I sat at the dining room table with my family and best friend. I reached for the potatoes. Dropping a blob into the center of the lilac fiesta ware, I passed the bowl to Katie. We chattered about our Halloween costumes as I finished assembling my dinner. As I reached for my fork I glanced at my friend’s plate. It too was lilac. More disturbing than her follow-the-leader choice of lilac for her plate, was the photographic identity of each food item on Katie’s plate. I shuddered, and pushed what I already knew, out of my mind. Katie had become more than my shadow, she was my clone.

Katie and I had been best friends since we were babies. We met in the co-op preschool, where our mothers had enrolled us for socialization. Our fathers were both self-employed, mine a woodworker making Adirondack furniture, her’s a fisherman. As they both had free time in the winter months, they, too, became friends. Our mothers became close also, yet it was a more troubled alliance. By the time I was twelve, I was aware that things were not quite right with Katie’s mother. It seemed as though she had her family on a roller-coaster, chasing behind her incredible highs, then plummeting to the depths of her darkest despair. We never knew what we would get with her, but one thing was certain. When she entered the room, there was no oxygen left for anyone else.

The weeks that followed that October dinner were a blur. Katie, who had spent weekends at our house for as long as I could remember, was no longer allowed there. On Thanksgiving, Katie attempted to cast herself from her family’s moving car en route to her grandmother’s house, delirious from starvation. Three days later she was in Children’s Hospital in Seattle and all communication between our families ceased. For the next six months, my mother and I tried to reach out to Katie and help. All of our attempts were rebuffed, and finally we were served with a certified letter that demanded we not attempt any further contact. I was heartbroken.

Katie had an eating disorder. Before our eyes, we had all witnessed her wasting away. She had become skin and bones, and although we had all seen, no one had really noticed. Now, sitting in the distant bleachers, we puzzled over everything that had happened. In the forensics of the moment, we scrutinized the clues. Katie had been pulling out her eyelashes, disappearing into the bathroom for hours at a time. She had started distance running, approaching it with an extreme determination. Her father reported finding her at 3 AM running in place on her bed. Then there was the food. She would only eat what I ate, bite for bite. When she was told that she could no longer come to my house, she stopped eating completely. By Thanksgiving, she had starved herself, and her body was shutting down.

During Katie’s stay at Children’s Hospital the treatment team saved her. They attempted to unravel the triggers that had caused Katie’s disorder. While my family felt that her troubled relationship with her mother must be involved, hers thought that I was the trigger. As a twelve year old, I found it hard to differentiate between “trigger” and “cause.” How could I, Katie’s best friend for eleven years, have caused her to starve herself? We played dolls, and Harry Potter and laughed about when our Hogwarts acceptance letter would come in the mail. I withdrew into myself and lost the innocence of my childhood that month. It was four years before I let a friend close enough to fill the void left by Katie. Now, I can accept that in some convoluted way I was associated with the anorexia, but I know that I am not to blame.