Frenemies by Megan Crane Page B

I’d yet to meet a woman who didn’t have her own secret shame hidden away in there somewhere, clutched in tight fists by her sulking twelve-year-old child within.
    Georgia, for example, never seemed to care about her weight or her clothes size. She told me once she’d never in her life fit into clothes below the double digits and paid no attention to it anyway. She
enjoyed
being statuesque. And yet she hated her ankles. For years, she’d refused to wear short skirts because she felt her ankles were so thick that she ran the risk of having people point and laugh at them. It didn’t matter how many times you told her they were fine, either, she still wept over those shoes with ankle loops and considered herself deformed.
    Amy Lee, meanwhile, was obsessed with her thighs. The fact that she was tiny, had never worn a garment above a size four in her life, and had a flat stomach no matter what she ate or how little she exercised? She didn’t care. She was forever railing against the
tyranny
of bikinis and rattling on about
minimizing
her
thunder thighs.
    For me, without question and despite certain Oracle of Delphi moments concerning my own thighs, it was my belly. The belly that refused to turn into abs no matter how many crunches I performed or how few carbs I ate. (This obviously led to alternating phases wherein there were no crunches and only carbs, to soothe the pain.) Either way, the belly hung there over the edge of my otherwise fabulous low-slung jeans, rounded and spiteful, despite my best efforts. I was convinced the belly made me a troll. That it was disfiguring. That it was the
outward evidence
of my true inner unlovableness. No one could convince me otherwise.
    Helen knew about my belly issues. She would be able to glance at me, see the belly that damned me, and use it against me to play on my worst fears. And what could I use against her? She claimed to feel oppressed by her eyebrows, which was weak, to say the least. Eyebrows could be tweezed into submission. My belly just hung out for all to see.
    A glance in the bathroom mirror confirmed it: I looked like the sea hag. (Not
a
sea hag—
the
sea hag.) It went without saying that I also looked fat. My hair was mushed into vaguely geometric shapes, and the less said about my half-hungover eyes, the better.
    Of course
Helen was on her way.
Of course
she, out of all the people I knew in Boston, should get to witness the haggishness.
    It was just so unfair.
    So I cleaned like a whirling dervish for about fifteen minutes, which involved flinging the contents of my living room into my bedroom and shutting the door, and then attacking particularly egregious problem areas with a Swiffer and some Windex. After that I dove into the shower, where I held my breath and stood under the hottest spray I could handle. Then the coldest spray. Then the hottest again. When I climbed out of the ancient, claw-footed tub (the sort of tub that was only cool when it came with a matching, painstakingly renovated country house—otherwise it was just old and you had to use one of those handheld things clipped to a pole as your showerhead) part of me was shivering and part of me was scalded, but the bags under my eyes were gone.
    I just had time to twist my hair back and throw on a pair of jeans and a sweater that I would normally wear only to work but looked like the sort of thing I imagined Naomi Watts might lounge about in on a rustic weekend. I applied a strategic layer of cover-up to approximate the flush of health. I was arranging my magazines into piles—with the more intellectual ones on top, of course, and the weeks of
US Weekly
hidden below—when my buzzer went off.
    As Linus reacted with his usual hysteria, I had a moment to consider just not letting her in. She couldn’t actually
make
me open the door to her, after all.
    Maybe I wanted to talk to her more than I wanted to admit to myself. I pressed the DOOR button.
    Helen swept into my apartment moments later looking like