The Rash Guard Summer

The summer I turn thirteen, I stop going to the community pool without a rash guard. My sister Grace lost a tooth at that pool years earlier, and we often joke that it’s still at the bottom somewhere, trampled by divers and eroding as each summer passes by. I review the disgusting things in the pool: the chemicals, the sweat and urine of hundreds of kids, my sister’s rotten, years-old tooth. My stomach, which I had never thought about until it became all I could think about, feels like the worst of them all. So I wear a rash guard, and I tell everyone I’m interested in surfing, as if that means anything in Pennsylvania. That same summer, I get deep into making friendship bracelets, and when I’m staying at my Grandma’s house, I ask if I can size one on her wrist. “Oh, I’m probably not the best choice for that,” she tells me. “I’ve always had really fat wrists.”
I start high school at fourteen, and the daily bathroom treks begin. We have two hours for lunch and study hall, and each day all of the girls I sit with migrate to the bathroom at some point in the middle to stare into the mirrors. We pick out flaws, putting our hair up and then letting it down again, dissatisfied with both styles.
“I hate these ridges on my throat,” my friend MJ says one day, leaning closely to the mirror and running fingers over her neck. I squint to see what she’s referring to.
“I think that’s just your trachea.”
MJ is tall but not too tall, has thick, naturally blonde hair, and never seems like she’s trying too hard. She’s a god to me, in the way that 14-year-old girls can only be gods to other 14-year-old girls, and she hates her trachea. I turn back to the mirror and assess myself. I feel simultaneously too small and too big. My stomach appears massive, but my chest is still flat. At home, I share a bathroom with Grace, who is twelve now and either my closest friend or worst nemesis depending on the day, and days earlier we got into a fight that ended in me insisting that I was older now, and needed more privacy. Grace scoffed, and looked me up and down before retorting with a blow that I could not recover from: “Yeah, maybe when you finally hit puberty.” In the mirror now, it occurs to me that my most pressing flaw of all is my too round face, so I spend the rest of the designated mirror time attempting to part my hair in a way that hides it.
At 15, I start going to therapy at my mom’s insistence. We’ve been fighting more than usual, and she says there’s “obviously some stuff I need to work through.” The therapist is cutting in a way that’s more comforting than kindness. I tell her about a condescending remark from a girl on my cross country team, and when she scoffs and responds, “What a bitch,” I am pleased to no end. In our third session, she flips her notepad over and says, “Oh, we haven’t talked about your body yet.” My ears begin ringing. She must have asked this question for a reason—therapists don’t want to talk about bodies unless there’s something wrong with them. I turn the question over and over in my head until it’s smooth, searching for a hidden meaning.
“So, your body is repulsive, obviously—how does that make you feel?” I squirm in my seat. The room is tilting on its axis, tiny decorative vases sliding off of the therapist’s antique coffee table and shattering, and I don’t like the way my thighs are pooling onto the couch, so I try to sit up, tilting my weight backwards.
“What about my body?”
The therapist blinks at me. “It’s just a topic that often comes up with my patients around your age, especially girls. We haven’t talked about it yet. How do you feel about it?”
“I feel fine about it,” I say, but the words fall out of my mouth in a rushed, too-loud jumble. I’ve given myself away. I twist one of the threads of my shorts around my index finger until it starts to pulse, and I take a breath. “I don’t have any feelings about my body. I never think about it.”
She squints at me. “Really?”
“Really.” The room rights itself, and I don’t look at my thighs for the rest of the hour.
16 and 17 blur together. I go to school. I go to practice. I get home from practice and climb onto the edge of the tub so I can look at my stomach in the mirror, pinching as much fat as I can between my pointer and my thumb and stretching it. I imagine trimming it off and leaving no scar, just a smooth, flat abdomen. Natural and pristine. Grace is in high school now, too, on the crew team, and she changes her mind weekly about whether I’m a cool older sister or an embarrassment she can’t be seen with in the halls. Dinners are different lately. Grace has suddenly announced that she’s lactose intolerant, and our mom is trying to be vegan, so we’re not left with many acceptable ingredients. “You’ve never had an issue with lactose before, though,” I tell Grace one night, poking at the low-fat, no-meat, no-egg, no-dairy casserole our mom made. When we were younger, whenever we went out to a restaurant she would eat the little individually wrapped packets of butter in one bite the second our mom turned her back, grinning at me like I was in on the joke.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” she replies, neatly slicing up her casserole into tiny bites and pushing them to the other side of the plate. “It’s just been hurting my stomach lately.”
I turn 18 in the middle of a pandemic, and everything is different. Grace is different—she snaps easily, and she starts doing sit-ups every morning until she gets a bruise on the small of her back that won’t go away and our mom makes her stop. She wears only sweaters three sizes too big now, wrapping her knees in them when she sits down. I think of the rash guard summer.
Things come to a head in June. Grace hugs me, and tells me she’s trying to get better, and I can feel every vertebra in her spine when my hands meet her back. I tell her I love her, and I try not to squeeze too hard. The treatment center admits her in September of the next year. Right before I go back to college for my sophomore year, I take a day trip to the beach with my friends Madison and Hannah. I suck it up and wear a bikini, and when Madison suggests taking pictures for instagram, I offer to be the photographer. Later, when we’re all standing in the waves, Hannah makes a show of tilting her face towards the sun, arms out, and asking, “Aren’t we so lucky that we’re here on such a beautiful day, and that we’re young, and we all have such hot bods?” She’s kidding, mostly, but it strikes a nerve.
“I kind of hate my body, actually,” I reply. I haven’t ever said it out loud before.
Hannah frowns, looking me up and down. “Why?”
I send Grace a package from school while she’s in treatment; a coloring book and new markers, a friendship bracelet I sized on my own wrist, and a card that says, “Get well soon, Grandpa.” On the phone, my mom tells me that she’s doing better, but I shouldn’t mention it. “Don’t tell her you’re proud of her next time you talk, it makes her upset.” I don’t feel better about my own body, but hating it feels more dangerous than it used to.
I’m 19, and when I’m home for break, my sister leaves the room, and my mom complains that she’s had to eat more to encourage my sister to finish her meals. “Nothing makes you gain weight quicker than having a kid with an eating disorder.” That same break, I go to a thrift store with my friend Viv, and in a sea of awkwardly cropped jeans and dresses with suspicious stains, I find a skirt that I love. It’s perfect—the perfect color, the perfect length, and the perfect fit on someone else’s perfect body. On my body, the zipper gets stuck an inch from the top and refuses to budge, no matter how much I suck my stomach in. There are no other sizes—this is a thrift store. I rotate in front of the mirror. Maybe I’ll get it just in case—anything could happen in the next few months. Maybe I’ll start running again, or I’ll forget to eat lunch more often, and one day I’ll dig the skirt out from the back of my drawer and slip into it with ease. Like it’s nothing—a happy accident. I reach back for the zipper again, and my fingers brush the base of my spine, and I’m struck, suddenly, with the memory of my sister’s vertebrae, each one its own jagged island. The fear that she’d break if I hugged her with a little too much pressure. I press my finger against my own vertebra, and for once, I’m relieved to find a wall of fat guarding my bones. I put the skirt back on the hanger.
I’m 21, and on my break from school, I take Grace out for coffee where we both order lattes with more sugar than caffeine and spend an hour unpacking her roommate drama and whether or not I’m going to switch my major again. She smiles without it looking like a strain now, and when she tells me she’s doing well, I believe her. I hug her as tight as I can before I leave, and she laughs and squirms away. I’m different, too. I go to the gym a few times a week with my friend Carlie, who high-fives me every time we finish doing crunches, and I don’t pinch my stomach the second I get home in a warped attempt to measure the success of my workout. I stop scanning myself for flaws every time I look in the mirror, and I will myself not to opt out of pictures, because I’ve realized that having no photos at all of myself with my friends doesn’t make me feel any better about myself than having a couple photos from a bad angle. When my jeans start feeling too small, I panic for a moment, and then I buy new jeans that fit. They join a wardrobe full of crop tops that I’m learning to feel comfortable in, and socks that I can’t ever find a mate for. No rash guards.