Milk Fed - Melissa Broder Page 0,25

could have something delicious to eat, but only after we did the other parts of prom night. She promised potato chips. She promised apple fritters.

She let me be the girl. She was the boy. I had no problem with that. We would slow dance in her bedroom, and she would tell me I looked very pretty. She would ask if I was having a good night. Then we would have an after-prom moment, before refreshments, and she would lay me down on her bed and softly brush the hair off my cheek. This felt good, it really did. Then she would put toilet paper between our mouths, lie down on top of me, and kiss me. One time, she kissed me without the toilet paper, and it was nice and soft. Sometimes she moved against me or rubbed our pelvises together. She said that since I was the girl, I was not required to move.

I enjoyed the caresses and attention. But what really turned me on was the anticipation of getting to eat forbidden foods after. As Amy kissed me and rubbed up against me, I thought: apple fritter apple fritter apple fritter.

“Good?” asked Miriam.

“I’ve plotzed,” I said, spooning up a bite of melted yogurt and a bit of hot fudge.

“Good.”

“What do you do when you aren’t yogurting?” I asked.

“I go to the movies,” she said. “Old movies.”

“With friends?”

“Usually by myself.”

I imagined her in an antique movie theater, sitting up in the balcony, smoking. Of course, you couldn’t smoke in any theaters in Los Angeles, but that was how I pictured her: blowing rings into the light from the projector as it cut through the darkness of the theater. Between puffs I imagined her eating a bag of Red Hots, spicy like the clove cigarette.

“I’m going tonight,” she said. “Charade. A late showing, ten p.m. Do you like Audrey Hepburn?”

When I was seventeen, at the apex of my starving, I had a big, vintage poster of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in my bedroom. My goal had been to become as narrow as Audrey, but no matter how little I ate, I could still feel meat on my abdomen, cushion on my thighs. Audrey was practically sculpted from bone. She was starved during childhood, World War II in Holland, which was why she was so skinny. I knew it was fucked up, but I found myself envious that she’d had skinniness fully thrust upon her. An enemy had inflicted her starvation, which made it heroic. She hadn’t had to starve herself to become a star.

“I’m sort of over Audrey,” I said to Miriam. “But I do love Cary Grant.”

“Want to go with me?” she asked.

“Okay,” I said, though I meant to say no.

“Great,” she said. “We’ll go to dinner first. A kosher Chinese restaurant near the theater, the one with the tropical drinks.”

“I can’t.”

Chinese food was impossible to keep track of mathematically: so many disparate items, shared plates, fried foods, starchy sauces.

“No?” asked Miriam.

“I have a work dinner,” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, that would be the whole fun of it. Dinner and a movie. What about tomorrow?”

I thought about the possibility of all these calories bleeding into the rest of the week: a sundae now, Chinese food tomorrow. The whole month could be infiltrated if I wasn’t careful! No, it was better to keep this madness confined to today, Day of the Peppermint Plotz, as it would now be known in the Hebrew calendar. Tomorrow I could get back to my regime again and stay there forever.

“You know what?” I said. “I think I can get out of the dinner tonight.”

“Great!” she said, smiling. “Let’s meet at the Golden Dragon in Hollywood. Eight p.m.”

CHAPTER 23

I wanted to bring Miriam a gift, but I had no idea what to get her. Flowers seemed too obvious, too date-y. I didn’t even know how she felt about me. Was she crushing? On the fence? Totally platonic? She probably just wanted to be friends. Maybe this was how normal women made friends with other women. They invited them to do shit like eat in public.

I stopped at a beauty store after work and bought her a red lipstick, Ruský Rouge. I told myself I was getting her the gift as a thank-you for how generous she had been with the sundaes. Really, I knew that I was testing her, seeing how far she was willing to dip into my side of modernity, at least aesthetically. I assumed that she never wore makeup because of religious