Boldly, she walked up to Mark, hearing admiring comments and even a wolf whistle, which was new. Back at home, nobody ever whistled at her, and the only comments she’d ever gotten from men on the streets were either “nice tits,” “you should smile,” or “you’d be pretty if you lost some weight.”
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Abby.”
The boy ducked his head and said, “I’m Mark.”
She asked where he was from (Long Island), how old he was (thirteen, same as she was), if this was his first summer at Camp Golden Hills (yes), and if he’d come because he wanted to, or because he’d been forced.
At that question, Mark finally stopped looking at his shoes and looked at Abby. “Little bit of both,” he said. “Sometimes, I want to lose weight, and sometimes, I think I’d like to be four hundred pounds by the time I’m forty years old.”
Abby blinked. “Really? Why?”
“Because,” Mark said, “who’d be able to tell a four-hundred-pound man no?” He gave her a big goofy smile. “I’d be unstoppable. I’d do anything I wanted.”
Abby laughed. Mark turned his smile toward her. His face was round, his cheeks full, his chins wobbly… but his smile was adorable. And he was funny. That counted for a lot.
“Do you want to sit with me at movie night?” she asked.
“Really?” he asked, once more managing to meet her eyes. Almost immediately he looked down again, his gaze sliding toward Marissa and Leah. “It’s a joke, right?”
“No. No, it’s not a joke.”
“Promise?” he asked.
“Yes,” Abby said. “I promise.”
That night, when she came back to the bunk after the counselors led a sing-along around the bonfire (combined with lots of vigorous arm motions and marching in place, the better to burn calories), Abby found a note under her pillow, with the drawing of a heart, and her initials, and a small bag of M&Ms. See you at movie night, he’d written. From your four-hundred-pound friend Mark.
“Oh,” she said, so enraptured that she forgot, for a few minutes, how hungry she was. She tucked the note away, after folding it carefully. She didn’t see Mark the next day, but the next night brought even more treasures.
“OMG,” Marissa breathed, as Abby reached under her pillow. There was another note—I think you’re beautiful, it read—but, better than that, there was a snack-size bag of Fritos, the kind that kids (not Abby, but some of her classmates) got in their school lunches.
“Do you know how much he must’ve paid for these?” Marissa asked, cradling the Fritos as reverently as the Virgin Mary had ever held the baby Jesus.
Abby shook her head. She then heard about the vibrant black market at Golden Hills. A few of the counselors could be induced to look the other way when parents sent care packages or when older kids raided the hotel vending machines on field trips to Gettysburg and Washington. There were maintenance workers who could be bribed to bring candy bars or even fast food into camp. And Kara’s sister, a Golden Hills survivor who was currently in college, would mail Kara sanitary supplies with Rolos and Twix bars and Laffy Taffy tucked into the maxipads.
“Ooh, he’s got it bad,” said Marissa. When Kelsey came bouncing into the cabin, Abby shoved the Fritos under her pillow. After lights-out, she ripped the bag open, as quietly as she could, and handed it around the bunk. Each girl got maybe three Fritos total. Abby tried to make hers last, setting them on her tongue to dissolve. She felt the burn of the salt and tasted the grit of the dissolving corn—or lab-made corn-like substance—and she smiled, remembering the feeling of Mark’s hand in hers, how he looked at her like she was a goddess, or Paris Hilton, thin and pretty and perfect.
Mark lost a startling fifty pounds during his first summer at Golden Hills. By the last night of camp, he’d become something of a hunk, and the girls who’d once scorned him, including Marissa, were trying to flirt with him right in front of Abby. To no avail. Mark ignored them completely. He only had eyes for her.
“You’ll come to my bat mitzvah,” Abby said, at the end of the dance on the last night of camp. She and Mark had swayed together under the pavilion lights, leaning into each other with her hands on his shoulders and his hands on her waist.
“And I’ll call you every Friday night,” Mark promised. They kissed—that was as far as things had gotten that summer—and they’d both cried as they’d said their goodbyes. It was as satisfying and as sweet a first love as Abby could have hoped for.
Abby didn’t expect to ever go back to Camp Golden Hills. Her father had promised her theater camp, and Abby still dreamed of going. But, later that fall, her parents’ divorce became final, and Abby’s dad told her that there wasn’t money for theater camp or for any camp—“not with Marni in college and Simon going next year.” That spring, after her mother got engaged to Gary the Businessman, and started planning their autumn wedding, it turned out that there was enough money for camp. But not for theater camp. Just for Camp Golden Hills. “Don’t you want to look good in the wedding pictures?” Eileen pleaded.
Abby told her, tersely, that she cared about how she looked in Eileen’s wedding photos even less than she’d cared about how she’d looked in her bat mitzvah album. Once again, her begging and complaints got her nowhere.
In truth, Abby didn’t resist that much. She didn’t care about losing weight—if the second summer worked like the first, she’d only gain it back again. She wasn’t thrilled about spending another six weeks starving, but she did want to see her friends again. And Mark.
That year, when she arrived, Mark was waiting for her on the steps of her cabin, with a bouquet of wildflowers in his hands, and a snack-size bag of Cheetos in the pouch of the hoodie he’d started wearing again.
“My goodness, will you look at that,” Abby heard her mother murmur. Either Eileen didn’t remember Mark from Abby’s bat mitzvah, or she didn’t recognize him, now that he’d gained back the weight. “How could that boy’s parents let him get that big?”
Abby barely heard her mother. All she saw were Mark’s eyes, his smile, the way he was looking at her, like she was his fondest dream come true. She got out of the car and ran to him. Mark got to his feet and opened his arms. When he hugged her, lifting her off her feet and swinging her around, it was like being embraced by a protective mountain, or like having an entire continent between her and her mother’s disapproval and judgment. She pressed her face into his fabric-softener-scented sweatshirt, feeling small and protected. Whatever hurtful things her mother had to say would bounce right off Mark, and never make their way near her. “Hi,” she whispered, and Mark had squeezed her even more tightly.