Free It's Never Enough: Book 1 in the Never Series by Susan Soares

mouth and separated my lips wide. I removed the chicken from the fork with my teeth and began to chew in tiny motions. Then I placed one pea on my fork and repeated the same process, never letting the food touch my lips.
    “What was that?” My dad’s voice was sharp and curt. “Why did you just do that?”
    The force of his voice pulled me from my trance. “What?” I dropped my fork onto my plate. “What are you talking about?” Even Fiona’s eyes were wide at me. “What?” I said to her.
    “You didn’t let the food touch your lips,” Fiona said. The look of concern from their eyes was weighty.
    My dad leaned in towards me. “Mallory, do you need to talk to us about something?”
    “What? No!” I snapped and pushed myself away from the table. I knew what was coming.
    I could hear their footsteps behind me as I rushed towards the door.
    “Mal, wait!” Fiona yelled.
    “You find out what’s going on with her. I’m not going through this again,” my dad said.
    “Jack, please, Fiona will talk to her,” I heard Janet say as I flung open the front door and dashed to the car.
    I sat stoically in the passenger seat as Fiona buckled her seatbelt and started the engine.
    After driving for about a mile she finally spoke. “So is there anything you need to tell me?” Her voice tread lightly like she was walking on a newly frozen pond at the start of winter.
    Part of me was super hurt at the fact that she even thought I had something to admit, and part of me totally understood.
    “No. I swear. I don’t know what happened. It was just an old habit. It didn’t mean anything. Really.” I rambled on thinking that the more I talked, the more she’d believe me.
    “Okay,” she said with a nod of her head. “I believe you.”
    Grateful, I let out a sigh. Suddenly, I wondered if I believed me.

CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
    “I promise it won’t be that bad,” Haley said to me as we stood in my bathroom. We’d just binged on a large pepperoni pizza, a pound of chocolate peanut butter cups, two bags of potato chips, and a pint of ice cream.
    The binge started after she came to my house, pizza in hand—half of it gone already. She was complaining about her stepfather again. Granted, her stepfather was an asshole who treated her mom like crap, so she had plenty to complain about. I had been studying like crazy for my French exam, knowing that I was going to fail since I’d spent more time French kissing Marc Hoover than I had learning how to conjugate French verbs. Needless to say, I was happy for the break. And for the binge.
    “Do we really have to go this far? I mean, why can’t we just work out for the next three hours or something?” I said to Haley, who was holding the bottle of ipecac syrup out to me.
    She wiped some syrup from the corner of her mouth after taking a swig. “Because that’s not working anymore. I mean, it did for a while but now I’ve gained three and a half pounds. We’re going to have to move on to more drastic measures.” She looked at the bottle. “This stuff is supposed to make you throw up, like, really fast.” She put her hands to her stomach. “It’s starting to hurt.”
    “Wow, that is fast.” My hands shook as I took the bottle from her.
    Haley was the one who first told me about her binge and manic exercise routine. Once I tried it, I had to admit I liked it. I’d always had a sort of messed up relationship with food. For some reason, I couldn’t have just one bite of cake; I’d want the whole cake. Never just one or two slices of pizza, but the whole pie. So I avoided all the foods I wanted to gorge on. Better safe than sorry. But the desire always seemed to be brewing in the background. Then Haley told me how I could pig out all I wanted and then just exercise like a freak for three hours. The system was perfect. Well sort of. It allowed me to control myself. It allowed me control, period, and I liked that. The feeling of being able to do whatever I wanted without