Big Fat Disaster (17 page)

The Goodwill store in Cedar Points doesn’t have much in the Big Girl department, unless you count polyester floral-print tents and old lady pants with elastic waists, but I’ve got four big bags of Tina’s
fat clothes
in the trunk of our car anyway. Drew lucks out and finds school clothes as well as a winter coat. She tries to get Mom to buy a ragged rabbit fur vest for her, but Mom refuses.

Drew slips on the vest and crosses her arms, tosses her hair, and prances up and down the aisles like she’s in a beauty pageant. “Look, Mommy! I’m Miss Texas!”

I warn, “That thing’s got the same skin disease as those dogs up the road from Aunt Leah’s house. You’re going to get bald patches and melty skin, too.”

“Ohmygosh! Ohmygosh! Ohmygosh!” Drew freaks out, throws the vest off, and slams into a wispy caramel-skinned girl who’s carrying an armload of clothes toward the fitting room. The girl drops the clothes and nearly falls.

I grab her arms and steady her. “Sorry, I didn’t mean for that to happen!” Drew recovers enough to gather the girl’s pile of plaid western shirts and worn blue jeans.

She doesn’t make eye contact; just accepts the clothes from Drew and hurries into the fitting room.

Drew gives me a wounded look, and I laugh. Mom’s not paying attention; she’s adding up the price tags on Drew’s clothes and looking worried.

Mom washes all the clothes, irons them, and proudly presents them to us. “Now you have clothes to start the year! Nobody has to know where we shopped. They won’t know if you don’t tell.”

Drew is in heaven, combining her tops and jeans and admiring herself in the mirror as if her school wardrobe came from the most expensive store in the mall.

I try on my clothes and know right off that Tina’s mom was right: I
am
“at least a 20.” I’m also
way
more than a 22. I don’t have the nerve to tell Mom that Tina’s
fat jeans
are too tight.

I make up my mind that the jeans will fit if I starve myself the entire week, but I can’t stay out of the sample box of broken cookies on the counter at Sugar’s. There’s a sign on the box that says
Free
, so I figure I’m not eating up Sugar’s profits. Every time Leah or Ryan turns away, I’m sneaking handfuls of cookie pieces. The more I worry about what I’ll wear to school, the harder it is to stop eating.

Mom starts working in the bakery, too. She’s mixing up muffins and quick breads and picks up easily on cake decorating. She’s so busy, she doesn’t notice when I take a spoon and a measuring cup full of icing to the bathroom with me and wolf it down. It tastes just like my dad’s recipe and I find myself thinking about him, but instead of the punched-in-the gut feeling I usually get since he left, I don’t
feel
anything.

It’s like I’m a robot and my hand is programmed for shoveling. Before I know it, the container’s empty. I check my face for icing before I open the door and hide the measuring cup behind my apron as I walk to the sink and drop it into the sudsy water. No one notices. About twenty minutes later, the sugar and fat have my head spinning and my stomach churning.

I promise myself that I’ll never do it again.

At night, I run my hands over the rolls on my stomach and pull my bed sheet up to the top of my neck so that my double chin doesn’t touch against it. I think about the first day of school, and I wonder what I’ll wear. I
can’t
tell Mom that the jeans don’t fit; it’s not like she can return them to a garage sale.

I click on my lamp and stare at the plastic star on my ceiling. I wonder why my dad doesn’t send Rachel or us any money. Don’t other kids get money from their dad when their parents split up? I think about the address label across my face…I hate myself for being ugly. I
hate
myself for eating like I do. My stomach kicks back the icing and cookies, and stomach acid burns my throat. I close my eyes tight and pray that when I wake up in the morning, I’ll be normal-size like Rachel and Drew.

The next day, I do it all over again.

Early on the first day of school, I pull Tina’s jeans up just past my thighs, then shimmy and dance around until the material reaches my hips. The floor shakes and thunders with each stomp, and I worry that I’ll plunge right through to the dirt under the trailer. Mom yells, “What are you
doing
in there?”

I grab a wire coat hanger off my dresser and fall back onto my bed. I thread the hanger hook through my zipper and pull on the hanger as the zipper strains upward. I hold my breath as I work the top button through the button hole until my fingers feel like they’re bleeding, but I finally get it fastened. I can’t sit up, so I roll side to side until I gain enough momentum to hurl myself toward my headboard, which I use to pull myself up. When I manage to stand, I release my breath. My lower back is screaming and my middle hangs over the top of the jeans, but, by God, they’re on.

I yank a purple shirt off a hanger—this one says
Hallister
on it—and it looks like it’ll be loose enough to cover the overhang of fat. But it’s not. So I pull it over my arms just enough to stretch it with my elbows side to side. I twist the shirt around and stretch it front to back. When I’ve got it as loose as I can get it, I pull it over my head and push my arms through the sleeves. I walk stiffly to the full-length mirror on the back of my door and gasp when I realize that I forgot to put on my socks
before
I wrestled myself into the jeans. I slide my bare feet into my shoes, step back from the mirror, and try on a smile.
My
smile’s not convincing, so I imitate Mom’s fake smile.

It really does look like a dog baring its teeth.

Mom offers me a Slim-Fast bar for breakfast, but I’m in too much pain to think about eating. I can barely breathe.

She hugs Drew. “I filled out the paperwork for the free lunch program when I enrolled you in school. The teacher will give you a student ID number, and you’ll use that instead of money to pay for food.”

Drew’s voice is high. “You’re not going to make my lunch? You
always
used to make my lunch.”

“Honey, if the school will feed you for free, we need to save money and let them do it.”

Mom turns to me and pushes my hair out of my eyes. “Try to make healthy food choices, Colby. Don’t choose all junk.”

I pull away from her. “Speaking of choices, you kept putting me off when I asked about my classes. Am I supposed to see the counselor to fill out my course selection sheet? I don’t even know which electives this school has.”

Mom abruptly steps away, pulls her phone out of her purse, and checks it for messages. She does that constantly, and she never says so, but I know she’s hoping she’s missed a call from Dad, or that he at least texted her:
some
sign that we still matter to him. She frowns and places the phone face-down on the kitchen table. “You were busy at Sugar’s, so I stopped in at the high school and filled out the papers for you.”

I reach for her arm. “Do they have choir? You signed me up for choir, right?”

Mom keeps her eyes on her phone. “They
do
have choir, but you’re taking life skills. It’s like a health class; I figured you could apply what you learn to lose weight.”

I kick a table leg, and Drew’s orange juice spills.

“Hey! Clean that up right now!” Mom pulls a bunch of paper towels off the roll and shoves them at me.

I knock her hand away. “Why didn’t you ask me what
I
want? I’m fifteen years old! You had no right!…You think I don’t know how to eat?”

Mom snaps, “Oh, you
know
how to eat, all right!” She leans against the counter and folds her arms tightly across her chest. “I’m your mother, and I can’t keep watching you destroy yourself. I don’t know when you’re doing it or why, but it’s got to stop! Are you doing this to get back at
me
?”

I kick the table leg again, and the milk in Drew’s cereal sloshes over the edge. “
You
? Why do you think that everything is about
you
? Just say it, Mom: You’re ashamed of me. I’m not tall, blonde, and thin. I take after Dad, and you hate me as much as you hate him!”

“
Hate
you? I could
never
hate you, Colby. I don’t hate your
father
. I hate what he’s done to us, and I hate what you’re doing to
yourself
. You have such a pretty face; if you’d just lose weight, you could—”