Fat Girl

Summer is a curse and a blessing in one, the two spilling into each other and creating a season that many love and many hate and Monica can’t decide which is right. Or if it’s right at all, or what she should even take it as. With the rise of heat and lack of school brings the promise of sleeping in and no worries. However, along for the ride are shorter shorts and tighter shirts and skin. Lots of skin.

More and more skin, more leg and more arm and more tummy, more everything. They want to see it all! It’s time for the show, who can expose the most? Except for Fat Girl, of course. Please, put some clothes on, no one wants to see that. You deserve to be scorching in the sun, you deserve to stay inside, cottage cheese should remain in the fridge and not on your legs in the open.

Only a month away and the weather is already beginning to warm up. It’s a cofusing mixture of hating and loving and lack of inspiration. Monica doesn’t want to wait anymore; she just wants to be skinny. Three days she’s been so strict, her routine so flawless, and yet she is still fat, and summer doesn’t seem to be taking a vacation somewhere far, far away anytime soon.

Her patience is wearing thin unlike her thighs and she’s exhausted with her dreams dancing just before her fingertips.

Shorts are making their yearly appearance, but shorts and Monica never have been on friendly terms.

“I am so excited for summer!” Stella materializes beside her, grin too wide and legs too thin. She is a summer girl who wears short shorts and tight shirts and shows skin. Shorts and Stella are friends, the best of friends, because that’s who Stella is.

Monica nods her head absently, not even sparing a glance as she remembers Hilary’s words. Stella’s not your friend, though.

“Are you friends with Bianca?”

It’s there, out in the open, and just like summer she’s not sure what to think. Is this good or is this bad? Will this be her beacon of hope or her crunching demise?

Stella pauses, knitting her eyebrows. “She’s alright; lately all she does is suck Brandon’s face off, so I haven’t talked to her in a forever.”

Is it true? Gullible sits on the tip of her tongue. Too quick. She can’t be happy yet.

“Oh,” the word stands on it’s own. It’s neither happy nor sad but it is content without either. Content is how Monica is.

Hilary would tell her it’s a lie. Monica wonders if maybe Hilary holds any resentment towards Bianca, or Stella, or anyone with legs that went on for miles because Hilary is skinny and she’s still not one of them.

Monica’s sure that people will like her when she’s skinny; it’s the only obstacle in her life. It’s the only thing keeping her back. When she’s skinny she will be happy, that is all she knows, that is all she’s been clinging to with her grubby little fingers.

All she wants is for people to like her. When Stella throws her the bait, she runs for it and seizes it as quickly as she can.

With a smile she turns to Stella. “So what did you do on the weekend?”

Stella immediately launches into a story and Monica listens because that is what she is good at. Eating her feelings and not having patience and listening and hoping. She hopes that Stella is telling the truth and that she will have friends and that James will look at her with those eyes like in the movies.

And that one day her brother will smile at her and call her his sister.

But hoping has never gotten her that far before.