And here I was again, facing someone who’d been through hell, feeling guilty that I’d been so shallow. But I’d honestly hated myself, had felt physically sick looking at myself in the mirror and hearing what people had said about me…
“Ari, mental health, trauma, and life experiences aren’t a competition. Dale has a form of survivor’s guilt. Do you think that’s shallow in comparison to what I went through?”
“No,” I frowned. “That’s understandable.”
“Exactly, and if what I’ve just heard was what happened to you, then those words have the power to really affect someone. I just need and want to understand what happened to you.”
What he said was fair, but I was still thinking it was like one person losing a limb while another person cried over a papercut.
Facing him, I got why he’d needed to buy himself time by taking deep breaths and why he’d fidgeted so much. Baring your soul was fucking hard.
“It all started when I hit puberty. All my friends were getting boobs and were seriously beautiful, but I had nothing on my chest and was… I don’t know, like a slightly feminine version of my brothers.”
Parker frowned, no doubt trying to think of me during the time I was talking about.
“Anyway, I kept putting on weight, and no matter what I did, it wouldn’t go away. I started running and working out, but I became self-conscious about different areas of my body. First my stomach was big, then my thighs jiggled when I ran, then I had that flappy skin under my arms, so I started working on toning them. When I wasn’t at school, I was working out in my bedroom or running outside.”
“I remember you being into fitness early on,” he nodded, his eyes distant as he remembered it. “I was staying at Jack and Colette’s house when y’all came to visit, and one morning you got up when it was still dark and went out running.”
That’s how I’d hidden how bad it had gotten. I’d started doing a lot of my workout when it was still dark, and my family was asleep, so they didn’t know.
“Yeah, that sounds right.”
Either he could read me more than I was comfortable with, or he was more astute than most because he focused on my face and guessed correctly, “You were hiding it from them.”
“They’d been trying to get me to stop doing it as much as I was, so I did part of it when they were asleep so no one would know.”
“What happened next?”
“I still wasn’t growing a chest, and when I say I was flat-chested, I mean I could run for eight miles in the morning without wearing a bra and not have any problems. I only just filled an A cup when my friends were all a B or C. I also became overly fixated on my nose. On my brothers, it looks great because it fits their faces. On me? It was just too much. I was looking up makeup tips for contouring around it to make it look more feminine and pretty, but I couldn’t get it right. All it looked like I was doing was coloring in a huge frigging schnoz.”
“Did anyone know you were going through this?”
Pulling at the hem of my top, I remembered my parents' faces when I’d come down to breakfast in the morning. They never pushed us to talk about things, knowing we’d open up to them. Well, unless it was terrible, and then you’d think we were at a confessional with all the shit that came out of us at once. At that stage, it wasn’t as bad as it had ended up being. The day I’d had the thought of killing myself, that’s when I’d told them all of it.
“They knew something was going on with me that centered around my chest and nose. You couldn’t miss the makeup or the way I was stuffing my bra, but my parents are really in tune with their kids, so they also couldn’t miss that it was something deeper.”
“But they never asked you about it?”
“Oh, they asked,” I chuckled, the noise sounding as fake as it was. “They would approach it from different ways, but I’d just tell them I was stressed or trying out a new look. I was always the least expressive one,” I admitted, struggling to find a way to describe how I’d been. “I kept more to myself and acted like nothing was wrong. Mom and Dad knew if they pushed me that I’d clam up even more, so they didn’t ask or mention what I was doing outright. They tried to get around it by asking about something slightly relevant to it, but not quite the issue itself. Does that make sense?”
Parker nodded thoughtfully. “A bit like when you’re driving, and the road you want has a diversion on it. You go a different route to bypass the area of the road, then rejoin it to carry on the original route.”