Pictures of You [Completed]

Thirty-one. Dead Wrong

Another restless night. He felt like a lump in the bed. A foreign parasite that didn't belong there. He couldn't move, his weight would shift the bed and wake his boyfriend—who was sound asleep.

Luke envied that.

For now he just sat and thought. He thought about how easily he'd fallen back in the pit. How accepting Ashton was. It had barely been a few days and already Luke had quit. He hated himself. Why couldn't he just stick with what was healthy for him?

Tonight he hadn't even pretended like he was gonna get better when he went out with the girls. And it was better in some ways. But in many ways, it was just as horrible as before.

At least he was completely off coke...

Luke sighed, and remembered Cam's words. "There are like forums for that you know? Recovery?"

"Like chat rooms? I don't wanna go on anymore chat rooms." He'd said skeptically. "I got in trouble for it when I was a teenager and it kinda broke that for me."

"I mean sorta, but it's more like a blog. You can read other people's posts and post your own stuff. They've got like subsections for recovery and stuff."

"Subsections?"

"Yeah," Grace piped up, "the main forum is for like support for people who struggle with it, I have an account. And so do thousands of people world-wide. It's really connected."

"So...what goes on there?" Luke wondered. He imagined typing on a hotel computer: "hey, I thought I'd stopped puking my guts out, but actually I just took a pause for a few days. Now I can't stop again, please help!" He would feel rediculous to post that.

"Here. We can show you..."

They'd taken him to their hotel computer, in easily the most public space in the building and told Grace to keep watch. And there before his eyes was the first pro-anorexia forum he'd ever seen.

The images and posts made Luke feel sick to his stomach. He didn't know a thing like this existed, and immediately he tried to look away. "What the fuck? That's like, propaganda..." he told Cam.

She just laughed. "I thought the same thing, too, at first."

Luke had looked back at the screen. Intrigued by all of the things in front of him. Images of heroin-chic celebrities, and ads for thinspiration-whatever that meant.

He looked at some of the banners. "Anorexia", "Bulimia", "Self Injury", "Recovery." There were more but he focused on the recovery bit.

He made Cam click on it. And only a few seconds in to viewing the little articles people had written recently about their own struggles, someone came up and she had to close it out quickly.

It was Michael. For some reason Luke didn't want Michael to know about what he was doing. He didn't want to disappoint him. As far as Michael knew, Luke was still in recovery. He hadn't made any mistakes. Only Ashton knew, and even then, he only knew what he assumed because Luke never spoke about it.

But now there were thousands of people who got online and posted about their experiences with addiction, or recovery, or relapse.

And laying in bed Luke couldn't stop thinking about just that.

His initial reaction, to shun the place that would have such triggering photographs, and ads for getting skinny, and calorie calculators. Now he'd realized that maybe it was necessary. He couldn't say that the idea of having something that would just calculate how many calories was in whatever he ate didn't pique his interest.

Control. That's what it was. The forum was a way to control it. Give him numbers . Give him reassurance. Obviously Cam and Grace, and maybe even Madison all found some sort of acceptance there.