All I Ever Wanted(32)
Mom had a point.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“OH, BLERK.” I LOOKED in the mirror, but it was undeniable. I turned to view my backside. Mistake! “Shit, Bowie! Look at me!” He stood up and came over, licked my knee in sympathy, then collapsed to the floor to offer me his stomach. I gave him a perfunctory scratch, then surveyed the issue at hand.
This morning at work, Muriel had received a large carton from her daddy’s company. With great aplomb, she’d handed out the goodies, starting in Reception with Damien, working her way down…Pete and Leila, Karen, Fleur, and then yours truly. She’d been quite stoked, laughing with Fleur, joking with Pete, dolling out clothes like it was Christmas and she was Santa. T-shirts in various colors, all with the Bags to Riches logo (a floating plastic bag). Multipocketed hiking shorts, the cute cargo type that went down to the knees. Hiking boots for everyone. A few backpacks.
And then she came to me.
“Callie,” she smiled. “Here you go!” She handed me a bile-colored T-shirt, then reached in the box and withdrew a handful of fabric. A small handful.
I blinked. “Um…” I held them up. My heart sank. These weren’t hiking shorts…they were bike shorts, the kind those bony praying mantis people wear on the Tour de France. “Are there any hiking shorts left?”
She pretended to glance in the box. “No, sorry. Well, there are, but they’re in my size.” She didn’t finish the thought…therefore you couldn’t even get your arm in here. “Callie, please. Don’t make this an issue. As long as it’s Bags to Riches, it doesn’t matter.”
Well, it mattered to me. As I stared into the mirror in my bedroom, I sighed. Miss Muriel deVeers probably weighed somewhere about ninety-seven pounds, all sinew and ropy muscle defined by countless hours with (according to Fleur) the same personal trainer who screamed at contestants on The Biggest Loser, a show I often enjoyed with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s. If Muriel wore these shorts, she’d look buff and bony. Me? I looked…oh, just past my first trimester, I’d guess. Unfortunately, I wasn’t pregnant. Not with a child, anyway. With Betty Crocker vanilla supreme. That’s right. I had a food baby.
Tomorrow evening was the mandatory corporate hike with Charles deVeers and a couple of BTR executives. Mark had encouraged us all to bring friends, hoping to show how much we all embraced a wholesome and adventurous lifestyle. If it sounded pretentious, painful and affected, I can assure you, it really was. Pete and Leila were computer geeks who often bumped into doors and walls, too engrossed in cyberworld to pay attention to the real deal. Karen’s last attempt at physical exercise had been on the high school shuffleboard team, which she quit her sophomore year. Me…my dog pulled me up the steep hills when I rode my bike, and I didn’t like to paddle my kayak faster than I could walk.
Add to this the fact that we were heading up to Deer Falls Trail, which twisted its way four thousand feet up Mount Chenutney. Apparently, the trail was so named because of the alarming number of deer that fell to their deaths on said trail, something I found less than reassuring.
But more than the hike was, of course, the attire. Damn that Muriel! I knew this was deliberate. She wanted me to look bulging and soft and sluggish, and since I was all those things, I would.
“Blerk!” I yelled, startling my dog. As I flopped down on my bed, the waistband of the satanic bike shorts cut into what had yesterday been a pleasant amount of padding and today was clearly blubber. I glanced at my rocking chair, which held no solutions and indeed, didn’t seem to want to speak to me. When you’re with me, it seemed to say, we’re not going to be shallow. Got it?
“Got it,” I said, well aware that I needed to stop talking not just to Betty Boop and Michelle Obama, but to my furniture as well. “Don’t worry,” I told Bowie, who was looking at me, his lovely little brow wrinkled in concern. “I’ll always talk to you. Any way you can chew some of this fat off?”
My dog gave my hand a few licks, but otherwise declined. I’d already tried my Dr. Rey’s Shapewear, but that type of bondage was not going to work if I was supposed to hike up several thousand feet of mountain. Even a rush order of hiking shorts from BTR was not going to make it in time for tomorrow.
I groped behind me for the phone and called Hester. “Hey,” I said. “Is there some miracle drug you can prescribe for me that will take off about ten pounds by tomorrow?”
“No,” she boomed amiably, “but I can come over and lop off your head. That’d be about eight and a half, nine pounds. How would that be?”
“You’re no help,” I said. “I have to wear these stupid bike shorts tomorrow, and I have a food baby—”
“I’m hanging up now,” she said, and did just that. I really couldn’t blame her. Yes, yes, I was incredibly pathetic. But still. There had to be something I could do. I picked up the phone and tried Annie, who tended to be much, much more sympathetic about matters like these.
“Hey!” she said. “What’s up?”
“I need to drop a few pounds overnight,” I said, getting right to the point. In the background, I could hear the clatter of pans. “What are you cooking?”
“Well, maybe we shouldn’t talk about it, if you’re trying to lose weight,” she said, ever wise. “Seamus, spit that out right now. I don’t care. It’s raw.”