“Be careful of Amber!” Mrs. Benson, my elementary school gym teacher would call out whenever I was part of a game. At my parents’ request, she wouldn’t let me participate in the more vigorous activities, like flag football or dodgeball; instead, I was allowed to sit at her desk and read or color until class was over.
Other kids, mostly other girls, were often jealous of the preferential treatment I received. “I wish I was tiny like you” was a line I heard over and over again, and their envy eventually transformed into a warm light burning inside my chest, making me feel like maybe I was a little more important than everyone else because of my size.
It was in the middle of sixth grade that everything changed. I remained the shortest girl in my class, but over the course of several months, I also became the one of the heaviest. It was as though someone had flipped a switch, and all the additional calories I’d been fed over the years erupted into rapidly multiplying, juicy fat cells beneath my skin. With each passing week, my body seemed to swell, rounding out my sharp edges, causing me to burst out of my clothes.
“Don’t worry,” my mother said when she had to take me shopping for a new, bigger wardrobe full of elastic waists and shapeless, stomach-hiding tops. “You’ll get taller and eventually, it will all even out.”
“But I don’t want to be fat,” I said, thinking about all the times I had heard her bemoan her weight. She always seemed to be on some kind of new diet—low-carb, high-protein, seafood only—Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, and Nutrisystem—but none of them seemed to have a permanent effect. She lost and regained the same twenty pounds over and over, cursing her slow metabolism and sighing every time she had to put on what she called her “fat jeans” again. And then she’d bake a big pan of brownies—“for your dad”—to make herself feel better.
“Oh, honey, you’re not fat!” she insisted. “You’re just having a growing spurt.”
I nodded at the time, but the weight I’d gained made me feel panicky, like there was a huge balloon expanding inside my body, pushing at my seams, threatening to destroy what made me feel special. If I was the same size as or bigger than everyone else—if I was fat—I’d be ordinary, the one thing I never thought I’d be.
More than a year after that conversation with my mom, a couple of days before I met Tyler in our backyard, I stood in front of the full-length mirror that hung on the back of my bedroom door, squeezing the dimpled pudge of my belly between tight fingers, wishing I could take the scissors from my desk drawer and cut it off.
“Disgusting,” I muttered. I dug my nails into my skin, enduring the pain for as long as I could before I finally let go. I thought about what had happened earlier that week, at a park that edged the northwest shore of Lake Whatcom. Kids would line up at the bridge crossing over it so they could jump the ten feet or so into the deep water below, and that’s where my friend Heather and I were when Brittany Tripp—who, with her long black hair, blue eyes, and lithe body, was the most popular girl in our class—cut in front of me with two of her equally popular friends. They all wore tiny bikinis, showing off their tan skin and budding breasts. Thanks to my mother’s Irish heritage, my skin had two colors only: snow white and lobster red, and I wore a sensible black one-piece to cover as much of it as I could, especially my breasts, which, since the beginning of seventh grade, had doubled in size. Heather was blond, with blue eyes. She was also a ballerina, slender, and already a head taller than most of the boys we knew.
“Hey,” Heather said. “We were next.”
“Like I could miss you guys,” Brittany said. “Amber’s ass takes up half the line.” She looked at her friends with a single, perfectly arched, dark eyebrow raised. “Why doesn’t she just go lose a hundred pounds?”
My eyes filled with tears and my throat seized up, preventing me from speaking. I didn’t know how to handle Brittany’s brutal words. For most of my life, when people had commented about my size, it was complimentary. “Oh, look at you! So petite! So cute!” So I did the only thing I could think of—I whipped around and ran toward the spot on the grass where Heather and I had left our towels. Even there, I could hear Brittany and her friends laughing.
“Don’t listen to her,” Heather said when she caught up with me. “She’s a bitch.” Heather and I had met back in first grade, when her family moved here for her father’s professorship at the university. She, her younger sister, and her parents were going camping over Labor Day weekend, so they would miss the party.
“She’s right,” I said. “I’m so fat.”
“Stop it. You are not.”
I rolled my eyes, pointed to my chubby middle, and Heather shook her head. But she had no idea what it felt like to want to crawl away from her own body; to wish, as I had countless times since I began to gain weight, to be struck with some kind of horrible, nonfatal disease that would magically melt all my fat away.
When I got home from the lake, I immediately got online and put the phrase “how to lose weight fast” in a search engine. I clicked on one link after another, skipping the names of diets I’d seen my mother go on, ignoring the articles written by doctors who recommended that a slow and steady weight loss of a pound or two a week was best. I wanted to be thin, and I wanted it now.
I redesigned my search by typing in “how to be the skinniest girl,” and then landed on a site called “Thin Intentions,” hoping to find a way to get more immediate results. There was a list of “thinspo,” which was a shortened version of “thinspiration,” and it was filled with suggestions of how to combat food cravings. I could chew sugar-free gum or crunch on ice cubes; I could drink tons of ice water or hot green tea. When I did have to eat, I could cut my meal into a hundred tiny pieces and chew each tiny bite at least thirty times. There were pictures of perfectly thin women, glorifying the substantial gaps between their thighs. There were quotes that said things like “Hungry to bed, hungry to rise, makes a girl a smaller size,” and “Keep calm and the hunger will pass.”