Free Fat Girl Walking: Sex, Food, Love, and Being Comfortable in Your Skin…Every Inch of It by Brittany Gibbons Page B

there on your porch wanting to kiss you.”
    “Well, that’s unfortunate.” My faced burned and I felt an actual shift inside my body, as if room were suddenly being made to accommodate all the feelings that were bouncing around in my stomach between the Egg McMuffin and hash browns. “I don’t kiss boys who listen to rap music.”
    And that was actually true. My mom’s best friends were her partners in the dog show circuit, Jon and Casey. Casey did the grooming, Jon did the showing, and my mom turned our attached garage into a working kennel. I loved tagging along with her to their home in southern Michigan, because while she and Jon, a hairy Greek man who reminded me of a character from Taxi, talked business, I got to hang out with Casey. Casey was in his forties with a receding hairline and thin mustache. He wore kimonos around the house, offered me hand-rolled cigarettes, and had a giant white cockatoo that cursed in French and drank scotch from a lowball glass. He also gave the absolute best life advice, and loved gossiping with me about the mean girls in my school, which was exciting, because usually fat girls don’t get their gay best friends until they try to turn them straight in college.
    “Between you and me,” he’d whisper, leaning in, shaking the ice around in his glass as we sat cross-legged on the long white leather couches of his living room, “Andrea sounds like a giant cunt, and if I were you, I’d tell her that right to her face.”
    “Oh sweetie, you don’t want to be homeschooled,” he’d coo to me as I’d cry on the phone at ten o’clock on a school night. “Homeschooling is for trolls and people who start churches with onlytheir family as members; you have so much potential and great eyebrows.”
    “Chubby girls have great boobs. Have your mom buy you a bra with an underwire instead of this elastic undershirt crap from the k.d. lang collection,” he’d quip before storming out of the mall dressing room full of ill-fitting homecoming dresses.
    And it was from Casey that I received perhaps some of the greatest relationship rules ever.
              1    Never date a boy who listens to rap music and makes you call him by his white rapper name.
              2    If the first kiss is bad, the second will be way worse.
              3    A good night cream is more important than air.
              4    Nothing saves a Keanu Reeves movie except a well-timed hand job.
              5    Hickeys are for truck drivers with jealous wives.
              6    If a boy tells you he is gay, believe him, believe him, believe him.
    At the red light at Main Street and Cherry, I broke rule number one. And a few months later, rule number four, but to be fair, A Walk in the Clouds was a really lame movie.
CITY MOUSE FAT COUNTRY MOUSE
    I was Andy’s first real girlfriend, so bringing me home to meet his parents was a big deal. He lived in a pretty brick home on a wooded street uptown. Not that Swanton was a metropolis, but there was marked difference between the people who lived in town with lawn service and access to city water, and we country folk who got our water from underground wells and mowed our lawns with actual tractors. Dressing for this experience washard, as his family was decidedly fancier than my own. His father worked in IT and his mother in real estate. I hadn’t seen her since the day she’d picked him up from my house after the accident, but she drove a new car and had a vanity license plate, two things I equated with very rich people.
    I had saved my babysitting money to buy a cute men’s red plaid windbreaker from the Gap, and was going through a phase where I wore it with everything, no matter the weather. If it was hot, I pulled it over my head with shorts and brown leather sandals. If it was cold, I wore it with jeans and platform shoes. I rationalized this by thinking I looked thinner hiding my midsection and arms