Keegan

        I stood in front of the mirror in utter disgust. Keegan wasn’t home yet; if he was and saw me like this, he’d break the thing and suffer the seven years of bad luck. He’d do anything for me.

            The full-length mirror was hung on the back of our bedroom door. We had gotten a really cheap one at Ikea because I insisted that we have one. It mocked me as I got ready for class in the morning and was this constant reminder of who I was, and what I didn’t want to be. I didn’t try to make peace with it, instead subjecting myself to its torment on a regular basis hoping that with each visit, I would be less “me”.

            The mirror reflected this pale, feeble person. Her skin as white as porcelain, cracked by blue veins.  But she was thin and that was all that mattered. It reflected all of my rib bones, my pointed hips jutting out in all directions. My thigh gap, the one I so desperately worked for starred back at me as my knobby knees and weak ankles supported my shriveling frame. I decided at fourteen that I wanted to be pretty so for the past six years I’ve tried to make pretty from ugly. Pretty was 100 pounds of bone. Pretty was pale skin and a tiny waste. I was never pretty enough.

            I drew my eyes away from the mirror to the messy Chester drawers to my right. Clothes spilled from ever door I rummaged for one of Keegan’s oversized t-shirts. I treated my body like a piece of art that was never quite done. A shave off here, a little less there, and until it was perfect it needed to be covered.  This time I grabbed his maroon Harvard crew shirt. We met through crew actually. The only reason I got into Harvard was because I was a top-ranking coxswain who happened to be decently intelligent. Keegan, besides being a genius, is an incredible rower and after spending countless mornings with him, we ended up dating. We started hanging out a lot after practice to organize the boathouse and setting up team runs so that we were the only ones who could go.  Something that wasn’t meant to be serious became serious. The summer of our senior year we moved in together in an apartment a bit outside of the Harvard campus. Keegan was honest with me when no one else was. He was the one that found me collapsed on the boathouse floor from malnutrition.

The shirt consumed by body and filled my nostrils with his smell, this combination of his cologne and cheap detergent. I looked back in the mirror one more time, flipped my long brown hair away from my face to my right side, and then opened the bedroom door to walked into our open living room.

            I plopped down on our couch and grabbed the throw blanket on my way down. I wrapped myself in its warmth and turned on the television. I watched one episode of Law and Order SVU before Keegan swung open the heavy door to our apartment allowing rush of cold air in that sent shivers down my spine. Cambridge was cold in February. It also snowed quite frequently so it wasn’t a surprise that his hair and shoulders of his jacket were sprinkled with a light dusting of snow. I used every ounce of energy I had to break free from the warm cocoon I had created on the coach. He set a pizza box on the counter top, and after doing so opened his arms for me to run into.

            “Hi Babe, how was class?” He said nuzzling his face out of his scarf and into the crook where my neck and shoulder met. Keegan was so cold. Even with a thick, black wool coat, leather gloves and a knitted scarf, his skin felt like ice to the touch.

            “Kee you’re freezing! Go change,” I lean away from the hug a bit to look into his bright blue eyes. They were an immaculate shade of sapphire to accent his dirty blond hair. He flashed a smile, raising his defined cheekbones and highlighting his chiseled jaw line.

            “Whose night is it?” He says putting me down and shuffling towards our bedroom. I heard the door slam closed behind him and I stood in the middle of the entryway with my arms crossed.