Chapter One
Nothing spelled misery like trying to find a seat on the school bus the first day at a new school.
I scanned the rows, and kids started stretching out so there wouldn’t be room for me. I didn’t want to sit by them either, but it wasn’t like I had a choice.
As I walked down the dirty rubber aisle, I took note of who was riding—only a handful of people my age sat amongst the crowd of younger kids. Would a grade-schooler or someone my age give me less grief?
“Don’t sit by me!” a little kid squeaked. He leaned over the seat in front of him and whispered, “I’m afraid she might crush me.”
Of course, he was as good at whispering as he was at not being a jerk.
Tears burned my eyes, I hurried to wipe them. So much for a fresh start.
“You can sit here.”
I twisted to see a guy—a good looking guy, the kind who never talked to girls like me—and said, “What?”
He pulled his backpack onto his lap. “This seat’s open.”
I eyed him wearily and was about to turn down his offer when the old bat driving the bus told me to “quit the pomp and circumstance and sit down already.”
I took the seat, and in an effort to give the guy some space, half of my butt hung off the edge. I hugged my backpack to my chest, wishing I’d just taken Grandma up on her offer to drive me.
“Are you new here?” he asked softly.
Glancing at him sideways, I huffed, “Yeah.”
He smiled so warmly it caught me off guard. No one ever looked at me like that, much less guys my age. Especially not ones who looked like him.
“I’m Jon.” He stuck out his hand over his backpack. “Jonathan, but Jon.”
Praying my hand wasn’t too sweaty, I took his grip. “Abi.”
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“McClellan,” I said, and I hoped he would leave it at that.
“That’s pretty close.” He leaned forward on his backpack. “Have I seen you at a game or something?”
Was that a joke? I definitely didn’t look like the kind of girl who hung out anywhere near a sporting event, except maybe at the concession stands.
“Doubt it,” I finally muttered.
He seemed at a loss for words, and I turned my head toward the front of the bus. Were we there yet?
“Your parents got a new job or something?”
“Not exactly.” I hoped my thick foundation still covered the yellowing bruise on my cheek. This wasn’t the kind of move caused by a promotion.
The bus pulled in front of a school twice the size of McClellan, and I took a deep breath. This was it.
“Well, let me know if you need help finding anything, Abi.” He patted me on the shoulder. “I’m sure I’ll be seeing you around.”
For the first time in a long time, I smiled. “Thanks.”
I could feel the ghost of where he touched me, even as I made my way back down the aisle. Maybe this would be a good new start for me, like Grandma said.
The shadow of a smile was still on my lips as I walked up the steps to the school. I already had a locker and books, but Mrs. Moscavits, the principal, wanted me to come by her office on my first day for my schedule.
A receptionist desk positioned in front of Mrs. Moscavits’s office made the plump woman with spiky hair sitting behind it look more like a guard dog than a secretary.
She lifted a red-penciled eyebrow, revealing more blue eyeshadow. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Mrs. Moscavits,” I said.
“Sandra!” she called to the closed door. “There’s a student.”
Overpaid doorbell.
“Hold on,” a voice called from behind the door.
I glanced my watch. We still had fifteen minutes until school started, so I took my backpack off and rifled through it until I found a granola bar I’d stashed there earlier.
The door to the principal’s office opened, and Mrs. Moscavits came out, tucking her glasses into her hairline like a horn-rimmed headband. “Abigail, good to see you again.”
She offered her square hand in greeting.
I wiped the leftover melted chocolate on my jeans, gulped down the un-chewed oats, and put my hand in her firm grasp.
“Follow me,” she said.
Matching her long stride without panting was a challenge, but I managed.
“Okay,” she began, “we gave you most of the same classes you had at McClellan, but if you have trouble catching up, we can arrange help.” She handed me the paper, and I glanced down at the classes on my schedule. “Your first class is biology.”
One word glared at me, more menacing than any I’d ever seen. “Gym?”
She pulled her glasses from her hairline to her nose and scanned the paper. “Yes, right before lunch.”
“Can I change it?”
“We have a physical education requirement here at Woodman, Abigail. If you’re not going to play a sport, you have to take this.”
She came to a door with a sign that said Room 139, Mr. Pelosi, and gestured that I should go ahead of her.
I went to open the door, and she said, “Stop!”
Her hand brushed my back, making the sound of crackling paper.
I turned to see a crumpled sticky note peeping through her fisted fingers. “What was that?”
She cleared her expression. “Nothing.”
“What did it say?”
“Nothing,” she said again, her voice firm. “Let’s go into your class.”
“I think I have a right to know.” I folded my arms over my chest.
She gave me a glare that could have rivaled my mother’s, then pulled open the classroom door, cutting the teacher off mid-sentence. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and if not for his dressy shirt and tie, I might have mistaken him for a victory-lap senior giving a class presentation.
“Hi, Mr. Pelosi. This is your new student, Abigail Johnson. I hope you’ll all give her a warm Woodman welcome.”
“Hi, Abigail.” Mr. Pelosi grinned at me. “Go ahead and take that seat there.”
He pointed at an empty desk next to a Hispanic girl in glasses. I had to squeeze between the rows, and my backside knocked over a water bottle on someone’s desk, but I made it to the seat.
Mrs. Moscavits switched the orange paper to her other hand. “Well then, if you don’t need me here, I’ll leave you to it.”
“I think we’ve got it,” Mr. Pelosi said and waved her off.
She dropped the crumpled note in the wastebasket on her way out of the room.
After the door shut, Mr. Pelosi leaned against the front of his desk. “So why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself, Abigail?”
I closed my eyes. “Like what?”
There wasn’t really anything good to tell. If I was in a newspaper, my headline would be “Girl with weight problem and abusive parents moves to new town seven months before graduation.” Not exactly above the fold material.
“Hmm.” He scratched his chin. “Okay, why don’t you tell us where you’re from, what you like to do in your free time, and why don’t we throw in your favorite animal since it’s biology?”
At least he didn’t ask me why I was there.
“I’m from McClellan. I like to watch movies, and I guess a fish?”
One of the boys in the row ahead of me whispered,
“More like a whale,” to his friend, and they both burst out laughing.
Mr. Pelosi pursed his lips. “Care to let us in on the joke?”
They both shook their heads. Apparently, my new classmates weren’t into sharing.
“Well, it’s great to meet you, Abigail,” he said, standing up from the desk. “I’m sure we’ll get to know each other a lot better as the semester goes on.”
He continued for the rest of the hour with a lesson about the circulatory system, and for the most part, the class was quiet. He called on me once to answer a question, and since I’d scanned the same section in the book about five times, I got it right.
Finally, the bell rang. On my way out of the room, I bent over and picked up the crumpled sticky note from earlier. WIDE LOAD.
“Don’t worry about them.”
I crushed the note in my fist and shoved it in my pocket. “What?”
The girl who sat next to me in class was now at my side in the hall. She was a few inches shorter than me, but she had to weigh at least eighty pounds less.
“Those guys in class. They pick on your life because they don’t have one.”
Instead of telling her I was the last person who had a “life,” I said, “Thanks.”
She readjusted her messenger bag, balancing the load on her slim shoulder. “I’m Stormy.”
“Abi.”
“So just don’t worry about them. Okay?” She didn’t wait for me to answer. “I’ll catch you at lunch.”
Stormy gave me a parting glance, and then tossed herself into the sea of kids in the hallway.
I stared down at the schedule in my hand. One class down. Seven to go.
English was fine, math was math, and gym was hell.
I’d arrived on FTD, “fitness test day,” aka all-students-run-a-mile-and-I-mean-every-student day.
At Woodman, all freshmen took PE, which met their requirement, so the only people in gym class now were scrubs, transfers like me, or kids who were in PE to get an easy A. Well, easy for them.
Wearing an old pair of track sweats the PE teacher scrounged up when I said I didn’t have any gym clothes, I stood at the starting line with fifteen other students. Seventeen minutes and eight seconds later, I crossed the finish line, nauseous, gasping for air, drenched in sweat, and red in the face.
Choking back tears, I walked to the locker room and sat in a bathroom stall until everyone else left. I used wet paper towels to wipe under my arms and cool my face.
When my breathing slowed and the lump in my throat dissolved into the usual feelings of inadequacy and shame, I left for the lunchroom, bringing the sweats with me. The PE teacher’s office came up on my left, and I stepped in.
“Hey,” he said.
I mumbled a greeting, then wadded up the sweats and tossed them to him.
“It’ll get better,” he said. “Just wait and see.”
I grunted. “We’ll be waiting a long time.” Seventeen minutes and eight seconds, to be exact.
Before he could reply, I walked away and made my way to lunch where I was practically accosted by Stormy, who insisted I sit by her and her friends.
“Are you okay?” she asked in between lunch ladies.
“Your face is really red.”
“FTDs,” I huffed.
She sucked in a breath and made a face. “Ew.”
“Yeah.”
Once I’d filled my plate with a mass of gravy-covered meat and fruit cocktail, she led me to a round table surrounded by the oddest mixture of students I’d seen before. Two girls with brightly colored hair and gauges, a Hispanic guy with heavy gold chains around his neck, a scrawny guy with more freckles than pounds on the scale, one guy with a buzz cut and a letterman’s jacket, and another boy who looked like a Campbell’s soup kid.
“This is Abigail,” Stormy said.
“I know,” gold chain guy said. “I’m with her in English.”
But he didn’t make an effort to introduce himself.
Stormy sat down and stared at me. “Well, sit down,” she said.
I wasn’t about to argue with the one girl who was trying to get to know me, so I took the chair between her and Campbell soup kid.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Andrew.”
“Abi,” I returned and sipped at my water.
No one else went out of their way to talk to me, but Stormy was adamant I took part in the conversation.
When the girl with purple hair brought up math, Stormy said, “Aren’t you in college algebra?”
When Andrew brought up a ski trip his parents were going on, Stormy said, “I really like snowboarding, how about you, Abigail?”
Then, gold chain guy, who was actually named Roberto, said he was planning a party.
“Have you ever drank before?” Stormy asked, like it was her last-ditch effort to include me.
I shook my head. My parents had done enough of that for all of us.
Roberto ignored us. “Yeah, well, it starts at nine on Friday.” He grinned. “My brother’s bringing the beer.”
“Cool!” Stormy said. “You’re coming, right, Abigail?”
Before I even knew if I could, I said okay.
***
Jonathan-but-Jon was in all three of my afternoon classes, but I didn’t get to talk to him in any of them. Not that I would know what to say to him. Something along the lines of “I thought you were a decent guy, but you put a WIDE LOAD sign on my back. That was a real Richard move.”
He wasn’t on the bus after school. Thankfully, that meant I had a seat to myself.
The driver let me off outside my grandma’s house and I walked down the sidewalk, practicing what I could tell my grandma so she’d let me spend time in my room. Alone.
I opened the door and was instantly greeted by the TV blaring a news station.
“Is that you, Abi?” Grandma called from the living room.
“Yeah.”
“Come in here!”
Time for my practiced line. “I need to go take a shower!”
“Just for a second!”
Just for a second. I dropped my backpack in the doorway. That was ten minutes in Grandma’s world.
I walked over orange shag carpet to the living room where Grandma rested in her recliner. She lifted the remote and muted the TV. On the screen, I saw winds and rain ripping through palm trees. Trouble in Florida. Again.
“How was your first day?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“Did you make any friends?” She looked so hopeful.
“Kind of… I got invited to hang out with some people after the game on Friday.”
“Oh, that’s great, honey! I hoped this would be a good start for you, after everything.”
“Thanks.” I turned to go to the spare bedroom—my bedroom.
“Hold on,” she said.
I turned around and waited. “Yeah?”
She pushed down the footrest on the recliner. I could practically see the plans brewing behind her bright eyes. She needed something.
“Well,” Grandma said, “I have a neighbor down the street, Marta Scoller, and she has a son in school that’s your age. She invited us over for supper tonight. Wasn’t that nice of her?”
I remembered the boys in biology who’d called me a whale. Pass. Hard pass. “I’m really tired. I had to run a mile in gym today and—”
“They made you run a mile?” Her eyebrows raised, deepening the wrinkles on her forehead.
“It was awful.”
“Well”—she put her hand under her chin, in thought—“I could call and cancel, but I think it would be good for you to meet more people from your school.”
The last thing I needed or wanted to do was meet people from Woodman. Half of them seemed to have a fat-girl-bullying hole I was perfectly sized for, and the other half—with the exception of Stormy, who I considered an anomaly on par with girls who could eat anything they wanted and not gain weight—seemed to find me slightly inconvenient. Like I was a scuff on the floor people walked by every day, thinking “I should clean that up.” My whole goal for the seven months until graduation was to fade into obscurity.
But I gave Grandma the condensed version. “I don’t really feel up to it.”
“Just for tonight, Abi, and you can rest all day tomorrow if you want to.” She sweetened the tone of her voice, and her soft blue eyes looked so hopeful.
“Well, I guess—”
“Great. You can go ahead and shower. I told her we’d be over at 5:45, sharp.”
She unmuted the TV, and I looked at the screen. A guy in soaking wet, tattered clothes was kneeling in front of a flooding building. A proposal. Great. I hoped for the girl’s sake he wasn’t as forceful as my grandma was.
I walked to the bathroom and undressed for a shower. When I tossed my jeans into the hamper, the orange sticky note spiraled to the ground.
Wide load.
Between the vanity and the bathtub was my grandma’s old spin dial scale. The last time I’d been weighed was at the doctor’s office, and it had been quite a while since then.
I lifted it up and moved it to the center of the bathroom. The yellowed sticker at the bottom read, Evenly distribute weight on scale.
With a deep breath, I lifted one foot then the other and watched the black numbers whir behind the red needle.
That couldn’t be right.
Frozen, I stared at the little tick marks and counted right from 210.
212 pounds.
The familiar sting of tears burned my eyelids. Why had I done this to myself?
I walked over to the sink and braced myself on the counter as I examined myself in the mirror.
What I saw was ugly. I saw my father’s round, pudgy face with dishwater blue eyes. I saw my mother’s thick, light brown hair, but without highlights. Stretchmarks rippled across my arms, hips, stomach, and legs. I saw my pale face, splotchy with heat. I hated myself. Absolutely hated everything about me.
If there was one thing I knew, it was that I never wanted to see those numbers on the scale again.
I stepped into the shower and let the hot water pour over my body. It relieved some of the kinks I’d acquired running, and I sat down in the shower, letting the heat work its magic. When steam filled the air and most of the hot water was gone, I got out and reached for a towel.
The towels at my grandma’s house all matched. They were dark blue and embroidered with creamy, smiling angels. All of the towels at my parents’ house were threadbare and different, faded colors.
I wrapped myself in a navy towel, making sure the angel faced away from my skin. With its big eyes staring at me, I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and cried.
