Ultrasharp Bordeaux shears.
Retail price: $79.
You know you’re some kind of nerd when you spend your first adult paycheck on a new pair of scissors.
But the right kind of shears glide through fabric the way a boat does along the water, creating shapes that billow like waves.
Thanks to my status as an official employee of the NutriMin Corporation, a couple of things happen. I’m able to afford my supplies for the fall semester at ASU without rooting through the couch cushions. I invest in high-quality pattern rulers, bobbins and tons of muslin.
And I can leave my job at Donutville. In fact, Lucy, my contact at NutriMin Water, pretty much tells me I have to quit. “You’re going places, Cookie. Places other than behind the pastry counter.”
At first I’m excited, but on my last day of work, there’s Steve’s face.
He’s got that “you’re like a daughter to me, don’t leave” kind of face and has made me a goodbye cake (yes, again with the cake) that is a tower of glazed doughnuts.
“You’re not too bad,” Steve tells me.
“Neither are you,” I say. We’re both sort of staring at our feet. “I’ll try to come by. To harass you. To make sure you keep things regulation size.”
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll say hi. If I see you.” He’s turned his attention back to the industrial mixer, where some kind of blueberry mixture that looks like it’s been made from the blood of sacrificed Smurfs is churning around.
I grab the paycheck attached to my last time card and start for the car. But I turn back, drop the tower cake on the steel frosting counter and give Steve a hug. He smells like clove cigarettes, and I notice all the tangles in his gray ponytail.
He must not get many hugs because he shuffles around for a few seconds before giving me a few awkward pats on the back. It’s the kind of hug kids give to each other at the end of camp. See you next summer. Don’t change.
But he grins. “Someday I’ll say I knew you when.”
“Yeah,” I say with a laugh. “Remember me. I may be here next week applying for my old job.”
He’s serious again. “You won’t be back.”
This is true. I’m leaving Donutville behind.
August 18 arrives.
The first day of school. Of college.
I am a college student.
The thought almost makes me giggle.
I try to manage it like any other day. I pack a lunch of apple wedges, cheese cubes and Diet Coke, and I’ve sewn a midi skirt from fabric I shibori-dyed with indigo powder Grandma brought back from Israel.
Also thanks to NutriMin, I’m able to afford a parking pass in a lot that isn’t on the dark side of the moon. Even though it’s hot, the walk isn’t as unbearable as it might be. Oddly though, the campus is under siege by insects. Every few minutes, my phone buzzes with bee warnings. Bees swarm the Language and Lit Building. Then the Memorial Union. Then they chase the coffee drinkers off the patio in front of Hayden Library.
The art building is wonderful. It has a cool, gray, concrete exterior, and inside there are students carrying oversize sketchpads and pieces of canvas. It smells of chalk and turpentine and wax.
I can already tell I’m going to love my first class. I can tell from the textbook alone—5000 Years of Textiles. Sure, the book set me back around a hundred bucks, and sure, the idea of fashion spanning all of memorable time might be overwhelming. But it’s amazing too how clothes have made men and women special through the ages.
There’s a whiteboard at the front of the room. Written in red marker I see Dr. Moreno’s name.
I’m picking at a hangnail and doodling on the cover of my notebook when Kennes Butterfield walks in.
Of course she’d be in this class.
She’s hell-bent on getting everything I want.
For someone supposed to be into fashion, Kennes is clad in almost nothing. Her microscopic shorts barely exist, and she’s wearing a tank top with straps the width of strands of linguine. I find myself rubbing my sweaty palms up and down my skirt.
Kennes slides into the chair in front of me. We glance at each other for a moment before she starts a conversation with the guy in the desk next to me who desperately needs a haircut. Soon, they’re in a braggish, semiobnoxious chat.
I hear the smack of flip-flops against the soles of feet, growing louder as it comes closer to our room. By the end of the fall, I’m conditioned to respond to that sound. Like one of Pavlov’s dogs. It signals that Dr. Moreno is near. She breezes through the door and takes her place up at the front and begins writing on the whiteboard. She’s got her hair in the same tight bun as the day I met her last year, the same makeup-free tanned face and another wrap dress, today made from a blue floral print.
Meanwhile, in front of me, Kennes is going full steam ahead. “So there we are in Paris and I happened to be chatting with a woman who’s an editor at French Vogue. So she tells us about this fabric market at Saint-Pierre. So we go over there and—”
“So. So. So,” I mutter. “That’s your favorite word. At least when it isn’t spelled S-E-W.”
Kennes turns around. “What’s wrong with you, Cankles?”
Her insult attracts a confused look from the guy next to me. I’m not as cankle-ish as I used to be. He’s regarding Kennes in a new way, like she’s not as nice as he thought.
Dr. Moreno also turns around. “Is there a problem, girls?”
“No,” Kennes says quickly.
“Cookie?” Dr. Moreno asks.
I want to say yes. Yes. That Kennes Butterfield is to fashion what McDonald’s is to fine dining. Or what Vanilla Ice is to rap music.
Kennes tenses up and has a worried frown on her face.
The truth is, I’m tired of fighting with Kennes. And Dr. Moreno is someone I really respect. I don’t want to be the girl who starts shit on the first day of school.
“No, Dr. Moreno.”
Kennes relaxes back into her chair and class begins.
College classes all seem to start the same way. There’s the syllabus. A big, long-winded speech about how and when to contact the teacher. How the grades will be figured out... I’m falling forward onto my elbows. My eyelids are heavy.
And then.
“Your first assignment will be making your own textile from a nontraditional material.” Dr. Moreno has her back to me and is pulling down a projection screen.
She’s got my full attention for the rest of the hour as she shows us clothing made of paper and used grocery store bags and waxy banana plant leaves. “In this class, we take nothing for granted. Beginning with Adam and the fig leaf, human beings had to be creative, had to look to their surroundings for their fashions. You can make your textile out of anything. But it must be from something you collect or find on campus.”
I’m kind of bummed when the people around me start packing up their bags as the class is scheduled to end. “Oh, one more thing,” Dr. Moreno calls out. “Make each assignment count. I’ll be selecting a few students for special opportunities throughout the year, and Juniors in the program will be competing for an internship with Stella Jupiter.”
An internship with Stella Jupiter. The idea is downright dangerous. I can imagine myself stuffing my bra with skeins of her epically rad cashmere and trying to smuggle them out of the designer’s iconic LA studio.
Kennes is packing up her stuff too. “I hope you know, I’m going to get the internship,” she whispers.
The mental images of luxe sweaters emblazoned with hooting owls and beavers reading books vanish.
Keep cool. Keep cool.
Keep it casual. I shrug. “I guess that’s possible. Your daddy could always buy Stella Jupiter. Or this university.”
Kennes’s face contorts in a rage. “You are such a—”
“Any questions?” Dr. Moreno interrupts as she drops the red marker on the rack at the bottom of the whiteboard.
I shake my head and leave the classroom.
Outside, I see Tommy’s sandy brown, curly mop through a slit created by a row of untrimmed hedges.
Walking forward to peek through the gap, I watch him, and for a second he’s exactly the same as he used to be. He’s sitting on a bench, bent over his backpack, chewing his lower lip and scratching on a notepad with a worn-down pencil.
For a moment I experience our friendship in a series of flashes. That first starry night at Fairy Falls. The view of the universe through Tommy’s telescope. It’s like nothing has really changed. The world has remained fixed and constant.
Some things never change.
And then I see her.
Kennes.
Of course he’d be waiting for her.
She has everything I want.
Tommy doesn’t look up from his books as she wraps her arms around his shoulders, but a smile creeps up at the corners of his lips. She scoots onto the bench next to him and pushes an iced coffee up to his elbow.
Kennes looks my way.
Her sticky, red-coated lips press into a smug line.
It’s the same expression she wore that first day on the plane. It’s the kind of face you make when you know you can take whatever you want.
They’re together.
And I’m alone.
Some things do change.
Kennes has become Tommy’s sun.
I’m icy Pluto, drifting at the edges of outer space.
No longer a planet. No longer anything.
I jam my sketchbook shut into my backpack and leave the art building behind, passing by the same things that, just half an hour earlier, were full of inspiration but now drip with drabness. Aging olive trees instead of lively greenery, oppressive heat instead of optimistic sunshine.
Food vendors line Hayden Mall. By the time I arrive at the social sciences building where my schedule says that Anthropology 101 is being held, I’m clutching a chocolate chip cookie, a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos, two Smucker’s Uncrustables Sandwiches and a Drumstick ice-cream cone.
A breakfast, lunch and dinner of champions.
The food accountant who’s had a small office in my head since the day I joined NutriNation is busy crunching numbers.
The oversize cookie alone means an hour on the treadmill.
The peanut-dipped drumstick is five hundred ab crunches.
The social sciences building is a low, squat, redbrick building with a cool, shaded atrium in the center. There’s a small fountain near a cement staircase and I take a seat on a bench near it. Against the soundtrack of trickling water, I rip into the plastic covering the ice-cream cone.
I’m just a few seconds from feeling better. From feeling full.
Kennes may have Tommy but I have chocolate candy coating.
That’s fair, right?
Except it isn’t.
I think of all the mornings I’ve gotten up before dark to run, of every carrot stick I’ve eaten, of every time I choked down a Caesar salad without dressing. This whole thing started because...well, because I thought that when I was thin I’d have it all. I’m a size twelve and people are no longer staring at me like they’re waiting for me to order a five-pound hot dog. But I’m still alone in the dark with my pals Mr. Corn and Mr. Chip.
Don’t cry.
Don’t do it.
The sticky white ice cream starts to run down my fingers. If I’m going to eat the thing, now’s the time.
Now.
Right now.
Except I just sit there and stare at it. Until the people passing by start to stare at me. Until I’m holding most of the ice cream in the palm of my hand.
For the first time, I realize that eating all this stuff is a form of self-defeat, a way of giving myself an excuse not to go for the things I want. As much as I hate Kennes, it’s getting harder and harder to hold her responsible for everything that’s wrong in my life. She’s not in the courtyard with me right now.
I take the ice cream in my hand and throw it in a trash can a few feet from the fountain. After washing my hands in the bathroom on the other side of the atrium, I take my seat on the bench.
It’s lunchtime and I am hungry. I open one of the PB&Js and the chocolate chip cookie, putting the rest of the food in my bag to give to Grandma later. Because it’s what I want to eat. Because it’s possible to have lunch and not have an emotional meltdown. Because a sandwich is only a sandwich and not a symbol of self-sabotage. And because this is what I think Lydia Moreno or Piper would do.
The fountain in front of me is a pyramid of river rocks with water spouting from a hole in the top rock. Someone’s put a sculpture of an odd ceramic head on one of the lower stones and a stream flows around its neck. It’s like a super weird, contemporary art piece. The kind of thing some snotty hipster would be pacing around and telling everyone how it’s a metaphor for the overconsumption of society or something.
I open my sketchbook and work on the assignment for class, using the fountain for inspiration.
I’m there.
Doing what I want to do.
This moment.
It’s going down as a non-scale victory, for sure.