Hunger Hurts

‘The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favours, it always wants more tomorrow.’-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Every year had two or three of them.

Girls who wore long sleeves in the middle of summer to hide arms cross-hatched with razor cuts. Girls who dashed to the bathroom immediately after eating and came back with breath that stunk of vomit. And girls like Nina.

Nina Gray arrived in our dormitory on a Thursday as seamlessly and quietly as if she had always been there.
She came to school with practically nothing. I know this because I sat on her roommate Sarah’s bed while she unpacked her worn little black duffel bag. Just a few changes of clothes, her school uniform and a toothbrush. Not even a cell phone. She was thin too. The kind of thin which meant she would be called to sit at the prefect’s table at mealtimes. The kind of thin that suggested she would gaze at her plate with dead fish eyes and use her fork to listlessly move the food about without ever lifting it to her mouth. The red flag kind. 

  She smile at us while she unpacked, the way her dark hair fell into her face made me think she was shy. I was wrong. She was the opposite. She would throw her herself around you and squeeze as if you were her favourite thing in the world. She would hook her arm into yours when she walked besides you, as if you had been best friends since birth. Sometimes when you spoke to her she would reach up and touch your face, turning your head towards her so that she could search your eyes while you spoke. Her fragility made us rally around her. That, and the air she had about her. The air of needing saving.

We were wrong about the anorexic thing too. Nina never stopped eating. Every meal time she would heap her plate with the food the rest of us passionately loathed. The swollen pork bangers that, when punctured, would seep rivers of oily white goo. Featureless, brown mystery puddings.  She ate it all and she would go back for seconds and thirds until the kitchen ladies shut the door in her face. Neither did she disappear afterwards into a toilet cubicle for an hour of thinly veiled retching noises. She never stopped complaining of hunger.

One night I was woken by Sarah.

‘Come quick’ She hissed. Panicked. I blinked at my alarm clock. 12:30.

‘What?’

‘It’s Nina’

Something in Sarah’s voice made me sick. Nauseous. Scared. Like I had once been when I was kid and my mother dragged me into Nana’s hospital bedroom to say good bye. I could still remember Nana’s waxy jaundiced face and her skin drawn tight around her skull. I pulled my duvet about my shoulders and winced when my feet touched the floor. My roommate Emma followed and by the time we had padded to Sarah’s room the whole dorm was gathering silently.

Nina lay curled in a foetal position, her blankets tossed onto the floor. The thin night shirt did little to hide her jutting hip bones, the hollow beneath her ribs. She was hugging her stomach and weeping.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong’ said Sarah.

I approached the girl carefully and knelt by her bed
.
‘Nina?’ I touched her arm. It was cold, dewy with sweat.

She murmured something.

I leaned closer, holding my ear to her pale lips.

‘I’m hungry’ she was barely audible. ‘it hurts. Im hungry, Ainsley, please, it hurts’

I turned away from her. ‘We have to get Miss Fowles’ I told to the army of peering, white faces that surrounded us.

Nina’s hand shot out, grabbing my arm with surprising strength. My breath caught. Her eyes had snapped open and she was staring at me intently. Perhaps her eyes were reflecting the moonlight pouring in through the parted curtains, because they seemed to glow.

‘Don’t call anybody’ she said. Her voice was hoarse and flat. ‘this has to be a secret’

I blinked at her. Meeting her eyes it dawned on me. She was so pitifully frail and beautiful. She was right. The adults wouldn’t understand. They would take her away. They would put her in an institution. She belonged here, with us, where she had always been. We could protect her.

‘We’ll get you food, ok?’ I said.

Nina nodded, the delicate movement of a baby bird. I glanced at the rest of my dorm and we needed no discussion. We dispersed quickly. Cupboards were combed and raided. With silent efficiency we piled offerings on her bed. Tupperware with our mother’s biscuits, packets of sweets, crisps and even the leftovers of Casey’s birthday cake. We gave it all to her and watched her devour it. She barely paused to chew. Sometimes she would stop and look up at us and smile. This was how we knew we had done well.

From then on feeding Nina became a fulltime occupation. We would eat only a fraction from our own plates, stealthily stuffing the rest into pockets and napkins, passing it along under tables, sneaking it to her room. Weekends we filled our bags with food and left most of our clothes behind. We all grew thinner. But that wasn’t a concern. She used to giggle and call us her worker bees, working tirelessly to for our queen...But no matter how hard we worked Nina continued to lose weight. And so did we

Parent’s began to complain their daughters were becoming skeletons. Our grades were suffering. A few of us refused to leave the hostel over weekends, because nobody ever came to fetch Nina. Supposedly her parents were dead and she lived with her great aunt or something. Miss Fowles watched our dorm with her face so tightly screwed up she looked like she had swallowed a lemon. Somebody was brought in to talk to us about healthy body image. Our portions were monitored.

Finally, Miss Fowles called Nina into her office during study hour. All the 9th grade girls watched her stand and leave the study hall. At the door she turned and gave a slight smile. A glint of something pale in her eyes.

She did not come back.

The clock ticked. Occasionally we look up from out textbooks and made eye contact, before glancing up at the clock. Six fifteen, Six twenty-two. I stole a few glances at the door. Nothing.

Six forty-eight.

I stood and walked over to the prefect who was monitoring the study hall.

‘May I go to the bathroom?’

‘You can’t wait another twelve minutes?’

I tried to look stricken, like I had already waited to long. Her lips thinned but she nodded. I strode out of the hall. Behind me I could hear the scrape of other chairs being pushed back. On the other side of the doors I started to half walk, half jog. Some instinct told me to hurry.

I reached Miss Fowles’ Office.I bit down hard on my lip and wrenched the door open

‘Oh Nina...’

The words escaped my mouth like a sigh.

The spinster lay prostrate, sprawled upon her plush eggshell carpeting. A puppet woman whose strings had been cut.A portion of her cheek had been ripped away, eaten. The gaping hole revealed a macabre and bloody grin on what had been the face of the House Mistress. Sitting on folded knees, bending the body, Nina might have been trying to resuscitate the woman.

Might have been.

.When I opened the door she looked up. A blood trailed from the corners of her mouth. That vulpine smile, those serene eyes.
The rest of the dorm crowded behind me. I heard Emma gasp and Sarah gag. Stepping inside I knelt beside her. She gazed at me, her eyes wide and imploring like a child’s.

‘She wanted to send me away Ainsley, away from you guys, my friends’  She paused; ‘You are all my friends aren’t you?’
I smiled. The pallor was gone from her cheeks, she seemed stronger. Healthy.
.
I used my sleeve to wipe the blood from Nina’s chin. ‘Always’