Puddin''

  “There’s not another girl,” he says with finality. “But believe what you want.”

  I whirl around on my heels. But the fire in my belly is quieting and disintegrating into hurt. He’s telling the truth. There is no other girl. He’d rather be alone than with me. I pull myself together and wear my anger like a shield, because the only thing I have left to save now is face.

  “Likely story,” I say. “Maybe I’ll remember that before I delete all your gross dick pics from my cloud. Or I could accidentally share them. All those little buttons are so tiny and confusing.” Now we’ve got an audience. Students and faculty are slowly creeping out of their classrooms. Great. My mom is going to kill me. But honestly, what do I have left to lose? “Oh, and here’s a note for future dick pics. Everyone knows you’re just trying to make it look bigger if you take it from underneath.”

  Someone behind me whistles, and I hear a teacher say, “Everyone, back to class.”

  Principal Armstrong walks up behind Bryce. “Both of you in my office.”

  “Not until this slut gives me my phone back.”

  “You want your phone back?” I ask. “Your super-expensive phone?” I’m screaming now. “The one I could never afford? I’ll give you your dumb phone back.”

  And then I slam his phone, screen facing out, into the nearest locker. I lied when I said popping the tab on that can of Dr Pepper was satisfaction. This is satisfaction. The glass cracks and I slam it again. “Good thing you have so much money to buy a new one!” I throw the phone over his head and it skitters down the hallway, making a few crunching noises along the way.

  I walk past Principal Armstrong and escort my own damn self straight into her office. She follows me, guiding a scowling Bryce along.

  I turn around just as I enter her office. “I’m not sitting in the same room as him,” I tell her.

  Armstrong rolls her eyes, then nods, sending Bryce over to Vice Principal Benavidez’s office.

  I sit down in the chair in front of her desk, and the moment Armstrong closes the door behind her, I begin to sob. “I need . . . I need to call my mom,” I say.

  She pats my shoulder. “That was supposed to be my suggestion.”

  Principal Armstrong does most of the explaining, for which I’m grateful. I nearly tremble when she hands me the phone, but my mom is . . . calm. She tells me we’ll talk about it when I get home and that she’s calling Keith and my dad to see who can get to the school quickest.

  I hang up, and Armstrong hands me a box of tissues. She cradles her chin in her hand and turns up the music on her computer just a little. Some kind of nineties acoustic songs with flowy lady voices dancing along to each note. “What is this? Old-lady slow jams?”

  “Tori Amos,” she tells me. “You’re having a bad day, so I’ll try not to hold that against you.”

  We sit there in silence for a little while.

  “We can talk if you want,” she finally says. “I can even send you down to the counselor. Or I can play mah-jongg and we can wait for your ride.”

  I sniff. “That last option is good.”

  About thirty minutes pass before there’s a light knock on the door. A freshman student aide sticks her head in the door. She focuses on me, my tearstained face, dirty clothes, and Oreos stuck in my teeth. “Um, her dad is here.”

  The aide steps back and in walks my dad. Not Keith. For some reason, I’d just assumed that the aide meant Keith. But no. My dad is here.

  “I was working a job just outside of town,” he says.

  But I barely even hear him, because all I can do is fall into his arms. He squeezes me tight. The thick black stubble peppering his chin tickles against my neck, and I let the whole weight of my body relax against him. It feels like falling into bed after a long day. He wears his everyday self-imposed uniform of a plaid button-up shirt and the same style of Levi jeans he’s worn since he and my mom started dating.

  “Should we talk?” he asks Principal Armstrong.

  “Tomorrow. I’ll talk to her and her mom first thing in the morning. And you too, if work permits. But I think it might be best to get out of here before the last bell rings.”

  He nods once and takes my hand. With his other arm, he hoists my backpack onto his shoulder.

  He doesn’t speak until we’re out in the fresh air. “Made quite a scene, did ya?” He tries to swallow a chuckle as he slides on his signature Ray-Ban aviators. “Your mother liked having an audience for our fights, too.”

  “Dad.”

  “Brian had it coming.” He opens the passenger door of his truck for me and tucks my backpack at my feet before slamming the door shut.

  “His name was Bryce!” I say, loud enough for him to hear as he walks around to the other side.

  He hops in and turns the engine on. “Guess it doesn’t much matter anymore.”

  I sigh.

  “Do I need to give you the whole he-never-deserved-you pep talk?”

  “No,” I tell him. “He was never in my league.” But for the first time the confidence I’ve always put on display for the world to see feels like a complete and total sham.

  “You know you’ll find something better out there.”

  “But maybe I won’t,” I say, my voice tiny.

  He pulls into the Harpy’s drive-through without even stopping to ask if I want something.

  The speaker crackles as we approach the drive-through. “Welcome to Harpy’s,” the deadpan voice says. “What’ll it be?”

  “You never found someone better than Mom,” I say.

  “Two vanilla cones,” he says. “One dipped in strawberry and one in chocolate.” He pulls forward, but not all the way up to the window, and steadies his gaze on me. “With your mom and me, it wasn’t about needing something better. Not for either of us. It was about finding something that worked. We loved each other, but we didn’t work. That wasn’t fair to you or Claudia. And besides, she snored too much.”

  “Well, you never found something that worked.” I huff and cross my arms. “And she still snores, by the way.” A smirk tickles at my lips.

  He says nothing as he pulls up to the window and hands the grumbly woman with a name tag reading LYDIA a few bucks before passing me my strawberry-dipped cone and digging into his chocolate one.

  But I let the ice cream drip onto my fingers for a moment. Partly because I shouldn’t eat it, especially after all that junk I ate this afternoon. I haven’t been working out like I did when I was on the team, and thinking about how many calories and how much sugar are in this thing makes me cringe.

  But the real reason I’m sitting here with this uneaten cone is because—“Oh my God! Dad, you’re seeing someone.” I gasp. “Does Claudia know?”

  He freezes midbite and then proceeds to wipe his mouth with the inside of his elbow. “I’m not seeing someone in particular,” he says. “Not yet. But I am starting to see people.”

  I grin and smack the dashboard. “It’s about damn time!”

  He pulls the paper off his cone and shoves the rest in his mouth. “Well, with your abuela retired from the university, she’s starting to travel more.”

  “So basically you’re not hanging out with your mom every night?” I ask.

  He winces. “Damn, you know how to make it sting.”

  “Well, if I’m still living with Mama when I’m your age, be sure to make fun of me too.” I smile. Even though I give him a hard time, Dad actually lives with Abuela to help her take care of her land, which is her second greatest love outside of my abuelo. She’s always been fiercely independent. My dad’s never said so, but I know he could never bear to rob her of that and my abuelo at the same time. “We need to get you on some dating apps,” I tell him.

  “Yeah. No, thank you. I’ll try the old-fashioned way.”

  “I could fill out your bio and help you take a good selfie,” I offer. I deepen my voice. “My name is Marco Reyes. I like watching TV with my mom. I have two daughters. The younger one is my favorite. I’m obsesse
d with purchasing gadgets from infomercials and then kicking the shit out of them when they don’t work.”

  He chuckles.

  “And I’m just looking for a nice lady my age who doesn’t want to make me buy clothes that might be considered in some way fashionable or current.”

  “Hey,” he says, “my style is classic.”

  “If classic means boring, then sure. You’re like a cartoon character who wears the same outfit over and over again. Like, does Bart Simpson just open his closet and have endless red shirts and blue shorts?”

  He shrugs. “Never have to worry about what to wear.”

  “Boring,” I say again as I turn up his music. My dad has different playlists for different things. Showering, cooking, mowing the yard, working. But they’re all the exact same eclectic mix of Rod Stewart, Maná, Bruno Mars, Selena, the Bee Gees, the Beastie Boys, and Jay-Z. If I could only get him to throw in a little bit of Drake and Kesha, it might not be so bad.

  Once we’re on my street, he pulls down our alleyway behind the house. It’s mere seconds before my mom is walking out the back door in her signature bright-red lipstick—which she’s totally reapplied and I know it’s because she knew she’d see Dad. I don’t have any grand illusions of them ever getting back together, but things like her lipstick still make my gut twist over what might have been.

  “Cal, wait for me inside while I talk to your dad, okay?”

  I nod and give my dad a one-armed hug so as to not drip any ice cream on him. He presses a kiss against my cheek, and his stubble tickles.

  “Thanks, Dad,” I tell him.

  “Siempre, mija.”

  I feel those tears prickling up again. I don’t give in, though. Instead I hop out of the truck with my backpack and devour my cone as I jog up the stairs and wait for my mom inside.

  “Mom?” Kyla calls from her room as Shipley trots down the stairs to greet me.

  “It’s just me. Mom will be back in a minute.”

  “Okay.” Her voice pouts.

  After a few minutes, the sliding glass door opens and Mom gestures for me to sit at the kitchen table.

  Her whole body ripples with a sigh. “You skipped class.”

  I nod.

  “You broke into the wrestling-mat room. You destroyed personal property. And you disrupted a whole hallway of classrooms. All at my place of work.”

  “It’s my place of school, too,” I remind her. “If anything, the lines here are a little fuzzy.”

  She’s quiet, and that’s my cue to explain myself. I squeeze my eyes shut and swallow. I can’t cry again today. I can’t. “He broke up with me,” I say. “It’s like the last year and a half didn’t even happen. And there’s not even another girl. He just doesn’t want me anymore.”

  She reaches across the table for my hand. “Oh, baby. Baby, baby, baby.”

  “I’m sorry, Mama. I shouldn’t have done any of that. I know. But I just—I have no friends and no life.” My voice cracks a little on that last syllable.

  “Which is your own doing,” she reminds me unapologetically. But then her whole body sinks toward me as she uses her foot to tug on the leg of my chair and pull me closer to her. “But you’re hurtin’, and when you hurt, I hurt.”

  We sit there in the quiet stillness of the house where I’ve spent nearly my entire life. Finally I say, “I like your lipstick. Looks nice and fresh.”

  She blushes lightly. “Always gotta remind ’em what they’re missing.”

  She’s right. I can’t wait for that moment—because I know it’s coming someday—when Bryce looks at me and he sees all that he missed out on. Or at least I hope it’s coming, because I’m clinging to that. But right now I just feel like a total slob who stuffed her face with soda, Oreos, and ice cream all day and made a huge scene at school. Tomorrow all anyone will be talking about is how crazy Callie is and how I overreacted. Drama queen. “That girl has lost it,” they’ll say. “First the dance team. Now this.”

  “Can I be excused?” I ask.

  She nods. “Come down and help me with dinner at five thirty.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She stands and opens the cabinet above the refrigerator where she keeps her champagne flutes from her and Keith’s wedding. “Hold your hand out.”

  She places my phone with its gold, sparkly case in my hand. “Is this a trick?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I figure today might have gone a little smoother if you’d had a phone. And I was thinking what if there was some kind of emergency or whatnot.”

  I nod fervently.

  “You’re still on house arrest,” she reminds me. “Still totally, completely one hundred percent grounded.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I understand.” I hold the phone to my chest as I walk upstairs to my room with Shipley a few steps behind me. I feel like I’ve finally got some kind of lifeline back.

  But then it hits me. A lifeline to who? To what? There’s no one out there waiting for me to rejoin the social world. I’m grounded forever, and it doesn’t even matter because I’ve got nothing left to be grounded from.

  The thought is tragically freeing.

  Millie

  Seventeen

  A bowl of mixed balled melon with a side of cottage cheese (my mom’s extremely sad idea of dessert), a homemade apple-cider-vinegar facemask I found online, my fluffy notebook of achy feelings, and my completely unwritten essay for my summer program application. I am the picture of Friday-night excitement.

  Callie called in sick to work today, so I was left to close the gym up by myself. I guess it’s not that big of a deal. I could do that job in my sleep, but I know she wasn’t sick unless you can get physically ill from your own self-induced drama.

  I feel judge-y. I’m trying so hard not to be judge-y. But what kind of person trashes someone else’s cell phone and causes a huge scene in the middle of school? I wasn’t there to witness it, but Amanda was, and she gave me every gory detail. Breaking up with someone is bad enough . . . I imagine, at least. Seeing as I’ve never had a boyfriend outside of the few random summer flings at Daisy Ranch. (Translation: two awkward summers of hand-holding with Scotty Pifflin and then James Ganns the following summer and one half kiss when Greg Kassab missed my lips in the dark and instead got the corner of my mouth.) But why would you want to make it worse with a public breakup? Why would you want to draw more attention to yourself?

  But maybe girls like Callie don’t think about the expense of drawing more attention to themselves. It’s something I consider every day. It’s like a cost benefit analysis. Is this floral tunic too loud? Is me being happy wearing it worth the attention it will cost me? Is my backpack covered in patches and stitching just one more thing for people to make fun of? How much do I have to love it for that to be worth it?

  I can feel my facemask hardening, letting me know it’s time to rinse. After a quick trip to the bathroom, I return to my computer, where my blank document awaits me. The essay is due in a matter of weeks and I’m not the type who can just wing it the night before and I still have to figure out my audition tape. I have my suit and my script mostly written, but I still need a cameraman, and the only person I know who’s familiar with AV equipment is Malik.

  I scroll through my video library and land on Legally Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon. A good rom-com for background noise is just as good as any playlist if you ask me, and Legally Blonde feels especially relevant.

  I push the laptop back and reach for a fresh sheet of paper and my freshly sharpened GIRL BOSS pencil.

  My mom stopped using her camcorder to record my childhood memories when I was ten years old and already shopping in the women’s plus-size section of Russle’s. I was the kind of fat that video couldn’t hide. Pictures were still safe, though. My mom was a master of all the various flattering angles.

  I stare down at the words. They’re going to see my audition tape. It’s not like they won’t know that I’m fat. But do I have to talk about it, too? I shrug. It’s ju
st a rough draft, right?

  I’m still fat. That hasn’t changed. What’s different now is that I’m ready to be on camera—unflattering angles and all. I’ve spent years dreaming of following in the footsteps of women like Barbara Walters, Lisa Ling, Diane Sawyer, Christiane Amanpour, and even my own local anchor, Samantha Wetherby. I think so many of us waste too much time dreaming of the things we believe we can’t have. But I’m done dreaming. I’m ready to make my dreams my reality.

  The messenger on my computer pings. I drop my pencil and push my papers aside as I pull my laptop closer.

  Malik.P99: that group project in psych was the worst

  I sit there for a moment, my fingers hovering above the keyboard. Why is it that he can talk to me so freely when we’re both hiding behind a screen? How is that fair? Especially after everything I said last week. I know Amanda had told him I had my wisdom teeth taken out and that I was under the influence of painkillers, but still I haven’t made any effort to take it back.

  I know that logically he’s probably just shy and everyone thinks I should put myself out there. But I’m having a really hard time thinking about things logically right now. Maybe it’s that dumb comment that Callie made in front of Mitch earlier in the week. I should have just shaken it off, but I couldn’t. It stuck with me.

  So now with my cursor blinking in the compose message box, part of me can’t help but wonder if the real problem is me. My head pieces it all together so easily. He went to the Sadie Hawkins dance with me out of pity, and now he’s reminded of it every time we see each other in class. Or maybe he really does like me. It could be that what he tells me from behind the screen is the real deal, but he’s just too embarrassed to act on any of it in real life.

  I know thinking like that isn’t gonna get me anywhere. And it’s the exact reason why I’m not going to fat camp and obsessing over diets with my mom anymore, but all those horrible thoughts still exist. I’m just trying to figure out how to live in spite of them.

  Despite all my doubts, I choose to believe I’m the girl who can tell a boy that her feelings are way more swirling-heart emoji than they are handshake emoji. Also, Elle Woods resolving to go to Harvard in the background doesn’t hurt. I take a deep breath and begin to type.