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Jazzy wagged a finger at her. “Oh no, honey, that one’s a jerk. He was obsessed with me being fat, asking these horrible questions like if it jiggled when I walked and if I was constantly tired and how much I ate daily. His nickname for me was Juicy.”
Everly rose from her seat to toss out her paper plate. “Ew.”
“Yup. It’s hard to feel human when everyone’s fixated on your size.” Jazzy shook her head, sending her curls dancing around her shoulders.
Logan had positioned himself by the trash can at the edge of the deck, trying to work everyone into a few frames. Everly wasn’t sure if he’d eaten anything, so she loaded a burger, some chips, and salad on a plate and stopped beside him.
“Do cameramen eat?”
In the dim evening light, the blue in his eyes was bright and saturated, like shards of stained sea glass on a sandy beach. They hung on her face for a moment before dropping to the plate in her hands. “It’s not your job to feed me.”
“And yet, here I am doing it anyway.” He had to burn a lot of energy lugging that camera around, and Everly had never seen him take a break.
Everyone deserved a break. That was all she was doing. She wasn’t over here feeding him because she was so attuned to him at this point that she always knew exactly where he was and what he was doing, his presence heavy enough to take root in her bones.
Nope. It wasn’t that at all.
After staring at her for another second, Logan accepted the plate with a grunt that might have been a thank-you. “Now get back in the shot.”
“Aren’t I in enough of them?” It felt like she was on camera perpetually, even when it wasn’t a filming day.
“That’s kind of the point.” As if to prove it, he slid back enough to get her in view of the lens.
She gave him her best scowl on the way back to the table.
By the time her mom coaxed the group inside for dessert, the sun had dipped below the horizon and the night air had cooled. A reminder that no matter how warm the days might get, they were well into autumn.
Everyone was gathered in the living room for interviews, so Everly hid in the kitchen under the guise of doing the dishes. Really, though, she was eavesdropping. She needed to be ready to pounce the second her mother said something inappropriate or fatphobic.
So far, all she’d heard was cooing, which meant that her mom and Stanton had broken out the baby photos.
Wiping her hands on a towel, Everly peeked around the doorway. The two of them were squished close together on the love seat, a red book splayed open on their laps. Her mother’s eyes were misty as she swept a finger back and forth over a page.
“It was after her father left that she started to get rounder,” her mother said softly.
Everly’s stomach clenched. She didn’t want her mother talking about her this way. Like she was a victim of something. Like her fat needed to be explained away, blamed on something, excused. Her body did not need an apology tour.
Stanton nodded. “That makes sense. There’s a lot of research out there about the connection between weight gain and stress. I’m sure it was hard for her to figure out what to do with big feelings like abandonment as a kid, so that emotional stress came out physically in her body.”
Everly’s mother studied the photo album. Her brow furrowed, emphasizing the crow’s-feet along her eyes and the line at the center of her forehead. It was only on these rare occasions when she looked vulnerable that Everly was reminded how much her mother had aged over the years.
“I tried to help her.” Her mom looked to Stanton almost pleadingly. “I truly did. We went to counseling. The two of us and Everly’s brother, too. I made sure they understood this wasn’t their fault. That their father left becausehewasn’t enough, not because we weren’t. But…” She shrugged dejectedly. The movement was bereft of hermother’s usual poise and control. It jabbed at Everly’s center, jagged as it twisted deeper.
Her mom picked at the edge of the clear plastic that adhered the photos in place. “It does something to kids, when they’re missing a parent. Especially when that parent chose to leave. I’m not sure there’s any way to fix that.”
A thick ball of emotion pushed itself up toward Everly’s throat, and she pressed her hands to her chest as if that might hold it in place. Her mother’s words rang too true. It always felt a little like her grip on the people around her was fragile. Like if she blinked, they’d disappear. Maybe that was what happened when your father left you behind. You feared you were expendable to everyone else for the rest of your life. Because if one of the two people programmed by biology itself to love you chose not to, it must mean that there was something fundamentally wrong with you to begin with.
Grandma Helen’s death only proved to her that you couldn’t hold on to anyone forever. So Everly let her world get a little smaller. She stopped trying to fill it back up with new people to replace the ones who were gone. Who’d left her.
If there was no one around you, you couldn’t be left behind.
“When Everly started to gain weight, I tried to help with that, too.” Her mother pulled a new album into her lap. This one was blue, their photos from high school. There were less of Everly in that one than the other albums. The more weight she’d gained, the more her mother had tried to hide her. The fewer memories she wanted to preserve.
“How?” Stanton asked quietly.
“Showing what clothes would slim her down, counting calories together, going for walks in the morning, not keeping problem food in the house.”
Stanton was careful to maintain a neutral expression. “Did that help?”
