Skinny Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning and remembered the loss all over again. The dreams stopped, but the nightly chocolate ritual continued. It still goes on today. Briella didn’t know that in the end none of it mattered. The chemo made my mom so sick she didn’t want to eat anything, not even the candy bars I would sneak into her hospital room.
    Cancer was the ultimate diet. Nobody knew all that but me.
    “She can’t come back,” Briella says. Like I haven’t thought that every single day since she’s been gone? “No matter how much she wants to, and she would want to. She would have never chosen to leave you.”
    “What’s your point?” I demand.
    “My dad could walk in that door every other weekend like he’s scheduled to do. Nothing’s stopping him. But he’s as gone as your mother.” She blinks at me several times, and I try to catch up. She’s not talking about my mom. Not really. She’s talking about her dad. Obviously, the conversation with Charlotte downstairs hit Briella harder than I’d expected. To hear her talk about her dad is strange. I’d always just thought of him as the goose that always came up with that golden egg just when it was needed. An invisible goose.
    I don’t answer her, don’t know how to. Briella’s never talked to me about her dad before, and it’s obvious from the look on her face now, she’s regretting it. She backs up toward the open door.
    “I’m just saying you’re not the only one with issues, Ever.” She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear the craziness of actually having a conversation with me. “Forget it.”
    “She doesn’t really expect you to feel sorry for her. She knows you only think about yourself,” Skinny whispers.
    Who would feel sorry for someone who looks like Briella? My stepsister swallows hard, looks away from me. She’s said too much, but it’s like she can’t stop. “My dad makes it clear every single weekend that it was his choice to leave,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to lie around in my bed and eat myself to death.”
    “You think I want this?” My hands contract into fists by my sides. Suddenly, it isn’t about my mom or her dad. It’s all about me.
    “Yeah, I think you do. You’d do something about it if you didn’t. It’s not like you’re in a wheelchair or something like that. You don’t have to be fat.”
    It’s what every thin person in the world thinks. I should know. Skinny has whispered it into my ear over and over again.
    “People lose weight all the time.” Briella flings a ponytail over one shoulder and glares at me. “You eat less and you exercise more. It’s science.”
    “Don’t you think I’ve tried? Diets and exercise don’t work for me.”
    “Then do that surgery. I saw that actress had it. She lost hundreds of pounds. You could do that.”
    “And it will just magically go away, right?” Everyone thinks there’s a simple solution I just haven’t thought about yet. Drink protein drinks for breakfast. Eat only apples one day a week. Buy some jiggling dumbbell from an infomercial.
    “Yeah.” She leans in toward me, excited now with this brilliant idea. “They make your stomach smaller and then you lose a lot of weight.”
    “Or you die,” I say.
    She looks confused.
    “Sometimes people die when they have that surgery. Of a blood clot or some other complication.”
    “So you know about it?”
    “Do you think I don’t watch TV?” She is so amazingly stupid. “How would you like it if someone told you to cut yourselfopen and rearrange your body parts? That then you could be normal?”
    “It’d be better than . . .” her voice trails off, and she realizes she’s gone too far.
    “Get out, Briella.”
    “Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.”
    “Yes, you did,” I say. I want to hurt her back, and I know how to do it. “No wonder Lindsey is the popular one. You’re The Great Lindsey’s little sister, but who are you next year when she leaves for college? You’re