Big Girl Small Read Online Free

have access to world-class medical facilities and are committed to our students’ physical and psychological well-being, Judy. I hope you’ll contact me right away with any concerns or if you need anything at all.”
    At lunchtime, they swept me away from the possible horrors of the cafeteria: my legs dangling from a bench, no one to sit with, some movie-worthy bully slapping my sloppy joe tray into the air and stealing my milk money. They took me off “campus” to Zingerman’s, where we all ate turkey Reubens. I chewed four pieces of spearmint Eclipse on the walk back and spat them out in the trashcan at the back entrance to the school. My parents insisted on walking to the door to drop me off, and tried to kiss and smother me as if I were leaving for a hundred years instead of three more hours of high school. But I fought them off and they left. I was desperately relieved to see them go.
    Walking back in, I felt less sure of myself, though. The halls were bulging with kids hugging each other, throwing books into their lockers, slinging on fashionable backpacks, singing, leaping. It was like that old movie Fame , the one that has no plot at all and is just a montage of beautiful people in tights, alternately weeping and fucking and frolicking. I chewed more gum. One girl was crying, and an absolute soap star of a high school boy was hugging her. I thought Spring Awakening , just knew they serenaded each other and danced through fields together on the weekends. Their life was definitely a rock musical, and they were probably engaged, or at least “going steady.” I felt sick, tried to focus on the student murals my parents had pretended to admire: swirling, spotted, punked-out zebras in rainbow colors, kids dancing, and a Greek goddess with her hair trailing all the way from one end of an orange hallway to the other. The lockers are all painted by students, too; one of the big bonuses of the place is that you’re allowed to decorate the outside of your locker, not just the inside like at most regular schools. It’s a big competition, of course, and there are stories of the most famous lockers ever, like Sophie Armaria’s. She graduated ten years ago but people still reminisce about how she painted herself naked on her locker, in thick, glistening oil, so that the combination dial was one of her nipples. The school didn’t know what to do. Did they “censor” her or celebrate her artistic freedom? Grown-ups are so idiotic. I mean, who cares? Finally they asked her (I’m not joking) to paint a bikini on the thing. She refused, and Darcy put some tape over the locker’s privates. Unbelievable. Sophie, apparently even more deeply in love with herself than ever before, wrote “CENSORED!” in black lettering on the tape. When I first started, people were obsessed with a senior named Amanda Fulton’s locker; she created a mosaic on it out of beads and glass tiles and photographs of her friends. She spent, like, her whole four years at D’Arts working on the thing. The photos look all 3-D, because she framed them and then broke the glass, so each face had at least a few shards of glass over it. It was incredibly cool, actually. I wish I were Amanda Fulton. Or at least one of her friends, framed for eternity (well, four years of high school) on that locker. Some kids who can’t think of anything better pretend to be above the whole thing and paint their lockers black. Others “tag” them with fake street graffiti. The truth is, the whole scene is a little fake, but I spent the whole post-lunch orientation meeting contemplating how I could amaze everyone with my locker decorations. Maybe I’d do something with tissue paper—make an enormous garden, blooming out into the hallway. Or a mint farm with boxes of Eclipse gum. Of course then everyone would steal it and chew it up. Maybe I would use marbles somehow. Was there a way to fasten marbles to a vertical metal surface? It was good I had this to think about,