The Truth About Alice(14)

I mean, if I didn’t, I don’t think I would have so many boys always wanting to ask me out or come to my parties. Including The Party.

It was actually sort of a last-minute thing, and months later I still think about how everything that happened this fall happened because of this random party I never even anticipated throwing. Even that afternoon, I wasn’t planning on throwing one. I walked downstairs to find something to eat and I found my mother in the kitchen, staring into the refrigerator like she was waiting for the orange juice to talk back.

“Elaine,” she said, pulling out a plastic bag full of grapes (Weight Watchers points = 0) and digging around for some, “you know what I’m thinking?”

I rolled my eyes because I totally knew what was coming.

“You want to join Weight Watchers again,” I told her.

“How did you guess?” she said, which is so ridiculous because how could I not guess? Every time my mother stares into the refrigerator like a prisoner of war about to be shot, it’s time to go back to Weight Watchers. Every time my mother whines about her jeans being too tight, it’s time to go back to Weight Watchers. Every time we order a pizza and my mother picks up a third slice and then puts it down and then picks it back up and eats it with a frown on her face, it’s time to go back to Weight Watchers.

If my mother goes back to Weight Watchers, I have to go back to Weight Watchers. It’s been that way since I was fourteen, and I hate it.

My mother has lost the same twenty pounds so many times I could make an entire extra mom out of all the pounds if you added them up. I’ve lost the same ten pounds just as many times, and I know from the way my mom is staring at those grapes what’s coming. Meetings on Saturday mornings where I have to sit and listen to some old lady talk about her Greek yogurt (Weight Watchers points = 3) or how she can’t find time to work out even though she’s totally retired. Weighing in behind a curtain and trying to hold my breath in case it makes me weigh less. Calculating the points of everything I eat so that I can’t even look at a Snickers bar without doing high level algebra (Weight Watchers points = 8).

Then my mom will take all our special Weight Watchers food and use a black Sharpie to label it with point values and store it on one shelf in the fridge and one shelf in the cabinet, and if she’s feeling totally nuts, she might even put a Post-it note on the shelves that says “MOM’S AND ELAINE’S SPECIAL FOOD—DON’T TOUCH!” which is totally stupid seeing as the only other person who lives in the house is my dad and he wouldn’t touch our SPECIAL FOOD even if it meant the Healy Tigers were guaranteed a winning football season for the rest of his natural life.

“So, honey, will you come with me?” my mother asked. “This time I know I’m gonna keep it off.”

I poured myself a huge bowl of Corn Flakes and then went to the sugar bowl and dumped half of it on top of my cereal (Weight Watchers points = Who freaking cares).

“Mom, do I have to?”

“Elaine, it’s so much more fun when we go together, you know that. And you want to watch your figure, too, babe. Dance squad is starting up again in the fall, and you don’t want to look funny in your uniform in front of everyone.”

Funny as in fat.

“Okay,” I said, and I jammed a spoonful of milk and sugar into my mouth and let all the sugar dissolve, like a real slow goodbye.

Then my mom told me she and my dad were going over to her sister’s place in Dove Lake for dinner and they’d just end up spending the night and did I want to come? Which meant she and my dad were probably going to drink too many beers and wouldn’t want to drive the twenty miles back to Healy.

“No, I think I’ll just stay here. Can I have some people over?”

My mother popped a grape into her mouth and eyed me.

“You mean like a party?”

“No, I mean like people.”

My mom isn’t dumb. True, she’s given Weight Watchers so much money it probably could have paid for my college education by now, but she’s not dumb about most things. She went to Healy High and she knows there isn’t anything to do around here except drive to the Healy High parking lot and drink beer, so maybe she figured it would be better if we just drank the beer in our living room.

“Elaine, I just don’t want it to get too crazy, okay? And nobody goes into the bedrooms. This is strictly a family room and kitchen affair. And nobody leaves drunk.”

“Okay, fine,” I said, and I knew she knew she owed me one because I was going to do Weight Watchers with her again.

I finished my cereal and went upstairs and texted the usual suspects and told them to come over around 9 o’clock that night and invite whoever, and I figured out who could get alcohol. I talked on the phone with some of my girlfriends about what to wear, I texted Kelsie Sanders back and told her not to worry if she was too sick to make it because it would probably be boring anyway, and I read Brandon Fitzsimmons’s texts asking me if I had enough beer lined up. I texted back that we could always use more, then briefly entertained the idea of messing around with him at the party. We were totally off again at that point, but still, sometimes it was just fun to mess around. I really couldn’t understand how my mother thought I was too fat when I had a serious history with the hottest and most popular guy in the school. Besides, guys like curvy girls. It always says so in Glamour.