My eyes want to stay shut. I felt like I was dying. I was laying in my bed with a caretaker standing over me. She smiled when I finally opened my eyes.
"She seems stripped bare of muscle," she looked back at my family who was pale as ghosts. I didn't even notice they were there.
I scoot up in my bed, "Please, you don't need to spend money on me."
"They do when you look like this," she said, wrapping her index finger and thumb around my arm, "could you sit up?" I did as she said and she lifted up the back of my shirt.
"Do you see these marks?" she turns to my family again, "this is excessive exercise."
"Please-" I laughed, but she was dead serious. "I mean, I ate."
I looked to my parents and Fay, "you watched me."
Even my plea sounded stupid.
"Look," the caretaker told us, "either she gets herself straightened out in the next five days before she is enrolled in school, or she will have to go to several hospitals. Like the mental hospital and the eating disorder hospital-"
"So what do we do?" Fay asked with panic smudged on her face.
"Nothing," she said, "it's all up to Arden. All you can do is monitor."
My mind flashes to the phone call with Harlow. I don't want to end up like them. "I'll do it. I promise."
"We'll talk downstairs," the caretaker told my parents.
"Fay, you stay here," my dad said sternly, which almost scared me.