: how much the cameras would love that, a girl who isn’t even skinny fainting! They’d play that clip all cycle. It would rival Tyra’s fake fainting GIF) She opens the fridge door fifteen, thirty times a day, looks at all the food labeled with all the other women’s names. Tyra calls all the women girls. A lot of them are eighteen, so my eating disorder supposes this makes sense. My eating disorder is just old enough to feel out of place here. That’s fine. After all, this isn’t America’s Next Top Best Friend.
In the first episode, where all the girls get weighed in front of each other and the cameras, my eating disorder counts every pound, looks for every ounce of fat on the other girls’ bodies. There isn’t any, of course. My eating disorder is tall enough to take up cathedrals. My eating disorder weighs a thousand pounds. She weighs six ounces. She can transform, weigh so much, weigh nothing at all.
Tyra asks my eating disorder, “What makes you different from all the other blondes?” My eating disorder snarls, says, Don’t you realize this is real? Doesn’t that count for something? She tears her hair out, clump by clump, holds hair blonde to the root in her lavender lotioned hands. Look. All blonde. My eating disorder smiles again, a wolf-smile. Janice Dickinson recognizes a fellow wolf-spirit.
My eating disorder doesn’t sleep, so she is often videoed in green night vision engaging in her compulsions. My eating disorder, opening the door to the fridge, reading the nutrition labels on everything in the kitchen. My eating disorder, standing in front of the full-body mirror in the bathroom, pinching and stretching. My eating disorder, drinking black coffee, sugar-free Red Bull, until the aspartame coats her tongue.
The other girls are afraid to talk to my eating disorder, so they whisper to each other when she’s sitting alone in the kitchen. Have you ever seen her eat? Do you hear her, late at night, opening the fridge, sitting in front of it? What is her fucking electricity bill like? Or maybe they don’t talk about her eating at all. No one is as aware of it as my eating disorder is. Of course. She knows this, by now. No one cares about her as much as she cares about her.
One of the makeup artists notices the bruises on my eating disorder’s knees, dark from kneeling in front of toilets, late at night when all the other girls are asleep. “Clumsy, aren’t you?” says the makeup artist. My eating disorder isn’t a good liar. She’s different from the other blondes like that. She just smiles her wolf-smile. The makeup artist is a little dizzied, uncomfortable, by this. Her hands tremble when she applies eyeliner.
My eating disorder photographs well. She’s all teeth. All eyes. Tyra says to smize. My eating disorder looks at the camera as if it’s something to devour.
My eating disorder came here to win. My eating disorder lies back in her uncomfortable bed and thinks about how many calories are in her birth control, in Chap Stick, in sugar-free Red Bulls and black coffee, in the CLIF Bar she ate late at night so it wouldn’t show in her pictures the next day.
She sits by herself at photo shoots and files her nails. When the girls go out to drink, she orders double diet vodka cranberries and throws up in the bar bathroom. She tells Tyra she wants this, wants this so bad, wants this more than anything in the world, and she’d be good, so good, so great at being a supermodel. America’s Next Top Model, in fact.
My eating disorder makes it to the final three. She’s gotten thinner throughout the series. Janice Dickinson says, “Yes, good, great, this is how modeling should be, ever thinner, ever smaller.” My eating disorder’s eyes gleam with hunger. Her mouth drips with it. Her stomach growls during photo shoots. Primal, animal, her body.
Tyra smiles when my eating disorder is eliminated. My eating disorder can’t win; of course she can’t. “You’re not hungry enough for this,” says Tyra. “Look at these other girls. They’re starving for this title.” My eating disorder sits at the end of the runway and does not cry when one of the other girls wins. My eating disorder chews at the flake of her lip, fragile from malnutrition, the fray of her cuticle. When my eating disorder smiles at the winner, it is a wolf-smile, all blood.
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