Free Jemima J. by Jane Green Page A

suppress a growing wave of nausea. It’s Ben. The love of my life, and he’s with a woman, and she’s beautiful, and she’s skinny, and I hate her, and I love him. I love him, I love him, I love him.
    And I can’t move, but I have to, because I don’t want him to see me, and as I turn and walk away the cloud I’ve been floating on for the past two weeks disappears into thin air, and in its place it feels like there’s a large black rain cloud. I walk slowly down the main street, and call me pathetic, call me a loser, but I can’t help it. I can’t stop the two fat tears that work their way slowly down my cheeks.

Chapter 7

     
    p. 60 Jemima Jones is not having a good day. The rain cloud followed her home last night, dropping tears into her eyes, removing the hopes from her heart.
    She trudged down the street, aware that people were looking at her, and not caring whether they were looking at her size or her tears. Nobody dared ask what was wrong, and Jemima had never felt so alone in her whole life.
    She went home, back to an empty flat, lay on her bed and cried, and when the tears had passed she just lay, staring up at the ceiling, wondering why nothing good ever seemed to happen to her.
    I know I’m overweight, she thought, but I’m not a bad person. I love animals, and children, and I’m kind to people and why does no one ever fall in love with me, why can’t Ben see through the weight and fall in love with me as a person.
    Because Jemima knows that Ben is a good person. She knows better than most about judging books by their covers. She knows that people judge her instantly on her appearance, and she knows that people do the same thing with Ben.
    p. 61 Single women of an appropriate age do one of two things when they meet Ben. They either fall instantly in lust with him, or, if they suspect Ben is the kind of man they could never hope to attain, they choose the second option and hate him instead, hate him for being arrogant, vain, self-important.
    But we know that’s not true because we’ve got to know Ben a little bit, and Jemima knows it’s not true because she looked through his dimples and blue eyes (for she got it wrong when she described him to her flatmates, his eyes are actually the color of the English sky on a hot summer’s day) and saw that Ben, like her, was not a bad person.
    Ben too makes time for people. Even Jemima. He has the same winning smile and easy charm with everyone he meets, regardless of what they look like. In fact, the only time Ben is awkward is when he meets a woman he fancies, and then he’s not entirely sure of how to behave.
    Take last night, for example. Ben was wrong about having to take Sam out a couple of times before he would manage to sleep with her. Sam was a sure thing. Sam made this blatantly clear. Too blatant. Too clear. Her aggression, which became more and more apparent as the evening wore on, suddenly started to turn Ben off. He still fancied her, but could he be bothered, he wondered? Did he really want to go through the whole procedure of waking up in bed with a stranger who may or may not become obsessive? Ben got bored, and Ben said goodnight to Sam, although not without a long, slow kiss goodnight.
    And he was absolutely right not to have gone home with her, for Sam is exactly the kind of girl to get obsessive. She’s the kind of girl who regularly sleeps with men on the night she meets them and then wonders why they don’t call afterwards. But she doesn’t stop there. She phones them, and phones them, and phones them. She offers them tickets to concerts, dinner invitations, parties.
    At first they are flattered, what man, after all, wouldn’t be, with a stunning girl like Sam chasing them. But then they be p. 62 come bored. Where is the challenge? Where is the thrill of the chase? And inevitably they start making excuses, and Sam does what she always does. She shouts and screams at them on the phone, calls them bastards, like all the bastards