She turned around, closing the cap on the long black eye pen, and looked at me with one eyebrow raised. “Suck in,” she repeated. “Like...” She stood up straight, pushed her shoulders back, and slowly her stomach receded into itself like a wave on the shore. “Like that. Suck it in.”

I did as she said and lost an inch off my stomach. I don’t understand where it went, or how my organs handled getting squished together, but the jeans fit much better after. “You do this all the time? How do you breathe?”

She laughed, entertained by my naivety. “Everyone does this all the time...”

I haven’t stopped sucking in since.

She waved another black makeup object at me. “Do you want some?” she asked. “I can do it for you, if you—”

I said yes before she even finished the question. I’d never worn makeup before. My only experience with makeup had been watching my mother swipe blush—which she concocted herself from some combination of beetroot powder and cornstarch—across her hollow cheekbones before church on Sundays. My father didn’t think women should be attracting attention to themselves in that way, so my mother hid in her closet for this ritual each week.

When Ruthie was finished swiping black stuff on both my eyelashes, she pulled back and smiled. “You look super cute,” she said, capping the brush and carefully putting it into the makeup bag on her bed that was the same colors and pattern as her duffel. She wiggled into white sneakers and I slipped back into my Tevas. “I’m definitely going to need to borrow that necklace,” she added. I reached for it without thinking, maybe to tuck it into my shirt, maybe to rip it off my neck and hand it over to her right there.

My mother gave it to me before I left. She told me to hide it inside my bra and leave it there until my father and his greenish truck had dropped me off on the base of campus and turned toward home. I stood beside the Covenant University welcome sign, my bags stacked next to me, and pulled the gold chain from under my shirt, dangling off of which was this thin piece of gold-painted something—an old flattened coin, perhaps—my initials scratched into it in my mother’s cursive. A cross delicately drawn on the back.