by Jen Larsen
“Weight-loss surgery,” he says. “You’re getting weight-loss surgery?”
I just look at him. I am not interested in offering him relief.
He runs his hand through his hair, looks at the house. “You weren’t going to tell me. You were just never going to mention you were going to get this surgery to lose weight.”
I shrug, look over at the house. There is no yelling yet. I wonder if they are letting Jolene talk.
He turns and walks away from me, stomping across the lawn, leaving a trail of flattened grass behind him. “Goddammit,” he says, lifting his foot and examining it. He’s stepped on one of Soto’s toys.
“You forgot to mow the lawn again,” I say, and he turns with the toy in his hand. “I always remind you and you never remember.”
“Not now, Ashley,” he says, and tosses the toy away, turns back to the house.
“They’re still talking,” I call. “Let them talk.”
“They can talk for as long as they want,” he says. “I’m going to speak to your grandmother.”
He’s off across the lawn. “My interview went well, thanks for asking,” I say, but he’s already gone.
All the lamps in the house cast rectangles of light scattered across the overgrown lawn. Jolene comes to find me, the dogs following behind her in an orderly fashion. Toby flings himself into my lap, his nails scratching at my shirt, jumping up and squirming and bouncing back onto the grass and running laps around me like he can’t believe his luck, just finding me out here. Annabelle Lee has wandered off, but Soto sits calmly, her tongue hanging out. Soto is always relaxed.
“What happened?” I say. I can’t see her face very well, but I see her shake her head.
“Everyone is gone,” she says. “They all left.”
“Together?” I say. “Are they forming a bowling team?”
She laughs. “No,” she says. She sits down next to my other side, and Toby swarms into her lap. “Shh,” she says to him, but he doesn’t like to hear that. He wiggles out of her arms and races off barking into the dark, his little yap echoing under the trees.
“Are you staying?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. She exhales. She looks just like she did when she was seven. Soft cheeks and sad eyes. Shattered heart.
“Let’s go swimming,” I say, and stand up, hold out my hand to her. Her face is a soft blur in the dark. I can tell she’s staring at me, deciding how serious I am. The air smells like salt and wind and pine and I close my eyes for a moment so I can smell it better.
“Yes,” she says. I open my eyes. She lets me pull her up.
We wind down along the narrow path through the trees, the ground changing from soft dirt littered with dead leaves to shifting sand. We stop at the edge and kick our shoes off the way we always do, the way we always will. There is no moon. It looks like the ocean is a stretch of black glass that goes on forever and we are racing toward it, our feet digging into the sand but it can’t slow us down until we’re splashing into the water, splashing and then wading and then throwing ourselves headlong, letting the water catch us and lift us up off our feet and carry us away.
CHAPTER 21
The main office is dark because Principle Simons does not approve of overhead lights anywhere near her personal space. On the front counter there’s a desk lamp that looks like the kind my grandmother collects, with a floral stained-glass shade that is pretty but blocks out most of the light. A slightly brighter lamp sits on Quincy’s desk, but he is still hunching over to look at the papers he’s shuffling through. I feel like I should pull out a flare to signal my entrance, but he looks up when I come in, the light glinting off the lenses of his enormous black-rimmed glasses.
“Absence slip,” he says as he pushes his chair out from his desk. He prides himself on being able to tell what every student is coming in for with just a glance. “Legit,” he says, looking me over. “Ponytail, tired eyes, skin color is off—”
“Quincy, how can you even tell in this light?” I say, putting my hand on my cheek.
He shrugs. “I know what you look like. And you’ve been sick.” He holds his hand out, palm up, for me to slap my weird old-fashioned slip on it like we’re high-fiving.
“No,” I say. “Just tired.” I dig it out of my bag and hand it over.
“Oh sure, sure. Stress is the worst,” he says. He squints at the slip. “Oh, right, you were scheduled to be out. For your interview! I heard that went well.”
I sigh. “She said she looks forward to watching my career,” I say, holding on to the strap of my bag. I want to lean on the counter but I stay upright.
“That’s good, right? There’s no implied ‘crash and burn’ at the end of the sentence. Of course there isn’t. You’re a rock star. And your thing, when is that going to happen?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I haven’t been accepted yet.” I think I’m too tired to feel anxious about that.
His eyes get big, and he leans forward. “Accepted? You have to apply for permission? You’re kidding me!”
I pause and look at him. I say, “I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing here.”
He waves his hand. “The gastric thing,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Right. That. Who told you?” I try to sound casual but my voice is lifting up a bit at the end. I reach out my hand and carefully place it flat down on the counter. It is cool marble and I concentrate on the feeling against my palm.
“Hmm, Principle Simons, probably?” He lifts his shoulders, tilts his head to the side, hands palm up. “Who knows? But,” he continues. “It’s pretty exciting, isn’t it? You’re going to want to do it before college starts in the fall.”
“That’s my grandmother’s plan,” I say. The bells for first period chime and I back away from the desk. “Okay, I have to go,” I say.
“Have a good day!” he says, waving the permission slip at me. “Get some sleep!”
And when I’m back in the hall and my classmates are streaming around me I realize I’m not imagining it. They are actually looking at me as they talk and their voices get lower when I come close and then the bright cheerfulness of an ordinary day snaps back into place with hello Ashley, hi Ashley, hey Ashley!, and the question that lingers at the back of their throats is jostled aside by all the other small talk I wave off.
It’s out. In the days since I left, it burst and started to spread like poison and this time Laura’s not here to menace the chatter into silence. It’s an intravenous overdose of humiliation coursing through me and I am shaking. I start walking faster, pull out my phone and frown at it like I’m looking at something important. The screen is blurry because my hands are trembling. I weave through the crowd and pretend I don’t hear anyone calling my name and that I don’t know that they’re talking about me, all of them. Everyone has eyes. Everyone knows I’m fat. I have spent so long making sure that it mattered as little to them as it did to me, playing by the rules, and it still wasn’t good enough.
I should have told my grandmother. I should have shut this down before all hell broke loose and went rampaging through school. I should have known this town was too small to let anyone really keep a secret. I should have known.
There are the double doors to the parking lot and I see my car pulled up under the shade of the sunflower bush because I got here early. But there is a surge of fuck that. I’m not running. I turn left and start heading to Calculus instead. Then Brandon is rushing toward me, his hand outstretched.
“Hey,” he says. He pulls his arm back before he touches me, and he’s looking at me so seriously again, I think it’s actual worry. “Hey,” he says. “It wasn’t me.”
People are eyeing us while they pass in the hallway.
I say, “Are you still expecting me to thank you?”
“Look, I’m just saying—”
“I know it wasn’t you,” I say abruptly. “I think you probably wouldn’t lie.”
“Only probably?” he says, with a weak little grin
.
“I’m not going to talk about it right now,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. “But I hope that—”
“I’m late,” I say, and push around him.
A text comes up on my phone ten minutes later.
I HOPE EVERYTHING IS OKAY. Brandon.
I leave it unread. I lift my phone a few times to reply, but I keep setting it back down until finally I shove it under my textbook.
In third period my phone goes off with the text chime again.
WHAT THE HELL R U THINKING?? from Laura. Brandon must have related the news.
NOT TRUE, I text back. She replies with a line of question marks and I turn my phone off.
In fourth period, I turn my phone back on to text Jolene.
DON’T WANT TO GO TO LUNCH
NOT HUNGRY?
PEOPLE
NOT HUNGRY FOR PEOPLE??
YES
COME TO LUNCH I AM HERE
Jolene has a table in the corner near a window. She’s unpacking her lunch bag, pulling out hummus and crackers and pretzels and cheese and an apple. I sit with my back to the tall glass walls, facing the rest of the room, but I keep my eyes on Jolene as she keeps pulling food out of the bag.
“I was hungry this morning,” she says, when she sees I’m watching her.
“Everyone has heard that I’m so fat I need weight-loss surgery,” I say. “How did this happen?”
She shakes her head. “Don’t know. No one has asked me directly. But . . .” She nods at Morgan, who’s sitting on a table at the other side of the room, laughing at something Oliver from the swim team is saying to her. He’s got his hand on her bare thigh and she’s not breaking his fingers off so I guess she’s okay about breaking up with Brandon.
“How would she know?” I say, watching them. Then I remember Morgan in Guidance last week, digging for info. She must be so delighted she turned out to be right.
I see Hector weaving between seats, holding his full tray up over his head with one hand. When he sees me, he smiles big, and then looks away fast like he didn’t mean to. When he glances back, I smile back at him. I pull out the chair next to me. He cocks his head and smiles again, then turns toward our table.
“I wanted to call you,” he says. His hair has gotten way too long in just a couple of weeks, and he is tanned dark. His mom is probably mad about that. He must be skateboarding again. He’s looking at me like he’s trying to catalog that all my parts are present, intact, and accounted for. “But I deleted your number off my phone because I was afraid I’d call you.”
I laugh at that. I want to reach out and touch his wrist. I want to say, Thank you for all the good things you thought about me. Thank you for believing I really was the person I wanted to be.
“You don’t have it memorized?” Jolene says.
“Why would I memorize a phone number?” Hector says. He picks up his vegetarian sloppy joe and demolishes half of it in one bite.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I say automatically, because I know him.
He pretends to be wounded, clutching his chest but keeps chewing. When he swallows he says abruptly, “Is it true?” He looks genuinely upset. He’s watching me with wrinkles in his forehead as I work out a way to explain it all, and then his face goes suddenly sad and resigned. “It is true.”
“No!” I say. “It’s just complicated.”
He nods and swallows, draws a line with his finger in the sauce on his plate. “Well. I know you’ve had a crush on him forever so I guess it’s not surprising.”
It takes me a moment to realize what he’s saying. And then I laugh and I can’t stop. I cover my mouth with both hands. Hector seems bewildered. I try to talk but all I can do is just shake my head and giggle.
Jolene is smiling at me and leans over to correct Hector, I think, but then her smile drops. She says, “Did you want to talk to Morgan? Because she’s coming over here.”
Hector stands up. I say, “Sit down, Hector. Please.”
Her mother probably loves her, I remind myself as Morgan stops short at our table.
“So you’re going to be all skinny for Harvard,” she says. “Weight-loss surgery. Aren’t you so embarrassed?”
But now I can’t imagine why her mother would love her.
“Why should she be embarrassed?” Hector says. He has a smear of sloppy joe grease on his chin. I hand him a napkin but he just holds it.
“Uh, because she’s so fat she needs to get surgery,” Morgan says. She says the word fat like a whip crack, and I wait for it to lash against me. But it misses. It sounds ridiculous outside my head. She says it again. “Sad, fat people—so desperate to be normal.”
“Ashley isn’t sad,” Jolene says.
“Maybe when you’re a normal girl Brandon will actually like you instead of feeling sorry for you.”
A click of a puzzle piece. My giggles bubble up again. “Are you—threatened by me, Morgan?”
She tosses her head like she’s in a soap opera. “Hardly. I’m embarrassed for you.”
And that means nothing at all to me. It is absolutely unimportant, what she thinks.
“You know, it’s a little uncomfortable the way you’re obsessed with my weight. And whether I get weight-loss surgery. And whether I care if anyone else knows my grandmother wants me to get weight-loss surgery.”
“Oh, it’s your grandmother’s idea!” she says triumphantly, her hands on her hips.
“Yes.” I sigh. “Yes, it’s my grandmother’s idea.” My voice is getting louder. I stand up. “My grandmother decided I needed it.” I put my foot up on the chair and pull myself up. Jolene pops up to hold me steady. I’m yelling now. “My grandmother thinks it would be a great idea for me to have weight-loss surgery, everybody!” I spread my arms wide. Kids I’ve known my whole life almost are turning around in their seats. “Do you want me to have weight-loss surgery, everybody?” They’re glancing at each other. “I don’t care! Do you care? No? I don’t blame you! Thank you for your time!”
“You’re going to break the chair if you’re not careful,” Morgan says.
“Oh my god, Morgan, just go away,” I say. I jump down, plop down in my seat, and take one of Jolene’s carrots and I don’t watch Morgan walk away and I don’t look at the rest of the room. I don’t want to know who is staring, or talking.
“Are you going to do it?” Hector finally says. He’s still got the grease on his chin.
“Napkin,” I say.
He dabs at his face.
“No,” I say finally. “I’m not going to do it. But my grandmother is still scheduling it.”
“You haven’t told Clara?” Jolene says.
I look at him, and glance over at Jolene. They’re both looking at me very seriously.
“I will,” I say finally.
CHAPTER 22
They were excellent, perfectly logical, and reasonable reasons. Of course I couldn’t play volleyball anymore—I was studying for the SATs. I was running for student government. I was working. My knee was acting up after one too many midair collisions where everyone landed ungracefully.
They were sincere reasons, real and true reasons that had nothing to do with my weight, or feeling so wide next to tall, wiry Amy, and lanky and muscular Justin, tiny Emily always gunning for captain. Or because I had to play harder, because everyone was skinnier than me. Play better, because they were skinnier than me. Be fierce because I had to be brave. Force myself on the court every single practice.
I threw up before every single game, my stomach heaving at the sound of the crowd outside the locker room. A hundred strangers with their eyes all on me, everyone wondering, how is that fat girl supposed to play volleyball?
Having to prove myself, over and over.
I have never allowed myself to acknowledge this, not really. More important, no one was ever supposed to know. Somehow, I really believed no one ever suspected I had this frantic, terrified center, a churning, overheating engine constantly propelling me forw
ard. The energy behind everything I do. Everything I am.
The thought tears through me, leaving me feeling bloody and ragged. My head is down and my fists are in my pockets and I’m walking fast. I’m not skipping my last class, because I’m not running away. I don’t run away. But relief slams me in the chest and stops me short when I see the classroom door is open and the light is off and no one is inside. I don’t care why no one is there. I spin and I march through the emptying halls and right out the back door, flinching at the brightness of the sun after the dimmed lights of the hallways. I’m ducking my head and moving more and more quickly, the farther I get away.
When I pass my car I drop my bag and kick it underneath and keep going. I don’t want to stop moving. If I stop, all these thoughts will catch up and swallow me. The faster I move, the louder the silence that fills my head. When I’m in motion, I’m just long breaths and bunching muscles and moving limbs. When I’m not thinking about my body, just using it, everything makes more sense.
I dodge through the gravel divider and over the sidewalk, across the road to the bike path that winds down to Main Street and the beach. When I cross from the bright sun to the shade of the trees I break into a run, my flip-flops slapping the dirt and branches dragging across my bare arms, leaving white scratches behind. I don’t stop at the end of the trail. I hit the cobblestones of Main Street, veer toward the boardwalk, leap off the boards onto the sand. I’m breathing heavily, too hot in the sun. But I feel light and invisible. I don’t notice anyone, and they won’t notice me if I keep moving. I kick off my flip-flops and I pound through the sand, chasing the gulls down the beach.
I run through the stitch in my side.
I run through the burn in my lungs.
I run through the image of my mother, laughing on the lawn of Harvard like she had some right to be there.
I run through my grandmother’s promises.
I run through the idea, the seductive, twining, choking-vine idea that everything could be easier. Everything could be simpler. That I never have to feel like this again. That skinny is so much easier than fat.
