“What about you, Addie?” Nevaeh says, cracking open a bottle of water. She drinks and hands it to me. “What’s your act?”

I shrug, realizing I’m mimicking her casual one-shoulder thing.

“I am still waiting for a bolt of inspiration,” I say.

Nothing feels quite right to me yet, my vision of myself onstage still fuzzy. I can picture myself step-by-step through the shapes of every one of my moves in the showcase—but a burlesque costume, and confident, naked skin, me front and center, I falter. Lots of people have felt free to tell me they don’t like my body, because fat personally offends them. Shrugging off unsolicited comments is easy. Mostly. But when I invite their opinion?

“I’ll be right back,” I tell them, and slip into the little white bathroom. I lean against the door, check my phone, and scroll through the voice mails.

I hear Nevaeh in the other room—“kind of like role-playing and kind of like being totally open”—and then my mother’s recorded voice is loud in my ear.

Her voice is cross in the message. “Why aren’t you picking up? I tried you on Skype and—”

I sit on the lid of the toilet and delete and skip to the next message, tapping ahead through it. “So I sent you a package. Did you get the package? You never check your mail—” I flinch, remembering her last care package, with a book about fasting diets and three packs of tights three sizes too small for me. I should have given the tights to Nevaeh or Katherine, but I pushed the whole box down into the bottom of the trash can outside the mail office and power walked away. I love them, I told her. They’re my favorite color.

Delete that message, skip to the last one. She sounds drunk. “Please call me, hon. I don’t know why you never answer. Call tonight. I’ll be up.”

She picks up on the first ring, and her voice is sharp.

“Oh, there you are,” she says. “Nice of you to check in on your mother.”

“I’m sorry, Mom, I didn’t see that you had called—”

“Well, I did,” she says. “Have you been out drinking?”

“I was at a performance—”

She interrupts again. “Drinking makes you fat, Adeleina. Your friends can drink all they want, but you certainly can’t afford that.”

I suck in a breath. “I haven’t been drinking,” I tell her, my voice a little loud. “I don’t drink.” More or less true. When do I have time to drink, or care about it?

A small sniff. “Good,” she says. “What do you weigh now?”