13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad Page A

though there is really nothing distinctive about it. It’s just a change purse. Black leather with a little zip.
    I ask her if she’s sure she doesn’t want me to take her home, the bus sucks. She says she actually doesn’t mind it, that ever since she moved back in with her mother, she uses the bus for Me Time. Me Time for Mel has always been a dark fantasy novel and some ethereal dark wave on her iPod. It comforts me that this has never changed.
    I know she wouldn’t care for most of the things I listen to now but I have a mix I keep in the car of songs we used to listen to together, and I put this on for the ride. The track playing now is “Annwyn, Beneath the Waves” by Faith and the Muse. I haven’t listened to them in a while but now I turn it up.
    â€œI love this song,” I say, turning to look at her.
    She says nothing.
    â€œRemember the first time we saw these guys?”
    She smiles now at the windshield. “Yeah.”
    â€œHow we lined up at the door at like three in the afternoon because we figured everyone would want to see them, that there’d be this huge line, but it was just us? For like hours on the sidewalk waiting? No one else showed up until like seven.”
    â€œWe got there early to get a table. We always did that for shows.”
    I thought of how we’d just sit there all afternoon, melting in the sun, listening to the album we were about to hear live on continuous loop on our respective Discmans. Me sweating profusely in the mostGothic ensemble I could patch together at my size, which was usually fishnet tights worn as a top under one of my mother’s black night slips, Mel fully decked out in one of her Siren ensembles, lipstick black, eye makeup red and three times more elaborate than mine.
    â€œWe were cute,” she says now, meaning it.
    I want to talk to her more, but she’s spotted the bus in the distance, so I say okay, good-bye, and tell her I’ll text her later, but she’s already out of the car, running toward the stop.
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    Tonight, as I do my assessment in front of the mirror, it seems there are more truths to come to grips with. Sometimes this happens. How many there are often depends on lighting. Not on how much, but on how it’s hitting me, on how it’s hitting certain parts. Three weeks and three days left until I fly there. He says he loves me right now. He claims he already loved me the moment he first saw me at Underworld. When I first saw him I remember thinking I must have been at least three times his size; he was so thin and pale, he looked like he was barely there, like a ghost, like I’d dreamed him. I remember thinking he was beautiful, but I didn’t look at him very much. In fact, I looked at him so little that first time that when I was away from him, I couldn’t exactly recall his face. In my memory, his features were slippery, vague. His eyes kept changing color, like in the song by New Order. But he claims that he loved me then and that he fell in love with me before that night even, before he even saw me, that he loved me from that night 103 days ago when we switched from online chats about music to phone conversations about music and I would sit here in my studio apartment, my phone crooked in my sweating neck, enumerating the many reasons why I loved this or that band or book or film and then he wouldenumerate his. From even before that when all I was was a small, snarky post he saw on the Dirty List at three a.m. to which he felt compelled to respond. That was nearly a year ago, and nearly a year ago, I was much further from my goal indeed. Probably I was Mel’s size then. Now I’m almost half that.
    After noting my progress, I lie in bed in my studio, thinking of Mel while I eat a bar of 72 percent dark chocolate square by square. I picture her in her mother’s Misery Saga house filled with all those strange breeds of orchid. I