Free The One That I Want by Jennifer Echols

“What’s your number?” As he recited it, I plugged in the digits. After I texted him, he peered at his own phone, then typed something. I thought he was recording my info, but a second later, I got a text:
    Thank you Gemma!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
     
    I laughed. It was nice that he even
pretended
to be enthusiastic about me. I would take it. “You’re welcome.”
    As he tucked his phone back into his own bag, he asked offhandedly, “How’d you lose all that weight?”
    I stared at him, wondering what he meant by
that
. Lots of people had grilled me about my weight since I started losing. Usually they asked me why I was giving in to the beauty queen mystique and trying to look like every other girl. But he seemed genuinely curious, nothing more. No agenda.
    “I told my baton teacher what I wanted to do,” I said. “She explained it to me in mathematical terms. If you take in more calories than you burn, you’ll gain weight. If you take in less, you’ll lose weight. I got on the Internet and figured out how many calories I was burning in a day. Then I added up what I was eating. Cobbler has a
lot
of calories.”
    “Cobb— Wow!” He laughed. “You were eating a lot of cobbler?”
    “Yes. My mom makes it.”
    “Low-fat cobbler, or—”
    “In Atlanta? God, no. That’s your California roots talking. You probably make it with tofu out there.”
    He grinned and shrugged. “And sweetened with organic honey.”
    “Right. Around here it’s refined sugar, lots of butter, and a scoop of full-fat ice cream on the side.”
    He winced. “Often? Every day?”
    “At least. My mom is a great cook. I used to cook with her, and we would eat together. And snack together. And have dessert together.” I thought back to those nights when I’d felt warm and safe and way too full. “Sometimes we might have dessert together twice.”
    “I gotcha.” As he said this, he chuckled a little. Not like he was making fun of me, but like he really did understand the rut my mom and I had gotten into after my dad left, and how hard it had been for me to get out.
    “The other thing my baton instructor told me was to ask myself, ‘Am I hungry? Or do I just want something to eat?’ The answer with cobbler is always going to be that you just want some cobbler. You’ve already had dinner, so there’s no way you can be hungry.”
    “I could be hungry,” Max said.
    “Really?” I looked at him beside me, his legs too long to sit comfortably on the concrete bench.
    “Lately, yeah,” he said.
    “You’re burning more calories playing football than I am twirling baton.”
    “Probably.”
    “I haven’t gone on a weird diet,” I said in my defense, because I always had to say this to Addison and Robert and everybody else who teased me. “I haven’t even stopped eating my mom’s cooking. I just eat less of it, and no cobbler, ever.”
    He looked up at the skyscraper in front of us rather than at me as he asked, “How does your mom feel about that?”
    “I really don’t care,” I grumbled. Total lie. I was afraid she felt like I had betrayed her. But I couldn’t dwell too much on that, because I absolutely refused to go back to my previous weight. “I exercised, too, but that was easy because there’s a gym at my house.”
    “You mean, your mom buys a piece of exercise equipment, thinking she will use it every day, and it gathers dust, and eventually she makes you move it into the spare room? My mom does that too. There’s not much butter in Japan, and apparently she went hog wild when she first came to America. Butter, and then loaf bread, and then she discovered mayonnaise. She seemed to have gotten a handle on it, but then we moved to Atlanta and there were biscuits.”
    I laughed and said, “Just keep her away from the cobbler.” But when I’d said there was a gym at my house, I hadn’t meant my mom bought exercise equipment. I’d meant that my house contained a gym. It was a big house.
    He must have read my