~
IT TOOK ME A while to realize I wasn’t chubby Serena anymore. If I’d tried to slim down it never would’ve worked. I like to eat. I mean, I was never all-out enormous, but I like second helpings, cupcakes at lunch, and soft drinks with real sugar. My brother Devin was the same way, and my parents never made us feel bad about our imperfect frames, but sometimes I could hear the silent comparisons with Morgan leak out from other people’s minds.
My extended family, my parents’ friends, even strangers like shop assistants or waiters — they were all charmed by Morgan. He was virtually perfect — friendly, funny, and nearly as good-looking as the guys you see in magazine ads for designer jeans. Whenever I was next to Morgan I noticed the way people beamed at him. They even beamed at me when I was beside him; I gained goodwill by association. You had to be a seriously hard case to steel yourself against Morgan. Confirmed homophobes even seemed to soften their antigay attitudes around him, usually unwilling to make an enemy of Morgan over something they’d label unnatural in someone else.
People loved Morgan no matter what he did, just because he was Morgan. Devin and I used to complain about it to each other, but Devin had his own exceptionalities going for him. Morgan was the popular one, but Devin was the one who’d qualified for Mensa at fourteen and had been doing my parents’ taxes ever since. He was the one who’d won a full university scholarship and was always first in his class. Before last spring he’d never failed anything in his life.
That was then, before Devin turned every day into a twenty-fourhour exercise in tension when Dad dragged him home from university in March. He wasn’t well, as my parents liked to call it. The results of Devin’s unwellness were unpredictable, and whenever I was around the house I was too edgy to be hungry (you never knew what would happen next). You’d think getting rid of the source of that stress would help, but when Devin went AWOL in June my appetite curled up and died completely.
For months everyone in my family was too preoccupied to notice my dwindling waistline much, me included. No one except Izzy even mentioned it, and that was only once.
So I didn’t really know I was thin until August 22. Devin was gone and the three of us still living at home weren’t doing a fabulous job of dealing with his absence. Dad didn’t talk about him or it if he could avoid the topic, but he didn’t smile much anymore either. Mom was away from the museum with migraines so often — lying in the dark with her white noise machine amped up to maximum — that they’d hired her a full-time assistant.
That night in August Mom was supposed to take me back to school shopping because nothing fit anymore; all my clothes hung on me like an exaggerated “after” image in a weight loss commercial. The funny thing about shopping with my mom was how she’d turn into a teenage girl while doing it, laughing at stuff she wouldn’t ordinarily find funny and asking me things about Izzy and Marguerite, as though the four of us were all friends. Then we’d stop for lattes and whisper silly things about passersby. Occasionally she’d try on things decades too young for her, just kidding around. It was embarrassing and comical at the same time. I’d be smiling while wishing for the power of invisibility.
This past August I didn’t have to make that wish, and there were no lattes or laughing either. Mom complained that she had a crippling headache and handed me her ATM card. Dad was the one who taxied me over to the Glenashton mall, instructing me to call when I needed picking up.
But I never made that call. Instead I bumped into Jacob Westermark, who surprised me by flirting with me in the food court line, his dark blue eyes zooming in on my pupils like I was someone else. We sat and talked for a long time, him listening almost as much as he spoke. Then he drove me home and kissed me in his car. Jacob with his sexy basketball player arms and a T-shirt that fit so well it made me wonder if I was staring.
He was precisely the kind of guy Devin would’ve torn to pieces under his breath in a funny voice the minute Jacob walked away. Athletic. Popular. Cocky enough to believe his own hype. But he was also sweet that night, and when I finally stepped inside my front door various bits of me were purring shamelessly from the things we’d done in his front seat.
Jacob didn’t pretend we’d never kissed. He didn’t apologize for it either. We kissed a lot from then on. In Jacob’s bedroom, the baseball diamond bleachers five minutes from my house, Chaz’s basement, around the back of the school portables, at a booth in Pizza Hut where we both sat on the same side and the middle-aged waitress called us cute. For a while he made me believe I’d found the thing, the person, that would make me stand out from all the other average, nearly invisible kids I went to school with. No Mensa or MuchMusic for me. His name was Jacob Westermark.