Free Pumpkin Pie by Jean Ure

a lot of fun, inventing parts that Deirdre Dobson could play in my movies. Old Fat Bag, Toothless Hag, Wizened Granny, Fat Woman in Bikini. I felt good. I felt strong. I would show her!

    I ate a plate of chips and a doughnut at lunchtime to keep up the good feelings, and a packet of crisps during afternoon break. Dad had left ravioli and Black Forest gateau – one of my favourites! – for dinner, and I ate quite a lot of that because Petal only wanted salad and Pip won’t eat ravioli on account of the sauce being red, so he just had a tin of sardines, which he disgustingly ate straight out of the tin, then went rushing off to do his homework.
    Round about nine o’clock I had a bit of a sinking feeling and nibbled some biscuits, but by the time I went to bed I was feeling really miserable. I do try very hard not to be oversensitive, like there’s this girl at school, Winona Pye (I know she can’t help her name) who just starts crying at the least little thing. I find that quite annoying. But it is horrid to be told that you are fat! Especially in front of all your classmates. It is really hurtful. I don’t care how much people go on about not being ashamed of your body, and saying how we can’t all look like fashion models, and that in any case why should we want to? They can go on all they like, it’s still horrid! ‘Cos the truth is that nobody, practically, I shouldn’t think, actually
enjoys
being fat.
    That was the night I made my big decision: from now on I was going to stop behaving like the human equivalent of a dustbin. I was going to slim!

A LL THIS HAPPENED at the end of term. I made up my mind that when we went back after the break I would be slim as a pin. Well, perhaps not quite that slim. If I starved for an entire month I didn’t think, probably, that I could get to be
that
slim. Maybe as slim as a darning needle. But at least a size smaller than I was now! All my clothes would be loose, so that I would have to buy a whole load of new ones. That was OK. I would ask Dad if I could take my savings money out of the building society, and Dad, in his Daddish way, would say, “Oh, you don’t want to do that! You can go into Marshall’s and use the store card.”
    I wouldn’t ask Mum because Mum was harder than Dad. She was more likely to say that I didn’t need new clothes, I’d just had new clothes. Which was true! We’d gone into Marshall’s just before Christmas. Only then I’d been
plump
and now I was going to be
thin.
Now I could enjoy the experience! I would choose all the tightest, brightest, funkiest clothes that I could find. I would wear crop tops! I would wear skirts that showed my knickers! I would wear everything that I’d never been able to wear before.
    Well, that was the theory. Unfortunately, when you have spent twelve years of your life as a human dustbin, it is not very easy to break the habit. Being holiday time just made it worse! I didn’t even have Saffy to help me, because she was away for two weeks visiting her gran. I went out a few times with a girl from our class at school called Ro Sullivan, who lives just a couple of streets away, but we are not all that close and it wasn’t like being with Saffy. I couldn’t tell Ro about my struggles!
    Mostly I just stayed home and practised voice exercises and dreamt about how it would be when I was thin. Petal was out every day, screaming round town with her friends, and Pip spent most of the time at his computer club or round at his friend Daniel’s, which meant that I was on my own with Dad. A fatal combination! For a would-be thin person, that is. Dad’s day is punctuated at regular intervals by what he calls “snackypoos”. Like every two hours he would cheerily sing out, “Pumpkin! Time for snackypoos!”
    At first I tried to resist.
    “I’m not hungry!” I would nobly cry (while in fact being
starving,
having done my best not to eat any breakfast).

    Alternatively, “I’m too busy!” “I’m working!”