"I'm beautiful. I work at it. Beauty is a magnet. Not just to get guys either. Women are more impressed by beautiful women. It's a fact. Know how my mom got my dad?"
"She was beautiful?"
"She was beautiful. And she's going to lose him unless she gets beautiful again. He warns her about it every day."
"He does?"
Trista nodded. "She gained weight. She was a size two when they met. Now she's a ten. Know what he gave her for her birthday?"
I had no idea.
"Box of sexy lingerie," she said. "All size twos."
"Subtle message." I wasn't sure what had the bigger yuck factor: the message or the fact that Trista knew all about it.
"I thought it was pretty straightforward," she said, completely missing my sarcasm. "He's not attracted to her at this weight. She has fewer friends, too. I've seen their high school yearbook—she was it. Now she has maybe two good friends, tops."
She took a big bite of the sundae, and a question started nagging at me. "Trista," I asked, "are you going to throw up when we're done?"
Trista thought about it. "Probably not," she said. "Real bu-limics are like that: they disappear after every meal and get rid of it. That's not me. I only do it once or twice a week. Three times at the most. And it's only after a binge, not just a meal or a dessert."
"What's the difference?"
"Are you kidding? Okay, once when I was really stressed out, I took the car and hit McDonald's for a Big Mac, large fries, and shake, DQ for a dipped cone, and Dunkin's for a half-dozen donuts. Downed the cone and the fries in the car, the rest back here."
Ew.
"Exactly. Who wants all that in their body? I had to get rid of it. That one sucked, though—too much doughy stuff—almost impossible to get up. I didn't think I'd be able to do it, which was a complete nightmare. Can you imagine?"
"No," I replied honestly.
"Now I'm smarter. I choose things that come up easier. Soft-serve ice cream, giant bowls of cereal with milk, that kind of thing. And lots of fluid."
It was weird. She was talking about the intricacies of her bulimia like it was a hobby, not a disease.
"But ... it's really bad for you, isn't it? I mean, does it hurt?"
"Sometimes, but if you do it enough, it's harder to trip your gag reflex, which comes in very handy, if you know what mean.
I did know what she meant, but somehow juxtaposing it with vomiting made the whole thing highly unappealing.
"Maybe you should talk about this with your parents or something," I said. "Maybe they could help."
"Oh, yeah, that'd be great. I went crying to Mom after my first time. It was, like, ninth grade and I'd eaten a whole box of Frosted Flakes—no milk, I didn't know—and scratched the hell out of my throat to get it up. I was totally freaked and I told Mom, but she didn't say a word, just kept filing her nails. I finally begged her to say something, and she goes, 'What am I supposed to say? What kind of mother do you think it makes me if my daughter's a bulimic!'"
"Wow," I said. "Okay, so maybe not her, but—"
"People don't want to see your weaknesses, Cara. And you can't let them. Not if you want to be a magnet."
She looked at me as if to make sure I'd gotten the message, then went back to her sundae. "I like talking to you about this stuff, though. It's nice."
It was nice ... which was weird. Trista and I had been having so many late-night conversations and she'd opened up so much to me, I felt closer to her than I ever had before. Claudia was my reality check. She reminded me that the only reason Trista was being so honest and genuine was that I had dirt on her. If she could have, she'd have thrown me to the wolves in a heartbeat.
The magnet thing became Trista's favorite metaphor for popularity. She brought it up again toward the end of March, right before spring break.
"So I've been thinking about our transition of power," Trista said, lining up a tricky shot on the bumper pool table.
"What about it?"
She sank the shot and lined up another. "It won't be easy for people to buy it. I'm so magnetic that, no matter how magnetic we make you and no matter how much I try to sell