Page 52 of Misadventures of a Curvy Girl
Impatient. That’s what Caleb had said about her, and as I look at her now, I can see it. In the way she shakes her silky hair out of her eyes and sucks the front of her teeth, in the tapping of her foot and the quick smooths over her clothes.
“Caleb said you’d left them when I called,” she explains. “You don’t have to walk me through the timeline.”
“Caleb said—wait, what? When you called?” Jealousy more bitter and distinct than body envy scratches at the inside of my chest. “Do you call Caleb a lot?”
Mackenna rolls her eyes. “It’s not like that, princess. I saw your article in the paper. I was already meaning to call after the storm—to check in and all that. See if my favorite tree was still there by the creek. Anyway,” she says loudly, as if bored by her own story, “after I saw the picture of you three, I really wanted to call and tell them, well, you know.” She stares at me as if the end of her explanation is obvious.
I feel silly. Abashed. Significantly less pretty and interesting than she is.
And still wildly jealous. “I actually don’t know,” I say. “Sorry.”
“You know, all that mushy, happy-for-you ex stuff.” She’s gesturing again, as if acting out a one-woman play. “When I broke up with them, I did genuinely want them to be happy. I just knew I was never going to be the woman to do it, and I definitely knew it when I met my two fiancés here in the city a year later. But even though I’m not in love with Caleb and Ben anymore, I still care about them, and I still want them to find a happy ending.” She pauses. “Not in the splooging sense, I mean. Like in the emotional sense. But I guess also in the splooging sense.”
I have no idea what to say to this, so I don’t say anything at all.
“Anyway,” she says, again in that bored, impatient-with-herself voice, “I called to say ‘I saw your new girl in the paper, I’m glad you’re happy, yadda yadda,’ and then instead of telling me how happy he is and how Robot Ben has become a human again because of you, he proceeds to wail about how you left them without a fucking word, and now you refuse to talk to them.”
My brain snags on a word. “Caleb wailed?”
Hand wave. “Sniffled, wailed, whatever. Caleb doesn’t cry, Ireland. Sniffles from him might as well be sackcloth and ashes.”
Ugh. The thought of happy, dimpled Caleb sniffling is enough to tear at my heart. I try not to think about it.
I made the right decision. That’s all there is to it.
Mackenna leans forward. “So I have to ask…why?”
“Why what?”
“Why, when you three had been happy for a month, did you just pack up and leave?”
I look at her, gorgeous and confident in her body, and immediately feel stupid. “Why do you care?” I deflect.
“Because I feel protective of them,” she answers bluntly. “Because I know under those big muscley chests beat two adorable hearts that want to spend the rest of their lives worshipping the woman they love. Because I saw how happy you looked in that picture, and why would anyone abandon people who could make them smile like that?”
Overwhelmed, I press my face into my hands. It’s like every feeling at once—every agonizing, earth-ripping emotion I’ve been burying over the last four days—is scrabbling to the surface.
“I thought it would be better that way,” I say into my palms. “For them.”
“But why?”
How can I even begin to explain it? The terror and shame of reading those comments? Of knowing that nothing, nothing—not my career, not Ben’s, not even the simple fact that we loved each other—was enough to stand against my size in the eyes of the world?
“Because I’m fat,” I say bitterly. As bitterly and meanly as I can, pouring every drop of pain and fury and shame into the word that I can. “I’m fat.”
“So?”
Mackenna says it blandly. Almos
t uninterestedly.
I look up from my hands, shocked. Actually shocked.
No one has ever said so? about my body before.
Not once.
People have protested when I’ve said the word—no, you’re not fat! Don’t say that about yourself!—or they’ve substituted euphemisms that amount to the same thing—you’re not fat, you’re curvy! Voluptuous! Plus-sized! There’s more to love!
