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Overview
I feel like I'm silently screaming for help
and no one pays any attention of tries to hear me.
I can't control anything anymore.
It's all out to get me!
When Kim can't handle things, she eats. Then she purges. Sometimes she fasts. She knows she isn't as thin as the other girls on her gymnastics team, and she's worried that now, away from home for the first time as a college freshman, she won't be able to live up to expectations -- especially her own. Eating is the one thing she can control -- or can she?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062012746 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 05/18/2010 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| Lexile: | 790L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 220 KB |
| Age Range: | 13 - 15 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
To Kimberly and every other young person
who wanders through the scary
maze of an eating disorder. Your journey
may seem confusing, complicated,
sometimes even sinister.
But you can find your way out!
You are not alone.
March 1
Wow! Today Melanie and I were checking out things we couldn't afford in the mall, when she spotted a little table stacked with journals. Neither of us had had one since we were little kids. Then they were called diaries and they were a third the size of these journals and a third as thick. It will be fun next year, when I am in college, to read about my last year in high school. Going from a diary to a journal is like exploding into adulthood. SCARY.
March 2
Nothing much happens in my dull life in Arizona . . . SAME OLD SAME OLD . . . Except next month we should be getting our college acceptances. IF we are accepted! I'm not absolutely, positively sure I WANT to go away from my family and friends and . . . everything in the world I know. Imagine seventeen-year-old me at a huge university.
March 6, Tuesday
I hurt my wrist on a floor exercise today. I don't know how or when it happened . . . which is weird . . . it didn't really start hurting bad till I'd finished my routine. Gymnasts are used to living with pain but wow. I'm home now using hot and cold compresses. Lucky it's my left wrist so I can write. Melanie and I had planned on going to the library, but she insisted I stay home and take care of my wrist. We girls on the team really try to encourage and work with each other. Our coach, Miss Muskinko, insists on that, and we trust her.
5:35p.m.
Melanie probably called Cam as soon as I hung up and now they are at the library looking for guys. And I'm not. It's amazing how many guys there are that WE would like to be magnets for, and how few . . . like practically none . . . seem attracted to us. Melanie and I can talk to each other about almost anything, like really wanting...almost physically longing for...some nice, handsome, smart, male person to hold our hand...put his arm around our shoulders or... just to let us know we are...human female creatures that need human male creatures. I don't mean needing us just as sexual objects, like the gross guys that make you want to throw up when they touch you. We can't figure out how about five percent of the girls get about ninety-five percent of the guys. I read in a magazine that that is what happens! It's not fair and IT'S NOT RIGHT! BUT THAT'S THE WAY IT IS! GUYS GET ALL THE BREAKS! Or do they? Maybe I'm just a dumb naive kid who wants to be a princess.
6:45 p.m.Is it normal to be jealous of girls who have boyfriends? I don't mean friends like Tad and Josh and Will, who treat us like we're ...a sister or cousin or something. I don't want to be a sister or cousin!
7:32 p.m.
Just as I was thinking...and feeling myself dancing in Tad's arms...with him looking deep into my eyes like I WAS someone very close and special, the stupid phone rang. So much for that! Wrong number!
Once when I was about thirteen, when we were still living in North Carolina, my friend Katie and I went to the Magic Shop on Fourth Street and bought some perfume that was supposed to draw guys like flies. It didn't work, nor did the candles and the other dumb stuff we got. Were we desperate? I still am!
It was really hard for me when we moved here. Dad had been offered a job on the hospital staff, with all kinds of perks, and Mom had been given a not-too-demanding job in accounting (which she loved). Dara and Lara, my twin sisters, had each other! Dara and Lara were eleven when I was born so they had always had each other. I envied them! Mom and Dad were like one entity they had been married so long . . . AND ME? Nada as usual! I wish the twins were teaching here instead of halfway across the nation. I miss them like part of me is gone. Sometimes I think I'm the only one in the world who doesn't have somebody.
That's dumb!
9:46 p.m.
I've been thinking of asking Mom to let me stop taking piano lessons, but when I walked by the piano with my left arm wrapped in its bulky cold compress, I realized how much I'd miss playing. I really love music and gymnastics and all the other stuff I sometimes think I don't like. SOOOOOOO . . . I'm a . . . Sometimes I don't know who . . . or what . . . I am.
March 15, Thursday
My arm is getting better but Miss Muskinko told me to take a little more time off. I had to watch everyone else doing the things I wanted to be doing on floor and bars and beams. Miss Muskinko suggested I scrutinize each person carefully and try to sense, as well as see, what they were doing right and wrong. She said I could learn a lot that way. It worked! In fact, I felt kind of like a COACH myself. I'm dedicated to gymnastics. I have been since the first day I was introduced to it in seventh grade. Even then it gave me a thrill and a boost that I can't get any other way! It's like defying gravity or something.
I WONDER...If I were lighter...could I fly higher? Ummmmmmm, what's to lose? A pound or two — or ten? No! Not ten...
Kim: Empty Inside. Copyright © by Beatrice Sparks. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.