Fat Chance by Julie Haddon Read Free Book Online

alternative: outsizing even their special-order offerings and being forced to drag my rail-thin mother to the local large-person clothing store to buy a plain yellow tee-shirt that we’d pay to have embroidered with the school’s name. The obvious distinction of that attire would clearly have been the end of me.
    It was during those same days that a boy in my eighth-grade class—I’ll call him Jimmy, because his name
was
Jimmy—bestowed upon me my latest nickname. Chicago Bears defensive lineman William “The Refrigerator” Perry was receiving a lot of press as a fan favorite at the time, and Jimmy thought it would be funny to dub me “The Freezer.” Sort of The Fridge’s equally enormous sidekick, I guess. Every single day I entered the class I shared with Jimmy, I heard him mockingly shout, “Hey, Freezer!”
    Ironically, Jimmy would wind up asking me out during my somewhat-thinner college years. In reply, I think my exact words were: “As
if
!”
    There was no comeback swift enough, no rebuttal fitting enough to match the depth of his crushing words. And so the funny fat girl would slip into her seat, silenced and rebuffed once more.
    I didn’t deal with Jimmy much after that, but I have bumped into a few other schoolmates over the past several years. When we were kids, I was the devastated recipient of their disdain. “Why are you so fat?” one had asked me. “What gives?” another probed. “Your
parents
aren’t that fat.” And then there was the girl who shooed me from her lunchroom table with four words that made her position abundantly clear: “Fat girls not allowed.”
    Interestingly, after my experience on
The Biggest Loser
, several of them tried to befriend me. I have a feeling they’d stand by their story that we were great friends in school, that of course they’d never done anything to harm me. But something in me simply stayed away, probably that same something that felt scraped out all those years ago, when cutting comments etched their way onto my soul.
      
    F or many kids, high school days are the glory days, the last great hoorah, the lovely, melodic tune that sings them right into adulthood. But for me, those days were just the constant refrain of an all-too depressing dirge.
    To make matters worse, I spent that time living in a humid, ocean-side community in Florida, which meant that every birthday party was yet one more reason to convene at the pool or the beach. If only granny-style skirted one-piece bathing suits and oversize men’s T-shirts had been in vogue for a sixteen-year-old! Not only did I not
own
a bikini, but had I ever chosen to show up in one, I felt sure everyone in the immediate vicinity would have cleared out in a heartbeat as my pasty-white lumps of flesh and I rolled and strolled our way by. Why hand over more ammunition, I figured, when I’d already been shot down so many times?
    It was for that same reason that I never, ever ate lunch at school. Instead, I would use my buck-forty’s worth of lunch money to purchase a doughnut or two before class started, and use the remaining thirty-five cents on a midday milkshake I’d sip all alone. Of course, I’d return home from school and devour everything in sight, but at least in my mind I hadn’t given people an obvious explanation as to why I was “that unbelievably fat.”
    I wanted to be thinner. I really did. Actually, I wanted to be “skinny”—that one word summed up my complete definition of all that it meant to be likeable, healthy and cool. But I was handed that goal from others in my life. “You could get any boy you want,” well-meaning family members would say, “if you’d just lose that weight.” (Translation: You’ll mean a lot more to this world when there’s a
whole
lot less of you.)
    I saw a survey that the TV show 20/20 did one time, where they asked kids to look at photographs of two people and select the more attractive person. In every instance they chose the thinner one, even