Keeping the Moon(2)
Author: Sarah Dessen

She loved her new, strong body, but for me it was harder. Even though I’d been teased all my life, I’d always taken a small, strange comfort in my folds of fat, the fact that I could grab myself at the waist. The weight was like a force field, shielding me as I was plopped into one new school after another, food being my only comfort through the long afternoons while my mother was working. Now, almost fifty pounds lighter, I had nothing left to hide behind. Sometimes in my bed at night, I’d find myself still pinching the skin at my waist, forgetting that there was nothing there to hold on to anymore.

My body had changed, parts of me just disappearing like I’d wished them away. I had cheekbones, muscles, a flat stomach, clear skin, just like my mother. But something was missing, something that made us different. I could build muscle, but not confidence. There were no exercises for that.

Still, I kept working out—doing aerobics, jogging, lifting weights—driven by the echo of words I’d been hearing for as long as I could remember.

Fat Ass! I’d force myself to do ten more lunges, feeling the burning in my legs.

Lard-O! I’d push through another set of repetitions, curling the dumbbell tight into my arm, even when the pain was killing me.

Thunder Thighs! I’d go another mile, running fast enough, finally, to leave the voices behind me.

My mother and I had become new people: even the pictures in our photo albums didn’t look like us anymore. Sometimes I imagined our former fat selves were still out there driving around the country like ghosts, eating bags of Doritos. It was strange.

Meanwhile, my mom’s classes at Lady Fitness kept growing, with women crowding in hip to hip to follow her gospel. Then the local cable access channel asked her to do a live morning show called Wake Up and Work Out. I watched her before school as I sat at the kitchen table eating my nonfat yogurt and high-energy Grape-Nuts.

“My name is Kiki Sparks,” she said at the beginning of every show, while the music built behind her, louder and louder. “Are we ready to get to work?”

Soon you could almost hear the hundreds—then thousands—of women across the city shouting, “Yes!”

It was only a matter of time before she went statewide, then national. The woman who’d hired her at Lady Fitness mortgaged her house to produce a high-tech “FlyKiki” video, which sold a million copies after my mom appeared on the Home Shopping Network and led the host in a five-minute Super Cal Burn. The rest is fat-free history.

Now we have a house with a pool, keep a cook who makes only low-fat meals, and I have my own bathroom and TV. The only downside is that my mother is so busy, spreading Kikimania across the country and around the world. But whenever I miss her too much, I can flip through the channels for her infomercial—KikiSpeaks: You Can Do It!—and find her, just like that.

Sometimes, though, I still think about us bumping along together in our old Volaré, me half asleep with my head in her lap while she sang along with the radio. And I miss that endless highway stretching out ahead, full of possibilities, always leading to a new town and another school where I could start again.

When the train pulled into the Colby station five hours later, the only person waiting was a guy with shoulder-length brown hair, a tie-dyed T-shirt, cutoff army shorts, and Birkenstocks. He had about a million of those Deadhead hippie bracelets on his wrist, and he was wearing sunglasses with blue frames.

I was the only one who got off in Colby.

I stood on the platform, squinting. It was really sunny and hot, even though the ocean was supposed to be close by.

“Nicole?” the guy said, and when I looked up he took a few steps toward me. His shorts were splattered with white paint and I was sure he’d smell of patchouli or pot if I bothered to sniff hard, which I chose not to.

“Colie,” I said.

“Right.” He smiled. I couldn’t see his eyes. “Mira sent me to pick you up. I’m Norman.”

Mira was my aunt. She was stuck with me for the summer.

“Those yours?” he said, pointing at the bags, which the porter had piled further down the platform. I nodded and he started after them, with a slow, lazy walk that was already irritating me.

I was immediately mortified to see the entire Kiki line right there next to my stuff. The Kiki Buttmaster, a carton of Kiki-Eats, the dozen new FlyKiki videos and inspirational tapes, plus a few more boxes of vitamins and fitness wear with my mother’s smiling face plastered across them.

“Wow,” Norman said. He picked up the Buttmaster, turning it in his hands. “What’s this for?”

“I’ll get that,” I said, grabbing it from him. For the entire trip down I’d imagined myself in Colby as mysterious, different; the dark stranger, answering no one’s questions. This image was significantly harder to maintain while lugging a Buttmaster in front of the only boy I’d seen in the last year who didn’t automatically assume I was a slut.

“Car’s over here,” he said, and I followed him to a battered old Ford station wagon parked in the empty lot. He put my bags in the back and held the door as I threw in the Buttmaster, which landed with a clunk on the floor. We had to make a second trip for the rest of the Kikicrap.

“So how was the train ride?” he asked. The car smelled like old leaves and was full of junk, except for the front, which had obviously been cleared out just recently. In the backseat were four mannequins, all of them headless. One was missing an arm, another a hand, but they were lined up neatly, as if they’d piled in for the ride.

“Fine,” I said, wondering what kind of weirdo Mira had sent for me. I got in and slammed the door, then caught a glimpse of myself in the side mirror. In all the confusion I had forgotten about my hair. It was so black that for a second I didn’t recognize myself.

Norman started up the car with a little coaxing, and we pulled out into the empty intersection.

“So,” he said, “did it hurt?”

“Did what hurt?”

He looked over at me and touched the right corner of his upper lip. “That,” he said. “Did it hurt, or what?”

I ran my tongue along the inside of my lip, feeling the small metal hoop there. I’d had it done only months earlier, but it felt like it had always been part of me, my touchstone. “No,” I said.

“Wow,” he said. The light turned green; we chugged slowly forward. “Looks like it would.”

“It didn’t.” I said it flatly, so he wouldn’t ask again.