Free Queen of Babble by Meg Cabot Page B

until eleven at night. I didn’t even know that waslegal . Plus, he doesn’t even have his own place. We’re staying with his parents. And his little brothers. Who he told I was fat. Also, he told his mom that I like tomatoes.”

    “I take it back,” Shari says, “I’m not going there. You’re coming here. Buy a train ticket and get over here. Be sure to ask for a youth pass. You’ll have to change trains in Paris. Buy a ticket there for Souillac. And then just call me. We’ll pick you up at the station.”
    “Shari,” I say, “I can’t do that. I can’t justleave .”
    “Like fuck you can’t,” Shari says. I hear another voice in the background. Then Shari is saying to someone else, “It’s Lizzie. That fucker Andrew works all day and all night and is fucking making her stay at his parents’ and eat tomatoes. And he said she was fat.”
    “Shari,” I say, feeling a twinge of guilt, “I don’t know that he said that. And he’s not—who are you telling this to, anyway?”
    “Chaz says get your far-from-fat ass on a train in the morning. He will personally pick you up at the train station tomorrow night.”
    “I can’t go toFrance, ” I say, horrified. “My return ticket home is from Heathrow. It’s nonreturnable and nontransferable and non—everything.”
    “So? You can go back to England at the end of the month and fly home from there. Come on, Lizzie.
    We’ll have SO MUCH fun.”
    “Shari, I can’t go to France,” I say miserably. “I don’twant to go to France. I love Andrew. You don’t understand. That night outside McCracken Hall…it was magical, Shar. He saw into my soul, and I saw into his.”
    “How could you?” Shari demands. “It was dark.”
    “No it wasn’t. We had the glow of the flames from that girl’s room to see by.”
    “Well, then maybe you just saw what you wanted to see. Or maybe you justfelt what you wanted tofeel
    .”
    She’s talking, I know, about Andrew’s stiffy. I stare blindly down at the water splashing into the tub.
    The thing is, I am generally a very happy person. I even laughed after Alistair said that thing at the table, about me being a fatty. Because what else are you supposed to do when you find out your boyfriend’s been going around telling people you’re fat?
    Especially since the last time Andrew saw me, Ihad been fat. Or at least thirty pounds heavier than I am now.
    Ihad to laugh, because I didn’t want the Marshalls to think I’m some kind of oversensitive freak.
    I think I succeeded, too, because all Mrs. Marshall did was shoot her son an outraged look…Then, since I guess I didn’t appear to be offended, she seemed to forget about it. So did everyone else.
    And Alistair turned out to be quite nice, offering to let me use his computer in order to start my thesis, which I then worked on for the rest of the day, until breaking for a “curry supper” from the “takeaway”
    shop on the corner with the two elder Marshalls, the boys having gone out. We ate while watching a British mystery show, during which I only understood approximately one word out of every seven, due to Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv erter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
    the actors’ accents.
    The thing is, I wasdetermined not to let the fat thing get me down. Because despite what my sisters might think—and they were always more than happy to let their feelings on the matter be known to me, growing up—weight doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t. I mean, it does if you’re a model or whatever.
    But in general being a few pounds overweight hasn’t ever kept me from doing what I wanted to. Sure, there were all those times I was the last one picked for volleyball in gym class.
    And the occasional mortification of having to appear in front of a guy I had a crush on in a bathing suit at the lake or whatever.
    And then there were the dumb frat guys who wouldn’t look twice at me because I was heavier than the kind of girls they preferred.
    But