Plus by Veronica Chambers Read Free Book Online

to hold up as an excuse.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think I want to be friends with Brian’s ex. Nothing personal.”
    “Well, I’ll see you around,” she said.
    Then she flashed me this huge smile as if she was my new best friend. As if the idea of me being friends with someone who’d swapped spit with the love of my life was even possible . I think the Latin term for this is movea onu crazae ladyil .
    As I walked home, all I could think was, This is just great. I mean really great. Truly great. I didn’t mean it in a good way. Oh no. I meant in the sarcastic, opposite-day way. Brian thinks I’m stalking him, which I ABSOLUTELY am not. And now his nutso ex-girlfriend is going to be stalking me too.

6
    Bee-friended
    I was so freaked out by Brian confronting me in the cafeteria that I decided to avoid it entirely. I had no one to eat out with, so I ordered in. After a while, all the delivery guys knew me. And that, my friends, is how I gained the famous freshman fifteen—plus ten more, for good measure.
    I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but being depressed is VERY TIRING work. I needed to eat for sustenance. It was like there was a great big hole inside me and it was sucking up everything: my ability to get out of bed, the energy it took to shower, the brain cells I needed to study. Eating, planning my meals, and going out for snacks kept me going.
    I was way, way over my monthly food budget, so I just started charging everything. I used my plastic at the bodega, at Rite Aid, at H&H Bagels, and of course at Ollie’s Noodle Shop. It’s not like I sat down and ate a whole pizza by myself in one sitting. But let’s just say, when Dad got the credit card bill, the Victoria’s Secret charge was going to be nothing compared to how much I was spending on food.
    The thing is that I never felt overweight. The scale was creeping up, but I didn’t feel fat. Six inches around your waist doesn’t actually feel like a tire, no matter what the infomercials say. It feels like your belly goes from flat to soft, like every day is the day after Thanksgiving and someone has been stuffing your jeans with pillow feathers at night when you sleep.
    I never wear panty hose, but I knew I was gaining weight when tights started being a problem. When you go to school in New York, a pair of warm, wool tights can be your very best friend. My old tights wouldn’t stay up. They kept slipping down around my butt and I was always adjusting them. It wasn’t until I was in the locker room at school and this girl saw me pulling them up around my thighs one day and said, “You might want to go up to the next size,” did it occur to me that my legs—never toothpick thin to begin with—had taken on a greater proportion.
    My face might have been chubbier, but I never noticed it. When I woke up in the morning, washed my face, and brushed my teeth, it was the same sleepy eyes that greeted me, the same crinkly smile when I heard Pharrell start to sing, “You’re beautiful. And I love you. You’re my favorite girl.”
    In high school, my teachers were constantly saying, “You just wait until you get to college; all these silly distinctions and cliques will fall away.” Then I got to college and found out that even at a brainiac school like Columbia, it’s still a lot like high school. There’s still the prettiest girl, the smartest girl, the most eccentric, and the most talented. I wanted to be the smartest or the prettiest or even just the weird chick who wore one sock as a fashion statement and did art installations involving Chia pets. But that’s just not me. I’m too weird to be cool but too vanilla to be weird in an interesting way.
    Then when I met Brian, all of a sudden, I wasn’t just this blob. I was his girlfriend, and together we did all kinds of cool things I would have never done by myself. But now he didn’t want to see me anymore, and it was all because I was a virgin. If I was experienced, if