Dude!” Ashley stares at my Wendy’s taco salad as if it just sprouted legs and started to walk off its Styrofoam bed. “You’re not actually going to eat that?”
It’s Sunday, a week after I got my letter. I still haven’t told anyone but Mom (since that went so well). Dealing with her parentnoia is more than enough without having to endure the Seven Stages of Grief from my friends.
“Um, I was thinking about it,” I say. Seems like a strange question, considering I ordered and now own said taco salad. “I mean, why not? It’s a salad.”
“It’s a taco salad,” Peyton says, like that explains everything.
“So?” I’m missing something here, some Rosetta Stone that will translate what they’re saying into English. I’m guessing I ordered the wrong thing.
When I used to see Peyton and Ashley around school, I couldn’t tell them apart. Now that we’ve been friends almost a year, it’s still hard—identical flat stomachs in crop tops (but Ashley’s top is plain, while Peyton’s says CHEERLEADERS ARE ATHLETES TOO!), identical noses (though I now know that Peyton’s is real, while Ashley brought a photo of Peyton to the plastic surgeon who corrected her deviated septum), wardrobes, fake Southern accents, and not-quite-identical streaked hair (Ashley’s is redder). Only by spending an insane amount of time with them do you see a difference: Peyton’s mostly harmless. Ashley’s potentially lethal.
But they’re my friends. When the whole ugly Nick thing happened, I thought they’d take his side since they were really his friends to begin with, and leave me with no one. So when Peyton and Ashley stuck by me, I was grateful. Confused, but grateful.
“So it’s … never mind, Cat. It looks yummy.” Ashley hands me a packet of sour cream that came with the salad. “Wouldn’t want to forget this.”
I lift my plastic fork, and Peyton yelps, like she might throw herself on the salad to save me from it. “She means it’s a salad with six hundred seventy calories—two hundred ninety from fat—thirty-two fat grams and eighty-five carbohydrate grams with the sour cream. Without it…”
She keeps going. I tune out, listening to the elevator music version of a Kelly Clarkson song and trying to remember if Peyton was the one who failed business math.
“If you eat that,” she finishes, “you can’t eat anything else the rest of the day!”
I think about the bagel and cream cheese I had only two hours ago and wave off the sour cream Ashley’s holding out. “Too fattening.”
“You only lose fifty calories and three and a half fat grams by not having sour cream,” Peyton says. “But you lose two hundred and ten calories, nine fat grams, and twenty-nine carb grams if you leave off the chips.”
But then what would be the point of having a taco salad?
Ashley squeezes half of her packet of fat-free French dressing onto her spring mix salad (I bet Peyton knows the numbers on that one too), and says, “Oh, leave her alone, Pey. Let her eat whatever she wants.” She glances at my thighs, then her own skeletal ones. “I need to lose ten pounds. I’m so fat.”
“You’re so not,” I say. She knows she isn’t, but smiles. It’s a game they play, the I’m so fat game, which you can only play it if you’ve never been a fatgirl in your life. I leave the chips and pick at the lettuce. I lift my legs so my thighs won’t sploosh out on the plastic seat. “I wish I had your thighs,” I add, and Ashley nods, all happy.
“I went shopping yesterday…” Peyton rolls her eyes. “With my mom.”
“Mallicide!” Ashley clutches Peyton’s arm.
“Did she at least buy you anything good?” I ask, knowing how her brain works.
“Negatory. It’s really hard for me to find anything, what with my size and all. I wear a zero, and hardly anything comes in that, only Rampage and a few others.”
“Rampage is nice,” I say.
Peyton and Ashley exchange looks.
I’ve said the wrong thing. I try again. “How about Express?”
“Too big.”
“Wet Seal?”
“Huge.”
“The Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy?” I’ve bought clothes at all these stores since I got thin. But I’ve never been as thin as Peyton and Ashley.
“Too big, too big, too big and too cheap. Hell-o? Old Navy’s, like, the cheap version of the Gap.”
I look at Ashley, who nods, confirming that this is, indeed, the sad case, and adjusts her top. I just read an article that said the crop top is out. Obviously, that was written by some hopeful fatgirl because all my friends are still wearing them.
“So, what are you wearing to cheerleader tryouts next week?” Peyton asks.
“Um, I’m not sure I can go,” I say, bracing for the nuclear reaction this will cause.
Total shocksville.
“But why?” Ashley asks.
“I don’t know.” I toy with my salad fork and think. “I’m just not athletic like you guys. I’ll look stupid. And I’m not sure I want to be a cheerleader.”
“But it’s cheerleading! Everyone wants to be a cheerleader.”
“Caitlin doesn’t want what everyone wants,” Peyton says, pushing aside her half-eaten salad.
“Well, what do you want?”
I have a flash of memory, like a digital photo the second after the snap, of Sean Griffin’s face. I wonder what it would be like to have friends—or even a boyfriend—who actually get me, people who don’t think opera and Oprah are the same thing. I squeeze the sour cream packet onto my salad, trying to figure out how to explain it to them without seeming snobby.
I can’t. I change the subject. “Did you hear about Brianna Owens and Josh Eisenberg in the luggage compartment of the bus, coming back from the chorus trip?”
“No!” Ashley says. “That skank!”
And the subject is changed. I pour out all the details I remember, considering I wasn’t paying attention, and they jabber about how could anyone want Josh Eisenberg’s anything in her mouth, and I relax. They’re happy if they’re trashing someone … Do they trash me if I’m not there? Probably. Doesn’t matter. While they’re doing that, I’m free to think about other things. It’s been happening more and more lately.
I pick at my taco salad and think Maria Callas, a diva who—this is probably urban legend—sometimes went on a raw-meat diet, because it gave her tapeworms, parasites that helped her lose weight. Yuck. But I understand.
I’m in the middle of that thought when I hear a voice across the restaurant.
“Caitlin!”
I ignore it, thinking it must be some other Caitlin, but it comes closer.
“Caitlin!” I turn then and see Sean Griffin walking toward us holding a taco salad identical to my own and a cup of water. “I’m right, right? It’s Caitlin?”
I’ve lost the ability to speak. I nod. Are my friends staring?
“Mind if I sit?” He does so, in the empty seat by mine. He opens his salad and starts squeezing sour cream onto it. I watch him. He’s wearing loose khakis and a yellow-and-white-striped button-down, which look like they’ve been washed a hundred times. The shirt has a tiny hole under the collar, but the pants are ironed to a crease. He’s poor, I think, trying the thought on for size. I’ve never known anyone poor. Actually, I’ve always been the poorest of my friends, with their massive allowances, houses straight out of MTV Cribs, and vacation places in Marco Island and the Keys.
I can see his skin through that little hole, and I lean closer, fixated on it, almost wanting to reach out with the tip of my finger and touch it … him.
I draw back, realizing he’s watching me. In his loose clothes, he looks skinnier than in the unitard. Maybe I’m just seeing him through Peyton and Ashley’s eyes.
Introduce him to your friends before he thinks you’re stupid.
Probably too late.
“Peyton Berounski and Ashley Pettigrew, this is Sean. Sean Griffin.”
He takes them in, top to bottom. I can actually see his thoughts, like subtitles on televised operas—Sheesh, cheerleaders! I almost laugh. But then he smiles. “Hey, great to meet you.” He turns back to me. “So? You got in, right?”
I force a smile. “Um, yeah. I mean, sort of. Not really. I mean, yeah, I got in, but I didn’t. I mean, I’m not going.”
Sean yells, “Not going?” at the same time Peyton and Ashley start in with, “Got in where? Not going where?”
“Nothing. It’s not important. I mean, I tried out for Miami High School of the Arts, just to see if I’d get in, and I decided I’d rather stay at Key with all my friends than transfer junior year.” I can’t look at Sean. “So you live around here?”
“No, I work at a church near here. Don’t change the subject. What do you mean, you’re not going?” To Peyton and Ashley, he says, “Your friend’s a fabulous singer—she’s going to be the next Renée Fleming.”
Like they know who she is. “Thanks. I don’t … I just didn’t think it was for me.”
“Of course, it isn’t,” Ashley says. “That’s where all the goths go.”
“And the freaks,” Peyton adds. “I see them on the train when we go downtown for Heat games. They don’t get out of school until, like, four-thirty, and they’re all there, singing and dancing on the Metrorail platform.” She wrinkles her nose. “So weird.”
I still can’t look at Sean, so I sit there, picturing a girl I once saw, doing what Peyton’s talking about; a girl in a black leotard with long, black hair, stretching and dancing between the columns, and none of her friends acted like that was weird at all. I watched her, even as the train pulled away, thinking she looked like a bat, dark and beautiful against the brilliant Miami skyline. I wanted to be her.
“I’m sorry you won’t be there,” I hear Sean say.
“Yeah,” Ashley says. “It’s a shame. Well, it was nice meeting you. Gotta go.”
I follow them, because that’s what I’ve become: a follower.
They’re barely outside before they start trashing him.
“Your friend’s going to be the next Brunhilde Fatso,” Ashley mimics.
“‘She’s fabulous!’” Peyton giggles. “He talks like you, Cait, all opera-y.”
My friends don’t get the opera thing. To them, it’s all fat ladies with horns, and I don’t even try to explain it. When I was a lonely fatgirl, I always had opera. Now I have other things, so I should give it up. But I don’t want to. I want to run to that school; maybe it’s running for my life.
“What was up with his shirt?” Peyton says. “It had a hole in it.”
“You should’ve given him your chips,” Ashley says. “He was so scrawny.”
“Like you’d want to go to that freaky school. Why’d you even try out?”
We reach Ashley’s car. I put my hand on it, steadying myself, feeling the warmth against my hand. I look through the window and see Sean looking at me. “I just wanted to see if I’d get in, okay? But I’m not going. My mom would never let me.”
I hold my breath. They hate my mom, even though they’re a lot like her. But Ashley says, “Yeah, well, even your mom can be right once in a while.”
Opera_Grrrl’s Online Journal
Subject: Rowena
Date: April 25
Time: 8:37 a.m.
Listening 2: Tape for my voice lesson (which is in an hour)
Feeling: Hyper
Weight: 116 lbs.
THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY VOICE TEACHER ROWENA’S CONDO
1. She has a mirror over the piano, so I can see my face when I sing, but not my body.
2. Her cocker spaniel, Sailor, sings along when I hit high notes.
3. Her cat, Fred, sits on the piano and tries 2 grab the sheet music pages.
4. Sometimes Rowena’s next-door neighbor bangs on the wall 4 quiet. R always bangs back and shouts, “Someday, you’ll PAY 2 hear her sing!”
5. She used 2 be a real opera singer and has pictures of herself playing Suzuki in Madame Butterfly at the NYC Opera!!!
6. Rowena thinks I’m special and talented.
So why am I lying 2 Rowena??? It’s been 2 weeks since I got the letter from MHSA ....... Every week, she asks me if I got it & every week I say no. It’s just ....... she’ll be so disappointed that I can’t go.