Cruel thin lines

Chapter 2

All my childhood and teen years -in fact, until my divorce four years ago-, I was overweight, sometimes more, sometimes less, but I was always a victim of what is now called bullying. I had my groups of friends, but I always ended up discovering that they even criticized me in the back. It was exhausting.

When I started high school, I met him. Nicholas Vilchez. The most extrovert and beautiful boy I have ever seen, and also the most unreachable.

During the first three years I kept my platonic love secret, I dreamt that we got married and we had boys, I dreamt that he chose me over all the popular girls in the class, I dreamt, I dreamt, I dreamt.

I was always good at dreaming, I guess that’s what we girls do with such a social life, yet so restricted that we use our imagination and live a thousand novel lives.

The truth is that the one, who was supposed to be one of my best friends, spread the gossip like seed in fertile soil and my life from then on was a social torture.

I walked through the corridors and I could hear them murmuring, laughing, mocking, it was a calvary. But I put up with it stoically.

When I started high school, a classmate taught me to vomit, the reality is that I did it only once and it was enough, that wasn’t my thing, but I could notice that it was becoming trendy among my classmates. They looked so thin, but even so, they finished lunch and all went in “little groups” to the bathroom. Halfway through the year one of them had to be hospitalized and the school management took action.

My eagerly awaited fifteenth birthday was the worst experience I could go through. That white dress that my mother dreamt for me, made me look like butter bathed in meringue, or a cotton candy, well, for that matter it was the same thing.

Did I tell you I’m very shy and shameful? Well, yes, so imagine the torture of walking in with that white dress and my cheeks on fire to the beat of Bryan Adams’ Everything I do, I do it for you. The only thing I enjoyed was Waltz with my dad, I would have liked to press the delete button for the rest, but today, as an adult and seeing it in retrospect, I understand that the adolescent years marked me, I am who I am and I am definitely where I am because of that.

Many times I found myself making decisions based on that time, I’ve talked about it with Martha, my only and my best friend for twenty-two years and she always tells me to let everything take its course, that I’m stuck at that time because I suffered a lot and I can’t move forward. And that’s what I wanted to do yesterday, to move forward. But the reality is that today I find myself as stagnant as or more stagnant than in those years.

It was the prom, I had managed to lose weight, seventeen demoniac pounds I still had to lose a few more by the standards of beauty of that time, but I felt fantastic, for once in my life I could go shopping, enter a*****e and the saleswoman wouldn’t look at me from top to bottom, and then say in an unpleasant tone: “There is no size for you”.

I had chosen a grape-colored dress of a single shoulder, long and beautiful. I spent hours in a hairdresser’s, where I had waxed, cut my hair, combed and made up. I “suffered” all that because there was an incentive: Nicholas had asked me to be his date. I suspected that the decision had been his father’s that he had business with mine and it was like a courtesy. But I preferred to believe that he had done it on his own. Naive! That’s to be in love!

The truth is that he came to pick me up and we didn’t talk the whole way, which was strange, since he was an extroverted boy, but he was so restless and I was so nervous that I didn’t want to say anything so as not to spoil the moment.

Which moment? I wondered later.

Anyway, I got to the party and he just vanished. I sat alone for a long time until Martha saw me and didn’t detach from my side the rest of the night, except when I decided to go out for air while she was in the bathroom.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment, a group of girls and boys were talking about betting that Nicholas would have s*x with me that night.

Fortunately they didn’t see me, but I heard them clearly and I didn’t need anything else. I almost ran in to look for Martha, my eyes and breathing were revealing that I wasn’t well, and indeed, I wasn’t. Nicholas intercepted me at that moment.

“I was looking for you... Shall we dance?”

And since I had no better idea than to accept, when I tell you that a woman in love gets silly, that’s the way it is.

“You look very pretty, Eve...”

And I melted, how can a son of a b***h of that magnitude nullify my brain like that?

“Thank you,” I replied with a smile and lowered my face.

“Don’t be ashamed, you’re beautiful...” he said, lifting my face.

I think at that moment my brain resolved that it was too much and decided that I should act. I parted, looked at him, and walked to where I had been sitting. I heard that he called me, but I didn’t see him again. I took my bag, I whispered to Martha that I was leaving, that she shouldn’t worry, that I was taking a taxi; and that’s what I did, I left without looking back.

Luckily, I have never had to see any of my classmates again, except for the main reason for my sleepless nights, their presence at family dinners and other common commitments.

Most of the time I managed to avoid them and excused myself for reasons of “study” or because “I didn’t feel well”, but the reality was that it hurt me to see them and remember the trick I would have played if I hadn’t discovered it in time.

I never gave him the opportunity to talk about it, in fact whenever he wanted to get close, I didn’t let him, and I couldn’t face that shame and humiliation.

That secret was with me for many years, until once I was married I told Martha, who of course was furious for not having talked about it before and giving him what he deserved.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to suffer too much humiliation and shame, because soon after I went on a scholarship to Paris where I met Fabrice, my ex-husband.