65. The you reflected in the glass
Underneath her uniform, she's a lot thinner than anyone ever guesses. Of course, she doesn't consider herself as such—Riza has subtle, sustained curves, enough width the never call herself small—but her waist, her thin wrists and ankles, the long lines of her arms and legs give her an almost delicate appearance.
Looking at Riza from that angle, she seems touchable and within reach.
Roy remembered how, once, at a pointless picnic on an obscenely hot day she wore some sort of summery blouse and skirt set. All through the party he watched her out of the corner of one eye, the judicious movements of her shoulders and the repositioning of her fingers on her glass.
When the party was over and everyone was leaving, all of them tired and a little drunk. Pausing in her task of gathering up abandoned glasses of half-consumed liquor, Riza yawned and stretched, raising her arms over her head and arching her spine along with the motion. The hem of her shirt rose with her arms and Roy had caught a glimpse of her hip, the sharp edginess of her bones straining against the skin like a knife pressed to elastic.
The sight of her, brief and skeletal, had broken his heart.
—Despite her apparent shapelessness in uniform, when Riza dresses down she is all lines. Her breasts and hips are vague curves, soft beneath her shirt and skirt, her shoulders and the bones encircling her throat are like long fingers, sharp lines. Riza is no swan, but she might as well dress in white, as tragically mute and lovely as she is.
Roy writes all of this in he little black book in another language, sketching arrays about the scattered text, thinking of ways to try and make her happy.
He never comes up with much, but the fact that he is trying eases a little of the heartbreak that watching her entails; she wavers subtly, like an image on silvered glass.
It's like she's slipping away from him, ounce by ounce, fat dissolving into compact, unyielding muscle.
It doesn't matter if she weighs the same or not—she has become all hard lines, an equation, part of his small, constricted world. This is something that she is obviously not meant to be, and this makes him, inexplicably, unhappy.
She should be incalculable, he thinks. Some sort of impossible variable in an equation that does not require a solution to prove its existence.