My parents think I’m going to study group tonight. They would kill me if they knew that the car that I’ll be climbing into in the next hour belongs to Tripp Montgomery and not to a taxi company.
Picking up my Blackberry, I re-read my boyfriend’s response to the text I’d sent him earlier, asking what he thinks I should wear to the party tonight.
My teeth tug at my lower lip as my cheeks heat, and I drop the phone back onto my bed before moving toward the mirror hung over my closet door. Smoothing my hands over my top, I turn side to side, letting myself inspect the outfit I’ve chosen.
A knock sounds at my door, and my mother lets herself into the room without being invited. She never waits for an invitation.
Almost immediately, she scans me head to toe. Inspecting. Looking for a flaw.
“Sweetie, you can’t wear that,” she says with a shake of her head. Her disappointment in me seeps into her every word. As she crosses the room, she takes hold of my soft belly, squeezing it between her fingers. “It’s too small for you.”
My eyes move to the mirror, the same mirror that my boyfriend has made me stare at and tell myself over and over again that I’m beautiful. That I’m perfect. That my body is healthy and that I don’t need to look like anything or anyone else.
The mirror in which my mother now amplifies the very thing that she finds disgusting about me.
And I close them.
“Are you taking your pills?” She asks. “They only work if you take them consistently.”
“They make my stomach hurt,” I grumble.
“A stomach that hurts is a stomach that doesn’t hunger,” she tells me with a kiss to my cheek before moving toward the door. “Ninety pounds until your goal weight, Julia. You can manage that.”
“Mommy,” I call out as she passes the threshold. She turns, bracing a hand against the door as she meets me with an expectant rise of her brow. “What if I can’t?”
Her features twist into contemplation, thoughts visibly swirling behind her eyes before she looks at me again.
“Then I suppose you won’t be getting your car returned to you or joining us in Seychelles next year, will you?” She muses. A soft smile pulls across her face as she dips her chin. “We love you, sweetie. We only want what’s best for you.”
And then she’s gone, and I’m all alone.
Present Day
My hands smooth the buttery burgundy fabric of my dress over and over again. Fingers tug at the ruched sections, pulling and adjusting. Hoping that it will somehow sit in a way that it isn’t designed to.
This is the fifth dress I’ve tried on tonight, and it’s just not…
Yanking the fabric down the length of my body with a groan, I toss it onto the bed behind me, where the other failures of the evening now live, and I slip back into the plush pink robe that I feel most comfortable in.
This hasn’t happened to me since high school. I don’t feel bad in my clothes, but tonight, every single piece is wrong.
“You’re not dressed yet,” Tripp comments with a gesture toward my discarded pile of clothes.
Thanks, Lovey, for that incredibly observant commentary, I want to snap at him.
Biting my tongue, I shrug, defeated, as I pull the tie on my robe to wrap it into a bow.
“I don’t know what to wear,” I tell him. At the furrow in his brow, I add, “I just don’t feel good in anything and I don’t want to look as stupid as I feel. I really don’t want to ruin his night.”
Crossing his arms over his chest, he pulls in a considering breath. “You talked to your mom, didn’t you?”
No secrets.
No lies.
“Not recently,” I tell him with a shake of my head. “I think all of this talk about families just has a lot of things cropping up to the surface, and I’m…” I heave a sigh in the direction of my clothes. “I just have to get out of my own head.”
“It’s not you who’s in your head,” he argues, “it’sMichelle.”
