Hannah nearly wept when she stepped on the scale for the first time in years. She'd never realized how much she'd gained since seventh grade, after all. Now look. She stared at herself in the mirror, a crestfallen girl with pudgy cheeks and a not-so-slim stomach gazing back at her with melancholy. "Why...why...why..." she sobbed to herself. She spent the next two weeks in silent agony. Breakfast became half a piece of toast, accompanied by two glasses of water. Lunch - a Thermos bottle of Lipton black tea. Her friends asked her once after she'd started. "I ate my lunch beforehand," she'd reply with a laugh, lying through her teeth. They never questioned her after that, and it killed her inside. Why didn't they probe deeper, and see through her facade? Besides, if she told them what she did, they would merely chide her for following Rebecca, the pretty girl of the group who refused to eat nothing but a granola bar for lunch. So she continued to eat this way, cutting dinner portions to a quarter of what she used to leisurely consume. She watched her weight drop over the weeks, scars appearing on her stomach, and she soon felt like parchment, where she could write her emotions all over her arms and legs and chest, and soon she never felt like eating at all, content with scratching away at herself with a pen, dreaming of a better Hannah until she finally snapped, like a dead twig from a tree during a particularly frosty winter.