Sophie
54 kg and falling

Ana, Mia, Sue, and I walked out of DeLorean's, the self-proclaimed best burger joint in Colma, laughing about how the waiter got annoyed with us when we ordered one Blue Cheese Supreme and four plates. Me, Ana, Mia, and Sue, the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I remember Ana taking little nibbles of her quarter of a burger, eating behind her hand. I remember Mia going to the bathroom after she finished her quarter, and when I wanted to go with her she said no, go when I come back. I remember, Sue, the quiet girl I had known since grade school, sitting lost in her own thoughts. I only invited her because I saw her outside art class and she kind of hung around without saying anything. She was like a lost little lamb, in a strange way I liked her company. Even if she didn't talk much occasionally she would say little insightful things, little bits of spicy punctuation or a quirky sentence in an otherwise bland conversation.
Mia got back from the bathroom and I slid out my phone and took a photo of us. Ana peered at the screen over my shoulder.
"Can you delete that? I look horrible."
"You do not."
"I said delete it. I don't want a record of me looking so fat. What if someone hacks it?"
What could I do? I deleted the photo.
"Hey, Sophie, you'll find this funny." Mia was talking to me. "When I used to be fat, like, no guys would talk to me, but the other day Jason Walton asked me out and I turned him down."
"Oh really? That's hilarious," I said, wondering just how fat Mia used to be.
"Now that I'm popular I have to make such difficult choices." Mia laughed and sipped her diet soda.
"You're not popular, your vagina is popular," Ana said, waving her hand at the waiter to bring the bill.
Mia glared at Ana, and it seemed like she was going to retaliate, to defend herself, but then she decided against it and looked down at her empty plate.
"I can't believe I ate all that, I'm such a pig."
We gave each other glances, each of us knowing what Mia had done in the bathroom, but she wanted to play the game of secrets. We paid the bill and walked to my car.
"You guys want to come to my place?" I said, trying to change the subject. "I have three, count them, three bottles of Bergerac Champagne I got as a house-warming gift from my mom."
"How many calories is that?" Mia asked, getting in to the front seat of the car. She had not buckled up, which annoyed me, but I didn't say anything.
"Not many, like 70 per glass. How many have we done today?"
Sue piped in, "Two twenty, including the perpetually motioned diet Pepsi."
Ana raised her eyebrows at me as if to say, what a weirdo.
"We can still do two or three glasses then." Mia said, as I unlocked the steering wheel.
"Mia, you stink." Ana waved her hand in front of her nose from the seat behind Mia. I saw Mia out of the corner of my eye flush with embarrassment. She did have an odor. I tried to block out the atmosphere and started the car.

My parents had moved me into their garden cottage, a small but perfect space for me to study and have friends over without them embarrassing me. It was actually really amazing of them to do that because they usually rented it out and used the money to go on holidays to the South of France.
Now I had my own space with friends over, things were finally looking up for me. We talked about art class and what Olive's problem was, about Bri, the art model. We came up with the theory that Bri was Olive's daughter.
Sue sat on the floor staring at the carpet, lost in her own thoughts. According to my textbook of Abnormal Psychology and a droning lecturer at class, routine and simple activity was the best method to engage in social confluence.
"Hey, Sue, would you get us some more champagne from the fridge?"
She nodded and stood up, trying to get past me without touching me, not an easy task in my small lounge.
We sipped champagne, talked rubbish for an hour, and after two glasses of sparkling wine I had to go to the bathroom. I walked in to see the reflection of Ana standing by the washbasin, adjusting a tube of thin, flesh-colored plastic that extruded from her stomach. The tube snaked from a plastic disc in her skin to the washbasin where some substance that looked like baby food squirted through it into the running water.
"Hi," I said, leaning over her to turn on the other tap. "What's that?"
Ana jerked around, startled.
"Don't you knock, Sophia?" She pulled her sweater over the tube and pretended to check her make-up, as if the last few seconds were some false memory.
"Sorry," I said, washing my hands. "I usually keep the door closed."
"Just a medical thing, it's not important," she said.
"Do you have a liver condition or something?"
"Something like that, yes. I don't like to talk about it."
"Okay. Hey, do you think Sue is okay?" I spoke quietly, not wanting my voice to carry.
"Who cares?" Ana said, tucking the tube into a small pouch clipped into her underwear. "She just brings us down. You should consider dropping her, she drains our energy. She will be a bad influence on your state of mind. You have to stay focused, okay?"
"Yeah, maybe." I did like Sue, but she was like a sweet white wine- not palatable with every meal. I walked out the bathroom, almost knocking over Sue carrying the tray of champagne glasses to my tiny, tiny, wonderful little lounge. She didn't say another word the whole evening, but I left her to her thoughts.
I took everyone home around midnight, for a while convinced there was a car following us. Damn my paranoia. I had been over these feelings a thousand times with Doctor D, and yet there was still the prickling on the back of my neck, the crawling unease at the lights behind us in the distance.

#

Olive was going to be the death of me. She didn't like anything I did, every time I tried to create something delicate she had to saunter over with her six-gun pencil drawn and destroy my effort. She wasn't singling me out, she just had a thing about creativity, as soon as anyone created something beautiful, something truly inspired, she walked over and told them to destroy it. And they did. They just fucking did.
"Kill your darlings," she told us, which didn't make sense. Wasn't the point of art to create your darlings? I had joined this class to explore my creative side, to get away from the destructive life that had been following me, but now, caught up in Olive's fascist agenda, Art was already just another place where the world was trying to get at me.
Ana and Mia were nowhere tonight, if they had come in and left I couldn't remember. They were fuzzy in my brain thanks to the inner battle with our oppressive overlord in the sarong.
In the next break I rushed out for a smoke outside the building to get away from everyone, and there was Sue, sitting outside on the bench, not reading or texting, just sitting there. If she had been slightly shorter her legs would be dangling and swinging over the edge, I was certain of it.
"Hey. What are you doing here?" I walked over and lit a cigarette, holding out the packet for her. "Smoke?"
"No thanks, I don't smoke. It's bad for your health."
"No kidding," I said, smiling at her, "why do you think I do it."
"Why would you do something that you knew was bad for you?"
"I don't know. To do something bad for me. Haven't you ever done anything that could kill you?"
"I suppose. I don't want to die of cancer though."
"Really? What do you want to die of?"
She looked at me like I was assaulting her.
"Sorry," I conceded, "I mean, we all have to die of something, right?" I threw down the cigarette and walked back to class, stopping to pee in the rest-room. In the stall someone had thrown up. So disgusting. They hadn't even bothered to flush. I had a strong suspicion who had left that little and obvious cry for attention and it unsettled me. Why couldn't she just be open about it? Or was that it, that it wasn't so much about the throwing up but about the identity attached to having a secret game? I really must stop over-analyzing things, I thought, or I will make a terrible shrink one day.
I walked back from the bathroom and the artist guy walked up to me, staring at me like I had offended him deeply. I could tell he was angry about what I said to him in the first class.
He stood in my way and said "Hey, are you losing weight?"
And there it was, the subtle insult, retribution for embarrassing him in front of the class. I sucked in my fat stomach and carried on putting my pencils into my bag, not really wanting to fish into this right now. I needed to let go of thought and go out with my new friends, take a party bus to good times, forget about last week's fatal flaw with me and Luke, forget about my mom, and the last year of my life. Then Max gave me his mega important business card, trying too hard to not impress me with how important he was, as if to say, look, I'm someone important, and you're not even anything.
I took the card and behind him saw Mia, trying to talk secretly on her phone to her boyfriend again. I felt a momentary pang of jealousy. Mia was permanently connected to her mysterious boyfriend, whoever he was, whenever I walked near she would put down the phone and make it awkward until I left.
The guy stood there, waiting for something, some response, as if he expected me to have my own business card to give back to him, like it was required. If I did have a card it would have no picture, no information, just the words

Sophie Krzinsky
Professional Nobody
Awkward Silences my Specialty

I turned over his card, on the back a beautiful black and white drawing of a girl glimmered under matte lacquer, on the front the neat gold embossed capitals announced Max Belmond. It was a work of art in itself. I carried on packing up.
I turned away to pack up my things, placing his card on the easel next to me as I bent down. "Thank you, Max Belmond," I said, hoping I didn't sound too sarcastic. Most students didn't have their minds on business cards. "Why do you have a business card?" I asked, because maybe I had misjudged his age and he was a post-grad, or studying part time.
I looked back over my shoulder at him, unsure if he was one of those creepy artist types who would end up stalking me, wrap my skin around his bedside lamp.
But wait, was he being sarcastic about me losing weight, or had he been watching me, how did he know I had lost weight? I tried to remember if I'd seen him around campus, but in the ocean of faces at college a person could be invisible in full view. But then he left. He just left.