The Fat Best Friend In A High School Rom Com

Maybe the popular boy she’s been crushing on since kindergarten says I don’t date beached whales. Maybe the mean girls get her hooked on diet pills, or Jenny Craig, or some cartoonish version of anorexia that sees her picking lifelessly at lettuce in the local mall’s food court. Maybe she just spends ninety minutes cramming brownies into her mouth—even in places where brownies would not logically be found, like the fancy boutique which hosts the prom-dress-shopping-montage-scene for Skinny Main Character.

I see these movies at sleepovers. When Fat Best Friend comes on screen, I hold myself still and quiet. I look at the faces of girls around me—the bodies of girls around me. Their vanilla stick arms, the hollows of their throats. All negative space and shadow where I droop and swell. Bright, poppy blues and pinks light up my friends’ faces as they watch. I wait for the inevitable: eyes darting toward me, the slight sneering curl of a mouth, low chuckles.

Maybe the issue of her unlovable fatness is wrapped up nicely when the chunky nerd from Chemistry class reveals he’s had a crush on her since kindergarten, and the two of them, bonded by fatness, share a chaste smile before scooching off-screen. Maybe Skinny Main Character finds Fat Best Friend with a finger down her throat, and delivers an impassioned speech about healthy weight loss before jetting off to tie up her love triangle storyline. Maybe she just keeps shoving brownies in her fucking face, offering a fudgy thumbs-up when Skinny Main Character wins Prom Queen.

The credits roll. My own thin friends prepare for bed, arranging their pointy, perfect limbs on a plush leather sectional. One girl offers me a spot, patting a single cushion with a smirk. I wave my hand, roll out my sleeping bag on the floor.

If there is one thing we Fat Best Friends are good at, it is accepting our preordained place.

Whispered gossip washes over me.

Danny Martin likes me.

I think Megan likes him, too.

Well, it’s not like she’s much competition.

Dude, she’s right there!

She’s sleeping. And she knows she’s fat, anyways.

Well, duh. She made herself that way.

I think about dressing room meltdowns, piles of too-small shorts. I think about my gym teacher, who made students line up and clap for me when I finished last during the mile, a symphony of slow, mocking hands. I think about Weight Watchers and all the ways I’ve tried to disappear. I think about how I can’t even eat brownies in public, because people give me that look, that same snicker my friends give, the Jesus Christ, do you really need a brownie?

The other girls fall asleep. Eventually, so do I.

If there is a second thing we Fat Best Friends are good at—it is dreaming.

I dream of Renaissance paintings, how full those women were, the plump flesh of an arm something over which an artist labored. I dream of recess weddings, when popular boys did not yet know my body meant I was unworthy, when my desk-mate married me on the playground, our flower girls throwing wood chips in lieu of rice, a pink construction paper veil over my face. I dream of chocolate milkshakes and filet mignon and Cherry Slushees and fried chicken.

As always, in sleep, my mind floats to that Rom-Com world of starry endings.

A slow song echoes through my high school gymnasium, decorated in twinkle lights and blue streamers. I stand in the center of the floor, couples moving beside me, some treading on the hem of my gown. For a moment, I am ashamed, desperate to sink through the floor or slink over to the dessert table, as Fat Best Friends are meant to do.

But in my dream, a smiling boy walks toward me. He puts gentle arms around my waist, rocks us back and forth. I rest my cheek against the smooth fabric of his tuxedo.

You look perfect tonight, he says. No one could compete with you.

I listen to the strong, certain beat of his heart, tucked behind layers of cotton and wool.

Don’t you know? he asks me. You are so beautiful. You made it that way.

Naked

Bird Brains