Teenage Waistland Read Free Page A

of those every day. If we get banded, we’ll probably never have any of that again. Or even if we could, it’ll only take a chip or two to fill up the tiny change purse that’ll be our new stomachs. You can’t cram very much happiness into such a small space. This is what I’m marinating on in this auditorium full of fat kids when Char elbows me.
    “Get moving,” she orders, standing up. “You’re so in outer space.”
    There’s a cute guy wearing a football jersey walking by himself in the direction she’s pushing me. Dr. Weinstein is keeping the parents in the main auditorium and the kids arebeing broken into groups for Q&A sessions in the smaller conference rooms. Through my ballerina flats—the only ballerina anything that could be linked with me these days—I feel the floorboards vibrate and imagine the building crumbling under the weight—all these fat teens wanting to be part of this trial. Or maybe, just part of something.
    “Oh, great,” I mumble. “I’m already sweating.”
    “Shut. Up. Shroud,” Char says, and pulls me along behind her as she strides toward this smiley nurse holding a clipboard. I groan and shake my elbow from her grip. The nurse says, “Ten,” to Hefty Quarterback, and, “Okay, number eleven,” to Char. Char whips around and yanks me forward.
    “She’s twelve.”
    Twelve is exactly how old I feel when Char speaks for me, which, in fact, she’s been doing since the day I turned twelve. Since the day my mother shoved me, my friends—my entire birthday party including the gifts and loot bags—out the front door with Char’s mom, Crystal, who piled us all into her minivan and took us to Jan’s Ice Cream Parlor. That was the party where I couldn’t speak, much less blow out the candles. The party where Crystal sobbed when they sang “Happy Birthday,” the party where Char whispered, “East, that’s so
you
,” as I numbly opened my presents.
So me?
Not that Char meant any harm or could have imagined I’d vomit my ice cream cake all over the table, but that was the moment I realized I had no idea at all who I was. The only thing I knew was that it was my twelfth birthday party, and an hour earlier, I had flung my cardboard party hat at the girl who called it babyish, and ran off to get my Little Miss Briarcliff tiara. I bopped down the drafty stairs to our basement, but never finished looking for the dumb pageant crown. I foundmy dad—he was supposed to be at work—hanging from a beam instead, his feet dangling above my old wooden rabbit step stool, which lay in pieces on the concrete floor.
    If not for Char, I wouldn’t still be here.
On earth
, I mean, not just here in Midtown. As I think about this, my annoyance fades. Really, I should kiss her feet for towing me along in her life.
    We came here together, all 568 pounds of us; Char is five feet eight, two inches taller and carrying twelve pounds more. If this were an SAT math question, it might be:
    Together, two obese girls weigh 568 pounds and want to shed 288 of them. If each of the girls wishes to lose the same amount of weight and still maintain the 12-pound difference, what does each girl hope to weigh?
    I’ll just tell you. I’m 278 pounds—144 light-years away from my 134-pound target weight. Char weighs 290 pounds and her “so hot” target weight is 146. That’s as of yesterday, at least, when Char made me come over for a weigh-in on the digital scale Crystal ran out and bought in the midst of their Lap-Band mania. Char insisted we needed to know our
exact
weight because they’d use it along with our height to calculate our body mass index, and we needed to make sure we have BMIs of 40 or more or else we’d be disqualified. I didn’t see how there could be any doubt that we’d be well over the cutoff. But Crystal made it official by waving the calculator and announcing our winning BMI scores, and Char shrieked and stuck her palm in my face for a high five. Char said my high five was lame, but