Free Big Girl: How I Gave Up Dieting and Got a Life by Kelsey Miller Page B

Maureen and Dave. Handing me Small after Small, she grinned with real pride, unable to take her eyes off me.
    “You did it.”
    But I’d needed her help to do it. And though I wanted that contract more than anything, nothing could have felt better than her smiling eyes on me. After the food policing and the failure, we’d finally done it, together. She’d washed and chopped my cucumbers into wedges, and I’d eaten them and only them each afternoon. I’d been good and now I was Good, just like those cucumbers. So, here we were shopping like a real mother and daughter. Like Sam and her mom. I was crystallized with joy, Buzzing like I never would again in my life.
    There was a slightly delayed reaction at school. My classmates had looked past me every day for years, but once I turned up in my newly cinched uniform and belly-grazing tops, rumblings began as to whether my status as Officially Gross should be reconsidered. With just days approaching my next appointment with Rainbow, I began to let the news leak to a wider audience (for example: everyone I spoke to over the course of a day). This, combined with my new not-fatness, meant that I was someone to talk to, someone to pick for your dodgeball team. Overnight, I’d become a girl instead of a sexless beach ball in a skirt. Literally, every single thing was better now that I was thin.
    “So, I’m actually going to sign with a manager,” I told Sam one day in Science. I spoke to Sam Fairchild; that’s how high I was on skinny.
    “Cool. Which?”
    “Rainbow Management?” She looked up into the middle distance for a second, then back down at her Trapper Keeper.
    “Huh. I don’t know them. That’s great, though.”
    “Yeah. They do mostly TV and film stuff, but also Broadway.”
    She shifted an inch in her seat to half-face me, because I’d insisted on making this a conversation. “I’d like to do Broadway, I think. But movies too, of course,” I added.
    She shrugged. “Broadway’s not my thing.”
    “Are you doing anything now? I mean, what are you doing right now?”
    “Um, just some callbacks. And I have this Noxzema campaign coming up.”
    She talked as if booking a national skin-care campaign at the age of eleven wasn’t a particularly thrilling achievement. This Noxzema thing, it was a B+.
    “Is that Frigid?” She pointed her chin at my hand where I’d painted my fingernails in silvery blue the night before.
    “Yeah, I just got it.”
    Frigid was the unrivaled star of my Hard Candy nail polish collection. The pastel polish trend was so universally identified with Sam that anyone with baby blue nails would immediately be pegged as a follower. Still desperately covetous of the look, I had opted to buy a set of Hard Candy pastel metallic shades, dropping all my remaining Christmas cash on six twelve-dollar bottles. The outrageous price was partially justified by the gummy rubber ring that came wrapped around every bottle cap. My fingers had always been too pudgy to comfortably wear them, and though every other part of me was now whittled down to an acceptable size, they remained the last bastion of my chubby past. Nevertheless, I jammed the rubber bauble down my right ring finger daily, and now stared in tingly awe at our nearly matching hands: Sam’s painted in neat, matte Sky, and mine in three sloppy coats of shiny, light blue Frigid. She reached over and grabbed my fingers for examination.
    “God, you get right up there to the cuticle edge.”
    To this day, I don’t know if this was a compliment or a dig, but I think of it every time I paint my nails.
    At recess that day, as I regaled another group of sudden friends with the details of my upcoming Broadway career, Sam bopped over and yanked me up by the wrist.
    “We need another player.”
    The game was something to do with bouncing a ball in the right chalk square, and though I’d seen kids play it hundreds of times while I sat folding origami cranes or reading on the grass, I had no idea