Free Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson

dinner because I have to do research at the library with stupid primary sources, which means I have to use an actual book that has probably been touched by a hundred thousand strangers carrying God knows what mutant strains of virus.
    It is such a bad lie I’m sure she’ll bust me for it, but she’s up to her elbows in papier-mâché helping Emma make a Greek temple.
    My car parks at the library. I hurry the two blocks to the church, keeping my head down and my hair in my face. The sun set an hour ago. Cold air blows in with the smell of burning leaves and dead things piled onto bonfires. Red-and-green Christmas decorations are hung on the streetlights and in all the stores.
    I can feel the shadows slipping out of the dark, coming for me.
    Last time I was locked up, the hospital shrink had me draw a life-sized outline of my body. I chose a fat crayon the color of elephant skin or a rainy sidewalk. He unrolled the paper on the floor, butcher’s paper that crinkled when I leaned on it. I wanted to draw my thighs, each the size of a couch, on his carpet. The rolls on my butt and my gut would rumble over the floor and splash up against the walls; my boobs, beach balls; my arms, tubes of cookie dough oozing at the seams.
    The doc would have been horrified. All his work, gone, in the endless loop of snot-gray crayon. He would have called my parents and there would be more consultations (meter running, thousands of insurance dollars ticking away), and he would have adjusted my meds again, one pill to make my self-of-steam larger, another to make my craziness small.
    So I drew a blobby version of me, a fraction of my real size, fingers and toes accounted for, stones in my belly, cute earrings, ponytail.
    He pulled another long sheet of paper from the roll and had me lay down on it so he could draw the outside of me, life-sized. The crayon hugged my bones tight and it made me shiver. He did not dare approach my inner thighs. He did not speculate about the size or condition of my interior organs.
    I pulled a magazine off the table while he taped the drawings to the wall. It was a trigger magazine, strategi-cally placed to send sparks into the air that could catch fire and burn clean away the craziness of his patience patients.
    Even the ugly people in the magazine were beautiful.

    “Look up here,” he said. “What differences do you see, Lia?”
    Truth? They were both hideous waxy ghosts on butcher paper. I knew what he wanted to hear. He couldn’t stand me being sick. Nobody can. They only want to hear that you’re healing, you’re in recovery, taking it one day at a time. If you’re locked into sick, you should stop wast-ing their time and just get dead.
    “Lia?” he asked again.
    The $$$$ were ticking away.
    I recited my lines. “The picture I drew is bloated and unrealistic. I guess I have to work on my self-perception a little more.”
    He smiled.
    I had figured out that my eyes were broken long before that. But that day I started to worry that the people in charge couldn’t see, either.
    I stop in front of the florist shop. On the second floor, the lights are on in my old dance studio. I spent a lifetime staring into the mirrors up there. I’d flex and leap, and bow and sweep; a sugarplum, a swan, a maiden, a doll. After rehearsal I’d steal my mother’s anatomy book and stand naked in the bathroom, tracing the muscles that swam under my skin, looking for the place where they thinned into tough tendon ribbons anchored in the bones.
    The girl reflected back from the window in front of me has poinsettias growing out of her belly and head. She’s the shape of a breakfast-link sausage standing on broom-stick legs, her arms made from twigs, her face blurred with an eraser. I know that it is me, but it’s not me, not really. I don’t know what I look like. I can’t remember how to look.
    Gray faces crowd the red leaves. The ghosts want to taste me. Their hands snake out, fingers open wide. I walk quickly, moving