Misadventures of a Curvy Girl (Misadventures #18)(53)

And still wildly jealous. “I actually don’t know,” I say. “Sorry.”

“You know, all that mushy, happy-for-you ex stuff.” She’s gesturing again, as if acting out a one-woman play. “When I broke up with them, I did genuinely want them to be happy. I just knew I was never going to be the woman to do it, and I definitely knew it when I met my two fiancés here in the city a year later. But even though I’m not in love with Caleb and Ben anymore, I still care about them, and I still want them to find a happy ending.” She pauses. “Not in the splooging sense, I mean. Like in the emotional sense. But I guess also in the splooging sense.”

I have no idea what to say to this, so I don’t say anything at all.

“Anyway,” she says, again in that bored, impatient-with-herself voice, “I called to say ‘I saw your new girl in the paper, I’m glad you’re happy, yadda yadda,’ and then instead of telling me how happy he is and how Robot Ben has become a human again because of you, he proceeds to wail about how you left them without a fucking word, and now you refuse to talk to them.”

My brain snags on a word. “Caleb wailed?”

Hand wave. “Sniffled, wailed, whatever. Caleb doesn’t cry, Ireland. Sniffles from him might as well be sackcloth and ashes.”

Ugh. The thought of happy, dimpled Caleb sniffling is enough to tear at my heart. I try not to think about it.

I made the right decision. That’s all there is to it.

Mackenna leans forward. “So I have to ask…why?”

“Why what?”

“Why, when you three had been happy for a month, did you just pack up and leave?”

I look at her, gorgeous and confident in her body, and immediately feel stupid. “Why do you care?” I deflect.

“Because I feel protective of them,” she answers bluntly. “Because I know under those big muscley chests beat two adorable hearts that want to spend the rest of their lives worshipping the woman they love. Because I saw how happy you looked in that picture, and why would anyone abandon people who could make them smile like that?”

Overwhelmed, I press my face into my hands. It’s like every feeling at once—every agonizing, earth-ripping emotion I’ve been burying over the last four days—is scrabbling to the surface.

“I thought it would be better that way,” I say into my palms. “For them.”

“But why?”

How can I even begin to explain it? The terror and shame of reading those comments? Of knowing that nothing, nothing—not my career, not Ben’s, not even the simple fact that we loved each other—was enough to stand against my size in the eyes of the world?

“Because I’m fat,” I say bitterly. As bitterly and meanly as I can, pouring every drop of pain and fury and shame into the word that I can. “I’m fat.”

“So?”

Mackenna says it blandly. Almost uninterestedly.

I look up from my hands, shocked. Actually shocked.

No one has ever said so? about my body before.

Not once.

People have protested when I’ve said the word—no, you’re not fat! Don’t say that about yourself!—or they’ve substituted euphemisms that amount to the same thing—you’re not fat, you’re curvy! Voluptuous! Plus-sized! There’s more to love!

And sometimes in Brian’s or my sister’s case, it was an excuse to be cruel, to point out if I just wanted it more, if I just tried harder, I could be thin like them. It was an excuse to tell me I was unhealthy, that I clearly didn’t love myself enough, to hint that my fatness actually meant I was a bad person. A weak or greedy person. A worse person.

But never, ever, ever has anyone just said “so?” Like instead of me declaring I was fat, I told her I love baseball or that I’ve never been to Idaho.

I blink.

“So what?” Mackenna repeats. “You’re fat. So am I. By the way, nice to meet you. Now what does having a fat body have to do with dumping Caleb and Ben?”

I feel like some kind of rug has been yanked out from under my feet. “I—” I don’t actually have words to follow that. I don’t have words at all. The only thing in my mind is a vague protest that she doesn’t really get it because she’s such a cute kind of fat girl, but maybe I’m wrong about that too. Maybe she gets it just as much as I do, because while I see her as having this magically-easier-than-mine body, the rest of the world may not. The rest of the world may see just another body that doesn’t fit.

Mackenna squints at me, tilting her head. The light catches again in her glossy, trendy hair, and a new kind of jealousy thrums through me. A softer kind of jealousy than being worried about her relationship with Caleb and Ben. I’m envious of her confidence. Of her utter and complete okayness with who she is. It makes her so fucking cool, so fucking magnetic.

She comes to a conclusion, apparently, bestowing a giant grin on me. “It’s that word, isn’t it? Fat?”

“Well, I don’t—”

“Do you think fat means bad?”

“I mean, I—”

Hand wave. “It’s just a word, princess. A word like tall or short or Nebraskan. It’s an adjective that doesn’t have to mean anything negative. The world thinks that fat is the worst thing a woman can be, but the more we use the word like a neutral description, the more we say fuck you to that idea.”