“If you don’t mind, Mia,” she says, “I’d ask that you turn around and step up backward.”
“Why?”
“Some of our girls have body dysmorphia and problematic eating patterns, so we have a policy of keeping students’ weight confidential.”
“Well, I don’t have an eating disorder.”
“Standard intake procedure, honey.”
Now I’m more annoyed that she just called me honey. I sigh, turn around, step backward onto the scale, and wait for her to record my weight. Then she takes my blood pressure and listens to my heartbeat, recording all my results in her laptop.
“I’ll ask you to remove your clothes now,” Mary Pat says, as she pulls two blue rubber gloves from a disposable packet on the table.
“Wait. You’re going to strip-search me?”
“Again, this is standard intake procedure.”
“Fuck that. I opt out of standard intake procedure.”
Mary Pat smiles at me with the unruffled American-heartland efficiency that I’ve already come to loathe. “Mia, if you refuse to cooperate, then we’ll have to hold you down and remove your clothes forcibly. But I’d really like to avoid that, if at all possible. That kind of physical interaction can be very triggering for some of our girls.”
I stand in the middle of the well-lit room, looking back and forth between these three women. I know I haven’t exactly led a life of dignity these last few years, but still, this feels egregious. At least when I’m taking off my clothes for somebody, they’re taking off their clothes, too. Plus, the room is usually dark.
“Now go on ahead and remove your clothes, please, and place them in the bin. This won’t take more than a minute.”
Nurse Melanie smiles at me and nods gently. Dee waits, watching me. I notice the thickness of her arms, the sturdiness of her short, bowed legs. Her face is impassive, but there is a certain mean energy in her eyes, a challenge. She wants me to fight this. She wants to put her hands on me, display her dominance. I realize that I hate her. It feels good. One of my little rules of life is that if you’re ever in a situation where you’re feeling vulnerable, the best thing to do is pick out somebody to hate. Hate is an uncomplicated emotion. It will give you something to latch on to, clean out your mind and strip you down to the animal that you are, reminding you that, as an animal, you have only one real job to accomplish, which is to survive.
I stare Dee down as I unbutton my jeans.
I’m still wearing Xander’s favorite bra—the black lacy one with the sheer band and the straps that dig into my shoulders. He bought it for me, which is why it’s the completely wrong size—he was unaware that bra sizes had numbers and letters. I never wear it except when I know I’m going to be seeing him. As I unhook it and toss it into the bin, even my humiliation can’t prevent me from feeling the physical sensation of relief every girl experiences when she takes off an ill-fitting undergarment for the day. I hope that Alanna, in her haste to get rid of me, at least remembered to pack me a sports bra.
I pull down my underwear quickly, squeeze it into a ball, and toss it into the bin. I stare up at the particleboard ceiling, blinking carefully because I’m afraid, suddenly, that I might cry. Goose bumps prick my skin as Mary Pat skims my shoulders and waist with her gloved hands.
“Almost done,” I hear her say. “You’re doing just fine, Mia. Now, bend over, please, and place your hands on the floor.”
I can feel Dee watching me, feel the imbalance of power that her smirk implies, as I touch my palms to the concrete. I tell myself again that my body is just a body and the me of who I am is something they can’t see or touch. If you cry right now, I think to myself as Mary Pat’s gloved fingers begin to probe me, then they’ll see you. If you let them see you, you’re letting them win.
They even make me squat to make sure I didn’t smuggle in anything up my vagina, like I’m some desperate drug mule. When I comply, Mary Pat and Dee and Nurse Melanie all stand there looking at the floor, as if they expect a gun to fall out or something. When nothing does, I swear Dee almost looks disappointed.
I hurry to put my clothes back on, thinking this is finally over, but then Mary Pat informs me that they need to make some “stylistic changes” to my person in order to make me dress code compliant. Nurse Melanie sits me down in one of the chairs and, with an apologetic murmur, snips off the colored ends of my hair.7 I watch the lavender curls sift to the floor, thinking of the day I bleached them with Eve, my sort-of friend, in the flickering basement light of her mom’s boyfriend’s apartment, while washing machines hummed and shook all around us like rows of giant hatching eggs.
Next, they declaw me, cutting down my nails nearly to the quick.8 Then they take out my tongue piercing.9 Mary Pat and Dee hold me down by the shoulders while Nurse Melanie, with another murmured honey and a gentleness that somehow still feels ruthless, forces open my mouth. Working quickly, as if she does this all the time, and I suppose she probably does, she unscrews the ball at the top and slips out the bar from the bottom. I’ve had this bar in since sophomore year, and without it, my mouth feels weirdly empty. I run my denuded tongue against the roof of my mouth, and the hole in the flesh feels the way it used to when I was a little kid and lost a tooth. I want to spit in their faces, but the hangover and the fear have dried up my saliva.
The last and final step is a pee test. They let me do this alone and with the door closed, in a small bathroom next to the intake room, but they make me shout-count the whole time I’m in there, I guess so they know I’m not climbing up on the toilet and hoisting myself out through the latch window and running off into the forest.
“Okay!” Mary Pat says as I hand over the warm cup filled with bright yellow hangover pee. “The unpleasant stuff is over now. What do you say we go meet your new classmates?”
9
THE FIRST GIRL I MEET is my roommate, Madison, a grinning lump of insecurity dressed head to toe in bougie-brand yoga clothes who has been tasked with showing me our room and then walking me down to the cafeteria for lunch.
My old high school was filled with girls like her: girls who dress and think strictly in pastels, girls with no chill and no spine. Girls from one of those two-golden-retrievers families, one of those matching-turtlenecks-on-the-holiday-card families, the dumbest but hardest-working student in your honors class.
She’s pretty, I guess: with pink skin, silky yellow curls, and the buggy, wet blue eyes of a Victorian china doll that blink at me from behind a pair of chunky Kate Spade glasses. But it’s a very temporary kind of pretty. Even though she can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen, I can see that it’s already fading. In a few years, her ass will melt from round to wide, her chin will soften and then multiply, her hair will turn prematurely gray and she’ll never find a colorist who can quite restore that sunny shade of blond. I only need to take one look at her to know which box she ticks.
Easily influenced by others; lacking a solid sense of self.
I can picture exactly how it all went down: how her parents went out of town, leaving her in charge, with a warning that they trusted her. And she meant to do everything right, but then some popular boy flirted with her a little, convinced her to have a tiny little get-together—just a few friends! They’d play Scrabble!