I might have been a little crazy.
“Were you spying on us?” Caroline demanded.
“Garrett,” I panted. “You don’t want to do this.”
“Brin, what’s up?”
Brin. My nickname. The one that made me feel special.
“You can’t have sex with her,” I told him. Pleaded with him, really.
“Brin…” he started to say, and I could see his face turn red. He didn’t feel comfortable with my talking like that. It was too personal. Too in his business. I got that, but it didn’t matter.
“She’s not good enough for you.”
“You fat little piece of shit. What did you just say?”
I let the fat comment roll off me. I had been doing that ever since Garrett had encouraged me.Own your shit.
That’s what he’d told me to do. It was in that moment I’d decided my weight was my issue and nobody else got to tell me how to feel about it. Not Hank, not my mother. Not the other kids in school. Certainly not Caroline.
“She’s cheating on you. Everybody knows it.” It was a lie. I didn’t know if she was cheating on Garrett. I only knew she had cheated on other guys.
“You bitch!” she screeched. “That’s a fucking lie. Garrett. She’s lying.”
“Brin, what’s this about?” He walked up to me then and put his hand on my shoulder, and suddenly I wanted to cry. Because I was too young and too fat and not nearly good enough for him, either.
Because I was lying to him.
“She’s not good enough for you,” I muttered, my bottom lip trembling.
“Oh, jeez, does the little fatty have a crush on Garrett? Is that what this is all about?”
“Hey, cool it, Caroline. All right?” Garrett barked at her. “Brin, look at me.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t look at him. I knew that if I did I would seriously lose it.
“It’s not cool to spy on people. Or to lie, for that matter.”
I nodded. I knew that.
“Garrett, let’s just leave.”
I stood there while he made his way back to Caroline. Took her hand. She smirked at me as if to show that she’d won the battle.
I suppose she had. They were going to go back to her parents’ place. They were probably going to have sex. She was going to get to have him. For a time.
While I was going to have nothing.
“You should run a few laps around the track while you’re out here…might do you some actual good,” Caroline said over her shoulder as they walked away.
I saw Garrett tug her hand and heard him mutter. “Not cool.”
She was a bitch. She wasn’t nice or kind, which meant she wasn’t good enough for him.
Suddenly I felt this deep well of rage in my stomach. None of this was fair. Not the fact that my dad wanted me to be a boy, or that my mother thought I wasn’t good-looking enough to be her child, or that my one half sister hated me and my other half sister had too much going on in her life to really care about me.
That Dylan had just left me.
That Caroline got to have Garrett just because she was older and pretty.
I looked at the track and suddenly the idea of running felt great. Felt freeing. Yes, that was exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to run. I wanted to run until all this anger and all this hurt went away.
So I did. And I didn’t stop until I collapsed.
