Lost In Me (Here and Now 1)

“What was it?”

“‘Lost In Me.’” She forces a smile. “But that doesn’t mean anything. It’s a seriously popular song.”

Maybe it’s not incriminating evidence, but it doesn’t look good either. “Go to my email first.”

She opens the email client and loads the “Sent” folder. A quick scroll through shows messages from me to several potential clients, vendors, future brides. When she pulls up my contact list, Nate’s name and email are listed, but a search for his email address gives us nothing from the history.

“Why would I have him in my contacts if I’ve never actually contacted him?”

“Let’s check the trash,” she says, moving the mouse to pull up the deleted messages. She looks at me. “Empty.”

My stomach churns, bile crawling up my throat. “I’ve never been good about clearing that stuff. Why would I do it here?”

“Because you were trying to hide something?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I mutter.

A search of my Facebook profile yields similar results. Nate is in my friends list, but we can’t find any evidence of correspondence between us. Of course, if we’d been having an affair, I can’t believe I’d be stupid enough to flaunt it on Facebook. Hanna is in a secret mostly-just-about-sex relationship with Nate Crane. I’m pretty sure they don’t have that option yet.

I want to scream. “I wish I were the kind of girl who kept a diary.”

“What are you ladies doing?”

I jump at the question and turn to see Drew entering the kitchen from the back door. She’s gorgeous, a younger, more petite version of Cally’s dark hair and sultry curves. But she’s certainly not dressed to impress anyone in her torn-up old jeans and raggedy T-shirt.

“Drew! Good morning!”

“Eh. If you say so. Coffee?”

“Up front,” I say just as the bell at the front rings to let us know a customer came in. “And can you get that customer while you’re at it?”

“Sure. I’m great with the public,” she enthuses, with an eye roll thrown in for good measure.

I ignore her sarcasm. “Thanks, Drew,” I say, and watch her push through the swinging door to the front of the shop.

“Let’s think about this,” Lizzy says. “Maggie says you met Nate three months ago at a show in St. Louis. That’s also around the time you stopped trying to lose weight and started taking drastic measures to be sure you lost weight.”

“Drastic measures?” Maybe the anorexia I was secretly seeing Dr. Perkins for wasn’t much of a secret at all.

“You stopped eating, took your one-a-day workouts to two or three times a day. Drastic. That’s also when you started pulling away from me.”

The truth is that my anorexia is more believable to me than the idea of pulling away from Liz. “You think I did that because of Nate?”

“I didn’t say that. I just think something happened three months ago and you changed.” Her eyes light up and she’s back at the computer, pulling up the web browser and typing madly.

“What?”

“Gossip sites.” Lizzy’s eyes scan the screen as she scrolls down with her mouse. “They’re in love with Nate Crane for the obvious reasons, and I bet there’s at least one pic of him while he was in St. Louis.” She stops scrolling and her shoulders sag.

“What?” I step behind her to see what she found. She minimizes the window, but not before I see the headline.

The thing about being overweight, for me at least, is that I’ve spent most of my life strategically planning how I’m going to lose weight and change my body. Most fat girls don’t like their pictures taken because they truly believe that soon enough they will be smaller, fitter, more toned—more aesthetically pleasing. No matter that I’ve been overweight my whole life. I wasted so much time and energy thinking about how to get rid of the weight that I never accepted my size.

Fitness people would probably say that’s good. They would probably talk about the dangers of complacency and “giving up,” blah blah blah. But they don’t understand that always hating your size, always planning to change, translates way too easily to self-loathing and depression. And every time someone takes a picture of a fat girl, revealing her true fat-girl form, it feels like an insult, an intentional jab.

But one hundred times worse than the pictures is the commentary, as if we must be reminded of this completely unacceptable shortcoming. As if we don’t spend the majority of our waking moments thinking about it.

My eyes sting as I blink at the screen where the picture was. Where the headline was.