I walked outside with two to-go containers filled with enough chicken tenders, French fries, and onion rings to last a normal person four or five days, but that I would eat in the span of fifteen minutes, until my belly was protruded and bloated, until I’d wake up in the middle of the night so full with food I couldn’t roll over. So full with shame I’d start to cry.

When I rounded the corner into the parking lot, I stopped short when I saw Catherine and Annie there, sitting on the trunk of the navy Suburban I bought for five hundred dollars from a Craigslist ad, the only car left in the diner’s lot.

“Hi,” they said in unison, like two people possessed.

“Hi,” I responded, walking the gap between us like a plank.

Catherine looked me up and down, a disaster covered in ill-fitting clothes and grease stains. I could see her reading my name tag, staring at it on my chest for too long.

“You still go by Elizabeth?” she asked. It wasn’t judgmental, just surprised. Like she assumed I’d want to leave that world behind. But I couldn’t. It was all Ruthie knew.

I nodded and shrugged.

“My real name is Molly,” she said. “I don’t do the saint’s name thing anymore. It was kind of bullshit, if you ask me. A way to strip us of our identities, create new God-fearing personas—”

“—that’s enough.” Annie nudged her and Catherine—Molly—stopped talking. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re just—I’m Jess. In real life.”

Of course, I already knew their real names. I’d been following them since graduation. Molly moved to New York and created a cheese board business on Instagram, which didn’t sound like a real job but according to Forbes’s “30 Under 30,” her net worth was over half a million dollars. And Jess was a lesbian now. She’d discovered herself at NYU while getting her masters in computer engineering. She calls herself an Ethical Hacker on her LinkedIn.

I shook their hands and it felt like a reunion with strangers.

“That poster in the diner—” Molly nodded toward the entrance, as if I didn’t know where it was. “Got any more?”

I waved them off the trunk and they jumped down, standing next to me as I push the key into the cylinder and open it up.

I printed out ten posters every morning. Sometimes I’d find ten places to put them, scattering them around town so everyone has as hard a time forgetting as I did. Sometimes I’d find they’d been ripped down or graffitied on, or had crumpled in a rainstorm, so I replaced them, good as new. But sometimes I didn’t and they ended up here. In my trunk. Like having three hundred Ruthies staring up at me.