Skinny by Diana Spechler Read Free Book Online Page A

nights) gathered on the steps that led to the cafeteria.
    No one wanted to say it first: “Let’s raid the kitchen.” We weren’t campers. We should have had self-restraint. If anyone, I could have said it: “I’m going to get a snack.” After all, although I was toting around fifteen more pounds than I would have liked, the other counselors were Fat. Their necks looked like stacks of doughnuts. The rolls of their stomachs were both horizontal and vertical. Their thighs were so large, their legs appeared to turn out below the knee, creating an arrowhead of space between their calves.
    But if I couldn’t make it even a day, if the program failed me (or rather, if I failed at the program), if I entered the kitchen, seeking out the hidden key that would unlock the dry storage room, if I couldn’t stop eating the way I’d been eating, I would have no choice but to do the one thing that I knew would make me stop.
    But how? Tap Eden’s shoulder and say, “Guess who I am? Guess what I did?” We needed time to get acquainted. I wanted her to like me. I had to try to “surrender.” So I said nothing to the other counselors. But as I recalled images from the kitchen tour—the wide metal refrigerator door, the cardboard boxes of 100-calorie snacks stacked against the wall—I kept losing track of the conversation.
    When I tuned back in, I heard a counselor named Brendan say, “I was so high, I saw a whole village in a fountain.” He chuckled, covering his face and glasses with his hands. “If they’d invited me in, I would have gone.”
    Brendan attended college. I knew this because his entire wardrobe consisted of clothing that advertised North Carolina State University—roomy basketball shorts, T-shirts that stuck to his sweaty skin. The day before, when Lewis had told the counselors that we would each have to teach a “specialty class,” Brendan had volunteered to teach rock climbing on the climbing wall in the gym. “Fine,” Lewis had said, without asking Brendan, “Are you qualified to teach rock climbing?” Perhaps he assumed that Brendan—who weighed three-hundred-plus pounds—would at least be able to hold down the belay rope.
    “I have nothing to teach,” I’d told Lewis.
    Lewis had nodded. “Water aerobics.”
    KJ, another boys’ counselor, had offered to lifeguard and to teach swimming lessons.
    “Perfect!” Lewis had clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “A lifeguard!”
    KJ had scratched the bridge of his nose in a way that said, I am not, in fact, a lifeguard. “I have really quick reflexes.”
    Sheena had volunteered to teach yoga, even though the extent of her familiarity with it was a yoga DV D she had memorized. “If you don’t mind me teaching the same yoga poses all summer . . .”
    Lewis didn’t.
    Mia, one of the counselors for the youngest girls, was dubbed “the nutritionist.” Nutrition was her college major, but she was only twenty-one years old, not a nutritionist at all. Regardless, she would teach nutrition classes. “Not that they should listen to me!” she’d told Lewis, patting her soft stomach, her southern accent calling to mind tea parties, long white gloves, floral church dresses.
    “I once got so high, I ate a whole box of Pop-Tarts!” she said now.
    Mia’s arms were so fat, she didn’t have wrists—just creases separating hands from forearms. I felt a gulf between us. I had once eaten two boxes of Pop-Tarts sober, tearing one silver foil packet after another, not bothering with the toaster, feeling the sweet grains of sugar and cinnamon on my teeth.
    My father had been different. He’d always eaten not as if he were running a race, but methodically, thoughtlessly, all day long, the way other people breathed.
    Mia continued: “Don’t start, any of y’all. I know a future nutritionist has no business eating Pop-Tarts. But it’s my favorite breakfast. Can’t help it.” She pinched her own chubby cheek. “Evidently.”
    I never ate