Life in the Fat Lane Read Online Free Page A

made love, and one day I looked at Danny and I thought: No. You’re not the one.
    How can you explain something like that?
    But still, I didn’t break up with him. I liked him a lot, I didn’t want to hurt him, and I didn’t want him to be mad at me.
    So we just went on. And maybe we would have gone on forever if it hadn’t been for Jett.
    Jett and I had discovered each other in July, when three generations of my family had gone on vacation, compliments of my rich grandfather, to Sea Pines, this ritzy resort on Hilton Head Island, off the coast of South Carolina. I had a sexy new white bikini, and right after we’d checked in, I put it on and went to the beach.
    By pure chance Jett Anston, who was a year ahead of me at Forest Hills High, was a summer lifeguard there.
    We had seen each other around school, but we didn’t know each other, exactly. I knew
about
him, though. Jett’s move to Nashville the year before had been reported in
The Tennessean
. Not because of him. Because of his mother, Anastasia Anston, the sculptor. Her famous piece,
Embrace
, a huge marble abstract of a mother, father, and baby, was in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Now she was artist-in-residence at Vanderbilt University.
    Jett was an artist, too. I had seen his watercolor thathad won the Metro schools art contest—a homeless man playing a battered guitar as a plain little girl looked up at a huge billboard of gorgeous Shania Twain.
    I’d never met anyone like Jett before. He wore his self-confidence like an old shirt: comfortable, a perfect fit, no need to impress anyone. He had a ponytail—
all
the other guys I knew had cut theirs short. He wore cowboy boots—every other guy wore sneakers or work boots.
    His parents had named Jett after the character James Dean had played in the movie
Giant
, and Jett seemed like a character out of a movie: quiet, mysterious, deep. Tall and very thin, dark-haired and dark-eyed, he wasn’t nearly as gorgeous as Danny. But he had this … thing. This intensity, this heat. Like he was looking right through you, seeing you naked, finding out all your secrets.
    And you liked it.
    Jett had already been at Hilton Head for three weeks when I got there. He’d lifeguard by day, and at night he’d draw. I was told this by another lifeguard, Heather Something-or-other, who also told me that she and Jett were a couple.
    As in “hands off.”
    But that night it was me, not Heather, Jett invited to walk with him on the beach. We built a driftwood fire and Jett drew my portrait by the light of the flames, his beautiful, slender hands flying over his sketchpad while I wondered what those hands would feel like on me.
    Then Jett talked me into playing piano for him in the resort center. After that, we went back to the beach and talked. I lost all track of time; I didn’t care.
    We were still there when the sun came up.
    Nothing mattered but me and Jett and the total perfection of being in his arms.
    The first time he kissed me that night, I knew. Danny was over. Jett was the one I had been waiting for.
    By the time school started, we were madly in love. All my friends thought I was crazy, giving up Danny for Jett. Even Mrs. Armstrong felt that Jett was not helpful to what she called “a winning pageant image.” I loved Jett too much to care.
    The only really bad part had been breaking up with Danny. He cried, which made me cry. I hated myself for hurting him, but not enough not to do it. So, when Danny told everyone
he
had broken up with
me
—to save his own rep, I suppose—I was glad. No one would hate me for us ending.
    As Danny smiled at me, Jett’s arms were still securely wrapped around my slender waist. “Hi, Danny,” I said.
    “So, you look great,” Danny said.
    “Thanks. Where’s Candy?” I knew he was dating a cheerleader, Candy Bingham.
    “Around here somewhere,” he said vaguely. He thrust his hands in the pockets of his dinner jacket. “It looks