my knees and my fat forming rolls at my middle. When I looked up all three of my friends were silently staring at me.
“Are you OK?” asked Bridget after a couple of seconds.
“You don’t look very good.” said Ann.
“I think I almost fainted. I stood up too fast. I’ll be OK. I just need to go back over there and sit down.”
Ann looked me in the eye. “OK. But…hey, did you eat today?”
“Not yet. I will when I get home.” I should have said yes.
“Jesus Christ, Cami. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon and you haven’t eaten anything? We need to get you something to eat. Why do you always do this?”
Ann ate all the time. Her family ate all of their meals together at a big table in the dining room. They had potatoes and gravy when it wasn’t Thanksgiving and dessert with each meal. She brought HoHos in her lunch and drank chocolate milk at breakfast. And she wore a size 1. I never understood how that worked. I ate that shit once a month – if that much! I spent weeks eating only rice cakes and grapefruit and I wore a size 11. Why was I the fat pig?
“I’m fine. And I don’t have any money anyway. No one does. Your dad will be here in an hour. I’ll just sit still.”
“No. C’mon. Get your shoes on. You guys stay with our stuff.”
My rubber flip-flops almost melted on the pavement as she marched me across the hot parking lot to the doors of Kmart. Cold air blasted me in the face when she opened them and I suddenly felt a bit better.
“Really, Ann. I’m good. Let’s go. What are you doing?”
“It’s 95 degrees out there and you have been running around all day on an empty stomach. You NEED to eat something.” Then she whispered, “I’ve got big pockets in this cover up.”
We walked down the candy aisle. Ann reached into her deep cover up pockets and pulled out an imaginary coin. She placed it into the ‘pick-a-mix’ 2 for 5 cents can and snapped her fingernail against it. Then she grabbed 10 pieces of candy and stuffed them in her pocket. We calmly walked out of the store and back to the waterslide.
“Here. Eat these. I tried to grab mostly peanut ones – they’ll be most nutritious.” She handed me the candy. “But, shoot, it looks like I got a lot of vanilla flavored.”
I ate a few of the peanut ones. I did feel better. Less woozy, more stable. But I immediately felt my stomach grow two inches. Maybe four. I wished there had been a grapefruit or a rice cake ‘pick a mix’ at Kmart. Those foods always made me feel smaller. Candy was never a good choice, no matter how starved I might have been. I gave the rest of the candy to the three of them while Ann rolled her eyes at me.
They bounced off to take a few more runs down the slide. I sat covered up on the side lines waiting for our ride home, claiming that I didn’t feel well enough to go up the steps, but knowing that my candy-filled size 11 self was far too fat to expose to the world.