My plan was working like magic. Clara and I had kept it up for quite some time now... it had been exactly 3 weeks since our first cut in the pool house. I wasn't a bad actress...I could easily shove the food around on my plate and give it to the dog and tell my parents that I wasn't feeling well if they questioned me. C and I made good use of her pocketknife, using at about 3 days a week for makeshift imperfections. We never cut deep enough to do an harm. We just cut deep enough that we could FEEL it. We wanted to remember that we were human, not plastic. Not perfect. Perfect was fake. I ran till I nearly passed out for hours every night in secret. I was working hard at this. I couldn't stop couldn't stop couldn't stop. This was my life. And I wasn't willing to give it up anytime soon. When I stepped on the scale after two weeks, I was very surprised. I hadn't eaten in that time besides the occasional granola bar, and it seemed to have payed off. I had gone from 105 lbs to 80. Just like that. Just like magic. I examined myself in the mirror, but I still looked the same, at least to myself. Everyone at school asked if I had lost weight, what my secret was, why I was always so perfect. I smiled and shrugged, politely blowing them off, blaming any changes on excessively long track runs. C and I always shared a wink. She had lost weight too, and her glow was gone. She was getting angrier, snapping at people, slipping up at assignments. Her grade in English, her best subject, had gone down from a 98% to a 91% within this short time frame. She was not the same Clara I had known my whole life. But I didn't dare say anything, for fear of breaking us up, of tearing what we had worked so hard for apart, of losing the closest thing I had to a sister. So I stayed quiet for her, as she did for me. It was okay that she was changing. She may not be the same C, but she was still MY C. And then again...I was not the same Lindsey. She was the only one who suspected a thing.
