That happened a long time ago. Calico was twelve then, and the days of her summer breathed in and out the way you breathe in your sleep, long and slow. She collected used bus tickets from strangers and began calling her parents Miss Havisham and Mason, although her mother's name was Mary, and her father's name was Joe. In the hospital they don't let you call your parents anything other than Mother and Father. That is only one of the things they don't let you do.

"I am turning into a tree," Calico says.

The doctor's name is Moses, although Calico will not call him that. He clicks his pen too much and tries to look as though he's not taking notes when he really is, of course he really is. "How do you feel about that?" the doctor asks.

Calico stretches out sideways on the armchair and digs her fingers deep into the leather. She says, "It's the least of my problems."

This is a lie.

Samothrace House curved over the road in a lattice, a skeleton of a home. Mr Nichols had let ivy grow up between the bricks and the foundations until the house came apart piece by piece. Light kaleidoscoped over the floor through holes in the walls. Spiders came and built thick webs in the windows, to make light patterns of their own.

When Mr Nichols left Calico said, "Miss Havisham, I want a cat."

Her mother pounded flour into dough. "Oh, Calico. You know we can't have a pet. We can hardly keep track of ourselves around here."

"A cat wouldn't need much taking care of," Calico said. "I bet it could keep track of itself."

"The answer is no," said her mother. "And I don't want to hear any more about it. Go wash your hands for dinner."

Calico turned on both taps in the bathroom, then tiptoed out again, out the back door. Samothrace House smiled from all its broken windows. "Here, kitty kitty," Calico whispered. "Kitty kitty kitty, it's me. It's Calico."

And the cat came. She was half dead then, white all over; white in her eyes, on her fur, as if her bones had spread upwards like blight. Samothrace let herself be carried out of Samothrace House. Her skin pulled silkily across her shoulder blades.

"Holy Mother of God," Miss Havisham said, "what is that? Calico Stone, if you bring a dead animal anywhere near my dinner table, I swear I will ground you for the next six months."

"Mr Nichols went off and left her," Calico said. "The whole house is empty. Look, I think she's sick. If we don't take care of her nobody will. Please," she said to her father, who had just come home from work.

Mason worked in a factory, making nothing but dust. He came home stinking of it. "Poor old thing," he said. "She must be ancient. I remember Mr Nichols had that cat when we first moved in. She probably won't live much longer, darling. Maybe we should just make her as comfortable as she can be."

They made Samothrace a nest of scarves and gingham tablecloths beside the kitchen window, where only sun and basil-scented air blew in. Calico's mother heated milk over the stove but Samothrace did not eat or drink. She yawned once, like a snake. Calico thought she could see the cat's skull through the roof of her mouth. It gleamed bright as a penny.

One day in the hospital Calico wakes up to find a carpet of moss over her body. The moss grazes in between her toes, under her arms, just behind her ears, in a trail down the stepping-stone ridges of her spine. It smells rich and wet. When she brushes her fingers over it, she can feel the tickle somewhere deep down, in the roots of her body. Her bedroom door swings open. "Rise and shine, sweetpea," says Lana, Calico's favorite nurse. Calico shouts, "What the hell's wrong with this place? I'm growing things!"

In the hospital there are many things you are not allowed to do, like skip meals, do sit-ups in your room, eat in your room, eat in the bathroom, throw up in the bathroom, take diet pills, take laxatives, hit the doctors, hit the other patients, hit your visitors, pick apart your Zoloft pills, pick out your IV tube, cut your wrists with broken CD cases, skip therapy, and run away. But in the hospital everything moves much more slowly. You have to keep busy somehow. If you can't get better, you might as well get worse.

"I am turning into a tree," Calico tells Doctor Moses, and Doctor Moses clicks his pen five times and writes oh-so-surreptitiously in his blue notebook. He asks, "What makes you think that, Calico?"

She folds her hands into the folds of the chair, but isn't sure if she's trying to hide the nicks on her knuckles or the moss between her fingers. "I'm sick," she says.

Doctor Moses does not look like a tree or a cat or a house. He has sad, sagging cheeks, very white arms, and a stomach that falls out over his suit trousers. If there was a competition between Calico and Doctor Moses to see who was thinnest, Calico would win. "Was this a dream you had?" Doctor Moses asks. "Would you like to talk about it?"

Calico would not like to talk about it. Calico is taking a vow of silence. She is sitting, sitting and sitting, her fingers knotted into the chair's spine, and Doctor Moses tells her she does not have to speak, and so she doesn't.

Samothrace died in the night. Calico got out of bed to watch her die. Moonlight washed over the house and made everything bone, and Samothrace's bones rose up under her skin, and she had no shadow. Before she died, Samothrace showed Calico secrets. She showed her how to count the little bones in her fingers. "They're like yours are," Calico said, astonished. When Samothrace died, she left Calico nothing but bones, bones, bones.

Once upon a time Calico tried to escape from the hospital. She was not entirely sure how she would manage it, but had an idea of what would happen after: she'd escape, and then she'd break into Samothrace House (which always stood empty), and Samothrace could tell her what to do. But escaping from the hospital is not an easy thing to do, especially when you are on seventy-two hour suicide watch and have forgotten how to walk without fainting. Calico got as far as the window. Lana, who found her, said, "You just wanted some air, didn't you?" and Calico said yes, just air. Later Miss Havisham told her Samothrace House had been torn down anyway.

That was the first hospital stay. Things have changed since then. Now Calico knows she would not be strong enough to escape, so she doesn't try.

By the next morning wood has splintered along Calico's arms. She creaks when she moves, but it makes standing easier, as though she is a delicate plant that needs to be supported with stakes and twine. In the bathroom mirror Calico's eyes are white as windows.

Her father comes to visit. All his hair has turned grey since Calico got sick again, and he lives in a bedsit by himself now. He rubs his hands together the entire time he's there. "You look good, sweetheart," he says, but Calico can tell he's lying.

"How are things with you?" she asks.

"Oh. You know. The usual."

"How's your girlfriend?"

Mason sighs. "Alice is fine, Calico. But we miss you."

A smiling nurse brings Mason away again. Calico has dinner with the other patients: dinner is always two starch, two protein, one fat, one vegetable, one fruit, one dairy, and underneath the table Calico adds calories on her fingers, and watches the other girls add calories on theirs. It is not something they want to do, at this point. It's something they can't help. Some of the new girls try tricks. They slide food into their napkins, or spit it in their cups when they think no one's watching. Calico has already learned that the nurses here know everything. Girls who try to get out of eating have all their privileges removed, and are kept behind until they finish their food. "How sad," the other patients whisper to each other, secretly delighted. In the hospital not being thinnest means you have lost.

Calico lies in bed and listens. Underneath all the normal hospital noises (someone crying, someone panting for breath in a dream) she hears the sound of her own body changing. It cracks like a shell. She has finally broken it. It sounds like rustling leaves, the tick of a clock, a cat purring.

Maybe, Calico thinks, it isn't a tree she's turning into, but something else completely.

Knowing Samothrace's secrets meant Calico never had to go hungry. Samothrace had taught her how to live off herself, and Calico needed nothing, the way a cat needs nothing. She began to crawl out of her bed at night to sleep inside Samothrace House. The floors smelled of mold and rotting wood. Her parents didn't notice, or didn't think it mattered enough to ask. Calico ate only sun and damp.

It was a little bit like religion, watching her ribs appear one-two-three, and the way her fingernails turned blue, the way darkness tingled across her eyes when she stood up too quickly. It was something like ritual and sacrifice. Calico knew there were other girls who did this, who counted the extra notches they poked in their belts, but they were not praying to the same gods. Calico learned about eating disorders in health class. "How sad," she said with the others, and counted her finger bones underneath the desk.

Soon people began to notice. Calico's Spanish teacher kept her back after class and asked if everything was all right at home. "Perfectly," Calico said, and after that she stopped going to school. "We're worried about you," her friends said. "You look horrible. It's sick, you're sick. Why won't you listen to us?" Calico stopped seeing her friends. She spent all day in Samothrace House, lying face-down on the floor, her mouth pressed to the floorboards. Her hipbones ached in the places where they tried to push out through her skin.

Time dissolved like cornstarch in water. Every day the mix grew thicker.

Her mother came looking for her, dressed in a business suit. She studied Calico very calmly. "Come on," she said. "We're going for a drive."

"I can't go. I'm sick."

"I know," said Miss Havisham. "Calico, get up."

Calico stood, and something growled, the house growled, or else her heartbeat sounded much too loud, and blackness filled her up from the bottom. She woke up in a doctor's office. The doctor was saying words like ketoacidos, thrombocytopenia, orthostatic hypotension, edema, atrophy, amenorrhea. "I have the flu," Calico said, but her voice echoed around her head.

That was how she ended up in the hospital for the first time. They let her out when she had gained twenty pounds. Calico went back to school, made new friends, and tried not to look at the hole in her street where Samothrace House had been. But Samothrace House hulked over her dreams. Calico thought she understood why Mr Nichols had left. And Calico thought: it's so easy to recover. It's too easy. And she thought: why not? Why not destroy what you have?

This time she almost died. She went back to the hospital, where so little had changed that it seemed she'd never left at all.

"Why did they tear down Samothrace House?" she asked her mother, when her mother came to visit.

"Oh, Calico. It was rotten. It should have been condemned. The stairs had collapsed by then, and there were stray cats living all over it. It was dangerous. You know the kids in the neighborhood, how they like to get into everything."

That year Calico's skeleton walked around outside her body. It danced back and forth between the hospital and her home. "Thank God you're back––I was starting to worry that you might have actually gotten better," Lana said, the last time Calico was readmitted. "Couldn't stay away," said Calico. Speaking left her cold and breathless.

Calico feels herself growing taller. Last night her feet poked the tip of the bedboard, and tonight she has to sleep with her legs tucked up tight beside her chest. In the morning her head brushes the ceiling when she walks. "Look at me, I'm huge," she says to Lana. "What's the matter with me? How can I have grown so big?"

Lana raises her eyebrows. "I'd hardly say you're huge. You're regaining weight, cupcake."

Calico ducks out of her bedroom and can't think of anything to say.

Later she examines herself in the bathroom mirror. Her stomach used to dip like a bowl, but it's swollen now, and the blue-green veins sprout like ivy over her skin. Her hair is hard and grey and brittle. She feels hollow. There are empty rooms in Calico's body.

She tries to explain this to Doctor Moses in therapy. "I'm changing," she says.

"Your body is trying to heal itself. You've done a lot of damage to it, Calico."

"That's not––" she presses her palms together. "That is not what I mean. What's wrong with you? What is wrong with you? Don't you see what's happening to me?"

"What do you think is happening?"

Calico gives up. She unwraps herself from the leather armchair and walks out. Her feet have grown longer since the morning, so she can balance on her splinter-thin legs. Bent double, the doorframe still scrapes the top of her head. A sharp grey scale slides loose and clatters on the floor.

By lights-out Calico does not fit in her room anymore. She sits with her legs dangled out the window, brushing the grass below, and watches her chest grow. If she wants to escape, it will have to be now. She slides through the corridor on all fours, manages the stairs in one step, and crawls out the door. No one notices. The doctors are busy bending over charts and notebooks. The patients are busy thinking of ways to starve.

Calico tastes night all over her new body, which is skeletal but not sick, and tall, so tall. She tastes dirt and sky and trees and breezes. Her feet flatten the ground. Calico slides back home in the dark.

Red and yellow signs warn her away, but Calico can't read the words anymore, the way castles can't read words. The rope of fencing won't keep her away. Somewhere in this ground is the sack of Samothrace's bones. Calico will dig until she finds them. Her feet burrow into the earth, stone now, tying her down like roots.

Calico's ribs are an empty room. Her eyes are glass sheets to see out of. Mold blooms down her spine, brick on brick, and in between the shutters of her fingers. Her mouth is a door, wide open.

Birds nest in Calico's grey shingle.

Down the street other houses are waking. Men drive off to work, college students run for buses. Kids are bundled into cars. Kids get into everything. One day they will shove through the plywood fence, and find Calico there, and walk right into her open mouth; and Calico will have her first real meal in years. It will be delicious.

Calico's nothing but rafters and attic now, beams and staircases where her veins once were, and her bones are Samothrace's bones. Sick girls would be jealous of her (so thin and so empty). She doesn't mind waiting. She is very good at waiting. Calico's smile is crooked, and tall as a house.

(c) 2005 - 2006 Becca De La Rosa