Puddin'(66)

“Don’t laugh,” I tell her.

She nods solemnly.

“Puddin’.”

“Oh my God!” she says. “Are you serious? I can’t believe it!”

“You said you wouldn’t laugh.” I can’t help feeling a little hurt.

“Oh no! It’s because my grandma on my mom’s side used to call me Puddin’. She moved to Arizona, but she still writes it in my birthday cards every once in a while.”

I bubble with laughter. “No way!”

She shakes her head. “For real.”

It’s sort of wonderful that for all the differences between us, we share this one small thing.

“So, Puddin’?” she asks. “How’d you come up with that one?”

“I got caught sneaking in one of those prepackaged cups of pudding my very first year,” I tell her. “The worst part is it was fat-free! It wasn’t even real junk food.”

She laughs then. “You really are good. Like, right down to the bone.”

I nod. “Breaking the rules always requires great effort on my part. But no more fat-camp rules for me. I’m done with that place.”

She’s silent for a moment. “So you’ve, like, tried to lose weight?” Her voice is tentative.

I laugh. I can’t help it. “Have I tried to lose weight? Up until last fall, my life was dedicated to it.”

“Wow.”

“What’d you think, I just went home at night and stuffed my face with marshmallows and chips?”

She pauses and shrinks back a bit. “I don’t think that now, but I definitely did before.”

“Before when?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Before these last few weeks? I guess?”

This shouldn’t surprise me, and really, it doesn’t. But it does suck. It really sucks, and I don’t use that word lightly. “I probably know way more about calorie counting and how to maximize workouts and the latest fad cleanses than any other person you’ve ever met.”

“I never thought about it that way.” She shakes her head. “All that work and no results.”

I let out a little snort laugh. “You know, me and my mom used to go to these ladies’ aerobic classes at church on Thursday nights, and they’d choreograph the whole thing to Christian music. They’d say how our bodies were the Lord’s temple, so we should maintain the temple and stay as slim and trim as possible.”

“That’s . . . that’s kind of fucked up,” says Callie.

“Well, I don’t know if I’d use that exact word, but yeah. Yeah, it really was. Because not only had the world already done a perfectly good job of making me feel like I’d failed at being a human being, but then I was a bad Christian, too.”

“Do you still go to church?” asks Callie. “We’ve never been a very churchy family.”

“I sort of stopped when I started working at the gym. I needed more time for homework, but honestly, the people at my church said lots of things I couldn’t live with. Like, the way they talk about gay people and loving the sinner but not the sin. I mean, if you can’t love the whole of a person, do you really love them at all? So maybe I’ll go back to a different church after high school once I’ve moved, but I don’t need a church to be a Christian. And I don’t have to be thin to be a good person. Or a pretty person.”

“Nope. You really don’t.”

“I have to ask you something,” I blurt. It’s something that’s been weighing on me all week.

“Shoot,” she says.

“Those green flyers with all those secrets. Was that you?”

She looks at me for a long moment and then nods. “I’m sorry for asking you to drive me there.”

I start to shake my head.

“No, no,” she tells me. “I shouldn’t have dragged you into that without clueing you in first.” She touches my thigh. “But no one’s getting into any trouble for that. Trust me.”

I gulp and nod. Guilt settles in the pit of my stomach as I’m reminded that I haven’t been honest. I’m such a coward. “Okay.”

“I’m serious. And if anyone does, you know I can take the fall,” she adds sarcastically. “Plus those girls got exactly what they deserved.”

Instead of opening my gosh-dang mouth and telling her I’m the one who spotted her on the surveillance tape, I change the subject. “So what’s the deal with Mitch? You don’t strike me as the type of person who needs time to emotionally recover from a breakup.”

She turns to me with her arms crossed in mock insult, but I’ve got her pegged. “I told you. He’s not my type.”

I lean back with my arms spread out behind me, propping myself up. “What does that even mean? Y’all seem to really make each other laugh, and isn’t that a good place to start?”

“Well, things with Bryce started in a coat closet at a party, so that was also a good place to start.”

“You’re avoiding the question,” I tell her.

“He’s just . . .”

“Fat,” I say.

She grimaces. “He is a bigger guy. And I do like his personality a lot, and he is kind of cute. Okay, maybe really cute.”