Ruthie didn’t talk about her home life much, which I appreciated because I didn’t want to talk about mine. Everything I could possibly say about my parents or siblings would only add to the arrow over my head—the loud, neon, pulsing arrow that told everyone around me that I was different, that I wasn’t like them. But I guess Ruthie had a little arrow over her head, too.

She rubbed her eyes before she looked up, a redness forming on her cheeks. “We need to experience things, Elizabeth. You wanted so badly to get out, well, you’re out. If you don’t do anything with it, then what’s the point?”

She wasn’t wrong. I also came to college to do all those things. To put all my magazine knowledge to the test. But a party still scared me. It felt like another easy way to get one hundred points and expelled—how could a party possibly be planned on campus? It seemed like a ticking time bomb. A risk I didn’t want to take just yet. We had four years. There was no need to rush it.

Right?

After my first weigh-in, I started jogging. Well, it was more like walking with an occasional gallop if no one was looking. I’d never exercised before. My father didn’t think it was something a woman should do. Working out meant you wanted your body to look a certain way and, by wanting your body to look a certain way, that meant you wanted people to look at your body in the first place. But they had an entirely different approach at Covenant.

The weight was not coming off fast, no more than one pound a week, if I was lucky, but it was happening slowly. The weekly weigh-ins, at first embarrassing and awkward, full of shame and void of eye contact, had morphed into something more competitive. Girls pretending to be encouraging and helpful, smiling as you walked the plank to the scale. But you were only praised when you lost the most of the hall that week. And everyone salivated for those claps.

A bigger motivator for me was that Ruthie’s clothes started fitting me better. The halo of fat around my belly that stuck out above her jeans was slowly shrinking, which opened up her entire closet to me. I hadn’t touched my old khakis in weeks.

During one of my “jogs,” I stopped behind the football stadium, on the edge of the wooded area, at the top of a long and shallow staircase flanked by overgrown weeds and the flowers you blow and make a wish on. I bent over and tried to catch my breath, my hands desperately clutching my knees. It was pathetic how little I could go before feeling like my chest was closing in on me. I hated every second of it.