Read Online Girls Under Pressure by Jacqueline Wilson - Free Book Online Page A

bunch of boys who were all over Magda the other day are here too. The fair one asks me where my friend is.
    “She’s coming,” I say.
    One of them mutters and they all snigger.
    I blush, hating them. I’m not going to stand about any longer. Why should I always wait hours for Magda? And I
must
see Zoë.
    I push past the boys and go through to the changing rooms. Zoë is already undressed, bending over her bag looking for her goggles. Her back is alarmingly ridged with her vertebrae. It looks as if her spine could snap straight through her skin. She hasn’t got any flesh anywhere. I can see all the cords and tendons in her legs as she stretches. She straightens up and I see there’s a gap between her thighs now so that she looks bowlegged. When she reaches up to put on her goggles her breasts are two little puckers on her rib cage, nothing more. There are great ugly grooves around her throat and collarbone. Her face is so shrunken in on itself you can see the shape of her skull. She is seriously starving herself to death.
    But when she shivers through the shower, raising her fragile arms, her tummy totally flat in her skintight Lycra costume, I still feel a stab of envy. I
must
lose weight. I want to be thin. All right, not as thin as Zoë. Not sick. But she’s shown me you
can
change yourself. Last year Zoë might have been nearly my size. Now she’s much thinner than Magda, thinner than Nadine, thinner than anyone I’ve ever seen, apart from those poor starving children you see on the news on television.
    I’m going to be thin too. It’s simple. I just won’t eat. And yet all the time I’m thrashing up and down the pool I think Danish pastry—golden, succulent, oozing jam. Magda turns up at last, in her strawberry swimsuit and matching red waterproof lipstick. She smiles her oh-so-jammy smile and all the boys hurtle down to her end of the pool and surround her.
    When I can get her on her own for half a second I tell her that a guy exactly her description of Mick is busy pumping iron in the gym. Magda’s own muscles clench excitedly.
    “Great! Well, we’ll get out soon, right, and go for breakfast.”
    “There’s no point coming here and swimming like crazy, just to make myself even fatter,” I say.
    “You’re not fat,” Magda says automatically. Then she glances down at me as I hunch under the turquoise water. “And you’re getting thinner now anyway.”
    “What? Really? How much thinner? Or are you just saying it to get round me?”
    “Ellie, you’re paranoid.
Yes
, you’re thinner. How much weight have you lost?”
    “Only about five pounds so far.”
    “Well, there you go. You look five pounds thinner. That’s heaps. So you can come and have a yummy Danish pastry with me and help me go Mickspotting.”
    “There! I
knew
you were just saying it.”
    “It’s true. Look, you’re going to go seriously anorexic if you’re not careful. You’ll end up a bag of bones like that poor sad Zoë.”
    “You think Zoë’s almost too thin then?” I ask eagerly.
    Magda stares at me.
    “Wake
up,
Ellie. She looks terrible. I’m amazed they don’t cart her straight off to hospital. I don’t know how her parents can let her get like that.”
    “Her dad’s taking her away at Christmas to feed her up.”
    “He’ll have to give her twenty meals a day, then—she’s like a skeleton.” Magda drops her voice as Zoë zips to our end of the pool and hauls herself up the steps.
    I stare at her stick limbs. She’s shivering, her hands pale purple with the cold. I watch the papery skin across her ribs as she gasps for breath. I know Magda is right—and yet I jog to school with Zoë rather than have breakfast in the café with Magda.
    Zoë might be seriously ill but she’s far fitter than me. I’m staggering in agony by the time I get to school. Mrs. Henderson finds me in a state of collapse on the cloakroom floor.
    “Ellie? What is it?”
    “I’m . . . just . . . out of . . . breath.”
    “I