Skinny (3 page)

“And they were happy?” Keisha asks.

“They were happier than they’d ever been in their whole life,” I say. For some reason the words bring tears to my eyes. I don’t know why. It isn’t a sad story.

The dancing five-year-olds end up in a giggling pile of bodies in the middle of the home center.

“
Now
sing,” Mario commands. But I don’t because Valerie jumps up suddenly, grabbing between her legs.

“I gots to use it!” she declares and gallops toward the bathroom. It’s hard to argue with that. Cinderella’s ball stops.

I see Rat standing in the doorway, tall and serious, watching me. He shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I’m not sure how long he’s been there.

“I have to go,” I tell the kids.

“Nooooo,” they squeal, grabbing my arms and begging me to stay. Valerie returns to join in the begging.

“Just one song,” she pleads, stamping her tiny tennis shoe on the red ABC carpet for emphasis.

“Sorry. My ride is here.”

“You mean your carriage?” Mario asks with a rare smile.

I look up at Rat and grin. He smiles back and pushes his glasses up on his nose.

“He thinks you look ridiculous.”
Skinny is back. Lately, she’s started to do Rat. I don’t like it.

“Let’s go.” I push past him, the smile gone from my face.

My stepsister Briella is already at the kitchen table when I walk in the door. Meat loaf and mashed potatoes sit untouched on the plate in front of her while she texts frantically in her lap.

“Eat your dinner, Briella,” my stepmother, Charlotte, says from the kitchen.

My mom, my real mom, was an artist. She illustrated children’s books. Fairy tales, picture books, animals. She was amazing. Sometimes I would fall in love with one of the illustrations, and she would give it to me. I kept them in her old portfolio in my closet. Bears with clothes on, kids going to school, but the one I kept on my wall — my very favorite was an illustration of Beauty dancing with the Beast. She painted that one when she was pregnant with me.

“I told you no gravy,” Briella says, not looking up from her phone. She’s wearing a black pleated miniskirt and a soft, bright blue sweater that hugs her fifteen-year-old curves. I know without looking under the table that she’s also wearing black Ugg boots. The miniskirt and the sweater I covet, but those black fur-lined boots with all that room left around her tiny calves make me absolutely livid.

I’m starving. All I had to eat today for lunch was a salad and an orange. Of course that didn’t include the three Snickers I stuffed down one after another in the bathroom stall between fifth and sixth periods, or the Little Debbie Honey Buns I bought from the vending machine when I was supposed to be at the library. I try to hide the actual eating part from almost everyone, especially the bad stuff that I’m not supposed to eat, because everyone knows the fat girl is going to devour the big chocolate sundae with the sprinkles on top, right? It’s expected.

Publicly, at the school lunchroom table, I eat salads and fruit. But secretively I continually push enough food into my body to result in my current weight. That’s a lot of secrets to swallow. It’s harder to keep the pretense up at home. I pick up a blueberry muffin off the countertop and cram a quick bite in while I look for the plate in the pantry. Charlotte frowns at me. I know what she’s thinking just by her glance.

“Do you really need that muffin, too? You’re going to eat dinner,”
Skinny hisses.

Charlotte isn’t a bad person, and she obviously loves my dad. She just isn’t my mom. Her blond hair is perfectly cut into a mooth bob of highlighted strands. Hair spray, a straightening iron, mousse, gel, and
lots
of time are required to get to this final look. She also never leaves the house without makeup. It’s a rule. My mom’s idea of makeup was the tiny bit of shiny clear lip gloss she put on before she left for the store. It’s different now.

“Is Dad here?” I ask.

“He’s going to be late. Go ahead and eat without him,” Charlotte says. She rinses off a spoon in the sink and opens up the dishwasher to stick it inside. “I’ll keep it warm and eat with him when he gets here.”

Not a big surprise. Dad works late a lot. He’s a Walker County Sheriff, and he’s been pretty busy lately. Last week, Bubba Rose pleaded guilty to attempted felony theft after Dad caught him stuffing a lead weight in a fish during a tournament at Lake Conroe in an attempt to win the grand prize, a fifty-five-thousand-dollar fishing boat. What can I say? Fishing is serious here in Texas. The week before that Dad helped catch an escaped prisoner who had broken out more than seventy times to go shop across the street at the Walmart.

I push the rest of the muffin into my mouth, crumbs dribbling down my shirt, and carry a fully loaded plate of meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and gravy over to the table. I sit down next to Briella. She glances over at me, looking pointedly at the food on my plate. I know what she’s thinking, too. I know what everyone is thinking about me. All I have to do is listen to the voice in my ear.

“How can anyone possibly eat all that? And you wonder why you are huge?”

I take an enormous bite of mashed potatoes and gravy, looking directly at my stepsister. She rolls her eyes at me.

“Where’s Lindsey?” Charlotte asks.

“I don’t know,” I mumble around a huge bite, the gravy dripping down my chin. But even though I just walked in the door, I do know. Everyone knows. She’s in front of the mirror in her room, applying a final coat of mascara or lip gloss or hair gel. As head cheerleader, she’s like God. And no one disturbs God on the evening of the Friday pep rally. Especially when it’s the night before the basketball playoff game.

I break off a piece of meat loaf with my fingers and slide it under the table. It’s snatched from my hand.

“Ever, do not feed that goat from the table,” Charlotte says.

She is referring to Roxanne, our chocolate Lab puppy. The goat dog, as Charlotte prefers to call her, is in trouble because she got into the pantry yesterday and ate two kiwis, a raw potato, and most of a pound of sugar. The rest of the sugar was scattered across the kitchen floor in a fine layer of gritty carpet that we’ll still be feeling weeks from now. Roxanne also chewed up a hardback book from Charlotte’s library, ate her fur headband, and put holes in her black tights. I didn’t tell Charlotte I’d also seen Roxanne standing on the dining-room table last week, licking the wooden top. Roxanne and I have to stick together. Neither one of us is on Charlotte’s list of favorite things.

Charlotte frowns down at her coffee cup as she refills it at the kitchen counter. No matter what time of the day it is, Charlotte usually has a cup of coffee in her perfectly manicured hand.

“She hates you,”
Skinny says.
“She wishes you weren’t here.”

I finish up the mashed potatoes and take a bite of the meat loaf. Briella is still texting, her food sitting untouched on the table.

“Have you done your homework?” Charlotte asks. I know she’s not asking me, so I ignore her. Briella makes a noise that’s supposed to sound like a yes but can later be said to be a no. I glance her way, but she doesn’t raise her eyes from the phone in her lap. It doesn’t matter. Based on Rat’s information about her English assignment, she’ll be looking for me soon enough.

“Your dad sent the check today,” Charlotte says.

Briella looks up from the phone in her lap.

“Did he say anything about this weekend?” she asks. “Is he coming?”

“He didn’t say, but I wouldn’t count on it, Briella. He’s really busy these days.”

“Right,” Briella says, and goes back to texting. Roxanne licks my hand to remind me she’s still under the table. Waiting.

“You’re invisible to everyone but the dog,”
Skinny says.

I clean my plate, then walk over to the dishwasher to put my dishes inside. Charlotte moves over to let me pass. A car honks outside and Charlotte walks over to the front window, pulls back the shades, and peers outside.

“Lindsey!” Charlotte turns away from the window to yell up the stairs. “You’re going to be late. Hannah is here.”

No answer from upstairs.

Roxanne follows me, looking up with her big, golden “I’m starving to death down here” eyes. When Charlotte looks away, I slide a piece of meat loaf into a napkin and then into my pocket. Roxanne wags her tail just a little bit and goes to wait for me at the bottom of the stairs. She might be part goat, but she’s not stupid.

“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 of
her
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.