Wicked Jealous: A Love Story Read Online Free

is that runs the universe that I wasn’t going to binge.
    Most people, if they heard that story, would see how crazy it was, to eat until I made myself sick to my stomach. But for a little while I forgot that I was That Weird Fat Girl. I forgot that I didn’t have a mother. I forgot that my father spent more time living in a make-believe world run by a talking dog than with me. For however long it took for me to eat my way into numbness, I forgot myself.
    And I’d forget that I was never going to be able to fit into the robin’s-egg-blue satin dress, which I had found myself holding again.
    “Okay, well, if you’re not going to buy that dress, can I buy it for you?” Nicola asked. “It’ll be your birthday gift.”
    “My birthday was last month. There’s a whole year before September rolls around again,” I replied.
    “Exactly.”
    I knew what she really meant by that: that it would give me the time to lose the weight so I could fit into it. If only it were that easy. Nicola was my best friend, but even she didn’t know about the stash of snack-cake wrappers and cake boxes in the back of my closet that I threw out every few weeks. Maybe because of the English thing, Nicola wasn’t so into talking about things head-on. Instead, she did it in roundabout ways, with bribes.
    “I’ll even throw in the shrug for being such a good friend for letting me copy your trig homework all the time.”
    And more bribes.
    I shook my head. “That’s really nice, but no thanks.” As much as I loved the dress and knew that, had I lost a bunch of weight and removed a few of my ribs and then taken the time to blow dry my straight dark hair instead of just jamming it up on top of my head with a clip, I kind-of-sort-of-maybe would have looked a little bit like Jeanne Moreau’s shorter, squatter, less-pretty second cousin, it felt wrong to take it off the market. This was a dress that deserved to go places. To parties. On dates. For walks on the beach at sunset. (Although because the dress was so cool, it might find that activity a little corny.)
    It deserved to be worn by someone who had an actual life—not to hide out in a dark movie theater and end up with petrified pieces of popcorn on the butt. I put the dress back and picked up the Doobie Brothers T-shirt instead. Maybe one day that dress would be me, but for now it was concert T-shirts and cargos.

    You’d think that someone with the nickname That Weird Fat Girl would totally stand out at Castle Heights, but not so much. In fact, the weight had the opposite effect: as time went on, it was as if I was slowly being erased, to the point where I was invisible. Letting my long dark hair fall in front of my face and being given the nickname Cousin Itt after the character in
The Addams Family
didn’t help this.
    How else to explain the fact that, as I sat in study hall in the auditorium the next day, flipping through a book of the French photographer Brassai’s photos I had found at one of the few used-book stores on Abbot Kinney that hadn’t closed down when I really should have been working on my English paper about
The Scarlet Letter
(and why I thought the movie
Easy A,
starring Emma Stone—my favorite actress next to Jeanne Moreau—did such an awesome job retelling it), I kept getting boinked in the back of the head by kids walking by.
    “Ow,” I cried when it happened the fourth time as one of Josh Rosen’s many video cameras made contact with the back of my skull so hard it almost knocked my contact lenses out.
    “Oh. Sorry about that, Simone,” Josh said as he almost took out my eye with the end of a tripod. “I didn’t see you there.” Because they were so low on the social food chain, film geeks were generally very nice people, but apparently, I barely existed even in their eyes. Which, seeing that artists are supposed to be such keen observers of life, was a little alarming.
    “It’s okay,” I sighed as I rubbed my head. Maybe if I was lucky I’d have a