My desk is perfect.

Everything in its place. Computer, textbooks, notebooks, dayplanner. Pens, Post-Its, highlighters. My certificate from NHS. My camera. A vase with daffodils I cut from my Logan garden. It's so perfect, orderly and clean. It's exactly how I want to be, to seem. I am not.

Dad traced his finger down the edge of the desk yesterday and asked if I was okay. He said that he's getting worried about how I've had another night terror, about how thin I'm getting. How thin I am. I smiled at him so bright, my insides winced, and I said that I am fine. I've said it so much that the words have lost their meaning and their shape. I'm fine, I'm fineimfineimfineimbreaking apart, and I don't know how to put myself together again? I don't know what to do? I don't know...I'm so lost, and I'm so scared, and I'm so empty, it's like everything that I do is falling down into a deep chasm, and I'm doing everything I can, I'm doing everything perfect, and nothing seems to...it all falls in me and down and through me, and I'm so...I don't know what to do. I don't know how to say it. I just feel like I'm screaming, but my voice has died...it's like it's ash. I taste ash when I speak. I have these nightmares, over and over, I wish...what do you do when you feel like you're already dead?

I'll do the memo later. After Kristy...I need to write this all down, I need to see why she and I can't be friends until she understands. I have to understand that, too.

Last year, when we moved into the barn, I had those nightmares again. Plus, I missed the club, school was harder...it was all just so overwhelming. I felt like everything was spinning out of control. I obsessed on how I looked and then exactly what I ate...I got compliments on my weight loss at first, so I knew I was fixing something that was wrong with me, I was so ugly on the outside... It was Sharon who said I was anoretic first, in early December; I was so angry at her for that. But for as often as she is horrible with her hovering now...she was right. If it wasn't for her, I wouldn't have gotten treatment so quickly. It saved me. In a way...I owe Sharon my life.

I was everything to everyone back then, I was Supergirl. All I had to do was stop eating. I lost twenty-one pounds; I could count each one my ribs, my vertebrate, run my fingers over them like the keys of a piano. To this day, everyone believes the story that I was just stressed from doing too much. I gained weight over Christmas break, I kept gaining slowly the next semester...I kept up appearances perfectly. Nobody knew that my trip to "Iowa" was really to a treatment center in Hartford. The older BSC girls know what it was anorexia. That it is. Those girls, Logan, Barbara and Tess and Dawn. I relapsed in early summer, but I clawed back. This fall, I've been better. Much better; sometimes I feel "normal" again. Not lately. I know that I'm sliding and why. I just have to keep telling myself this, that I know how to fight back, and not let the mirror shout back at me the way it does some days. Not let the people who treat me like I'm made of glass or that I'm "Miss Waistline" bring me down.

What Kristy doesn't get is, I've been standing up to anorexia for a year now. I'm fighting it. I found my voice for the first time in seventh grade, with my father. I used it more and more in eighth. I'm quiet, but I'm not shy anymore: I am not silent anymore. In the end...I will be shouting. In my own Mary Anne way, I will shout. One day.

Rick and I broke up. It took three minutes, right after school. I kissed him, he thanked me as if I had lent him a pencil, and then we both stared at each other and knew. But I was the one who broke the silence and said it.

"I think this isn't working anymore," I said. And he agreed. He said we should stay good friends. I agreed. He squeezed my hand and let go and...Rick Chow and I were over. Three months and one week together, and done in three minutes. We should have ended two months ago, but...I didn't want to end something again. I wanted it to work, I wanted to find...what I once had, with someone else. I guess I kept hoping that all of the promise of our first dates would click back in. It never did.

All I did was hope with Rick, and here I am, hoping that Kristy and I can click back in. I've been avoiding her all week, I know, I'm angry about what she said on the boards. I mean, I'm trying, I'm trying really hard, I don't need her idea of "help." We haven't been the same since last year, since I got back from treatment. Everybody else...most everyone ignores it, lets me handle it on my own. I'm doing good, too, I am. I ate so much at Thanksgiving, I feel disgusting...I'm fighting really hard here to not to...I'm fighting myself. Kristy's not helping.

She has to understand. I'll try explaining it again to her. But what if she doesn't? What am I going to do, let her and I drift on like I did my relationship with Rick? I broke up with Logan for hovering and bossing, even though I loved him so much. And since then, he's become my absolute best friend again. But Kristy is my best friend now. I don't have to "break up" with Kristy, do I? Please. Listen to me tomorrow night, Kristy. Please.