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for Chrissakes. It’s my body.”
    She glances around the circle; no one budges.
    “It’s body decoration. Like tattoos.” She keeps talking, like she’s been in the middle of a conversation that everybody else happened to walk in on. Like we’re new, not her. “It’s better than people who bite their nails till they bleed. I mean, they’re actually eating their own flesh. They’re like cannibals.”
    Tiffany, who bites her nails until they bleed, tucks her hands under her thighs.
    “I mean, why is everyone so upset? It’s freedom of expression, right?”
    I grind the hem of my sleeve between my fingers. The frantic barking of a dog rings in the distance. Amanda/Manda is saying something about an article she read in a magazine. I turn my head ever so slightly to catch the words.
    “You know, they used to bleed people all the time back in the old days,” she says. “When they were sick. It’s an endorphin rush.”
    “And …” All heads swivel in the direction of Claire’s voice. “Does it make you feel better?” Claire says.
    “Absolutely.” Amanda/Manda shifts in her chair. “It’s a high. I mean, you feel amazing. No matter how bad you felt before. It’s a rush. Like suddenly you’re alive.”
    “And you want to do it again, don’t you?” Claire says.
    My fingers are numb from pinching my shirtsleeve.
    “Yeah. So?”
    “Let me rephrase that,” Claire says slowly. “You need to do it again.”
    The new girl leans forward in her chair, her dark eyes blazing. “Not me,” she says. “I can control it. I always control it.” She folds her arms across her chest; her elbow nudges mine. I jump.
    “What about you, Callie?” Claire’s voice is loud. “Can you control it?”
    The room is dead quiet. Debbie stops cracking her weight-control gum. Even the dog stops barking. Far off, down the hall, a phone trills, once, twice, three times. It’s answered by an invisible voice.
    “Callie?”
    I feel the new girl turn to regard me.
    I nod.
    And I can feel the rest of the group exhale.
    I spend the rest of the session counting the stitches on my sneaker and hating this Amanda/Manda person, hating Claire, hating this whole stupid place. Because now everybody knows why I’m here.
    I’m at my usual place at dinner that night, at the far end of the long rectangular table, trying to make each mouthful last for twenty chews. That way, it takes me just as long to eat as it does for everybody else to eat and talk. The other girls are turned away, discussing some kind of petition. Sydney says she wants pizza. Tara suggests lowfat yogurt. The petition, I deduce, must be about the food. Becca says she wants croutons without gluten, whatever that is.
    “How about an ice cream bar?” Debbie says. “Like a salad bar. You can go back as many times as you want.”
    “Yeah, right,” says Tiffany “That’s just what you need.”
    “I was kidding,” Debbie says.
    “What do you want?” It’s a voice I don’t recognize right away the new girl’s.
    When I look up, two rows of heads are turned in my direction. This reminds me, suddenly, of a book my Gram gave me when I was little, about Madeline, the little French girl who lived with twelve little girls in two straight lines.
    I pick up my plastic spoon and sculpt my mashed potatoes into a little hill.
    “We don’t know about her,” I hear Debbie say. “She doesn’t talk.”
    I make a little mashed potato ski slope, then flatten it with my spoon. The other girls go back to talking about the petition and I decide that dinner’s over for me, that it’s time to bring my tray up to the conveyor belt that takes all the dirty dishes and cups and leftover food through a window into the dish room, where they disappear.
    I stand and try to squeeze between the chairs at our table and the ones behind us. The space is tight and I hold my tray high so I don’t bump into anybody. I pass safely behind Sydney, then Tara When I get to the new girl, she rocks back;