Page 137 of Call the Shots
“We can be toxic.”
Her eyes slid to mine. “Bear.”
“This’ll be the healthiest toxic thing I’ve ever been in.”
“It’s not fair to you.” She rubbed the inside of her wrist. “It’ll hurt a lot if this happens…again.”
“This happened before?”
“Yeah. A lot worse than this—I was hospitalized in high school. Like my hair started falling out. It was that bad.”
That was when she was openly with Xavier. Suddenly, I connected the dots. The reason why her breakup hit her so hard.
“Was Xavier helping you deal with it?”
“Oh my god, no. We had very clear boundaries on what I could talk about.”
I froze and her eyes snapped to mine. Neither of us moved, not even when the waitress returned with our drinks.
“I didn’t mean to say that,” June blurted out. “That’s not—there were things we both decided not to talk about. It was a mutual decision. It was healthier.”
“Healthier?” I echoed.
“It’s—it’s complicated. The eating disorder was so hard on everyone. I can’t imagine how difficult it is, to watch someone you love…wilt, I guess.”
Yeah. I can’t imagine.
“Do your friends know?” I finally asked.
“King knows about high school…”
“But he doesn’t know about this. They don’t know.”
“No.”
“How?”
“An eating disorder isn’t hard to hide when you’re living alone,” she confessed.
I took a long drink of my soda. I would’ve bet the bank account I’d be emptying out for this lunch that her family didn’t know. And the longer I thought about Xavier, and what she was ‘allowed to talk about,’ the angrier I became.
“June? I don’t know how to talk about this with the right terms and stuff so I want to say what I mean, and I can fix that later.”
She swallowed. “Okay.”
“The weight-loss shakes have to go.”
Slowly, she nodded.
“That dress you have hung up? The weight you used to be? That’s gone too.”
“It’s a size zero,” she admitted. “I wasn’t even close.”
I flinched and took another drink. “Is there anything else?”
“Um…”
“Anything.”
