“To get rid of this,” he said, grabbing at nonexistent pockets of flesh above and toward the back of his hips, right near the kidneys. “My love handles.”

Adrienne laughed. “But you don’t have love handles.”

“Yes I do,” he insisted. “I’ve always had love handles.”

“No you haven’t,” she offered. “You didn’t have them when we were together, and you don’t have them now.”

She looked at me for the first time since she’d spilled the beans, and I could see the old gleam in her eyes. She’d extracted a precious little nugget of information out of me about Donald; she’d used it to bust me; now she was gloating in the power she held to make him feel better. All of this to get closer to him and terminate our budding friendship, if that’s even what it was. I felt idiotically naive, and also inexplicably sad: as if I’d lost a new friend whom I’d really really liked but who had clearly never really liked me.

Adrienne?

A friend?

Whom I really really liked?

Was I completely crazy?

“I didn’t have love handles when we were together?” Donald continued. Despite himself, her reassurance was working.

“No. You didn’t.”

“And you don’t now,” I threw in, hoping he would see that I, too, had his best interests at heart. But he ignored me, waited for Adrienne to continue plying him with compliments.

“You look amazing,” she said for what seemed like the thousandth time. “I told you that the minute I saw you back in November. You look better than I ever remember you looking.”

His face grew serious. She was gazing at him with her big brown eyes, pushing his buttons expertly. “How so exactly?” he urged. “I mean, how exactly do I look better?”

She considered the question. “Fitter. Thinner. You know, like I said, you look fantastic.” She reached over and touched his wrist with her pinkie finger, then combed her fingers through her hair.

His hands then ran feverishly over his abdominal region, along and around his belt to the kidney area in question. Suddenly, they stopped their incessant search for excess flesh, and he sat back, and breathed out slowly.

“I know you always thought I was crazy about my weight, but I was a fat kid. And because of that I’ll always think I’m fat. No matter how much weight I lose; no matter how many people tell me I’m not.”

Adrienne’s eyes glazed over with tears. Now she took his hand, gave it a little squeeze. Then her eyes shot over to me, glittering with silent victory. Even if I could have thought of something to say, I wouldn’t have dared to speak. She’d made it known that I’d done enough damage already.