ThinandBeautiful.com by Liane Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

atnight and even a computer that you could go on if you signed up for some time. The food was totally awesome and everyone pigged out the whole time they were there. The older campers, like me, pretty much did whatever they wanted. We could swim and hike if we wanted to. We could also just hang out and do nothing in particular if we wanted to. That’s what we usually chose. My mom and dad would have completely freaked if they had known that their hard-earned cash was being spent on me finding a different place to hang out, doing the same stuff I did at home. I’m pretty sure they thought I was learning all about survival training and knot tying and other terribly important life skills.
    There was a group of girls who went to camp with me most years. We had known each other since we were about ten and always managed to book the same three weeks even though we never actually talked to each other during the year. We were summer friends, I guess.
    I had expected that summer after grade nine to be the same as any other. I figured my summer friends would all be there just like every other year and that I’d have a great time and come home to my real life.
    It didn’t work out that way. Somehow, the girls I usually spent the summer with ended up at camp during a different session than me and I ended up standing in a strange cabin surrounded by even stranger girls. I could feel that sick feeling in my stomach that I always get when something goes wrong and I can’t do anything to fix it. Kind of like how I felt right after my kindergarten teacher found the worms, only worse. The girls strutting around the cabin were not only strangersto me, they were obviously friends to each other. They didn’t even look at me. They just picked their bunks and pinned up pictures of their perfect-looking boyfriends. They all seemed to be wearing designer clothes that fit them like they were made for them. They looked sophisticated and sure of themselves, everything I wasn’t. I felt like a drab little caterpillar in a room full of high-class butterflies. Every one of those girls weighed about three pounds and most of that was perfect, shimmering hair in every lustrous shade that you’ve ever seen on TV.
    I never mentioned my hair, did I? That’s because it really isn’t worth mentioning most of the time. I have curly brown hair. Annie calls me a brunette, which sounds nice, but my hair is really just plain old brown, kind of like garden soil. Earthy, I guess. Some people tell me that curly hair is a good thing. My mom keeps reminding me that people spend a lot of money trying to get their hair as curly as mine. It was nice of her to say so, but it wasn’t really true. When you get your hair permed, the curls are all perfect and stay just right all of the time. When you have naturally curly hair, the curls do whatever they want to do, whenever they want to do it. My hair was more often frizz than curl and I tried everything I could to get it to go straight. Everything I tried worked for about three minutes and then my hair pouffed right back up.
    Anyway, back to the summer of the alien invasion. The first few days were basically awful. I didn’t think I was going to survive the three weeks but I didn’t want to give in and call home like some kind of baby-faced first-year camper. I wandered around by myself most of the time, avoiding the other girls as much as I could. The only time I had to be with themwas at meals and at night. Nighttime was the worst, because they all stayed up half the night talking to each other and pretending I wasn’t there, while I put my dragon pillow over my face and pretended I wasn’t there.
    Mealtimes were pretty bad also. I could see all of them staring at me, judging everything I put in my mouth and wondering how someone like me could eat at all. So, I started playing a game with myself. I would look at all the food and figure out what had the least calories. I