This will never do, she thinks. This extra flesh, born of ennui and sloth. And her secret grief, which judgement will only label as self-indulgence. (Years later, she learns that exhaustion was likely the invisible straw that crushed her camel.)
Too late. There is photo evidence now. She puts the album away. She has been eighteen for a month. She is learning to be a scientist.
Weight = mass X acceleration due to gravity
\= Some arbitrary perception. You cannot tell it with your eyes, as everyone seems to think.
This will require objectivity. Some equipment; a method; consistent recording of data.
Blinds are down in her study cave. Twenty minutes before the bus; she has time now, as she changes into her uniform.
She finds a pen and an empty notebook, takes the dressmakers tape to her goosepimpled skin.
In the echoing formaldehyde stink of the science lab the academic speaks of the assured demand for jobs in the environmental sector. The bench-tops are cracked black lino under her restless eyes, and she knows she’s not going to be looking down at them in a year’s time. You’re not saying anything about the assured cash that this intake will bring you, she thinks, or the revelation that your institution has been marking international students’ work in a special way.
This place is too close to where she doesn’t want to be. It will be populated by too many of those people that she can’t approach, reminding her too much of the self she wants to leave behind.
Back on the bus, the emptiness is a familiar curling ache, concrete and internal.
The second-last exam is Extension English, for which she now only feels a disdainful resignation. (Was it the crime fiction that murdered her dream of being an author? Who cares, she never did for those sorts of banal mysteries anyway.) It is almost a relief when she realises the nausea is critical enough to have to stop, but it still doesn’t feel like a big deal until she passes out at the bottom of the stairs and then finds herself being carried to the sick bay by two teachers.
The doctor looks at her carefully. She’s 10 kg underweight. Has she been deliberately restricting calories?
She’s been eating more vegetables, because they’re good for your health, and running with the dog to get fit.
(The data has been showing a effect from these treatments. Numbers have been decreasing.)
She has been successfully restraining the sloth. She has learnt how to be disciplined with exercise, how to avoid trans fats and focus on what is necessary to get her work done. She has achieved many goals; there is numerical evidence of that. But perhaps the concerned mothers and her puzzlingly unstable bulimic friend are right.
The game is up. Anyway, she’s won.
Metanoia 