It Happens All the Time: A Novel

It was snowing in Eastern Washington on New Year’s Day, making my drive back to Pullman more treacherous than usual. The roads over Snoqualmie Pass were icy, and chains were required, so I was happy my father had insisted I learn how to put them on my tires without anyone’s help. After a tense, seven-hour trip—an hour longer than it normally would take—I opened the door to my apartment to find Daniel stretched out on my bed, waiting for me, just as he’d told me he’d be.

“Hey, you,” he said, standing up to his full six-foot height.

“Hey,” I said, with a big smile. I dropped my bags to the floor and jumped up, locking my arms around his neck and my legs around his waist. He held me like that, neither of us speaking, his face pressed into the crook of my neck and mine in his, breathing each other in. I thought about the first time I’d seen him, back in July, when he started working out during the same hours I was on shift as a trainer at the gym. We’d smile and nod at each other, and sometimes I’d catch him watching me with a client as I issued instructions on how to use the medicine ball or free weights, until, finally, I approached him at the juice bar, putting one hand on my hip. “Are you trying to decide if you want to hire me?” I asked.

“Not exactly,” he said, and his mouth curled into an amused smile. He had short, thick, black hair and heavily lashed brown eyes. His skin was naturally tan, and I guessed that he was of some kind of Hispanic descent. He was muscular, but not overtly so, and he wore loose gray nylon shorts and a blue tank top.

“Then why, exactly, have you been staring at me?” I said, standing up a bit straighter. I was not a high-maintenance girl—I came to the gym to work, not to be the hottest chick in the room, so I was barefaced, sweaty, and my hair was in a topknot bun. I found myself checking out his biceps, wondering if I could bench-press as much as he could.

“I’m Daniel,” he said, holding out his hand, which I stared at for a moment before shaking it and giving him my name. “So, Amber,” he continued. “Would you like to go rock climbing with me this weekend?”

It took me a moment to respond, realizing that I’d been expecting him to ask me out, but to a frat party or a bar, like most guys my age would do, which was a huge reason that I’d never had a serious boyfriend. The ones I’d dated all seemed like little boys trapped in men’s bodies, and I wasn’t interested in having a long-term relationship with an adolescent. The fact that Daniel wanted to do something adventurous and physically challenging immediately made him stand out.

I accepted his invitation, and after we spent a long, sweaty Saturday afternoon together climbing rocks at Minnehaha just outside of Spokane, we went for sushi, which it turned out we both loved. I learned that his last name was Garcia, and that he was the youngest sibling in his immediate family. All three of his older sisters were makeup artists who’d started a business together in Los Angeles, leaving their parents in Denver with the rest of his numerous extended relatives. “Fun fact,” he said. “I have thirty-two first cousins.”

“Shut up,” I said, holding my empty chopsticks, midair, above my plate. “You do not.”

He laughed and nodded. “No joke.”

“How do you remember all their names?” My eyes went wide, trying to imagine how it would feel to be part of such a huge family. I had exactly three cousins, all of whom lived in Oregon, and who I saw only at our infrequent reunions.

“A lot of the guys are named Jesus,” Daniel said. “So that helps.”

We both laughed, and he went on to tell me that he’d chosen Washington State University for its exceptional premed, physiological bachelor of science program. “I’m going to be a sports medicine doctor,” he said. “Maybe work for the NFL someday.”

“No way,” I said. “It’s, like, my dream job to be a trainer for the Seahawks.”

“You like football?”

“Love it. Grew up watching with my dad.”

“Awesome,” Daniel said. “We should hit a few Cougar games this season then.”

“I’d love to,” I said, unable to eat anything more due to the giddy, skipping feeling inside my belly. Even though it was still the middle of summer and we were only on our first date, he was already talking about the two of us being together in the fall. I was attracted to Daniel’s looks, but even more so to his easygoing nature, intelligence, and sense of humor. I loved that, like me, he was a goal setter, someone who knew what he wanted out of life and was willing to work hard to get it. The arousal I felt in his presence, the chemistry between us, was undeniable.

When he walked me to my door after dinner, Daniel cupped my face with both of his hands. “So, that was fun,” he said, leaning in to kiss me, softly at first, then more insistent. I felt an ache between my legs that took me over, and then I did something I hadn’t done before on a first date—I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him inside my apartment, then led him to my bed.

“You’re sure?” he asked as we toppled over and I began to push down his shorts. He was above me, bracing himself with both arms so he wouldn’t squish me.

“Yes,” I hissed. I wanted to sleep with Daniel, and the fact that he paused to make sure of that made me want him even more.

“Do you have condoms? I didn’t think—”

“In the nightstand,” I said, pulling him back down to me and cutting him off with another kiss. I’d bought the condoms several months before, after a series of seemingly promising dates with a guy I’d met in my biomechanics class, who eventually revealed that he already had a girlfriend in Seattle.

Daniel opened the drawer, pulled out one square package from the still-sealed box, and then set it on the mattress. Turning his attention back to me, he began to work his mouth over my neck, pushing the length of his body against me. Frantically, we peeled each other’s clothes away, his hands moving over each newly exposed piece of my skin. I ran my hands down his arms to his well-defined waist, dipping my fingers lower, stroking.

He groaned with his lips on my breasts while his fingers brushed over the heat between my legs. He kissed my stomach, then shifted his body downward, his mouth following suit, tasting and touching me. I began to tense, feeling the pressure in my pelvis build and build. My nerves tingled, standing at attention, begging for release. Daniel went still, only for a moment. “Look at me,” he said, his voice ragged with lust, and so I did. I opened my eyes, locked them on his, and then, his fingers took over where his mouth had been.

A moment later I was falling, wild spasms pulsing through my entire body; a meteor shower of brilliant lights flashed behind my eyelids. He rolled on a condom and was inside me then, moving slowly until he, too, was trembling.

When he finally collapsed next to me, his legs still entwined with mine, both our bodies were slick with sweat. Breathing hard, Daniel kept one of his long arms around my waist and kissed the closest part of my flesh he could find—my elbow. “Wow,” he said, and I rolled over onto my side, resting my head on an outstretched arm.

“No kidding,” I said, smiling shyly. I hesitated to speak what came to my mind next, but felt compelled to share it. “That was the first time I’ve ever . . .”

“You’ve never had an orgasm?” Daniel asked, with evident disbelief.

“No, no,” I hurried to say. “I have, of course. But not . . . well . . . no one has ever given me one.” I paused. “Except me.” It wasn’t like I was a virgin, but I was particular about who I invited into my bed, and once they were there, I had a hard time relaxing enough to let go. Being with Daniel felt different. He made me feel safe.

“Ohh,” Daniel said. “Well, that’s tragic.” He raised a single eyebrow and grinned. “Want to do it again?”

Seeing him now, after two weeks apart, I felt the same sensation as I had that first night. I clung to him for a few minutes, until he finally dropped me back to the floor. He kissed me, set his forehead against mine, and then asked, “How’d it go?” We’d texted each other pretty constantly throughout our separation, but it wasn’t the same as talking face-to-face.

“I probably gained ten pounds, but otherwise, good,” I said, stepping back from him and patting my belly. I’d forced myself not to get on the scale when I was home, too afraid of seeing a number that might spin me into a negative place.

“You look exactly the same,” Daniel assured me. He knew about the struggles in my past, and was a huge help in making sure I stayed on the right track. He understood that my choice of career was my way of maintaining balance, both physically and mentally—focusing on being healthy and strong instead of being thin. He didn’t worry about it the way my parents did; they feared that my becoming a fitness and nutrition professional would keep me walking too fine a line between my illness and my recovery.

“You should check out your fridge,” Daniel said.

“What? Why?”

“Just look.”

“What did you do?” I asked, as I took a few steps over to the tiny kitchenette, which was on the other side of the studio. I opened the refrigerator door and saw that the shelves were filled with a week’s worth of my typical meals—baked chicken and brown rice, kale salad, baggies of chopped vegetables, and individual half-cup containers of plain Greek yogurt. “Babe,” I said, looking back at him. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“I know. I wanted to. I figured you’d be too tired to cook tonight, so when I made mine, I just made enough for you, too.” Daniel wasn’t quite as rigid with his diet as I was with mine, but he did like to eat clean, so it made it easier for both of us to stick to it. Unlike me, he gave himself one cheat day a week, when he enjoyed a cheeseburger or an entire pepperoni pizza, but he exercised enough that his body didn’t show it. Not that how his body looked was the most important thing to me. He could have weighed three hundred pounds and I was certain I’d love him just as much.

“You’re so sweet to me,” I said. “I swear to god my mom purposely slathered everything I ate in extra butter while I was home.”

“I doubt that,” Daniel said. “And remember, everything in moderation, right?”

I nodded, though a part of me knew that while Daniel understood the mechanics and medical details of my eating disorder, he hadn’t lived through it with me like Tyler had, so there were some things he would never fully comprehend. He never saw me looking like a skeleton, my skin stretched over my bones, my joints red with sores simply from rubbing against my clothes. He didn’t see just how close to dying I’d ended up. And now, no matter how far I’d come in recovery, I knew that anorexia was as much a part of me as my hair color or height; I needed to stay vigilant, or else run the risk of letting it devour me again.

I’d been dating Daniel a little over a month when I shared the basics of how my disorder began. I told him how my issues with food started early, that because I’d been only three and a half pounds when I was born, I was bottle-fed on a special formula that was engineered to help me gain weight. Later, as a toddler, I drank calorie-boosted nutritional shakes instead of regular milk. My mother added butter to my rice, heavy cream and extra cheese to my macaroni, and every night, if I wanted to, I could have ice cream for dessert.

Still, I remained a diminutive creature, delicate and sprite-like in the midst of other children, so when I was five and I should have begun kindergarten, my parents decided to give me another year to grow. When I finally did start school, their decision to hold me back resulted in the odd contradiction of me being the oldest, yet also the smallest, person in my class.

“Be careful of Amber!” Mrs. Benson, my elementary school gym teacher would call out whenever I was part of a game. At my parents’ request, she wouldn’t let me participate in the more vigorous activities, like flag football or dodgeball; instead, I was allowed to sit at her desk and read or color until class was over.

Other kids, mostly other girls, were often jealous of the preferential treatment I received. “I wish I was tiny like you” was a line I heard over and over again, and their envy eventually transformed into a warm light burning inside my chest, making me feel like maybe I was a little more important than everyone else because of my size.

It was in the middle of sixth grade that everything changed. I remained the shortest girl in my class, but over the course of several months, I also became the one of the heaviest. It was as though someone had flipped a switch, and all the additional calories I’d been fed over the years erupted into rapidly multiplying, juicy fat cells beneath my skin. With each passing week, my body seemed to swell, rounding out my sharp edges, causing me to burst out of my clothes.

“Don’t worry,” my mother said when she had to take me shopping for a new, bigger wardrobe full of elastic waists and shapeless, stomach-hiding tops. “You’ll get taller and eventually, it will all even out.”

“But I don’t want to be fat,” I said, thinking about all the times I had heard her bemoan her weight. She always seemed to be on some kind of new diet—low-carb, high-protein, seafood only—Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem—but none of them seemed to have a permanent effect. She lost and regained the same twenty pounds over and over, cursing her slow metabolism and sighing every time she had to put on what she called her “fat jeans” again. And then she’d bake a big pan of brownies—“for your dad”—to make herself feel better.

“Oh, honey, you’re not fat!” she insisted. “You’re just having a growing spurt.”

I nodded at the time, but the weight I’d gained made me feel panicky, like there was a huge balloon expanding inside my body, pushing at my seams, threatening to destroy what made me feel special. If I was the same size as or bigger than everyone else—if I was fat—I’d be ordinary, the one thing I never thought I’d be.

More than a year after that conversation with my mom, a couple of days before I met Tyler in our backyard, I stood in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the back of my bedroom door, squeezing the dimpled pudge of my belly between tight fingers, wishing I could take the scissors from my desk drawer and cut it off.

“Disgusting,” I muttered. I dug my nails into my skin, enduring the pain for as long as I could before I finally let go. I thought about what had happened earlier that week, at a park that edged the northwest shore of Lake Whatcom. Kids would line up at the bridge crossing over it so they could jump the ten feet or so into the deep water below, and that’s where my friend Heather and I were when Brittany Tripp—who, with her long black hair, blue eyes, and lithe body, was the most popular girl in our class—cut in front of me with two of her equally popular friends. They all wore tiny bikinis, showing off their tan skin and budding breasts. Thanks to my mother’s Irish heritage, my skin had two colors only: snow white and lobster red, and I wore a sensible black one-piece to cover as much of it as I could, especially my breasts, which, since the beginning of seventh grade, had doubled in size. Heather was blond, with blue eyes. She was also a ballerina, slender, and already a head taller than most of the boys we knew.

“Hey,” Heather said. “We were next.”

“Like I could miss you guys,” Brittany said. “Amber’s ass takes up half the line.” She looked at her friends with a single, perfectly arched, dark eyebrow raised. “Why doesn’t she just go lose a hundred pounds?”

My eyes filled with tears and my throat seized up, preventing me from speaking. I didn’t know how to handle Brittany’s brutal words. For most of my life, when people had commented about my size, it was complimentary. “Oh, look at you! So petite! So cute!” So I did the only thing I could think of—I whipped around and ran toward the spot on the grass where Heather and I had left our towels. Even there, I could hear Brittany and her friends laughing.

“Don’t listen to her,” Heather said when she caught up with me. “She’s a bitch.” Heather and I had met back in first grade, when her family moved here for her father’s professorship at the university. She, her younger sister, and her parents were going camping over Labor Day weekend, so they would miss the party.

“She’s right,” I said. “I’m so fat.”

“Stop it. You are not.”

I rolled my eyes, pointed to my chubby middle, and Heather shook her head. But she had no idea what it felt like to want to crawl away from her own body; to wish, as I had countless times since I began to gain weight, to be struck with some kind of horrible, nonfatal disease that would magically melt all my fat away.

When I got home from the lake, I immediately got online and put the phrase “how to lose weight fast” in a search engine. I clicked on one link after another, skipping the names of diets I’d seen my mother go on, ignoring the articles written by doctors who recommended that a slow and steady weight loss of a pound or two a week was best. I wanted to be thin, and I wanted it now.

I redesigned my search by typing in “how to be the skinniest girl,” and then landed on a site called “Thin Intentions,” hoping to find a way to get more immediate results. There was a list of “thinspo,” which was a shortened version of “thinspiration,” and it was filled with suggestions of how to combat food cravings. I could chew sugar-free gum or crunch on ice cubes; I could drink tons of ice water or hot green tea. When I did have to eat, I could cut my meal into a hundred tiny pieces and chew each tiny bite at least thirty times. There were pictures of perfectly thin women, glorifying the substantial gaps between their thighs. There were quotes that said things like “Hungry to bed, hungry to rise, makes a girl a smaller size,” and “Keep calm and the hunger will pass.”

I didn’t put another bite of food in my mouth that night, chanting those phrases over and over again. I lay in bed, my stomach empty and growling, feeling oddly powerful about my decision to do whatever it took to force my body back into shape. I would lose weight and everything would be okay again. I’d go back to being the smallest girl in my class—to being special—and everyone would want to be like me. Brittany and her friends would give me envious looks, and I’d know that they were wishing their bodies looked like mine. They might even ask me for diet tips, which I’d refuse to give them, of course, so they’d know what it was like to feel powerless, to feel disgusted by their own shapes. My body, how thin I became, would become the standard by which they measured their worth.

I started skipping breakfast, then throwing away the lunch my mother had packed for me to take to school. At dinner with my parents, I did as the websites suggested—I cut my food into tiny pieces, chewing a few of them slowly, hiding the rest beneath piles of mashed potatoes or rice, shaping and forming my food into piles that made it look like I’d eaten more than I had. It only took a couple of weeks for me to lose ten pounds, and one more week to lose another eight. My face slimmed down, and by Thanksgiving of my eighth-grade year, I started to be able to fit back into the clothes I used to wear. But by Christmas, those were hanging off of me, too. I weighed myself up to ten times a day, training myself to do jumping jacks or sit-ups in my room if the scale tipped even a few ounces in the wrong direction. I took up jogging, since my thinspo websites insisted that running was the absolutely most efficient way to burn off any calories I ate.

As the number on the scale dipped lower, the number of compliments I received went up, and that warm light in my chest returned. When I started my freshman year, even the popular upper-class girls would ask me to share my secrets for staying thin. “I just exercise a lot,” I told them. “And I’m supercareful about what I eat.” What I didn’t tell them was how I used my allowance and birthday money to buy phentermine, the one still-legal prescription medication of the fen-phen weight loss pill phenomenon, off one of the girls in Heather’s ballet class. I’d learned about the drug on one of my favorite websites, which touted how taking it made you forget about food and eating altogether. It also gave me a crazy, jittery amount of energy, amping me up enough that I could get by on just a few hours of sleep a night. I hid the pills inside a pair of black boots that I kept in the back of my closet, spending the hours I should have been asleep in front of the mirror, examining my body, pinching at skin I was convinced was still thick with fat, sucking in my gut, counting my ribs, and relishing the empty space that remained between my thighs, no matter how hard I tried to push them together.

“Do you think Brittany Tripp is fatter than me?” I asked Tyler one autumn afternoon during my freshman and his junior year. It was a Tuesday, and we were sitting in the family room off our kitchen, doing our homework together. His mom was working at the hospital pharmacy until six, and then she had a date with an orthopedic surgeon, so Tyler was going to spend the evening with my family for “taco night.” I had already decided that for appearances’ sake, I would force myself to eat two one-inch cubes of chicken, four grape tomatoes, and one quarter cup of shredded lettuce. That way, if my mom or dad said I hadn’t eaten, I could point out that yes, in fact, I had. Both of my parents had expressed their concern over how little I was eating—my mother had gone so far as to take me to the doctor, to whom I lied about how many calories a day I was taking in, and who believed I was heavier than I actually was because I’d used a trick I learned about on one of my thinspo websites—I wore two extra layers of clothes, thick-bottomed hiking boots, and put a handful of lead weights in my coat and jeans pockets when the nurse made me step on the office scale. Since then, the only place I put any food in my mouth was at the dinner table, in order to help keep my parents off my back.

“You’re not fat, period,” Tyler said, looking up at me. His pencil was poised over the notebook that rested in his lap. “If anything, you could stand to gain some weight.”

“No way,” I said. “I want to lose at least ten more pounds.” Dropping that amount would put me just under a hundred on the scale, and according to my websites, double digits were the only acceptable place to be.

“That’s crazy.” He shook his head and made his longish blond hair fall over his eyes. “If you lose any more, you’ll disappear. Like your boobs.”

“Hey!” I said, shooting out my leg to kick his. “Be nice!” I crossed my arms over my chest and curled my shoulders forward, even though I knew what he’d said was true. My boobs had gone from a D to barely an A cup since Tyler and I first met, something that secretly pleased me, since it had stopped all the weird stares I’d been getting from boys.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said, quickly backtracking. “You’re still pretty and everything, but you have lost a lot of weight.”

“I know,” I said. “But it’s only because I needed to. Ten more pounds and I’ll look perfect.”

“I think you’re perfect no matter what you look like,” Tyler said, ducking his head down so I couldn’t see his face.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling a twist of pleasure inside my stomach. He always seemed to know exactly the right thing to say.

Of course, when I told Daniel the story about Tyler pointing out how my boobs had shrunk, I made a joke out of it, leaving out the part where Tyler also told me I was perfect. Daniel knew that my best friend was a guy, that Heather had moved to San Francisco with her family right after we finished our freshman year, leaving Tyler as the person with whom I spent the most time.

“You two never hooked up?” Daniel had asked me when I told him about my friendship with Tyler.

“Nope,” I’d said, though that wasn’t one hundred percent true. I’d certainly never slept with Tyler, and I reasoned that that was what Daniel had meant. “He’s like my brother.”

“That’s cool,” Daniel had said, and then never mentioned it again. I didn’t tell him about the fight Tyler and I had had back in August, and now that it was resolved, I didn’t see the point in bringing it up.

I closed the refrigerator door and walked back over to Daniel, slipping my arms around his waist. “You know what’s not good in moderation?”

“Hmm,” he said, with a slow smile. He reached his long arms down and cupped my ass in his hands. “I’m not sure that I do.”

I kissed him, then, letting the tip of my tongue brush over his lips. “Let me show you,” I said, and a moment later, our clothes were off, and we were welcoming each other back home.