I always thought of my cousin (Let’s call her Cousin for the sake of her privacy) as a small, slightly pudgy girl with a big smile. She always trailed behind my eleven other cousins, my big brother, and me while we played games, and she always seemed to happy just to sit and talk with us.

I was once told that while she was in fourth or fifth grade, her mother found her in the bathtub with her legs completely hairless. Very confused, her mother inquired about it, and Cousin explained how girls in her class called her legs hairy and gross, so she shaved the hair off.

That was the time that we should’ve started keeping a closer eye on her.

I had heard over the years that my aunt and uncle were worrying about Cousin and peer pressure issues. They were mainly concerned about her eating habits. They thought that maybe girls were calling her fat and she was reacting the same way she did when they told her she had hairy legs.

But when I saw her two years ago, it was not what I expected. The girl I once thought to be radiant and albeit a little pudgy, was nothing more than a shell of a person. Her feet were pressed against each other, as were her knobby knees, but her legs touched in no places. Her shirt rested a bit high above her jeans, her hip bones jutting painfully out and her stomach fat nonexistent. With her back turned to you, you could practically count her ribs and her arms looked no more than toothpicks. Her collar bones stuck out like mountains from her chest and her neck looked to thin to hold her head up. She wore makeup and looked as though she thought the world of herself. Cousin was in sixth grade.

It made me angry. Oh, it made me so angry to see her this way. I wanted to yell at her, shake sense into her feeble little body and watch her as she ate every last thing on a plate piled a mile high. But I sat back and watched as she and her equally skinny friend shared a kids meal, but barely touching the plate at all.

While in the car back to the hotel they were staying at, I casually mentioned how if you stopped eating you would gain water weight as your body tried to counter it’s lack of nutrients and eventually your stomach would start to eat itself. They looked appalled, but recent photos show no difference in her ghastly appearance.

I just want her to go back to the way she was before. I just want her to be happy.
I just want her to live again.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will hurt forever.