Free Life in the Fat Lane by Cherie Bennett

completely broken.
    “Fine,” I said.
    I sat there and he drew me, and the drawing was good and we pretended everything was fine, only it wasn’t.
    I had ruined everything.
    As he drove me home I started to open my mouth a dozen times, to tell him that I felt self-conscious because my medication had made me gain so much weight. To tell him that I was about to change medications, and that soon all the extra weight would be gone and everything would be normal again, and that one day I would want him to see me naked and beautiful, and that this was just temporary.
    But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. So I didn’t say anything at all.
    I just sat there like an idiot, clutching my purse, which had my Doxepin in it. Soon that same Doxepin would change everything and I’d be restored to the real me, and then Jett would understand.
    And maybe, after I was thin again, I’d even create a classical piece on the piano, kind of an answer song to Jett’s mom’s sculpture, and I’d tell Jett the truth in theonly way I could. The song would have no words, only feelings that I knew to be true.
    I would call it “Things I Can Change.”
    T wo weeks later I was off prednisone, and the Doxepin was completely controlling my allergies. Best of all, I’d lost five pounds. The beginning strains of my answer melody rang in my head. I really
could
change things.
    I was on my way back to being me.

I stared at my dinner plate.
    One half piece of plain bread. One half cup of fat-free cottage cheese. A colorful medley of raw vegetables. One small orange.
    This was my Thursday night dinner on the eight-hundred-calories-a-day diet, handwritten by my mother, now posted on the refrigerator. I’d been on it for a week.
    The reason I was limited to eight hundred calories was simple. It was two days before Valentine’s Day now. Since Thanksgiving I had gained another twenty-two pounds. If you included the five pounds I’d temporarily lost when I switched from prednisone to Doxepin, I had actually gained twenty-
seven
pounds.
    I weighed 158 pounds. God, I could hardly bring myself to
think
the number.
    I looked over at Scott’s dinner. Meatloaf. Mashed potatoes swimming in gravy. Buttered biscuits.
    The nightmare of the past ten weeks washed over me again, and I closed my eyes. I had been so hopeful, so full of resolve when I’d weaned myself off prednisone and had success with Doxepin.
    Then I’d started gaining again.
    We called Dr. Fabrio in a panic. He said the prednisone would take some time to leave my system, and I needed to be patient.
    My mother didn’t want us to be patient. She took me to the top diet guru in Nashville, who put me on a twelve-hundred-calorie-a day diet, and I stuck to it, too. Okay, I cheated now and then when I got so hungry I couldn’t stand it, but that wasn’t enough to make me actually gain weight, was it? When I was working out five days a week?
    And yet I got fatter. And fatter. After three weeks we called Dr. Fabrio again. He said that at this point my allergy drugs had nothing to do with my weight, and he urged me to seek counseling for my emotional problems. My mother told him that was absurd. So with great reluctance, he referred us to an endocrinologist—a specialist who could see if my weight gain had a metabolic cause.
    My mother called the endocrinologist, Dr. Laverly, immediately, but she had absolutely no openings available until mid-February. We took the first appointment we could.
    I continued to gain. My mother cried and took me back to the diet guru. She begged him to put me on some new wonder drug. He refused. He said I was tooyoung and not overweight enough for him to even consider prescribing drugs for me. Then he lectured me about feeding emotional hunger with food, while Mom nodded in agreement.
    I gained more weight. Photos of the thin me mocked me. I mourned for my old self the way you mourn for a lost loved one. And sometimes, when I got really sad, I ate. And then I’d hate myself.