Inventing Bulimia

Is there a connection between the deeply demented person I secretly am, and the fact that I throw up all the time?

I count and remember how many awards I win during my last year of high school at L.B.J. in Austin, Texas. Forty-nine. And I am by no means one of the biggest winners around town. Choir, Speech, Drama, and Journalism are my areas and there isn't one category where I'm not given an award saying I am one of the best in Texas at what I do, sometimes among the best in the nation.

Along the way I get cold sores, dermatitis, asthma attacks, and welts from the anxiety of it, but I never choke when it counts. I take my amphetamines and perform. When I want to be in Texas All-State Choir I face and flourish through six months of District, Regional, Area, and State auditions, knowing I haven't just learned my music, I have memorized it, including an entire Latin mass. I hammer that music so deeply into my brain that I can still sing most of those damned Latin songs from memory - a peculiar talent that comes in rather less handy today than one may imagine when I am singing in the temple choir during High Holiday services.

Of the ninety school days in my second and last semester, I miss well over half for school excused absences so I can leave campus and come back with trophies, plaques, medals, ribbons, and certificates. Not once in the years that follow do I come close to feeling as blithely confident as I do in high school.

I'm getting all embarrassed now and worrying that despite how pathetic I think this all sounds, I may be coming across like the popular girl in high school who complains about being too pretty to be taken seriously, or a National Merit Scholar ratcheting up the false modesty to let you know that yeah, quantum particle physics can be a little hard at first. You just want to slap them. Maybe you want to slap me. Screw it.

The truth is I'm positively giddy, ready to wet myself in more ways than one, from bragging about my triumphs. I love talking about them. I tell virtual strangers about the time I win first place with a Humorous Extemporaneous Speech after drawing the topic, "Are Hamsters Good to Eat, Raw and Alive?" Sam I am. I am a ham.

I'm at L.B.J. for just one year, which is my sixth year of being allowed to live with my mother again. Mom, the object of my desire, the unattainable Madonna I am kidnapped from by the Naked Dad and his Girl in Braces, my stepmother.
Despite my happily satisfied high school ambitions, I love my mother so much I sometimes cry at night because I'm not sure if she loves me. She shows me all the time but I still can't feel it.

Somehow during my junior (and final) year of high school it finally dawns on me that I am heading down a path that probably isn't all that good for me, and that my pursuits lack a certain depth; which is not to imply that I connect that in any way with my father's fears for my future. The thing is, I very much want to be considered deep. That way when People Magazine does an article on me I can wear glasses and look intelligent in a sexy, serious way. I decide to graduate a year early, forgoing my senior year which would be the most lucrative one awards-wise.

It means leaving my mother a year earlier than she imagines I will. I do weep at night about that, but I don't tell her. I don't tell anybody. I am too busy showing everyone how cool, adult, glamorous, and-- God, I'm sick of adjectives. Fill in the blanks yourself. I remain the only person I know who misses high school. Everyone else seems to have been filled with dread and self-loathing all through it. Me? I can't wait to get to school every day; vocalizing and smoking cigarettes as I drive to my early morning Madrigal class that starts at 7:30, an hour before regular school begins. I like learning. I like sleeping around with adults I shouldn't. I like bulimia.

I think I am inventing Bulimia, along with my Duet Acting partner Wendy and my friend Donna Myers. It isn't all over daytime television yet so we have no way of knowing it is epidemic and bad for us. We wouldn't care anyway.