I let that sink in for a moment, but it didn’t put me at ease. There was still a lot more that bugged me.

“I didn’t realize how much of a jerk he was. He just assumed I would take his side, even when he did something wrong. Thank you for calling him out on the spin the bottle thing. That was weird.”

“I should have said something sooner. He’s in your class, isn’t he?”

“He is. He’s just been pretending that I don’t exist. Typical boys.”

She let out another breath and curled up, propping her head on her knees. She was hurt, and so was I. I still needed answers though. I figured it might be the only time I could ask. I thought back to months before on our “cheat day” and why she left me. I was left with so much hurt and confusion that it was almost impossible not to wonder what her real intentions were that night.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“That night, well, morning. I mean, when you found me throwing up.”

She looked up at me and let out yet another breath. There was a story in her, one that would reveal something, and I wanted to know what it was.

“There’s a lot behind it.”

“I have time,” I said.

“Fine.” She shook her head and stood up. “When I saw you that night, I just didn’t wake up and decide to leave you that morning. There was more —” She paused abruptly. I knew that it was going to be hard, but I wasn’t sure to what degree. I got as settled in as I could. This was strange territory for both of us.

“Listen, when I saw you purging, it made me feel really unsafe.”

I was confused. “Why did it make you feel unsafe?”

“You don’t know this, but two years ago, I had an eating disorder. It was bad. Hospitalization bad.” I hadn’t known about any of that. A wave of emotions hit me hard, and I wasn’t sure how to sort them out. I had no idea what to say, but it also gave me a piece of this weird puzzle I was attempting to solve.

“I didn’t know,” was all I said.

“At my lowest, I was at ninety pounds. Dude, I was sick. They kept me in the hospital for a month and then I was put in a treatment program that lasted from then until last February. I only finished the program a year ago,” she confessed. Mel took another deep breath. She’d been holding in a lot and now she was letting it all out. “When my parents divorced I stayed with my dad. He wasn’t making much money at his shop, so he couldn’t afford to keep me in karate. I was depressed. I’d lost my mom, my community, and I felt alone. I found comfort in food and began gaining weight, and he noticed. My own father called me fat and so did kids at school. It got to me . . . it weighed on me. I felt so gross in my own body. I was tormented about it in my own home, at school — I had no safe space. I felt like I had to change to be loved, so I did what you did, and I couldn’t stop.” She continued after a breath. “Everyone would compliment my appearance when I began losing weight — my dad, people I went to school with. I liked it for a bit, then I resented it. But I couldn’t stop. One day at my dad’s shop, I just fainted and hit my head . . . hard. My dad called an ambulance, and that’s how he found out.” I hadn’t known about any of that. I wasn’t sure what or how to feel about it.