A Place in This World - Taylor Swift x Fem OC

Chapter 8

warning: this chapter mentions fainting, eating disorders, mental hospitals, and I think that's it. be safe yall.

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Something Arina has learned is that being a teenager fucking sucks.

Everyone always says that you should enjoy these years because being an adult is harder, but do they truly remember what highschool was like? Did they honestly forget what it's like being mature enough to raise yourself but not enough to make important decisions? To be both a child and an adult in other people's eyes?

Well, whether they do or not, it doesn't matter.

Arina hates being a teenager.

She's always liked routine. It keeps the chaos of her siblings and her tired mothers under control, it makes life easier, and mostly just keeps her sane. When Ronan was born, she realized that maybe routine isn't everything. Maybe it doesn't matter if Jessie wants to go to the park for a few minutes and they'll be late for dinner. Maybe it doesn't matter if she's not early enough to school to read a chapter of her book because Ronan puked at breakfast and her mothers weren't there to clean it up. Maybe, it all just isn't that a big deal.

But routine is still important.

So she wakes up at 6am, gets Ronan ready, and makes breakfast for her tired moms and the kids, and then gets herself ready while they're all eating. Breakfast isn't a meal she eats, so she gets ready and then gets the kids ready so she can walk them to school. Then she plops herself into the library with Mrs Green to work on homework or poetry or read a book. Then comes all her classes, lunch that she once again spends in the library with the nice 80 year old woman (maybe she needs more friends her age), a few more classes, and then she picks up the kids and goes home. After that she just stays in her room, then around 3am, she gets up, using her super secret spy abilities (using her secret spy abilities to scale her makeshift rope of sheets to get outside and off of the second story roof. Then, she goes to the gym. Weird right? What teen sneaks out and doesn't go to a party or their boyfriends house?

Arina does.

So that's how she finds herself here, running fast on the treadmill. She's run 8 miles in the half an hour she's been here, and some creepy old man is eyeing her from the corner of the room, but all she can think about is the amount of calories in the cupcake Jessie made her eat earlier because he made it for her in school.

She can never say no to her siblings, so she forced it down with the biggest smile she could muster.

The number on the scale went up by 0.08 kilograms.

So she runs, and she runs, and she runs, ignoring the voice of her mothers in her brain telling her to stop and drink water despite the sweat dripping off her body and the fact that she feels like any second now, she'll pass out. She's okay with it.

Her music is blasting in her headphones, but she can still hear her heaving breathing and the churning in her stomach from not eating and .

It doesn't matter though.

She's fine.

Everything is fine.

Waves of nausea wash over her and she begins to feel more dizzy than usual, but she hasn't burned off the amount of calories she sets for herself so she can't stop.

Everything is fine.

Her vision is blurry, so she goes to wipe her eyes in hopes of fixing it, but it's like her mind isn't connected to her body and all that happens is a small whimper. Her legs are going weak, and before she can turn down the speed or grip onto something, she's falling backwards as the world around her fades.