ADELINE ▿ ARNAULT
Outfit
Location: Adeline's Bedroom
Dialogue Color: #7957C2
"I didn't have any choice in being gone all summer. It wasn't my fault." Adeline was very adamant in feeling that way, and in truth, she didn't have a choice. She didn't know that the private plane she was boarding in June was going to take her to a state where she would then be driven to a treatment facility. She thought that she was on her way to California to visit her mother, and she literally believed that until she got into the airport in Illinois and realized that she wasn't at LAX. To claim that it wasn't her fault was definitely aligned with her typical victim mentality. It was her fault that she hadn't accepted any of the preliminary help her father had pushed her towards a couple of months or so before that, and that she had continued to allow her illness to fester into something uncontrollable. She wouldn't accept responsibility for it, even today, but no one else could really be blamed for it.
At this point, Adeline wasn't necessarily opposed to telling Sydney the truth. It felt inevitable, to an extent, but additionally, she wanted Sydney to know. Despite the cold air that was suddenly filling the room, they were best friends. Adeline trusted Sydney. She told her nearly everything. The only reason that she hadn't told her about her illness before this summer, was because she didn't think she had one. She didn't think that she was skinny enough or sick enough to qualify as having an eating disorder, and she didn't want people to worry about her or try to regulate her. The last thing she wanted, really, was anyone judging what she looked like, and she knew that that was what was going to come out of revealing something like this. Now that she had been through what felt like hell and back, admitting to it was less of a burden, but she still didn't know how to actually say it. In the past few days, she actually almost felt like she had PTSD, as dramatic as that sounded, because thinking about how she had spent her summer almost immediately elicited tears and emotions from her. She knew that she didn't want to start crying now, but even if she wasn't actually upset, the anxiety that she was feeling made her feel like her throat was closing up, and that it was only a matter of time before the waterworks began.
She perched herself on the edge of her bed, her posture tight with tension as she looked almost everywhere but at Sydney. "My dad's new wife," she began, because she definitely was not in a place lately where she would consider calling Grace anything that had the word "mom" attached to it, "Convinced him that their summer would be better off without me in it. She basically dramatized an issue and claimed that I had some full blown eating disorder when it's never been that deep, and my dad tricked me into getting onto a plane that brought me to some treatment facility in Illinois." Okay, that wasn't that hard, she thought, but still, she didn't think that she could look directly at Sydney without crying until she had finished saying that. It wasn't a lie, at least not in her mind. At this point, she knew that she did have a bit of a problem last spring, at least by a doctor's standard, and not her own, but that was over and done with, she told herself, so she didn't want to make it seem like that big of a deal still. "And so that was where I was until this past Sunday, and I've basically been in bed since then. I just needed a few days to get myself together, which was why I wasn't in school, and I didn't reach out because..." This was another sentence that had her eyes drifting from the blonde, because part of her was sure that Sydney was more angry about her silence than her actual disappearance. "...I just didn't know how to like... explain myself. I knew you were going to be mad at me, and I obviously didn't want you to be mad at me, but I just didn't know what to say to, like, explain why I just disappeared like that. I just really don't want anyone finding out about where I was. It's stupid and embarrassing and I don't want people to think I'm crazy... I don't know." By that point, tears were streaming down Adeline's cheeks before she even realized it enough to stop them. She was an emotional person by nature, but stress always made it worse.