Wicked Jealous: A Love Story Read Free Page A

trying to insist to her that I actually wasn’t fat; it was that all my baby fat had just redistributed in such a way that made it so that I
looked
fat. That was just him using the skills he had learned back when he was pre-law in college so he could get off the phone with her as soon as possible.
    Although before high school, I never would’ve been accused of being skinny, my discovery January of freshman year of Tastykake Butterscotch Krimpets and the fact that you could order them by the case online at tastykake.com made it so that by the time summer rolled around, I had graduated from being someone you’d consider “normal” to officially fat.
    According to Dr. Gellert—the shrink whom Dr. Melman suggested to Dad I go see after Lupe, our housekeeper, presented him with two cases of Krimpets wrappers she had found stashed in the way back of my closet—the Tastykake thing was a way for me to “eat my feelings.” Apparently, the loneliness I was experiencing now that Max was away at college and my dad was at the studio until late at night had triggered the loss I had never let myself feel over the fact that I had never had a mom, and so sugar became a way for me to check out and self-medicate.
    Seeing that he was the one with all the diplomas on the wall from places like Yale and Columbia, I’m not going to say he was completely off the mark, but I do think that at first the stuffing-my-face thing was less about loneliness and grief and more about the fact that Tastykakes have a really interesting texture. Kind of like if you ripped off a piece of a Nerf football and put it in your mouth.
    Even pre-Tastykakes, I had never been one of those kids who got comments on her report cards like “Simone needs to do a little less socializing with her neighbors and a little more paying attention in class.” But it’s not like I was some weird kid who sat in the corner muttering to herself, either. I always had a decent number of friends and invitations to sleepovers and bar and bat mitzvahs—not Dylan Schoenfield league, but decent.
    But once high school started, the four or five other girls Nicola and I had been hanging out with since middle school got all boy-crazy and started spending entire lunch periods discussing the merits of OPI’s Bubble Bath nail polish versus Essie’s Ballet Slippers. It quickly became just the two of us—especially when Dylan Schoenfield anointed me with the nickname Ghost Girl, because I happen to have very dark hair and very pale skin. The name stuck.
    Max had suggested I go play a sport or join a club, but with limited coordination and lung capacity, I had no interest in after-school sports teams. Although I wouldn’t have admitted it on Twitter or anything, I much rather would have watched a rerun of
One Tree Hill
after school than take part in a sit-in staged by SAAMP (Students Against All Mean People).
    Nicola held up a black cocktail dress covered with feathers. “When did you say Max is coming home again?” she asked. “’Cause I think I’ll wear this the next time I see him.”
    For some reason that I had yet to figure out, Nicola had had a crush on my brother for years. “So you can see him and not say a word to him?” Even though she normally couldn’t keep her mouth shut, whenever she was around Max, she totally clammed up. Which meant that other than things like “Hi” and “Whoops—I didn’t know this was the door to your bedroom, I was looking for the bathroom” she barely ever spoke to him.
    “That was in the past. I’ve changed,” she said before she sneezed.
    I did miss my brother. Especially at dinnertime. But even before
Ruh-Roh
went on, my freshman year at Castle Heights, Dad had been on staff of another sitcom. Which meant that he rarely got home before nine. Which meant that Max and I had been on our own food-wise. Not that I was complaining—very few of my friends got to eat pancakes with caramel sauce for dinner.
    Although we definitely bickered