“I am so sick of people trying to get me to stop!” I said more loudly than I’d meant to. My own voice rang in the car, an upper-class debutante-type harangue with the punk beat on the radio as a sarcastic background. All the frustration I’d felt for months came spilling out. “I used to eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. It was good. It was incredibly hard for me to stop doing that. On top of that, I work out every single day and then practice baton for at least another hour. I am proud of myself. I feel better physically. I don’t get tired when I twirl like I used to. I have accomplished something here. And all Addison and my mother can do is put milkshakes and peach cobbler in front of me and tell me to eat because I look anorexic, when I don’t! I know I don’t.”
“Yeah, Addison commented on what you were eating when we were at the Varsity.”
And you still asked her out? There was no accounting for taste.
He ran one hand back through his hair. “I know that’s hard, and I know you’ve accomplished something. I also think there’s a point where you stop losing weight in a healthy way, and it becomes an obsession. I’ve played football for years, and I’ve shared the locker room with the guys on the wrestling team.”
I knew what he was getting at. Wrestling was huge around here—not as important as football, but still popular—and boys competed by weight class, which was decided when they got on the scale right before a meet. To have the best chance of winning, they wanted to be as muscular as possible, but weigh as little as possible, and I’d heard some of them resorted to drastic measures.
“I’m not bulimic or anything like that,” I assured him. “I haven’t thrown up since I caught the flu in the sixth grade. Addison and my mom have said that to me too, like that’s the only way to lose weight.”
“I don’t mean that at all,” he said. “I’m not talking about now. I mean in the future.” Max flipped on his turn signal. While we waited for the light to change, he reached one muscular arm across the car.
I thought he would put his hand on my shoulder, as he had when my mom picked me up from the MARTA last Friday. Instead, he touched my chin with one finger. He held me there gently and made sure I was listening to him. “If you don’t have a goal, Gemma, you will never reach it.”
My whole body vibrated from his touch, and from the realization that he was right. For the past nine months, I’d arranged my life around losing weight. What was my goal?
“You can get to the point that losing weight itself is the goal,” he said, “and that’s where you get into trouble. But you could stop here, today, and say, ‘This is my goal. I don’t need to lose any more weight. I have made it.’ Wouldn’t that be a huge burden lifted off your shoulders?”
I took a long breath, considering. “I enjoy working out. It’s part of my day now, something I look forward to. And I love practicing baton. This is the first time I’ve ever felt like an athlete, and I don’t want to stop.”
“So don’t stop. You are an athlete. Keep being an athlete. Your goal now isn’t to change your body, but to keep the great body you have.”
Max had said I had a great body. Last week Carter had called me beautiful, and it had hardly registered. But Max’s words echoed in my head.
I reminded myself that he was saying that as a friend, my best friend’s date. My date’s best friend. I knew this. So I concentrated on what he was really telling me. “It would be a relief to stop buying shorts.”
“And you look great in those shorts,” he said. “You look—”
He stopped talking and put his hand down. I couldn’t blame him. Having me gape at him in the middle of his sentence was probably somewhat disconcerting.
As the turn signal tick-tocked the seconds away, he watched me with his dark eyes. He swallowed. “—great in those shorts,” he repeated.
The light changed. He swung his car into the parking lot, where Addison and Carter were waiting for us in Carter’s pickup. As we pulled in, they both got out of the truck to greet us.
Addison’s top was cut so low that I was almost embarrassed for her. I would have been, if she hadn’t been enjoying the attention. Every man who walked past her in the parking lot turned and looked. A group of boys our age even nudged one another and nodded in her direction. I could not believe her mother had let her out of the house in that—and then I saw the sweater tied around her waist. Clearly she’d left the house with the sweater covering her boobage. Ruefully I looked down at my chest, most of which I had lost along with the forty-eight pounds. Gemma Van Cleavage was no more, but I did not miss her.
My outfit went in another direction entirely. I had made damn sure that what I wore would tell Max what kind of girl I was. I was the quirky one. Since my bracelet collection had not made this obvious to him before, I had worn my necklace collection instead, and I’d touched up the purple in my hair with an even more vibrant shade.
I might have miscalculated. I had assumed Max was that rare boy who preferred the quirky friend, and that he’d mistaken Addison’s ditzy qualities for her free spirit. But when I saw the way he looked at her as we got out of his car, I knew he’d gotten what he’d asked for.
8
Without another word, I bailed out of the front seat of Max’s car to make room for his date. Addison edged around the car door and squeezed past me into the passenger seat. I eyed her bare boobs and whispered, “Really?”
“Really!” She grinned her majorette grin. Sometimes I wondered whether Addison was all there. She didn’t know when she was being made fun of. But this time she knew exactly what I was talking about. She jerked the door closed behind her. Through the window, I could see her leaning across the seat and giving Max a big hug hello, positioning herself so he could see down what little there was of her shirt.
“Hi,” I called to Carter over the roof of the car.
“Hi,” he said without smiling.
We both got into the backseat. With Addison and Max laughing together in the front, it seemed like Carter and I should . . . hug? Shake hands? Even a peck on the cheek would have been appropriate. But he looked out his window at the parking lot.
Finally he called impatiently into the front seat, “What’s the plan, Max?”
“We’re close to the mall,” Max said. “Let’s go make fun of rich people.” He turned all the way around in the driver’s seat, gasped as if he hadn’t realized I was there, and said, “Oh—Gemma—I beg your pardon.”