13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl

by Mona Awad

was busy eating my Oreo McFlurry, hunting for the larger pieces of Oreo that sometimes get trapped at the bottom, which I hate.

understand there has been no mistake. Three weeks after that, you’re paying

I even hazard a look at myself in the subway car windows on the way to work and I don’t immediately look away.

What we did in the half dark of his dad’s truck was a platonic arrangement, so that we would no longer be freaks to ourselves or the world.

The words rise in my throat like bile, but they don’t come out.

I could never in a million years picture this man finely slicing broccoli florets, chopping bacon into bits, then mixing them carefully with Craisins and grated cheddar and mayonnaise.

That’s fine, I shrug, feeling little bits of me catch fire.

“You’re very salady,” she says.

All afternoon I have the waking dream where she gets so fat on scones, she explodes.

Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our low-ceilinged studio apartments and still expand inexplicably.

We even have a girl we hate together: Probiotic Yoga Evangelist, this whore from HR. After we caught each other making gag-me faces at her Bikram Changed My Life speech, which she made between spoonfuls of Oikos in the break room, we sort of bonded.

I tell Mel about Aggressively Naked, this woman who works out at my gym who does all of her post-workout grooming naked.

It might have been the last time I looked right into a lens and smiled with no reservations, with no shame.