Skinny Page 3

  “I’m going to do my homework,” I say to nobody, picking up my backpack from the couch and pulling myself up the stairs. Roxanne matches my slow pace, step for step, sniffing at my pocket. Halfway up, we are both confronted with the whirlwind of perfume and pom-poms that is Lindsey. Her dark, almost black, hair is pulled into a perky ponytail and tied with a ribbon in the green-and-gold school colors. The short, pleated cheerleading skirt flounces around her tan thighs as she jogs down the stairs in perfectly matching tennis shoes. Roxanne and I both squeeze to one side of the staircase to let her size-two body pass as she rushes for the door, leaving glittery strands of green plastic behind.

  “Hey,” she says to Charlotte and Briella, and then she’s gone with a door slam. Roxanne and I keep going up the stairs and into my room at the end of the hall. The meat loaf is gobbled up from the napkin almost before I can shut the bedroom door behind us.

  “You’re welcome,” I say to Roxanne. She wags her tail, jumps up on the end of my bed, and settles into a big circle of soft brown fur with a huge sigh of satisfaction. I pull out my iPod and push the earbuds into my ears. Turning up the volume, I dig around for an algebra book in the bottom of my backpack. I get to the right page of the assignment, which I carefully wrote in my homework folder, take out a properly sharpened pencil, write my name at the top of the blank page and then . . .

  I close my eyes and lean back against my headboard. The music is what I want, not algebra. I need the melody, the harmony, the emotion of the music. My mind takes flight behind my closed eyes.

  Then suddenly, the earbuds are yanked out. Briella. I’d been expecting her, but the sudden interruption of Kristin Chenoweth’s original cast version of “Popular” is a rude awakening. Roxanne jumps down off the bed and finds a spot out of sight under my desk. Even the dog feels the wintry gust of air that always seems to accompany my younger stepsister. Briella stands just inside the bedroom door, hands on her impossibly tiny hips, glaring at me with icy blue eyes. The exact opposite in coloring to her dark older sister, she inherited all the genes from her mother’s German ancestors while Lindsey looks just like her father’s Portuguese side of the family. She’s dressed for bed in some tiny green sleeping shorts and a tank op; her long, thin legs are bare. With her strawberry hair combed into long, loose pigtails, Briella’s face is free of any makeup. A rare sight to see. She looks impossibly gorgeous.

  “You could have knocked.” I push over to the side of my bed and confront her.

  “I did. You were playing that stupid music so loud you didn’t hear me.”

  “I wouldn’t call it stupid if I were you. Not if you want that poem on Huck Finn.”

  “You heard,” she mumbles. “Nerdy rat boy.”

  “That’s going to cost you. The price just went up to two downloads.”

  “Come on, Ever,” she whines. “I don’t have that much this week. I need a new dress for the homecoming dance on Friday.”

  “But you also need a poem by Thursday.” I smile up at her. “It’s a dilemma.”

  “Fine,” she snaps. “Use my password. You know it.”

  I shove my body back up to the headboard and lean back in triumph. The bed creaks. I start to push the earbuds back into my ears, but she isn’t leaving. She looks down at me with a sneer.

  “How does that bed hold up under all your weight?”

  “What?” I ask.

  “You don’t have to always act like that.”

  “Like what?’

  “Like you’re better than everyone else. Like you’re smarter and . . .” She pauses, searching for the right word, then spits it out, “special.”

  “Yeah, I’m special all right,” I mumble sarcastically, thinking how ironic it is that I was telling the five-year-olds the tale of Cinderella earlier. “I’m the poor, motherless stepsister that does all the work around here.”

  My mom was like me. It was obvious to everyone we had the same genes — the same rounded, curvy, pear-shaped bodies ofher mother and two sisters. She was always on a diet. One time it was the cabbage soup diet that made the whole house smell for weeks. Another time it was strawberry protein shakes that tasted like ground-up oatmeal. By the time I was nine, I was on a diet, too. Not because I was fat, because according to the pictures of me I was a pretty normal-sized little girl. But I guess my mom could see my future. So we joined Weight Watchers together — the only mother/daughter team. Then came the exercise craze. We walked, we Jazzercised, we did water aerobics. We balanced encyclopedias on our ankles, holding up our legs inches off the living room carpet until we couldn’t stand the burning thigh muscles any longer.

  “Give me a break. Poor Ever. I got it. Your mom’s gone,” Briella says. “But at least she’s dead.”

  “What are you talking about?” How dare she talk about my mother? Briella didn’t know anything about her. She didn’t know the one constant in the midst of all the dieting and exercise was the Snickers we ate in the car on the way home from the grocery store so my dad wouldn’t see that once again we had fallen off the wagon. My mom’s laughter and chocolate — forever connected. For months, maybe even years, I ate chocolate before bedtime thinking it would help me dream about her and she wouldn’t be gone. In my little kid brain it seemed to work, until I woke up the next morning and remembered the loss all over again. The dreams stopped, but the nightly chocolate ritual continued. It still goes on today. Briella didn’t know that in the end none of it mattered. The chemo made my mom so sick she didn’t want to eat anything, not even the candy bars I would sneak into her hospital room.

  Cancer was the ultimate diet. Nobody knew all that but me.

  “She can’t come back,” Briella says. Like I haven’t thought that every single day since she’s been gone? “No matter how much she wants to, and she would want to. She would have never chosen to leave you.”

  “What’s your point?” I demand.

  “My dad could walk in that door every other weekend like he’s scheduled to do. Nothing’s stopping him. But he’s as gone as your mother.” She blinks at me several times, and I try to catch up. She’s not talking about my mom. Not really. She’s talking about her dad. Obviously, the conversation with Charlotte downstairs hit Briella harder than I’d expected. To hear her talk about her dad is strange. I’d always just thought of him as the goose that always came up with that golden egg just when it was needed. An invisible goose.

  I don’t answer her, don’t know how to. Briella’s never talked to me about her dad before, and it’s obvious from the look on her face now, she’s regretting it. She backs up toward the open door.

  “I’m just saying you’re not the only one with issues, Ever.” She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear the craziness of actually having a conversation with me. “Forget it.”

  “She doesn’t really expect you to feel sorry for her. She knows you only think about yourself,” Skinny whispers.

  Who would feel sorry for someone who looks like Briella? My stepsister swallows hard, looks away from me. She’s said too much, but it’s like she can’t stop. “My dad makes it clear every single weekend that it was his choice to leave,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to lie around in my bed and eat myself to death.”

  “You think I want this?” My hands contract into fists by my sides. Suddenly, it isn’t about my mom or her dad. It’s all about me.

  “Yeah, I think you do. You’d do something about it if you didn’t. It’s not like you’re in a wheelchair or something like that. You don’t have to be fat.”

  It’s what every thin person in the world thinks. I should know. Skinny has whispered it into my ear over and over again.

  “People lose weight all the time.” Briella flings a ponytail over one shoulder and glares at me. “You eat less and you exercise more. It’s science.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried? Diets and exercise don’t work for me.”

  “Then do that surgery. I saw that actress had it. She lost hundreds of pounds.
You could do that.”

  “And it will just magically go away, right?” Everyone thinks there’s a simple solution I just haven’t thought about yet. Drink protein drinks for breakfast. Eat only apples one day a week. Buy some jiggling dumbbell from an infomercial.

  “Yeah.” She leans in toward me, excited now with this brilliant idea. “They make your stomach smaller and then you lose a lot of weight.”

  “Or you die,” I say.

  She looks confused.

  “Sometimes people die when they have that surgery. Of a blood clot or some other complication.”

  “So you know about it?”

  “Do you think I don’t watch TV?” She is so amazingly stupid. “How would you like it if someone told you to cut yourselfopen and rearrange your body parts? That then you could be normal?”

  “It’d be better than . . .” her voice trails off, and she realizes she’s gone too far.

  “Get out, Briella.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”

  “Yes, you did,” I say. I want to hurt her back, and I know how to do it. “No wonder Lindsey is the popular one. You’re The Great Lindsey’s little sister, but who are you next year when she leaves for college? You’re nobody.” I feel bad the minute it comes out of my mouth. She lowers her eyes, but not before I see the pain. It has hit home. Hard.

  “Congratulations. You’re fat and mean,” Skinny says.

  “Never mind. Lie here and do nothing. I don’t care.” Briella leaves finally, stalking out the door and slamming it behind her. The noise wakes Roxanne, and she comes back up on the bed. She flops down along the length of my body, lays her head on my stomach, and looks up at me with sad, sympathetic eyes. I rub her silky smooth ears until her eyes close to slits, and she starts to puppy snore. It doesn’t matter what Briella thinks about me. What I am is too far in for her to see. I can’t be found. By anyone.

  I pull out a half-pound bag of M&M’s from under my nightstand drawer, trying not to wake the sleeping dog, and tear it open with my teeth. It’s no use. Roxanne’s head perks up with the tiniest rustle of the bag, and she turns toward me with a hopeful gaze.

  “Chocolate Labs cannot have chocolate,” I say for about the hundredth time, and Roxanne flops her head back down on the bed. I grab a handful of M&M’s and pour them into my mouth. My hands are like oven mitts. The fingers indistinguishable from one another. I eat two more handfuls before I slow down. I shove the music back deep into my ears, but it doesn’t stop the noise in my head.

  It’s not like I haven’t thought about the surgery before. But if I have the surgery, I could die, and that scares me. I have a door inside my head. It’s a black door with big red letters that spell out one word: DEATH. And even though I’ve kept myself from getting too close, I know something of what’s waiting behind that door. It’s a black, swirling tornado, like the kind I’ve seen on TV and in the movies with the cows and the houses swirling around inside all that black wind. But it’s different, too, because instead of pulling me up into the sky, it pulls me down, down, down into a world that is different from everything I know — into a world where “is” becomes “was.”

  Memories of childhood go swirling by mixed with all the houses and cows and fence posts. And every memory has my mom in it. My mom when I was little, helping me bake cookies for the first time — I got to lick the spoon. My mom bringing out my birthday cake when I was seven — the candles lighting up her beaming face. My mom putting a big yellow trash can underneath my mouth, while holding my hair back from my face, when I was throwing up from too much candy corn at Halloween when I was ten. And at the bottom of that swirling horrible black tornado there is no mom.

  Even worse than the dying part, is the hoping. If I hope for normal, and it doesn’t happen, then what? I lose five pounds. Ten pounds. Hope raises its ugly head, and I start to believe. I can do it. I can lose the weight. I can be normal. But then something happens. It starts to go back the other way. One pound. I slip up. Five pounds. I try to make it stop. I can’t. Ten pounds. Don’t. Twenty pounds. I’m back there again. STOP. Thirty pounds. I’m worse off than when I started. I’m hopeless. It isn’t like I can hide it. I wear my failure for everyone to see. When the diet fails and the pounds come back, I know what they think.

  I knew she couldn’t do it.

  I told you.

  So sorry.

  Too bad.

  Look at her.

  Pity from the kindest. Gloating from the rest.

  Tears roll out the corners of my eyes and down my face to the pillow, leaving wet, salty patches of pity for myself. I pull up the blankets over the mass of my body. I’m so tired of looking at my prison. I turn out the light and try to escape into my dreams. Wicked plays me out.

  PRINCE CHARMING

  Chapter Four

  I’m in line for the spring awards ceremony right between Wolfgang Gines and Kristen Rogers. Kristen is in front of me. I focus on the back of her head, her naturally curly, soft brown hair cascading down to the middle of her back. Kristen’s mom, retired stripper Crystal Rogers, offers free pole-dancing classes on Sunday afternoons if you bring your church bulletin. Of course, you have to wear clothes, and she dances only to “Christian music.”

  I glance back at Wolfgang. He shifts from one foot to the other, staring over the top of my head. Like he doesn’t see me. Right.

  “He can’t believe he has to sit by you. He’s going to be telling his football buddies about this at practice today,” Skinny says.

  I can’t really blame him. It’s pretty obvious I’m not going to fit. They put the wooden folding chairs lined up right next to one another. Touching. There won’t be room. Kristen is normal high-school-girl sized. Probably doesn’t weigh more than a hundred twenty-five pounds. I can use some of her space.

  Wolfgang won’t be as easy, though. He’s big — the football-player, camouflage-hat-wearing, take-off-from-school-the-first-day-of-hunting-season type. His family currently supports a bill to allow legally blind hunters to use laser sights to hunt any game sighted people can hunt. He was quoted in the Huntsville Item as saying, “This opens up the fun of hunting to additional people, and I think that’s great.” C’mon, what’s not to like? A bunch of blind people out in the forest shooting guns?

  Wolfgang’s going to need all of his seat space and more. Kristen glances back at me, flipping a few curls over her shoulder with a signature move, and frowns. Her light brown eyes are the same exact color as her hair.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me. Out of all the kids in this line, I have to be next to her?”

  I stick my tongue out at her and she quickly turns back to face front with a huffy puffy noise. There is a rustle of people and voices out beyond the curtains. The whole school will be here. It’s required. The bleachers will be full of students all the way up to the nosebleed section. The band will play, the principal will speak, some class president will say a few words, and they will announce the awards.

  “Are your hands shaking?” It takes me a minute to realize Wolfgang is talking over my head to Kristen. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I don’t like to be in front of crowds,” she mumbles back to him. “Stage fright.”

  She should take one of her mom’s classes. Hanging upside down on a pole would probably give her plenty of confidence.

  I see Rat near the back of the line with the other science geeks. He gives me a silent thumbs-up, and I nod back at him. Since I’m only receiving the award for outstanding sophomore English student, I don’t actually have to go to the podium. That’s the only reason I actually came to this thing. Otherwise, I would have faked being sick or something to get out of it. But they told me all I had to do was sit there and smile when my name was announced. They said I didn’t even have to stand up. But I didn’t think about the wooden chairs in tight little lines waiting out there in the stage lights. It was a stupid mistake.

  Once when I was nine years old I sang a solo. It was Christmas Eve, and t
he church was lit only with candles. I sang “O Holy Night.” There was a collectively murmured “awww” when I walked slowly to the center of the stage. They thought I was cute and chubby, and they were going to like it no matter what sound came out of my mouth because I was a kid and it was Christmas. Then I sang the first line. I could feel the surprise trickle through the crowd. I could actually sing. Pure. Clear. Perfect.

  On the first chorus, I hit the high note. O night divine! I felt like an electrical plug meeting a socket for the first time. The energy surged through me, connecting me directly to every single person in every single pew. I had them, all of them, held in the notes soaring through the wooden beams of the chapel. People wanted to look at me because they wanted to listen to me. My body dissolved into the sound. Magical and totally addictive. I knew that night it was what I was meant to do. Sing. There was no one in the room who doubted it. Especially not me. Then the music was trapped inside the pounds, and I stopped singing. Now I can only remember what it felt like to want people to watch me.

  I see Jackson in the front row of the trombones. He has on his football jersey. Number 82. Not many boys play football and are in the band. That’s part of his charm. He’s a geeky jock. Perfect. I watch him laughing and talking with two flute players in front of him. He is so relaxed. So easy. His smile flashes often, and the flute players respond with giggles. One girl, the one with the little red rectangle glasses, hugs him, still laughing. I wonder what it feels like to reach out unselfconsciously and< touch — randomly, casually, and frequently.

  “You’ll never know,” Skinny says softly. “Never, Ever.”

  Kristen steps in front of me and sits down in an empty seat. I squeeze down into the space beside her, breathing in and out shallowly. It hurts to watch, but I can’t stop. I focus on Jackson’s face and try to feel smaller in the wooden folding chair. I cross my arms tightly over my chest and press my thighs together. The less room I take up the better. Hundreds and hundreds of eyes stare down at me from rows and rows of bleachers. Take a breath. Another. Concentrate on being invisible. And smaller.