I know, different times for sure. But then again, thirteen-year-old Dahlia cared way more about making friends than I did now.
“Are you almost ready to go?” my mom called out in passing, and I shouted back a ‘yep’ before walking back towards the mirror.
Turning to the side slightly, I smoothed a hand over my stomach, paranoid the dress was too tight on me. Paranoid that I looked bad. My fingers played with the end of my hair nervously as anxiety prickled up the back of my neck, making me feel almost light-headed. I used to think it was low blood pressure, but considering the bile rising in my throat, I was pretty sure it was just me fending off the constant panic attacks that threatened. Any excitement for tomorrow vanished as my eyes moved over towards the scale I kept near my bathroom door.
Giving in, I walked over to the digital scale and stepped on.I was just checking.It was the last time today. I promised.
Breathing out a sharp exhale, I hopped off, seeing nothing had changed in the past hour. I needed to prepare myself for eating in front of others without having a total freak out and letting them realize just how much of a nut job I was. My hand rubbed the back of my neck as I tried to not reflect on just how bad all of this had gotten.
I knew I wasn’t getting any better.
In fact, I was possibly getting worse.
My entire life, I’d been completely comfortable with my weight. It had never been an insecurity of mine. Hell, I’d had a lot bigger worries for most of my life. Even when other students had started to comment about me not ‘fitting in’ with the Wildberry Lane group, I’d felt good about myself overall. Sure, I sometimes felt out of place, but can you blame me? I mean, I was adopted into one of the wealthiest families in the country—I felt like I’d literally won the lottery. Not just in fortune, but in love. I had parents who legitimatelywantedto keep me. Who wantedmearound.
But none of those insecurities had really messed with my physical self-image. No, that had happened our senior year in an uncontrollable spiral that still had yet to be interrupted. All because I hadn’t expectedthem.No one had.
Abby and Max Brooks.
When they had first started at our school, transferring in from California, the twins had seemed like genuinely decent people. I quickly learned that was a guise, though, after both of them failed at working their way into hanging out with our families. Then their ugly side came out.
Max quickly became bitter that King wanted nothing to do with him, despite having played lacrosse together for one season. I didn’t blame King—people were always trying to get on his ‘good side’ so that they could profit from his family’s connections.
More than that, though, was that Max was sort of a creep. I know that sounded harsh, but too many times I had found myself in uncomfortable positions with him, one of which King had walked in on.
I think that was when King went from being annoyed with Max to legitimately hating him. I’d never seen him that mad, and I wish I could tell you I’d been surprised when Max was absent from school for the following two days, coming back that Monday with a busted lip, acting like nothing was the matter. It shouldn’t have made me so happy how protective he was… screw that, I absolutely loved it. There was nothing I could do to change that.
Maybe protective men were my kink? Was that a thing?
Yet, for all the trouble Max was, it was absolutely nothing compared to Abby. The woman infuriated me. It may have been in part because I knew she wasn’t after ‘friendship’ with my boys. Now, I knew they wouldn’t give her the time of goddamn day and never had, but it didn’t stop my frustration with her from growing. I had no right to tell her to back off from ‘my guys,’ but I essentially had done that this fall.
I’d told her to leave ‘us’ alone, but she knew what I’d meant. I had felt embarrassed at my outburst because it had been at lunch when we’d been eating outside enjoying the autumn weather, and almost everyone had been paying attention to us at that point, but my guys had backed me up… so I didn’t overthink it. Especially since they would have done the same for me. It was what we did—we looked out for one another.
There just happened to be a difference in the reasonwhy.
Still, despite all of that, I’d gone into the holiday season feeling like they both somewhat understood that they needed to back the heck off. Then the anonymous messages started to come in.
First they appeared in my school email. Then my private email. Followed by my social media accounts, from Facebook to Instagram. This was all before my phone began to be bombarded with the same type of messages.
It didn’t matter the time of day.
At the beginning, I’d been able to ignore them, rolling my eyes at the rather uncreative name-calling that ranged from ‘slut’ to ‘whore.’ But that was before the pictures began arriving. Pictures of me eating at a restaurant with my mom, the sender placing a pair of pig ears on me during editing. It was stupid and drawn-on, but effective in unburying that small seed of doubt in my chest. There were others as well, ones where I was just walking and the sender highlighted everything wrong with my body. Well, wrong in their eyes, at least. Large red circles would cover my stomach, and arrows would not so subtly point out what they hated about me.
There hadn’t been a breaking point for me, not at first. Instead, it had slowly started to wear on me, a subconscious sliver of insecurity that I hadn’t even realized was growing into something far more deadly and toxic. I stopped eating in public almost altogether, not wanting to give them more ammo than they already had. I wish I could tell you that had been the end of the ‘adjustments’ I made to my eating habits, but it had only been the start.
I ate less in private, hoping that it would reduce the places they had to ‘circle.’ So that I didn’t have any obvious flaws they could point out. By the end of April, I had found myself sobbing in the girls’ bathroom after throwing up a smoothie I’d forced down at lunch.
That was when Sterling had found me.
There had been a second where I’d considered telling them who I thought it was. I’d hesitated not only because I was unsure at first, but also because I didn’t want my boys to be on the receiving end of their shit if they confronted them. I still wasn’t positive on who it was to this day.
Plus, at the time, we’d been so close to graduation, I had figured it would stop. I prayed it would. It didn’t though. No, this summer, despite shutting down almost all of my private social media accounts, fake profiles had started to send messages to my photography account while also commenting cruel things underneath each picture I loved. I had no idea how they figured out it was mine since I didn’t use my real name.
They had taken that away from me as well, as I stopped posting anything on the profile, not wanting their attention. Just wanting them to leave me alone. My parents stayed off social media for the most part, so they hadn’t even realized I’d deleted my accounts until I had mentioned it in passing.
Although, honestly, they hadn’t liked the fact that I’d been on there in the first place. All of our families liked to stay out of the spotlight, and the few times that we had made news, my parents purposefully kept my name out of the papers. It still didn’t stop people from finding me on social media and requesting to follow me, but I rarely accepted. Which is why it was so frustrating that these fake accounts had seemed to find a way around that and still send me messages.
I just wanted, more than anything, to be left the fuck alone.