Camp Utopia & the Forgiveness Diet (9781940192567) Read Online Free PDF Page B

hat like a marquis—as soon as the S disappeared, the P flashed across. PLEASE FORGIVE OUR MESS. I looked to Doug, who now checked his phone for alternate routes. Doug: so in love with my sister that he’d forgotten she deserved much better.
    Suddenly the minivan felt hot, crowded. Its doors seemed to contract, squeezing me tighter and tighter, pulling me closer and closer to Utopia. The sun beat down with no mercy. Macaroni curled all over the seat. Pink lemonade baked into the carpet. My eyes took in the construction zone, the wavy heat lines twisting above the asphalt.
    This bus was hellbent on fat camp, there was no stopping it. However, one couldn’t go to weight loss camp without weight to lose, right? Just like TJ’d said, I had a lot of people to forgive. I had a lot of weight to lose. The Forgiveness Diet made sense in a cosmic collision of desperation and marketing kind of way. It had to have worked for someone. Why not me?
    Who knew, right? Maybe The Forgiveness Diet was based on scientific fact. For every one person you forgave, you lost three pounds. Or thereabouts. Doug had to be worth ten pounds alone. Of course afterward, I’d have to maintain the loss, but forgiveness enhanced the results the way certain spices enhanced flavors. Maybe it sped up the whole process. Given my sitch, rapid was key. I eyed the chicken bucket on the floor. It looked delicious. I would try this Forgiveness Diet. Let’s see how tasty Colonel Carolina looked afterward.
    I didn’t have any glass fish bowls like they had in the commercial, so I emptied out the Colonel Carolina bucket by eating the chicken in it. The infomercial blipped in my brain. What were the instructions again? There had been that surfer, his slicked hair glistening in the sun.
    All I had to do was write down the names of the people I needed to forgive and what they needed to be forgiven for, and the weight would just vanish.
    Did this mean I had to forgive Doug for being a model douche?
    So be it. I grabbed a yellow napkin from the bag. I fished out a Zyprexa pen from the seat pocket. I wrote: I forgive Doug for bringing Jackie down.
    True that. For the past two years she’d been saying, “I’m going to dump him,” but it never happened. Now she didn’t even bother saying it anymore. I crumpled up the napkin and flicked it in the bucket. That wasn’t so bad , I thought. I can do this .
    I wrote down the people who had pissed me off. I scribbled every offense, every misgiving, and mean thing. Out it bubbled—everyone’s trespasses. Everyone’s screw-ups. I forgive my mom for being embarrassed by me . Bam. I forgive Terrel Bailey, Wendy Schmidt, Allison Continelli, Jeremy Connoll, Merry Rodesky, Piper Fleish, and every other loser at Magnet who calls me Beth Aint Thin Ny . Done. I forgive Victoria’s Secret for their too small bras. I forgive food for tasting so good . I wrote down my father’s oversight in Chuck E. Cheese’s. TJ’s blunder. Even the secret Jackie made me swear on a Hebrew Bible I wouldn’t tell. You bet I wrote it down. It took a long time too, writing everything. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. Long enough that I had to shake my cramping hand a few times. Just look at them all , I thought, after I was done piling the napkins around me. No wonder I’m so fat . And then I did what the commercial said. What TJ had said. I forgave them. Everyone.
    â€œI forgive you,” I said, kissing the napkin scraps tenderly before dropping them in the Carolina Chicken bucket. Then, just to be safe, I forgave them again.
    With the construction zone behind us, Jackie steered the minivan past billboards advertising Lap Band surgery and Burger King. Her tanned legs flexed on the gas pedal. Truckers leaned on their horns when they glimpsed her graceful profile and clear skin. Such a beautiful girl, my sister. Everyone said so. I could see it—especially now that I’d forgiven