Wicked Jealous: A Love Story Read Free Page B

like all siblings do, there was something about dinnertime where, no matter how much we had been screaming at each other a few hours earlier, a cease-fire was always called and I’d spend an hour cracking him up with different voices (if there was an after-school club for
that
, I might have joined it, but there wasn’t) or listening carefully as he told me every fact he knew about our mom, even though I had committed them to memory long ago.
    I may not have been super pretty, or five-minutes-in-the-future cool, or crazy smart, but it didn’t matter. My older brother just
got
me. He laughed at my jokes that other people considered a little weird. He didn’t give me a hard time for bursting into tears whenever the Sarah McLachlan ASPCA commercial came on TV. He didn’t tell anyone that I was addicted to the TLC show
Strange Addictions
,
about people who couldn’t stop eating sofa cushions or toilet paper. I didn’t advertise it or anything, but I actually
liked
hanging out with my brother.
    I picked up a T-shirt that said NEIL DIAMOND—LIVE AT THE GREEK . “My dad likes this guy,” I said. “I remember he bought the album when we were at the Rose Bowl one Sunday.”
    Brad looked up from his computer. “Your dad has great taste. Neil is
awesome
.”
    My dad hadn’t been in danger of winning any sort of Touchy-Feely Dad of the Year award, but pre–
Ruh-Roh,
he was still pretty on top of what was going on in my life. Most of which I downloaded during our Sunday outings at the Rose Bowl or Santa Monica flea markets. Not like an eighth grader had all that much going on, but he knew about what I was working on in school; and the drama of the week in my circle of friends (none of the Real Housewives have anything on a group of eighth-grade girls).
    But once the show took off, our flea market outings became rarer and rarer, and the time Dad got home from the production office was later and later. Andrew Chomsky, the star of
Ruh-Roh,
was a Method actor and therefore liked to come from a dog’s point of view in terms of the dialogue. The problem being, dogs don’t talk. Around then, Lupe, our housekeeper, started dating a guy she met on Match.com, so she wasn’t around all that much, either, which left me all alone in a very big house.
    At first the Tastykake thing was totally under control. One package every week or so, which I bought after walking to 7-Eleven. (I figured that, in a preemptive strike, I was working off the calories on the walk there and back.) But as freshman year went on, and my IM list began to shrink, my Tastykake consumption expanded. As did my purchases of sheet cakes from Ralph’s supermarket, Uncle Eddie’s vegan chocolate chip cookies (you’d think because they were vegan they’d be healthier, but not so much), and peanut-butter-covered pretzels.
    When that happened, I got a new nickname: That Weird Fat Girl. Which also stuck. As did my thighs, on really hot days. Although I’d start each morning saying that that day was going to be different—I was done with the eating and that afternoon, instead of bingeing, I was going to . . . go for a bike ride. Or take a yoga class. But something would happen throughout the course of the day that would stress me out and make me feel that what I really needed to do was come home and relax and take the edge off with a snack. Not a
huge
one. Just a little sweetness to make up for the lemon of a high school experience I had been given.
    So I’d come home from school, bring some food up to my room, lock the door (weird, seeing that I was the only one in the house, I know), and eat. While I was pretty disciplined when it came to things like school, with food I was missing an Off button. One Butterscotch Krimpet turned into three turned into six, and before I knew it I was sitting on the floor with an empty snack cake box feeling sick to my stomach, wondering how I’d ended up here, yet again, on a day I had sworn up and down to myself and whatever it