From Chapter Seven of my upcoming novel Fat Girl:
My week is a roller coaster. Just
after I reveled in seeing my first column in print in the illustrious New York Times, I received this lovely,
expertly-crafted message on the dating site: “U don’t show pics here cuz u a
cow. Moooooooo.”
My cheeks were instantly engulfed
in flames, glowing with red hot embarrassment. The involuntary reaction swiftly
transported me back to an equally humbling event from my childhood. I was
twelve years old and in the seventh grade. It was the first year that I
actually became interested in the opposite sex beyond playing kiss tag on the
playground at recess. It was during the week, a school night, and we were on
our way to some school function, maybe a band concert? In our haste, we stopped
by a local fast food establishment for dinner where I sat at a table with my
parents and my sister. Across the restaurant were three teenage boys, probably
a little older than me, I’m guessing eighth or ninth graders. I didn’t
recognize them, which meant that they were either already in high school or
they went to a different junior high than I did. In any case, through the whole
meal, I caught them staring at me and smiling, joking around to each other, and
then looking back at me. I sincerely thought they were flirting with me. One of
them was pretty cute, so I was flattered and, yes, even a slight bit twitterpated
as I wasn’t used to attracting the attention of boys.
My mother got up to take my sister
to the restroom while my father scooped up all the trash onto two plastic trays
and began to head off toward the receptacle when the boys approached me. They
dropped a napkin face down on the table before me as they exited the
restaurant. I flipped it over expecting a love note of sorts. What I saw was:
“Quit staring, fattie.”
Blood pumped to my cheeks like
magma preparing to explode from a volcano. I crumpled the napkin into my hand
and forced myself to act normally as my family returned to the table. I
remember feeling like my legs each weighed a thousand pounds as I plodded
toward the door, the weight of their ridicule pressing into my lungs. At twelve
years old, I was on the chunky side, but not grossly overweight. I was around 5
feet 4 inches, tall for my age, and I weighed about 150 pounds. I wore a size
12 in women’s clothes, having left girl’s sizes behind in fifth grade. That
particular night, for the concert, I had squeezed into my mother’s size 10 blazer.
I was feeling pretty mature and feminine as I believed the jacket nicely accentuated
my developing curves. But that little spark of self-confidence had been instantaneously
obliterated by three hateful words scrawled on a fast food restaurant napkin.
It wasn’t the first time that I
had been publicly shamed about my weight. And I knew even then that it wouldn’t
be the last. What to this day I could never understand was why or how people
could be so cruel. Many kids who are bullied run to their mothers, earnestly
needing the comfort and consolation that only a mother can provide when one’s
intrinsic value has been attacked. But I never told my mother about any of
these incidents. Sometimes the comments she made about my growing body were as
hurtful as any bully’s.
