Alice had spent the commute telling me about her current lover, his distancing mechanisms and terrible cologne. I could nod in earnest. Louis never wore cologne, but he had plenty of distancing mechanisms, like his wife. He made our silences—our failure to understand each other, his failure to try—seem like inevitable symptoms of the human condition.

Now the party was so loud I could barely hear Alice when she spoke, though I could tell from her face—lips pursed or cracked wry, circling an O toward her frosted martini—whether she was expecting me to laugh or frown. Occasionally, she wanted me to reply. She wanted to know, for example, if Louis’s approach was very theoretical. His approach to what? This was one of the questions I hadn’t heard, or paid attention to, very well. I kept coming back to an image of Grandma Lucy eating dinner: a seersucker robe plastered against her knees, damp with chicken broth, folded over the nest of cracker crumbs and blue pills caught between her cushions. Every so often Alice touched my arm and said something like: “Isn’t that just the intensest?”

Alice and I had eating disorders at the same time in college and shared them like an extracurricular, the way some people share cocaine or volleyball. She taught me her tricks, like drinking hot water to keep warm. She could go through fifteen cups at a meal, wrapping her fingers around each glass to absorb the heat. She told me that green-tea farmers did this during Shizuoka winters in their drafty wooden shacks. She trained herself to believe she had the yearning built into her bones. I thought about her bones more than I thought about other people’s bones. They were like tree branches under her skin. I remembered this old version of Alice like a legend, a collection of surreal details, but really she was just starving, we both were: sick in the heart and showing it.

We recovered together, or said we did, touring a circuit of therapy panels and discussion groups. We made fun of their clichéd slogans and the girls who didn’t look skinny enough to need them. We got a little bigger ourselves. We said we hurt, and this was the truth. We did hurt. We felt something, but we used it, too, and this was the worst part. When we finally saw our pain, dredged it up and spoke it, we found it mangled by our manipulations, the ways we’d twisted it around to get what we wanted. We could barely recognize it. It was barely ours. Then Alice got bad again, worse than I’d ever been, and we kind of drifted apart.

Now we frowned together at our past selves. “That was so fucked up,” Alice said. “How we were back then.” Alice wasn’t plump, but you could see the weight in her breasts. She was a B cup now for sure. She had a strange way of talking about her disease: “It was the worst thing that ever happened to me,” she said. “And the best.”