Dumplin' (Dumplin', #1)

by Julie Murphy

She’d call us her bee-utiful girls and take us for hot chocolate on Mondays, because Fridays didn’t deserve all the attention.

“A Magic 8 Ball,” he says. A smile spreads across my face. I feel silly. “Well, I’ll never feel the burden of decision again.”

I think maybe it’s the things we don’t want to talk about that are the things people most want to hear.

“I don’t know. I think you gotta be who you want to be until you feel like you are whoever it is you’re trying to become. Sometimes half of doing something is pretending that you can.”

I follow him up the walkway to the front door, which has a hand-painted sign hanging from it that says: Unless you’re selling cookies, no soliciting, please.

Maybe fat girls or girls with limps or girls with big teeth don’t usually win beauty pageants. Maybe that’s not the norm. But the only way to change that is to be present. We can’t expect the same things these other girls do until we demand it. Because no one’s lining up to give us shit, Will.”

There’s something about swimsuits that make you think you’ve got to earn the right to wear them. And that’s wrong. Really, the criteria is simple. Do you have a body? Put a swimsuit on it.

I guess sometimes the perfection we perceive in others is made up of a whole bunch of tiny imperfections, because some days the damn dress just won’t zip.

The fat kids, the skinny kids, the tall ones, the short ones, and everybody in between: I am so thankful that not a single one of us is the exact same. What a boring world that would be.