Because Nicola’s parents were English, she had this Madonna-esque Continental accent. Which, when she was trying to make a point—like now—got more English because she knew it made her sound smarter.
I looked up from the vintage robin’s-egg-blue satin dress I had been stalking since the end of August. According to the handwritten tag, it had belonged to an actress who had played a teacher in an Academy Award– nominated musical from the 1960s before she had a religious vision while drinking a martini at Musso and Frank’s restaurant and gave up her Hollywood career to become a nun. At fifty bucks, it was a total steal, especially with the 15 percent discount that I would get because of my “Inside Outsider” status (granted to me after I sat there one afternoon nodding sympathetically as Brad updated me on the saga between him and Luca, his on again/off again boyfriend who owned the lighting store down the street). “What study?” I asked suspiciously.
Nicola held a neon-pink spandex dress circa 1980s to her stick-straight, so-flat-chested-she-kind-of-resembled- a-twelve-year-old-boy body and checked herself out in the mirror. The dress was pretty hideous, but something about the purple-tinted cornrows she was rocking that day made it work. (“I’m an Aquarian. We’re expressive,” she was always telling her mother.) “Let’s see . . . you know, I can’t remember where I read it. I read so many of them.”
Nicola was very big on throwing out facts and figures from studies, none of which actually existed once you started drilling down. That being said, the fact that she was such an optimist (even though she hated being called that) was one of the reasons I was drawn to her as a friend. Well, that and the fact that when your nickname is That Weird Fat Girl, like mine was, you don’t tend to find yourself neck-deep in Facebook friend requests. But even if I had looked like Dylan Schoenfield, who was the most popular girl in our grade, Nicola would have been my best friend. She just got me, and I got her. Although if I had been Dylan Schoenfield, Nicola would’ve hated me.
“Nice try,” I replied.
“Yeah, well, what about all those John Hughes movies? The misfits always win in those.”
“Yeah, because they’re movies—not real life,” I said as I picked up a black velvet shrug and placed it over the dress. I smiled. With that small addition, it looked like something that the actress Jeanne Moreau would have worn in a 1960s French film directed by François Truffaut. While other kids my age lined up at the multiplexes for the Twilight movies, I spent my Fridays at the Nuart and New Beverly watching black-and-white foreign films with subtitles—hence, the “Weird” in “Weird Fat Girl.”
I loved the French vintage look. And from the photos of my mom that I kept on my nightstand, she had, too. In fact, my name—Simone Colette Walker—was in honor of the famous French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir and the novelist Colette.
Nicola took off the orange cowboy hat that had swallowed up her head (“That belonged to an actress who had a bit part on the TV show Dallas in the seventies before she became a political activist with migrant workers in northern California,” Brad explained) and glanced over at me. “Will you just buy that dress already?”
I glanced at the tag at the neck, ridiculously hoping that somehow the “size 8” had miraculously changed into a “size 16.” It hadn’t. Putting it back on the rack, I grabbed an extra-large vintage Doobie Brothers T-shirt and held it up. “What do you think of this?”
“I think it’s yet another T-shirt that smells like moth balls and makes you look schlumpy,” Nicola replied. She turned to Brad. “No offense about the moth-ball thing.”
“None taken,” he said, not even looking up from his computer, where, from the way his brow was all furrowed, I could tell he was either scouring eBay or Etsy for vintage dresses or trolling OkCupid for a new boyfriend.
I shrugged. “So I like to be comfortable and not buy into the lies we’re sold by the advertising and fashion industries about how tight clothes somehow make you more attractive to the opposite sex, which ultimately results in growth in world population and an even more troubled education system.”
Nicola shook her head. “Okay, that’s way too many syllables for me to deal with when I haven’t had my four P.M. mochachino yet,” she said before she dropped the whole thing and went back to hunting through a box of old scarves.
Although I was grateful that women had the right to vote, the fact that my wardrobe was made up of baggy cargo pants from Old Navy and vintage concert T-shirts (my all-time favorite? a baseball-style Fleetwood Mac Rumours T-shirt from 1977 that Brad had been sweet enough to keep on hold for me even though a two-time Grammy winner offered Brad like five hundred dollars for it) wasn’t because I was a member of the Young Feminists of the New Millennium Club. It was because there was nothing more uncomfortable than the feeling of elastic cutting into your skin or having to go through an entire day of school barely breathing because you were sucking in your gut the whole time.
Brad looked up from his computer. “Hey, Simone—some new purses came in.”
I shook my head. “Thanks, but I think I’m good on that front.”
Because of the weight, I had also become a girl with a purse collection. Not even regular leather bags that I could use every day, but these itty-bitty evening bags that could fit only a lipstick (something I didn’t even wear) and maybe a pack of gum. Seeing that my evenings were spent at home in my room or in movie theaters, they didn’t come in real handy and instead lived on the top shelf of my closet.
I once overheard my dad on the phone with my grandmother trying to insist to her that I actually wasn’t fat; it was that all my baby fat had just redistributed in such a way that made it so that I looked fat. That was just him using the skills he had learned back when he was pre-law in college so he could get off the phone with her as soon as possible.
Although before high school, I never would’ve been accused of being skinny, my discovery January of freshman year of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets and the fact that you could order them by the case online at tastykake.com made it so that by the time summer rolled around, I had graduated from being someone you’d consider “normal” to officially fat.
According to Dr. Gellert—the shrink whom Dr. Melman suggested to Dad I go see after Lupe, our housekeeper, presented him with two cases of Krimpets wrappers she had found stashed in the way back of my closet—the Tastykake thing was a way for me to “eat my feelings.” Apparently, the loneliness I was experiencing now that Max was away at college and my dad was at the studio until late at night had triggered the loss I had never let myself feel over the fact that I had never had a mom, and so sugar became a way for me to check out and self-medicate.
Seeing that he was the one with all the diplomas on the wall from places like Yale and Columbia, I’m not going to say he was completely off the mark, but I do think that at first the stuffing-my-face thing was less about loneliness and grief and more about the fact that Tastykakes have a really interesting texture. Kind of like if you ripped off a piece of a Nerf football and put it in your mouth.
Even pre-Tastykakes, I had never been one of those kids who got comments on her report cards like “Simone needs to do a little less socializing with her neighbors and a little more paying attention in class.” But it’s not like I was some weird kid who sat in the corner muttering to herself, either. I always had a decent number of friends and invitations to sleepovers and bar and bat mitzvahs—not Dylan Schoenfield league, but decent.
But once high school started, the four or five other girls Nicola and I had been hanging out with since middle school got all boy-crazy and started spending entire lunch periods discussing the merits of OPI’s Bubble Bath nail polish versus Essie’s Ballet Slippers. It quickly became just the two of us—especially when Dylan Schoenfield anointed me with the nickname Ghost Girl, because I happen to have very dark hair and very pale skin. The name stuck.
Max had suggested I go play a
sport or join a club, but with limited coordination and lung capacity, I had no interest in after-school sports teams. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it on Twitter or anything, I much rather would have watched a rerun of One Tree Hill after school than take part in a sit-in staged by SAAMP (Students Against All Mean People).
Nicola held up a black cocktail dress covered with feathers. “When did you say Max is coming home again?” she asked. “’Cause I think I’ll wear this the next time I see him.”
For some reason that I had yet to figure out, Nicola had had a crush on my brother for years. “So you can see him and not say a word to him?” Even though she normally couldn’t keep her mouth shut, whenever she was around Max, she totally clammed up. Which meant that other than things like “Hi” and “Whoops—I didn’t know this was the door to your bedroom, I was looking for the bathroom” she barely ever spoke to him.
“That was in the past. I’ve changed,” she said before she sneezed.
I did miss my brother. Especially at dinnertime. But even before Ruh-Roh went on, my freshman year at Castle Heights, Dad had been on staff of another sitcom. Which meant that he rarely got home before nine. Which meant that Max and I had been on our own food-wise. Not that I was complaining—very few of my friends got to eat pancakes with caramel sauce for dinner.
Although we definitely bickered like all siblings do, there was something about dinnertime where, no matter how much we had been screaming at each other a few hours earlier, a cease-fire was always called and I’d spend an hour cracking him up with different voices (if there was an after-school club for that, I might have joined it, but there wasn’t) or listening carefully as he told me every fact he knew about our mom, even though I had committed them to memory long ago.
I may not have been super pretty, or five-minutes-in-the-future cool, or crazy smart, but it didn’t matter. My older brother just got me. He laughed at my jokes that other people considered a little weird. He didn’t give me a hard time for bursting into tears whenever the Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial came on TV. He didn’t tell anyone that I was addicted to the TLC show Strange Addictions, about people who couldn’t stop eating sofa cushions or toilet paper. I didn’t advertise it or anything, but I actually liked hanging out with my brother.
I picked up a T-shirt that said NEIL DIAMOND—LIVE AT THE GREEK. “My dad likes this guy,” I said. “I remember he bought the album when we were at the Rose Bowl one Sunday.”
Brad looked up from his computer. “Your dad has great taste. Neil is awesome.”
My dad hadn’t been in danger of winning any sort of Touchy-Feely Dad of the Year award, but pre–Ruh-Roh, he was still pretty on top of what was going on in my life. Most of which I downloaded during our Sunday outings at the Rose Bowl or Santa Monica flea markets. Not like an eighth grader had all that much going on, but he knew about what I was working on in school; and the drama of the week in my circle of friends (none of the Real Housewives have anything on a group of eighth-grade girls).
But once the show took off, our flea market outings became rarer and rarer, and the time Dad got home from the production office was later and later. Andrew Chomsky, the star of Ruh-Roh, was a Method actor and therefore liked to come from a dog’s point of view in terms of the dialogue. The problem being, dogs don’t talk. Around then, Lupe, our housekeeper, started dating a guy she met on Match.com, so she wasn’t around all that much, either, which left me all alone in a very big house.
At first the Tastykake thing was totally under control. One package every week or so, which I bought after walking to 7-Eleven. (I figured that, in a preemptive strike, I was working off the calories on the walk there and back.) But as freshman year went on, and my IM list began to shrink, my Tastykake consumption expanded. As did my purchases of sheet cakes from Ralph’s supermarket, Uncle Eddie’s vegan chocolate chip cookies (you’d think because they were vegan they’d be healthier, but not so much), and peanut-butter-covered pretzels.
When that happened, I got a new nickname: That Weird Fat Girl. Which also stuck. As did my thighs, on really hot days. Although I’d start each morning saying that that day was going to be different—I was done with the eating and that afternoon, instead of bingeing, I was going to . . . go for a bike ride. Or take a yoga class. But something would happen throughout the course of the day that would stress me out and make me feel that what I really needed to do was come home and relax and take the edge off with a snack. Not a huge one. Just a little sweetness to make up for the lemon of a high school experience I had been given.
So I’d come home from school, bring some food up to my room, lock the door (weird, seeing that I was the only one in the house, I know), and eat. While I was pretty disciplined when it came to things like school, with food I was missing an Off button. One Butterscotch Krimpet turned into three turned into six, and before I knew it I was sitting on the floor with an empty snack cake box feeling sick to my stomach, wondering how I’d ended up here, yet again, on a day I had sworn up and down to myself and whatever it is that runs the universe that I wasn’t going to binge.
Most people, if they heard that story, would see how crazy it was, to eat until I made myself sick to my stomach. But for a little while I forgot that I was That Weird Fat Girl. I forgot that I didn’t have a mother. I forgot that my father spent more time living in a make-believe world run by a talking dog than with me. For however long it took for me to eat my way into numbness, I forgot myself.
And I’d forget that I was never going to be able to fit into the robin’s-egg-blue satin dress, which I had found myself holding again.
“Okay, well, if you’re not going to buy that dress, can I buy it for you?” Nicola asked. “It’ll be your birthday gift.”
“My birthday was last month. There’s a whole year before September rolls around again,” I replied.
“Exactly.”
I knew what she really meant by that: that it would give me the time to lose the weight so I could fit into it. If only it were that easy. Nicola was my best friend, but even she didn’t know about the stash of snack-cake wrappers and cake boxes in the back of my closet that I threw out every few weeks. Maybe because of the English thing, Nicola wasn’t so into talking about things head-on. Instead, she did it in roundabout ways, with bribes.
“I’ll even throw in the shrug for being such a good friend for letting me copy your trig homework all the time.”
And more bribes.
I shook my head. “That’s really nice, but no thanks.” As much as I loved the dress and knew that, had I lost a bunch of weight and removed a few of my ribs and then taken the time to blow dry my straight dark hair instead of just jamming it up on top of my head with a clip, I kind-of-sort-of-maybe would have looked a little bit like Jeanne Moreau’s shorter, squatter, less-pretty second cousin, it felt wrong to take it off the market. This was a dress that deserved to go places. To parties. On dates. For walks on the beach at sunset. (Although because the dress was so cool, it might find that activity a little corny.)
It deserved to be worn by someone who had an actual life—not to hide out in a dark movie theater and end up with petrified pieces of popcorn on the butt. I put the dress back and picked up the Doobie Brothers T-shirt instead. Maybe one day that dress would be me, but for now it was concert T-shirts and cargos.
You’d think that someone with the nickname That Weird Fat Girl would totally stand out at Castle Heights, but not so much. In fact, the weight had the opposite effect: as time went on, it was as if I was slowly being erased, to the point where I was invisible. Letting my long dark hair fall in front of my face and being given the nickname Cousin Itt after the character in The Addams Family didn’t help this.
How else to explain the fact that, as I sat in study hall in the auditorium the next day, flipping through a book of the French photographer Brassai’s photos I had found at one of the few used-book stores on Abbot Ki
nney that hadn’t closed down when I really should have been working on my English paper about The Scarlet Letter (and why I thought the movie Easy A, starring Emma Stone—my favorite actress next to Jeanne Moreau—did such an awesome job retelling it), I kept getting boinked in the back of the head by kids walking by.
“Ow,” I cried when it happened the fourth time as one of Josh Rosen’s many video cameras made contact with the back of my skull so hard it almost knocked my contact lenses out.
“Oh. Sorry about that, Simone,” Josh said as he almost took out my eye with the end of a tripod. “I didn’t see you there.” Because they were so low on the social food chain, film geeks were generally very nice people, but apparently, I barely existed even in their eyes. Which, seeing that artists are supposed to be such keen observers of life, was a little alarming.
“It’s okay,” I sighed as I rubbed my head. Maybe if I was lucky I’d have a concussion and I’d be able to miss the chemistry pop quiz that was scheduled for tomorrow. Apparently, Mr. Weiner, our teacher, never got the memo that announcing pop quizzes ahead of time kind of defeated the whole “pop” of it all. I liked to think that chemistry was a waste of time, since in 245 days—which is when I would be graduating, not that I was keeping track or anything—the odds of my having to call on my knowledge from the periodic table of elements were about as great as coming across a rhombus or isosceles trapezoid.
After Josh walked away, I went back to my book, happy to see that Parisian women from the 1920s hadn’t been stick thin, either. Even more evidence to support my argument that I had totally been born in the wrong country.
“You know, if you start feeling dizzy or start having sensitivity to light or noise, you might want to go to the nurse and get that checked out,” a voice from behind me said in my ear. “Those are two of the main symptoms of a concussion.”
Wicked Jealous: A Love Story Page 2
