Lorena Otes is a long-time scribbler and fledgling professional writer. She has written for Mamamia Online, Bounty Parents, Defenestration Literary Humor Magazine, and Little Old Lady Comedy. Her memoir manuscript ‘Round After Round’ placed runner-up in the Hawkeye Publishing Manuscript Development Prize 2024. She also shortlisted in The Letter Review April 2024 Nonfiction Prize for her deeply personal article In Serenading Disorder. Her short fiction has also longlisted in both the March and September 2024 AWC Furious Fiction competitions. She is a classical and contemporary dance teacher by profession, an avid Bonnie Tyler fan and proud mum to her fantastic five-year-old daughter, Bonnie.

In Serenading Disorder

On the way to the floor, a sharp edge of the wrought-iron bed slashed your neck open. But heart failure was listed as the official cause of death.

‘Just another six kilos.’

Our ballet teacher was serious. I’d already shed an eighth of my body weight. Now he wanted more.

Often, during our half hour lunch break, you and I raced down to the café with plans to order calorie-free black coffees. As full-time ballet dancers, we wanted the aesthetic of our physiques to be tiny and toned, and there were silently competitive tallies between us of who had the most protruding bones.

“Well, I think he’s going to tell me to lose TEN kilos,” you told me as we ran. You always knew how to make me feel better.

“No way,” I replied through tears. I was devastated. Embarrassed that our teacher had told me to lose weight in front of the whole class. The whole class! With a swift pinky swear, we both skipped lunch. Again. All we needed to get us through the rest of the day was a substantial hit of caffeine.

“QUICK — c’mon, we don’t have much time!”

As we ran, we both knew what would end up happening. It nearly always did, neither of us daring to admitted it until the exchange of a knowing glance at the café counter.

“Two Vienna Chocolates, please,” you announced to the waiter, as if in proclamation of the surrender of our collective willpower. “Well, it IS Friday,” we chortled.

I watched you inhale that thing like it was the last mug of calories you would ever consume. Delicious hot chocolate, smothered in fresh whipped cream. The love of our lives. But what I didn’t know was while I was going home to have dinner later that night; you were not. Not after this indulgence. You wouldn’t eat for days. How did I not pick up on that?

‘You put on weight in the summer holidays.’

We had to line up along the ballet barre: you, me, and the rest of the class, all anxiously awaiting our personal physical assessment. It wasn’t in-depth: we had either put on weight, or we hadn’t. We both stood there, glancing sideways at each other in solidarity.

The teacher paused in front of me, looked me up and down, walking by without comment. Phew! I was in the clear. Then she walked up to you. She paused for longer. “You need to be careful,” she told you.

We sat in the changing room after class drying your tears, wondering what the teacher even meant by ‘careful’. “Am I fat, or not?” you sobbed.

You would never be confused again after that day: the answer would forever be, “Yes. I am fat”. Yet somehow, I didn’t see it coming.

‘I’m going on the apple diet!’

“What’s that?” I asked. I’d never heard of it.

“All you eat is apples,” you replied. “I’ve heard of others doing it. It really works!”

You’d seen the “Apple Diet” in Dolly magazine, I think. The one crammed with the stick-thin models in bikinis. We never aspired to those particular aesthetics, though. We wanted the bodies of classical ballet dancers. All the extra sit-ups, and use of the ‘correct’ muscles would get us there. And apples too, apparently.

“They feed apples to pigs to fatten them up,” my dad told me that night. I immediately rang to let you know.

“Oh well, I’ll try something else then,” you told me, disappointment in your voice. How did I not hear your frailty? I should have listened harder.

‘Don’t use your quads to lift your legs, girls, because you will build them up and look like football players.’

We wanted long, lean legs, but struggled to understand how our technique was going to help with that. “I know!” you said, “Let’s just eat less. Not that you need to — you’re skinny enough already.”

You must have been kidding. Sure, I was short, small and underdeveloped. We were only fifteen and still in the depths of prepubescence. You were sinewy, lean and lengthy. You told me every day that you wished you were as ‘skinny’ as me. I was continually baffled by this, when all I saw were bones pressing through your translucent skin. Why couldn’t I see what was really going on?

‘You went to America and didn’t gain weight. Well done.’

“Because a lot of teenagers eat too much fast food and junk when they go on holidays,” my ballet teacher had informed me, worried I’d return the size of a house. But I was only away for a few weeks and I hadn’t been too worried about it.

“How did you do it?” you asked, wide-eyed.

“I just ate what I wanted. I reckon I put on a few kilos, though — look.” Pinching some skin on my side, I tried to convince you I was bigger than before I’d left. You didn’t take any notice, replying that you wished you had my metabolism.

‘See? Now you’re less heavy, you can feel those obliques working.’

My teacher had been right. With less fat around on my waistline, I could feel the rock of my muscles engaging underneath.

“It must be your daily sit-up routine” you applauded. You were right. I did have a cruel and gruelling sit-up obsession where I forced three-hundred sit-ups upon myself every morning before class. At seventeen, the façade of my young body’s outward washboard perfection housed a colony of butterflies anxiously awaiting breakfast.

“I still have a long way to go,” I quipped.

“No, you don’t! You’re amazing!” you said. “I wish I could just eat nothing and become lightheaded, but I need food as a reward for after class.”

“Tell me about it,” I replied, and we both laughed. But I really had no clue exactly how much you craved the prize of hunger. Why couldn’t we just wake up, have some toast, and head to class like everyone else? Our young hearts couldn’t think through the consequences. Your twenty-six-year-old heart paid the price.

Countdown to midnight on the eve of your eighteenth birthday: “10, 9, 8 …” I watch you rip the Mars bar wrapper off, “7, 6, 5 …” You are holding the chocolate bar to your mouth. You sniff it, “4, 3, 2,” Oh my goodness, this is IT; you haven’t had a Mars bar in eleven days!!! “1… Happy Birthday!” — Gulp.

You ate it with so much force and speed I was convinced you were going to choke on the thing. “Aah I needed that,” you sighed, in the afterglow. I asked if you wanted to go out drinking the following night to celebrate turning eighteen, but you didn’t. The Mars bar you just ate meant you weren’t allowed any calories for days. And alcohol was riddled with calories.

‘There’s just this squishy bit here, but don’t worry; when you use your rotator muscles correctly it will lengthen and your bottom will shrink.’

“I can’t wait for my massive bum to shrink,” I told you in the changeroom afterward. You assured me, once again, that I was the skinniest person you knew. I reciprocated, because no one else I knew was so effortlessly thin.

We both learned how dancers needed to be connected with every muscle in their body. Every single muscle. Having a layer of blubber over the top just added to disconnection which amounted in failure. We needed to work harder! We knew we couldn’t afford to carry additional baggage, and learned that the easiest way to fast-track this goal was to eat way less.

“But I just love green frogs too much,” you laughed. You always guzzled those cream-filled frogs from the bakery like they were the last things you’d ever eat. So sweet, drenched in sugar.

Sometimes I didn’t eat for days. Usually, to make up for eating too much earlier in the week. As teenagers, we didn’t need Instagram to know about body perfectionism. We had the mirrors of the ballet studio. They were enough to tell us everything we needed to know.

The daily rush into class to get the coveted spot in front of a ‘skinny mirror’ was a full-blown tsunami of pink ballet tights. The body conditioning rules we all placed on ourselves bordered on self-abuse. Mine was the daily sit-ups. Yours was an one-hour jog. All before class, and without a crumb of breakfast. Give us a benchmark and we’d bench press it out of the ballpark.

‘You were on my list of people to phone. I am sorry to tell you, but your friend was found dead two days ago on her bedroom floor. Suspected heart failure. Her family wanted you to know.’

I am breathless.

Hearing the words but not believing them.

Then I knew. There was no ‘effortlessly skinny’. The bones pressing through your skin were the precise result of a special form perfectionism, causing your ever diminishing fire to become scarcely a withering ember.

Your heart gave in just when it was time to soar. It had been working hard to keep you alive when you were incapable of nourishing your body. What on earth would somebody have to put their body through for their heart to stop? What did you do? Old people die of heart failure, not twenty-six-year-olds.

My beautiful, young friend.

If we blamed that damn wrought iron bed, that would have made more sense.  A big gothic four-poster giant with sharp edges that made your exit from this life a gory one. Your dance out of this world was not the way either of us could ever have possibly imagined long ago, sitting in that café guiltily guzzling mugs of Vienna chocolate.

We both serenaded disorder, you, with cut-throat precision.

‘She is buried near the edge of the cemetery near the noisy road, so she will never be alone.’

I am now fifty. Nearly twice the age you were when you left. I drive past the cemetery all the time, never not thinking of you.

Once inconceivable, life without you is now a stream of normality. Time erodes disbelief, and the ticking of the clock allows us to continue, where once we weren’t sure we could.

But … if I could still talk to you, I would tell you this: there are flickers of hope.

People talk about mental health more freely these days. There seems to be an openness evolving, alongside a rising symmetry around the diagnosis of disordered eating. It will never be enough, but there are micro steps forward. What would you say about this if I could speak to you now, even just for two minutes?

Perhaps, next time, I will be the one to notice. Perhaps I will be the witness to someone being treated and saved in a way you couldn’t be. My long dance of lament, shrouded in guilt and regret, took its curtain call decades ago; but you are never far from my mind.

And I will never, for the life of me, figure out why I didn’t read the signs. How could I have not known?

Perhaps I could have helped.

If only I could have helped.