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“I guess not.” She sounded like she did kind of mind.
I sat on the bed across from the one with her neon-green, very eighties—not what I was expecting from her—comforter.
Bridgette sat on her bed. “My mother would hate this.” She patted her comforter, a look of pure delight for defying her mother lighting up her face.
More and more I had to know what Nina had done to her family.
“You probably hate it too,” Bridgette guessed.
“No. I was actually admiring it. I had something similar in high school, but mine was neon pink with zebra stripes.” That earned me a tiny grin.
“Huh.” She was reserving judgment.
I held out the plate of cookies. “Help yourself.”
She looked at them warily.
“I promise there is nothing skinny about them.”
“I know. It’s still hard for me to ...,” she stopped herself.
A thought popped into my head. Nina, as I recall, had been constantly worried about calories and was always starving herself. I feared she had made her daughter afraid of food. Maybe even worse.
“There’s no need to feel guilty about food. Ever. It’s okay to eat something because you want to enjoy it. There is no good or bad food.”
“I know,” she sighed. “It’s just hard sometimes.”
“I get that. You know what I do?”
“What?”
“I give myself permission to let go of the guilt.”
She crossed her arms in thatI’m such a skeptical teensort of way. “That works?”
“Not right away, but eventually.”
“Did you have an eating disorder?” she asked bluntly.
“No, but I grew up in a time when you weren’t considered beautiful unless you were stick thin. It gave a lot of people my age issues with food and our bodies.”
“But you’re beautiful.”
“And so are you.”
She grabbed some strands of her long, wavy hair and began playing with it.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know what to believe. Guys tell me I’m pretty all the time, but my mother ... never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
I set the plate of cookies next to me on the bed, my heart breaking for Bridgette while I wanted to metaphorically smack Nina. More and more I believed my old friend was not the girl I knew. “It does matter, very much. You matter.”
“That’s what my dad says,” she choked out.
“He’s right. Is that why you were crying after school? Is it about your mom?” I delicately asked.
“No,” she rankled.
