She got up again, walked into the kitchen. I heard the fridge open and close. “When do you think you’ll talk to Naurene’s surgeon?” she called. I hesitated, watching her return. She held a sugar-free chocolate vanilla pudding cup. She’d purchased three packs from the store, saying she’d put the extras in her suitcase. The T-shirt she wore was nightgown sized, the outline of a running man and the words Marathon folded between her breasts, which seemed smaller now, like everything about her. She looked so fragile; I couldn’t tell her. “Not sure,” I said. “Tomorrow probably.” She sat again, peeled the lid off her cup. I opened a highlight reel on Erin’s account called Booty Transformation! and we watched in silence. Pictures of Erin, small like us, gave way to pictures of goals she had set and realized on the way to her present It felt good to see her grow, a sign of life, a positive example, the power of persistence. I thought of Jake, the pulls-ups he did from a bar in his closet, how he could lift his own weight like it was nothing, how when I tried, I couldn’t leave the ground, and both of us had laughed about it.

When the highlights ended, Leah leaned over me and touched the screen to see Erin’s entire grid.

“I think she got a butt lift,” she said.

“I want a pudding,” I said and went to the kitchen. I had wanted her to ask me about my implants, but now I wanted to avoid them. I wanted to be strong on my own, like the weightlifter girls, so different from what Leah had become.

“Get me another,” she called from the couch and I carried two cups back, passed her one. She put my phone down to take it and I watched her dip the small spoon she’d picked from the drawer of big ones into the shiny chocolate surface. She lifted a sliver to her mouth and held it there.

“Remember high school Marcus?” she asked, speaking around the metal. “You still talk to him?”

“Not really, not lately.” I opened my cup. “He’s whatever.” I wanted to tell her about Jake but was afraid of what she’d say.

“What about you?” I asked. “Boys? Girls? Anyone you like?”

“No,” she said. “I already told you I never really made friends in Australia.”

“Sounds hard,” I said and went quiet, trying out excuses for why I’d ghosted her: when you left it felt like I’d done something to deserve it; since then my only friends have been guys and they don’t know me like you do; for months after you moved I rode my bike by your house until a new family moved in and I stopped; I have a selfish personality; abandonment issues.

“At uni—” she started, but my phone buzzed with meaningless notifications. I let them drown her out.