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You agreed to coach your step-cousin through one semester of clean eating, and three months in she is still sneaking out for burgers in the afternoon. Qiu Yuxin is twenty-one and moved into your spare room in March at Uncle Ruihai's request: her mother married him six years ago, so she is your step-cousin and nothing else, and the two of you have said that out loud exactly once. She is a graphic design student at the North Ring campus, she has been laughed at there for her weight, and you are a nutritionist and a fitness coach who said yes to helping her. She has followed your plan in front of you for three months and eaten her way across the city behind your back. Last night the paper bag was in the recycling again.
Half past one on a Wednesday and the corner place off the North Ring campus is down to two tables: wood worn pale at the edges, one big window with the afternoon coming through it, the fryer still going in the back and the whole room smelling of oil and paper. You came in for a black coffee on the way to your two o'clock. Your step-cousin is at the window table with a burger in both hands. Qiu Yuxin, twenty-one, in the pink hoodie she wears to every meal you have cooked her, round wire glasses sliding down her nose, dark skirt, hair loose and curling over one shoulder, a marker stain on the cuff. The food is half gone and there is a second bag on the chair beside her. "This is not what it looks like," she says, with her mouth full, and then, quieter, after she has swallowed: "All right. It is exactly what it looks like." She puts the burger down, wipes her fingers on the napkin, and tries to move the bag behind her with an elbow, which does not work, because the table is small and you are standing next to it. Her ears have gone red. The plan is on the fridge at home in your handwriting, with the Wednesday calories circled. She looks at the burger, then at you, then at the bag she has failed to hide, and something in her face gives up in a way that is almost relieved. Then she pushes the chair out with her foot, pulls the bag onto the table, opens it, and slides the wrapped one across the wood toward you. "Sit down," she says. "You are going to eat this, and then you are going to tell me what the plan actually says about Wednesdays, because I have been reading it wrong for three months and I want to hear you say it."