Tasha Coryell 2

It will Creep

She has developed an affinity for looking in windows as she walks down the street. She sees herself in restaurants, boutiques, and grocery stores. In the windows of cars in the parking lots, in the doors of buildings she enters. She walks, as with another being beside her, whom she glances at from time to time.

It occurs to her that others might see her staring and take it as vanity. She is not entirely sure that they would be incorrect in this assumption. It is because of interest in her appearance that she looks in the windows as she passes them. For what, she wonders, does she really look like?

An ex-boyfriend noticed this fascination of hers, noting the way she stretched out naked in front of the mirror on his closet door and just stared at herself.

“Is this what I look like?” she asked him. “I mean, what I really truly look like to you?”

“Yes, you are beautiful Amber,” he said.

But beautiful was not the answer she was looking for because the word beautiful carried all sorts of implications with it, and she wasn’t sure which ones were true. It was quite possible, she thought, that she was only beautiful to him because in her nakedness lay the promise of a sexual act. It was not beauty that she saw when she looked at herself in his mirror, but the stretch marks that lined her hips and her back and the way the fat on her stomach sank as she sat down, creating a pool around her midsection. It seemed strange to her that he could possibly not see these things. He must, he must see these things.

So there in lies the purpose of looking in windows, to try and discover what exactly others see when she is walking or laughing or just looking off into space. Amber imagines herself to have a certain dreamy demeanor, a sense of just floating around in the world. She suspects however, that she is an awkward looking girl, her pronounced cheek bones lead down to a squared jaw and the concave space between the shoulder and collar bones. Her ribs, slightly protruding, like a second chest that emerges from the stomach. Her hips come as a surprise. Like gravity has pulled down the collected flesh and concentrated it around wide hip bones. She looks uneven in pictures; as if she is about to topple over.

She can remember the very moment when this feeling of self consciousness appeared. It was in her third grade classroom, during the creative writing part of the day. She had taken her notebook- her handwriting little more than an atrocious scribble- and was waiting in line to show the teacher. It occurred to her then, standing in the middle of the classroom in front of the other children, that she was not like them, that perhaps there was something fundamentally wrong with the way she was. Her wrists were too skinny, they bent at funny angles when she wrote. Her clothes, they were horrible as well, how could that not have occurred to her before? She liked to wear dresses, like she thought a princess would. In her mind she was not stuck in this bleak existence of a tiled third grade room, but was living an adventure with knights, princesses and dragons. But that was not reality she knew. In reality Amber was reduced to the girl who dressed funny, who didn’t wear jeans and t-shirts like the other girls. The girl whose hair was too dark, too curly, too long, too messy. Later she would describe this feeling as “acutely inadequate, like everything was wrong with me.”

She went home that night and examined her body in the mirror. She had always been a skinny child, but that night she found a lump of fat on her belly. This ball that she could poke and squish and squeeze. She decided then that perhaps she should diet. Not eat anything until that fat went away, after all how could she possibly expected to go to school with that growth around her middle?

The feeling declined with time. She bought jeans and t-shirts with snooty phrases on them, things like “Princess” and “Brat.” She tried to learn how to put her hair into a ponytail, her mother having failed to teach her how, but they always were up too high or down too low and she could never get her hair to lie perfectly flat on her head. Her mother thought these attempts were cute. She would laugh at the dozen butterfly clips that Amber stuck around her head when butterfly clips were popular. She laughed when at age eleven Amber demanded that she be allowed to start shaving her legs, because none of the other girls had hair on their legs yet and it was really embarrassing.

Amber feels that maybe she is past these deep childhood securities. She does not much pay attention to what others around her are wearing and she is back to wearing dresses and skirts, though it’s for comfort rather than to feel like a princess. Yet, she cannot help but look at herself every chance that she gets, just to reassure herself of what she looks like. She has this great fear, however irrational it may be, that she will realize, much like she did in third grade, that she is an ugly girl. An ugly girl, a fat girl, an inadequate girl, and all the while she will have been carrying with her the delusion that she was average looking, nothing special, but not a leper. So she must check, at every opportunity she must check, for she is never sure when this change might take place.

She had another such moment in eighth grade. Amber has begun blaming her ignorance on the shroud of depression that was over her at the time. She doesn’t remember having a body, for several months all she can recall is the negative, cyclical, thoughts that went through her head. Her body weighed no significance in these. She was depressed, utterly depressed, and as she did not see how she could survive much longer then the state of her body was of little importance. Two months after being clinically diagnosed and four months after recognizing her own depression Amber looked in the mirror. It was quite a shock to see the roll that had formed around her stomach, the masses that had developed around her thighs. Even her face looked wider. In that instance, Amber resolved that she was just going to stop eating. There was no immediate struggle in this cessation. It was quite a logical choice she thought, she was fat, so she wasn’t going to eat and then she wouldn’t be fat anymore. The great debacle, the showdown of food came about a month later. It was a great debate over a Chewy Granola Bar. Actually, two Chewy Granola Bars and a Capri Sun juice. These were not ordinary household items for her family and they had only been bought to feed her brother’s soccer game as an after game snack. What was in the house were the leftovers. They had been offered to Amber when her dad and brother had arrived home, but Amber refused. She refused until late that night, when she sat up watching television. Her television viewing was an act, for really she was thinking about the granola bars in the kitchen. One, she just wanted one. She could taste the granola bars. These simple things, one hundred and twenty calories of preservatives and chocolate held together with granola. But no, she couldn’t. It would get stuck to her, just as the chocolate chips were stuck in the bar. There it would be, a rectangle over her ribcage.

Amber lost the debate. She broke down, ran into the kitchen and ate one granola bar and washed it down with the juice. When this didn’t satisfy her, she went and got the other granola bar and ate that too. Amber cried when she was finished. She stared down at herself and watched the granola bars accumulate around her hips and the juice filling up her thighs. She resolved not to let it happen again.
Amber eats too much now. She recognizes this every time she steps inside of the college cafeteria. Two cups of milk, one chicken sandwich, a scoopful of rice, frozen yogurt. Her stomach hurts after these meals. She watches the other girls as they eat. Some pile their trays full of food. A whole plateful and then some of the deep fried food that the cafeteria served. Then they would get desert. She thinks if they are not fat and they can eat like that, then perhaps she can too. But then she thinks about the large girls in the cafeteria, and that these thin girls who indulge themselves are just the preemptive version of the large girls. Amber recognizes the cruel judgmental quality of these thoughts and knows that she should concentrate on the intelligence of others rather than the appearance, but knows that once she leaves campus that this is not how the world works. Even on campus, she is quite sure this is not how it works.

She finds herself working out more often now. She likes to go on the treadmill next to the mirror and from time to time she glances at her figure as she runs. Her form is awkward, she knows this. In seventh grade a boy endlessly taunted her about how she ran and for several years she was hesitant to run in front of anyone. She likes to watch her muscles in the mirror, the way the muscled tighten when she moves her legs. She watches this on other girls too, outside of the gym. Her own legs jiggle when she walks and she wishes they would look more like they way they do when she works out, the muscles tight and visible. She glances around at the other people working out, she cannot help herself. The thin girls, the ones who can run for miles. She is jealous of these girls. Amber imagines they look at her and sees what she sees in the larger girls: someone who is desperately trying to get thin.

The men in the gym stand in front of the mirror while they lift weights. They watch their muscles while they flex and make faces. Amber knows that if she were to be caught doing this that it would be seen as an act of pure vanity. She makes faces in the mirror sometimes. Tries to catch herself within the midst of laughter and see what others see when they look at her. She sucks her in breath and sees how many ribs she can expose. There are times when she looks in the mirror and thinks that maybe she is pretty, that maybe she is thin, and perhaps she is adequate. These are dangerous thoughts, she knows, for what if these thoughts are wrong?

She got drunk at a party one night in eleventh grade. A boy that she had a crush on in the sixth grade was there and after her first couple swigs of vodka, she announced, “I liked you.” He laughed.

“Say it again,” he said.

“I liked you.”

The last time they had talked to each other had been on a school picnic five years before. They had sat on a picnic blanket with a group of people and had listened to pop music. Amber had envisioned a moment in seventh grade of him coming up to her on the first day of school and declaring, “I like you Amber,” and she would have laughed and said, “that’s really sweet, but you had your chance and didn’t take it.”

Instead it was him with his arms around Amber and her friend Blair, both at the same time. He stepped back and talk with one of his friends and they compared which of the two girls had a better butt.

“Blair, definitely.”

“Yeah, I knew you would say that, her butt is too flat.”

He came back over, put his arms around the two of them and began to kiss Blair’s neck. Blair pulled away, she was anxious, she wanted to leave. When he started kissing Amber’s neck she didn’t move. Neither did she move when he started kissing her lips and pulled her downstairs and stuck his hands down her pants. She only moved when someone said, “Dan you have a girlfriend.”

“No,” she said, “no, I won’t do that.”

She stood up and started walking back up the stairs.


“She’s ugly any ways,” one of his friends said to him.

Stumbling out to the car, she pretended that she hadn’t heard. She sat in the backseat and held a friend down who was more drunk then she was, repeated that they were almost home.

It was no different than sixth grade. Like the Halloween where they were playing the game chicken on a wooden beam. Amber was a wizard and her costume was stretchy. Francisco pulled on the fabric and it came down and revealed her uncovered chest. All of her bra straps had been too visible to wear underneath the costume and so she had gone without. At the sight of her breasts Francisco shouted, “gross!” and made a disgusted face. Amber often worries now, about the shape of her breasts. In tenth grade she was felt up by her boyfriend Joey and she was fascinated by the fact that they were so little that there was hardly anything to grab onto.

“I think you’re hot,” Joey had said, “But people tell me I have weird taste.”

He broke up with her a month later, she was too emotional. He didn’t state that explicitly, instead he said that he just wasn’t used to longer relationships.
“It’s been a month,” Amber whispered into the phone. “But whatever, don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”

Amber had been worried about the pimples on her forehead for most of the relationship. They came like cancer, spreading across her forehead at a massive rate and then growing. She tried to wear hats, but then one spread to her cheek and she had no way to cover it other than makeup. Amber watched Joey’s eyes to see where they went, to see if they were watching her pimples. They focused instead on her hip bones, “You’re so skinny,” he said. “Look how far they stick out.”

“They are like handles,” Amber laughed.


Her handles have receded. They no longer jut out like they did before, leaving a concave space in her abdomen. Instead they poke out through a gathering of stretch marked flesh. Her ribcage too, seems to have mostly disappeared into her stomach, though she can still stick her hand underneath them. That used to be something that Amber did compulsively. People would ask her if her stomach hurt because she was always touching it.

“No, I’m fine,” she said.

“Are you sure?” people would ask. “You keep holding your stomach.”

“No, I’m fine, really.”

Amber’s stomach vaguely reminds her of that of a pregnant woman’s. It is rounded, rather than collapsed. It fills the space between her hip bones and grows bigger out from her stomach. She has only grown about an inch around. Thirty-three, twenty-five, thirty-seven. One inch and she feels as if she is drowning in an excess of flesh. She can see it in the windows when she walks, this lump of lard on the back of her hips. That didn’t used to be there. She imagines that the other girls are saying things like, “God that is disgusting, why doesn’t she just wear clothes that fit her?”

Amber is not sure what fits her. Everyday is seems to change, every hour that she weighs herself things shit. One hundred thirty, one hundred and twenty-eight point two, one hundred and thirty-one. It’s when it hits one hundred and thirty-one that she gets nervous. During the summer after eighth grade, the summer when she stopped eating, she went to camp. Her camp physical had been conducted in the spring and August of the summer she had peeked at her form and saw that her weight listed was one hundred and fifty-six.

“One hundred and fifty-six,” she said. “I don’t weigh one hundred and fifty-six. It must have been the shoes I was wearing, they weighed like six pounds each.”

It was with some fear that Amber stepped on the scale when she arrived home, not yet having weighed herself that summer. The scale rested firmly at one hundred and thirty-five. She was down to one hundred and thirty by the time school started a couple weeks later.

It is the pictures that bother her. The pictures, the windows, the mirrors. The glances she gets from other girls. The thoughts that she knows must be accompanying those glances. When she was fifteen they had family pictures taken and she remembers going out and buying a new shirt to wear. In the pictures her stomach looks small, but her legs look huge, as if all of that fat had simply shifted downwards. In other pictures, in other glances in the windows, her legs look long and stick like. She simply cannot decide which girl she is.

Some days she wakes up wide eyed. Her eyes still partially rimmed with eyeliner, she thinks that perhaps she is beautiful. On these days she might catch a boy looking at her with what she thinks is a look of adoration. She is thin and beautiful, the floating creature that she imagines herself to be. Something cracks these days. Perhaps it is waking up the next morning or eating food and getting the grease on her face, making her feel zit-faced and dirty. Maybe it’s the laughter of a group of girls behind her or a boy glancing at her while she is on the treadmill.

“No offence Amber,” a girl said to her in the sixth grade. “But I cannot imagine you without zits.”

There is still the worry there. She posed the question in eighth grade, “Am I fat?” and silence met her ears.

It is quite possible, she thinks, that when she enters a room everyone is looking at her with contempt. This is why it must be constant. She must constantly be aware of the image that passes by the windows and mirrors. She must weigh herself, use the bathroom and then weigh herself again. She must stand naked in front of the mirror and say, “You’re ugly Amber, you’re ugly. Stop thinking otherwise.” For if she lets her guard down then the fat will creep. It will creep into her thighs, breasts, and stomach. Her cheekbones will fill in, the flab on her arms will droop and others will look at her and say, “Look at that fat girl, that girl with the tire around her waist, and the pimples around her chin. I bet that no one loves her.”