Chapter 35
10,118 steps. That’s what her watch said she’d completed. But the app said 2,811.
Willa narrowed her eyes at her phone as she sat in the car, waiting for Charlie’s soccer practice to wrap up at 6:40 p.m. She refreshed her fitness app and re-synced it to her watch and her phone, but the data didn’t change.
She felt her jaw tighten as she tried to calculate in her math-challenged mind how many calories she’d ingested that day, and how much activity she’d actually completed, and what that meant in terms of what she should eat for dinner that night. This was an ugly feeling, one she hadn’t felt quite so strongly since her days at the Ithaca Journal, before she met Pete.
While working there as a graphic designer, she’d been pulled on to a project on the news desk about a firearms manufacturer that was closing down after 150 years of employing the majority of men in a neighboring hamlet. Jake was the news editor in charge of coverage, and they became close friends after putting in several late nights — creating and reworking timelines, bio boxes, and demographic charts that could illustrate the economic devastation the closing was causing — and going for beers at the fake Irish pub afterward. He had sparkling blue eyes, a sarcastic streak, and wore fleece vests over button-down shirts, as well as a visor, even though no one had seen the sun there in years. She promptly fell in love with him.
Willa didn’t tell him, though, not even when he came to her and asked if he should dump his long-distance girlfriend, who seemed bony and boring. Willa believed she was taking the righteous path by giving him objective advice — “I think you should give her another chance” — rather than angling to make out with him.
When Liza joined the staff as a photographer, Willa was the welcoming committee, mostly because she didn’t want the newbie to feel as lonely and ignored as she did when she was first hired (a co-worker would later admit he’d thought she was a high school intern, so why bother getting to know her?). Willa invited Liza — who was hilarious and skinny and never worked out and had great skin — to go dancing and to shows and to bars with the gang from the newsroom.
As they became closer friends over the following weeks, Willa told Liza about Jake. So it seemed peculiar when, one night at the Green Stage, Willa looked over and saw Liza grinding her butt against Jake’s lap.
She’s just drunk, Willa reasoned.
She would later learn that Liza had started hooking up with him almost immediately after Willa had introduced them.
This floored Willa, who decided the issue must be her own body. That it just wasn’t skinny enough for Jake. So she ramped up her already grueling workouts and counted calories. She only emerged from that particular spiral when she met Pete, and saw through his warm hazel eyes that maybe she was just about good enough.
Tonight, sitting in the car at the soccer field, Willa called up Facebook and felt a little thrill when she saw that both Jake and Liza had gotten fat. And then she felt a little sick for being so awful.
Willa had always seen herself as an ally to plus-sized people. She was pleased when magazines started being more size-inclusive, and when Athleta began to use bigger models in its catalogues, she screenshotted some of the images and posted them on her Instagram with the hashtag #bodypositivity.
But the fact was, on some of her worst days, she’d soothe herself by looking at other women — soccer moms who hadn’t lost the baby weight, a woman in the grocery store who had a spare tire, a heavy girl who was panting while out for a slow walk — and thinking, “I’m so glad I don’t look like that.”
This felt like a defect in Willa’s character. It probably was. Sometimes she tried to blame it on her upbringing, how her father would say things like, “I don’t trust an overweight doctor. If she can’t take care of herself, how can she take care of me?” Dieting was a constant for her mother, who drank Tab and served sandwiches on tiny slices of low-carb bread. Gaining weight was bad in her family, plain and simple.
But the zing of secret, spiteful glee? That was all Willa.
What had sent her into a step- and calorie-counting spiral today was a photograph. Earlier in the day, FitFams had updated its website for the Atlanta studio location, adding images of the staff.
During the shoot, Willa had felt pretty good. She’d used Crest Whitening Strips that morning, and she’d blown out, flat-ironed, and beach-waved her hair so that it looked shiny and effortless and maybe even haphazardly beautiful, with long bangs covering most of her forehead. She’d created a natural look, with foundation, concealer, shimmer stick, brow pencil, light mascara, tinted lip balm, a dusting of bronzer, and some rosiness swirled onto her cheeks. She knew to stand up straight with her hands on her hips and her elbows pointing behind her, as opposed to letting her arms hang limply at her sides, which might make them look like slabs of meat. She knew to engage her core and turn slightly to the side. She knew to press her tongue to the roof of her mouth in order to tighten the skin under her chin, and she knew to open her eyes wider so her lids didn’t look quite so much like the ones on Garfield the cat.
“The photos are ready and up!” Coral, FitFams’ marketing lead, had emailed Willa. “Your team looks awesome.”
Willa had shut herself in her home office to take a first look at the site on the huge monitor she used for graphic design work. Splashed across the FitFams homepage was, of course, Dee. Her face, then sections dedicated to torso, butt, and legs, as well as her hard-knocks story, philanthropic achievements, and QVC products. Clicking through to the Atlanta studio page, there were group shots of coaches Jen, Jamie, and Ashley. They were hugging, picking each other up, riding piggyback, and pretending that the photographer had said something incredibly hilarious, which of course was impossible because he’d never smiled and clearly despised all of them.
Also on the page were individual, gorgeous, from-the-waist-up shots of the coaches. Willa hovered over each image to see their names, Instagram accounts, and motivational quotes (two chose words from Maya Angelou; the third, Lil Wayne). In the last row was Willa, alone.
As she examined the image, Willa’s breath caught in her throat. She zoomed in to analyze a fold of skin near her left armpit, a hint of a double chin. Was that a little roll over the side of her pants? Is this what she really looked like?
She hadn’t heard Pete come into the room. He looked at her stricken face, then looked at the image on the screen.
“You look beautiful,” he said.
She stifled her sobs as she pushed past him, grabbed her cross-body bag and keys and rushed to the car so she could get Charlie from soccer practice.
And now here she was, tempted to place her watch and her phone on the gravel parking lot and run over them approximately 46 times. But of course she’d never do that. It would leave her without crucial data, data that determined who she was.
She’d never be that reckless.