Free Elena Vanishing by Elena Dunkle

hundred and twenty girls from Germany and Switzerland and the Netherlands, too—even one girl from Australia. The headmistress was this big tall nun who wore the whole black habit. She had thick glasses and a deep voice that could make you jump out of your skin when she came up behind you and suddenly said your name.”
    â€œA foreign girls-only boarding school,” the young woman says, and even though she’s trying to stay expressionless, I can see that she’s got her answer: the answer to What Went Wrong. “It must have been very hard for you,” she adds, “to go to school so far from home.”
    â€œIt wasn’t that far,” I say.
    â€œA foreign country,” she continues meaningfully.
    â€œI live in Germany!” I say. “We moved there when I was eleven. America’s the foreign country!”
    But the young woman isn’t about to give up. She’s like a dog chewing a bone.
    â€œTo have to leave your parents,” she murmurs. “To have to spend months away from home . . .”
    â€œWe went home every three weeks!”
    But her conviction acts like battery acid. It corrodes my confidence. Away from home at twelve—that does seem pretty cruel.
    A memory flashes into my brain of my own voice, crying: “Please don’t make me go back!”
    And then my mother’s calm voice: “Elena, this is a great opportunity for you.”
    Now I’m holding my own face expressionless—or trying to.
    â€œSo you started restricting there,” the therapist says. “Did you know any other anorexics?”
    â€œThere was Anna Anton. She was anorexic.”
    â€œAnd how did you know Anna Anton?”
    â€œShe sat next to me at meals.”
    The thought of
that
little irony almost makes me giggle.
    When I first got to the boarding school, I was one of the younger girls in the middle-school grades. We didn’t play with dolls anymore, but we collected stationery with cute cartoons on them, and we broughtour games and stuffed animals from home. I brought my old cloth black-and-white cow, even though her black patches had faded to purple. She stayed on my bed, and my classmates called her the Milka cow.
    The boarding school went up to class thirteen, one class higher than in America, and because of how the German school system works, it wasn’t unusual for those seniors to be nineteen or twenty. It was the custom for each of the young girls like me to pick an upper-class girl to idolize. We wrote them little notes, and some of them treated us like pets. It was supposed to be good for us since we were so far from home, like having an older sister.
    I picked Anna Anton, who was in charge of my table in the cafeteria. She was quiet, she liked to read, and she was nice to me. That was enough to make her my idol. I studied her like my very own manual for how to be a real almost-grown-up woman. And what did I learn from Anna Anton?
    Anna Anton sat right next to me at the table. And Anna Anton didn’t eat.
    Most meals, all she did was drink hot tea. Maybe once a day, she would eat a slice of bread, and she could make that bread last through the whole meal. No one corrected her because she was the oldest person at the table. Anyway, I think I’m the only one who noticed. You’re pretty selfish when you’re sitting down to eat in a school cafeteria. All you care about is what’s on your own plate.
    When Anna Anton had her wisdom teeth taken out, they couldn’t wake her up after the surgery. They tried to bring her back around, but her exhausted body slept right through it. She stayed unconscious the whole day.
    I heard about that and thought,
Wow, that’s so wonderful! I’d love to sleep for a whole day.
    Anna Anton fainted in church a lot. She’d black out right there in the pew. Then there would be a big commotion, with two older girls putting her arms around their necks and dragging her out to