Girls Under Pressure Read online

  I wish I had the courage to contradict her. She’s the one who’s sick, only she can’t see it. Or is she? She’s extremely fit so she must be healthy. She’s top of her class. Best at everything. Especially art.

  “Do you still paint, Zoë?”

  “Well, just my entrance exam work.”

  “You don’t do any art just for fun? You know, like when we did that mural together in the art room?”

  Zoë shakes her head, looking pitying.

  “I don’t really have time for that sort of stuff nowadays,” she says, as if I’m a toddler wondering why she won’t do finger-painting with me.

  She disappears inside the pool. I hang around waiting for Magda. I see a tall dark hunky guy in a very stylish black sweatsuit go through to the gym. I wonder if he’s Mick? I can’t really ask. The bunch of boys who were all over Magda the other day are here too. The fair one asks me where my friend is.

  “She’s coming,” I say.

  One of them mutters and they all snigger.

  I blush, hating them. I’m not going to stand about any longer. Why should I always wait hours for Magda? And I must see Zoë.

  I push past the boys and go through to the changing rooms. Zoë is already undressed, bending over her bag looking for her goggles. Her back is alarmingly ridged with her vertebrae. It looks as if her spine could snap straight through her skin. She hasn’t got any flesh anywhere. I can see all the cords and tendons in her legs as she stretches. She straightens up and I see there’s a gap between her thighs now so that she looks bowlegged. When she reaches up to put on her goggles her breasts are two little puckers on her rib cage, nothing more. There are great ugly grooves around her throat and collarbone. Her face is so shrunken in on itself you can see the shape of her skull. She is seriously starving herself to death.

  But when she shivers through the shower, raising her fragile arms, her tummy totally flat in her skintight Lycra costume, I still feel a stab of envy. I must lose weight. I want to be thin. All right, not as thin as Zoë. Not sick. But she’s shown me you can change yourself. Last year Zoë might have been nearly my size. Now she’s much thinner than Magda, thinner than Nadine, thinner than anyone I’ve ever seen, apart from those poor starving children you see on the news on television.

  I’m going to be thin too. It’s simple. I just won’t eat. And yet all the time I’m thrashing up and down the pool I think Danish pastry—golden, succulent, oozing jam. Magda turns up at last, in her strawberry swimsuit and matching red waterproof lipstick. She smiles her oh-so-jammy smile and all the boys hurtle down to her end of the pool and surround her.

  When I can get her on her own for half a second I tell her that a guy exactly her description of Mick is busy pumping iron in the gym. Magda’s own muscles clench excitedly.

  “Great! Well, we’ll get out soon, right, and go for breakfast.”

  “There’s no point coming here and swimming like crazy, just to make myself even fatter,” I say.

  “You’re not fat,” Magda says automatically. Then she glances down at me as I hunch under the turquoise water. “And you’re getting thinner now anyway.”

  “What? Really? How much thinner? Or are you just saying it to get round me?”

  “Ellie, you’re paranoid. Yes, you’re thinner. How much weight have you lost?”

  “Only about five pounds so far.”

  “Well, there you go. You look five pounds thinner. That’s heaps. So you can come and have a yummy Danish pastry with me and help me go Mickspotting.”

  “There! I knew you were just saying it.”

  “It’s true. Look, you’re going to go seriously anorexic if you’re not careful. You’ll end up a bag of bones like that poor sad Zoë.”

  “You think Zoë’s almost too thin then?” I ask eagerly.

  Magda stares at me.

  “Wake up, Ellie. She looks terrible. I’m amazed they don’t cart her straight off to hospital. I don’t know how her parents can let her get like that.”

  “Her dad’s taking her away at Christmas to feed her up.”

  “He’ll have to give her twenty meals a day, then—she’s like a skeleton.” Magda drops her voice as Zoë zips to our end of the pool and hauls herself up the steps.

  I stare at her stick limbs. She’s shivering, her hands pale purple with the cold. I watch the papery skin across her ribs as she gasps for breath. I know Magda is right—and yet I jog to school with Zoë rather than have breakfast in the café with Magda.

  Zoë might be seriously ill but she’s far fitter than me. I’m staggering in agony by the time I get to school. Mrs. Henderson finds me in a state of collapse on the cloakroom floor.

  “Ellie? What is it?”

  “I’m . . . just . . . out of . . . breath.”

  “I thought you were having an asthma attack. Have you been running? And you’re not even late for school!”

  “I’ve run all the way from the leisure center,” I gasp.

  “My goodness. I think I need to sit down. Eleanor Allard on a fitness kick!”

  “I’ve actually never felt less fit in my life,” I say, clutching my chest. “I think I’m having a heart attack.”

  “Maybe you need to come to my lunchtime aerobic session,” says Mrs. Henderson.

  “OK, maybe I will,” I say.

  It’ll burn off two or three hundred calories—and stop me craving lunch. It’s a special lunch today, the cook’s traditional Christmas dinner treat for the end of term. Turkey, one chipolata sausage, two roast potatoes, a dollop of mash and garden peas, and then mincemeat tart with a blob of artificial cream. We’re talking megacalories per trayful.

  I can’t risk setting foot inside the canteen. I go to the aerobic session. It’s hell. Total burning hellfire.

  I feel such a fool among all the seriously fit muscle girls leaping about in their luminous Lycra. I stand behind Zoë, who is bunched up in a huge T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms. She looks hopelessly weak and weedy, but she’s fighting fit. She never misses a beat, her lips a tight line of effort.

  I get so hot I can’t see out my glasses and the spring goes out of my hair. I’ve got such a stitch I have to fight not to double up. I still try to swing my arms and stamp my legs but they’ve turned to jelly.

  “Take two minutes’ break, Ellie,” Mrs. Henderson calls.

  I crash to the floor. Gasp gasp gasp. But I’m not going to lose any weight lying here going wibble-wobble. I drag myself up and get going again. I last to the end of the session . . . just.

  I’ve got to take a shower, obviously, but I seriously hate the school showers because there aren’t any curtains at all. I hunch in a corner, trying to keep my back to everyone, taking envious peeks at all the taut thighs and flat tummies surrounding me.

  Zoë avoids this ordeal. She runs off in her sweaty T-shirt, clutching a sponge bag, obviously going to have a little wash in the toilets.

  I shove my school uniform over my sticky pink pudding body as quickly as possible. Mrs. Henderson catches hold of me.

  “Can I have a word, Ellie? Come into my changing room.”

  Oh, God. The only times I’ve been invited into her inner sanctum it’s to get severely told off for pretending to have a permanent heavy period to get me out of games. She’s surely not going to tell me off for volunteering for extra games?

  “So, Ellie, what’s going on? First it’s swimming, then running, now aerobics. Why?”

  “You told me to come along this lunchtime.”

  “I was joking—though it was certainly a pleasant surprise when you turned up. But I just wonder what you’re playing at, Ellie.”

  “I told you. I’m trying to get fit. I thought you’d be thrilled to bits, Mrs. Henderson. You’re always nagging at me to take more exercise. So I am.”

  “Do you want to get fit, Ellie—or thin?”

  “What?”

  “I’m not stupid. I know why poor Zoë comes to aerobics. I’m very worried about her. I’ve tried talking to her umpteen times�