When she wakes up, she’s smiling. She doesn’t know why. There’s blue hair falling over her face and her bare back, and it tickles her eyelashes and her nose and her lips, and she rolls over, running her pale hands over her pale face.
Her mind flies to question the sudden absence of the weight that has rested on her shoulders every day for as long as she can remember. Since you were four, whispers the doubting, calculating, forever brooding part of her mind.
She tries not to think about it, tries with all her heart to enjoy it while it lasts, but in doing so she makes a mistake, and by the time the smile is gone and she realizes what she’s done, she hates herself, feels like she wants to throw up.
She does the only thing she knows how to do, and she runs, because sometimes it feels like that’s all she knows how to do.
The sweat lingers on her neck and her chest, and she loves every second of it, loves how it makes her thirsty -- like she needs something more to survive.
In the shower, water slides carelessly off the word, and she marvels at how simple it is to suddenly be marked. She wonders if the deeply drawn letters forming that mark will ever leave, or if maybe they’ll be there forever.
Fingers trace across the word – fatass. It doesn’t seem quite as delicate of a word to describe how vulnerable she feels – white skin bared to the white walls and the perfect white tile floor. Everything that she was supposed to be.
Except for thin.
She reaches one thin arm behind her, blindly grabbing at the faucet before giving up and turning her face straight into the on pour of hot water, her skin burning. The water shuts off, as always taking a second for the faucet to realize that the knob has been turned completely, leaving her shuddering in a ceramic room, protected from the angry stare of the mirror spread across the wall only by a thin, lacy curtain.
It’s cold outside, and cold in her bathroom as well, but looking past a rainbow of sweaters she reaches past them, pulling out a cheaply made polo shirt. It’s not his, but for some reason it still smells like him, even after he’s gone.
She loses track of time, staring listlessly through the pages of words that she used to believe in, and so she doesn’t know how long it’s been until her stomach growls. It’s a relief, because all her efforts haven’t been in vain.
And even though she’s thin again, she hates herself for the bagel still. Because it was just a bagel, after all. Because she did it for him. Because he asked her to. Because he asked her to try to care. And she did promise, after all.
The book falls from her hands after a while and she finds herself staring absently at the clock in front of her. She remembers staring at the clock until it’s turned all the way around.
Tomorrow, she won’t wake up with a smile on her face. Tomorrow, she’ll wake up feeling sick, but she’ll have things to do. But tomorrow, he’ll know what to do, even if she doesn’t.

When she falls asleep, she's smiling.