“LA.” That was all I said to him. And I tried to walk away again.
“Well, you look great,” he said. “You’ve lost a lot of weight, haven’t you?”
But he said that like it was a good thing, which felt weird to me, because it showed me how much he didn’t know. He was about forty or fifty pounds overweight, so I guess he just figured everybody has all the food they want anytime they want it, so if they get thinner it’s because they wanted to. Because they tried.
I didn’t answer, so he asked, “How did you get so slim?”
“Starving,” I said.
And this next part was weird, but they both smiled at me, like they still thought this was a really great thing to be able to say.
“Tell me about it,” his wife said, even though we had only ever seen each other from a distance and she’d never talked to me before. “It’s so hard to stay on a diet. I don’t know how you managed.”
I had no idea how to hack through all that distance between where their heads were and the way I’d been living, so I just smiled and walked away from them.
I walked up to the counter and ordered a latte, because that had a lot of milk in it, and I hadn’t eaten anything. Brooke would’ve bought me breakfast, but I’d been too queasy to eat any.
“Can I get the key to your bathroom?” I asked the girl behind the counter. Weirdly, I didn’t know her, so she must’ve been a new hire or something.
She gave me the key and I told her my name so she could write it on the cup. I had to walk right by my science teacher’s table to get to the bathroom.
“It was good to see you again, Molly,” he said.
And I completely decided right then that he didn’t know the real truth, because he wasn’t acting like any of this was a tragic thing. I stopped because I was confused about something, and all of a sudden I couldn’t walk and be confused at the same time.
“How come you’re not in school?” I asked him.
“It’s Sunday,” he said.
“Oh. Is it?”
Then I got a little embarrassed because most people know those simple things like what day it is.
I let myself into the bathroom with the key and looked at myself in the mirror, and what I saw was just a regular girl. Clean clothes, clean hair, clean face. Thin enough to look like I was trying to be a fashion model. But the look felt like a fake, because I knew that’s not who I really was at all. I felt like I was wearing a normal-girl costume. Like I was trying to fool everybody about my life.
I looked away from the mirror and used the bathroom and washed my hands.
And then I stepped out of the bathroom and ran right into Gail. I mean banged right into her hard enough to almost knock her off-balance.
“Molly,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Nothing,” I said, which was a stupid answer.
My heart was hammering around in there, and I could feel my face getting hot and tingly, which meant it was turning red because I was embarrassed. And the redder it got, the more she would see how embarrassed I was, and I knew it, so that made me even more embarrassed. And I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I mean, I was literally looking away, kind of desperate, like I had to do that to save my life. I could see her hair out of the corner of my eye so I knew she still wore it slicked back with product and, like, purposeful comb marks, but other than that I can’t even tell you if she looked good to me anymore, because I literally didn’t even look.
She had just been walking up to the counter, to order I guess, and she was with Jason Miller, which was just too weird for my brain to process.
“You look great,” she said. “You lost a lot of weight.”
That I decided I couldn’t forgive. I forgave my science teacher for saying it—in fact, there was nothing to forgive with him, because I never really blamed him for saying it, because he didn’t know. But Gail knew what I’d been through. Then again, I guess there were a lot of things I couldn’t forgive Gail for.
“I was just leaving,” I said.
And I walked out the door without my latte, which I had already paid for. I had no idea where I was going, but I had to get away.
Then, as I was walking along really fast with my head down, I realized that in a minute the new girl barista was going to call my name and say my drink was ready, and then Gail would know I’d walked out without it. And then she would know I hadn’t just been leaving at all.
My face burned hotter and hotter the more I thought about it, but, like everything else in my life, it was a done-deal disaster and there was nothing I could do to make it right.
Chapter Nineteen
Brooke: The Devil
I was taking Etta out of her car seat. To take her up to the house with me.
That’s when I noticed my hands were shaking.
It came as a surprise to me. Because, as my mother tended to say, I didn’t have a dog in this fight.
At first I wrote it off to the general stress of anticipating having words with a stranger. But, you know what? I’m pretty damned good at that. I’m no coward about such things. I’ll talk to anybody about anything, provided there’s no actual threat of physical violence.
I lifted Etta into my arms. She
