Filed to story: Kissing the Wrong Brother
I start to grab a Coke from the fridge, then hesitate as I imagine Miles St. Claire’s glare. I grab a Diet Coke instead.
I don’t care about being skinny. Not that much, anyway.
But I am tired of feeling out of control.
Granted, a sugar-substitute beverage is not going to help me take over the world or anything, but still, it feels like progress.
Baby steps, right?
I head out to the pool, watching from the chaise longue as the last of the daylight fades away, when someone plops down on the chair beside me.
“Hey, Ari.”
Ben.
Just like that, all the tension and headache melts away.
He and I don’t often get time alone.
Okay, hardly ever.
But every now and then he seems to remember that we were friends long before my sister even knew he was alive, and I get rewarded with moments like these.
Kylie-free moments.
“Hey,” I say softly as he stretches out his legs on the chaise. He’s wearing green cargo shorts and I try hard not to stare at the shape of his calves, I swear, but I look anyway.
Why is he so beautiful? And why do I have to notice?
“Where’s Kylie?” I ask, trying to remind my lust-addled brain that Ben is not for me.
I try to force my mouth to stop watering. It’s just his legs, for Christ’s sake. Hairy legs. Male hair is practically pubes … which so does not help my train of thought.
“On the phone,” he replies. “One of her sorority sisters is having some sort of crisis.”
“Probably a highlighting appointment gone wrong,” I say, pulling my legs up to my chest and wrapping my arms around my knees until I remember that I’m wearing shorts and that the fat white underside of my thighs is exposed. I quickly extend my legs straight out, but that sort of makes the leg fat spread out like a beached whale.
Lose-lose.
I sigh and try to forget about it.
Ben’s not paying any attention to my legs (of course), but he idly reaches out to take a sip of my Coke only to wince and make a face at it. “Diet?”
“Mom buys it for Kylie.”
“So why are you drinking it? You run out of the real stuff?”
I don’t know if I love that Ben’s totally ignorant, or if I’m totally annoyed by it.
I mean, on one hand I guess it says a lot about him that he doesn’t automatically assume that I’m drinking Diet Coke because I need to, well … diet.
But on the other hand, come on, dude. You don’t think a girl with a few extra pounds isn’t highly aware that the nondiet stuff isn’t going to make her look good in a pair of skinny jeans any faster?
I open my mouth to tell him this, but I hesitate.
Ben and I haven’t talked about anything that personal in a long time.
And I know that some people think the Holy Grail of friendship is being able to sit in comfortable silence with another person, and Ben and I have always had that, which I’m grateful for.
But I don’t fool myself into thinking we’re besties.
Once upon a time, I told him everything, and he told me as much as an eleven-year-old boy is likely to tell anyone.
But lately?
Lately I’ve been wondering if Ben doesn’t still think of me as my ten-year-old self, because there’s so much he doesn’t know about the grown-up Aria.
He doesn’t know that the bold preteen he once knew who pretended she didn’t care what other people thought of her is having a harder and harder time holding on to that illusion.
He doesn’t know that twenty-one-year-old Aria has more than a couple self-esteem issues, one of them centering around that Diet Coke can that he’s commandeered.
And he definitely doesn’t know that grown-up Aria has grown-up feelings for him.
I don’t have a clue how to tell him that this brother-sister thing he thinks we have going on is pure agony.
And since I can’t tell him how I feel, I tell him something else instead.
Because maybe it’s time to revisit the bold, say-anything Aria.
“I went with diet over regular because there’s fewer calories,” I blurt out, my gaze locked on the unmoving blue water of my parents’ pool.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see his hand falter in the process of taking a sip of the Diet Coke, and he turns to look at my profile, and then … horror … I see his eyes briefly run over my body.
My soft, untoned, prefers-real-Coke body.
I resist the urge to cover up, but I do suck in my belly. Just a little.
“Ari-” His voice is a horrifying mixture of surprise and dismay.
“Don’t,” I mutter.
“Don’t what?”
I turn to meet his familiar blue eyes. “Don’t be all nice to me about this. I know kind is written into your DNA, and that’s usually super charming, but I know what I look like, okay? I’m no Kylie.”
He opens his mouth and shuts it just as quickly, and because I know him-because I know Ben Carson so freaking well-I know what he was going to say.
I like you the way you are.
But he can’t say that, because he’s not dating the girl with the soft thighs; he’s dating the one with the skinny, toned ones.
He may very well like me just the way I am.
But he doesn’t like like me just the way I am.
Not like he likes Kylie.
And for the first time, it occurs to me that maybe Ben’s not quite so unaware of my little crush as I’d imagined.
The thought bugs.
And then an even worse horror occurs to me: What if Kylie knows?
What if she knows that I’m breaking the ultimate sister code? What if she and Ben talk about it in the oh, poor chubby Aria kind of way?
My face burns at the prospect, although not with embarrassment so much as shame.
Is this what I’ve let myself become?
Really?
I’m terrified that it is.
At school I can fool myself into thinking that I’m in control; that I’m at the helm of my own future.
But back home in Cedar Grove, where everyone overlooks Kylie’s imperfections and where the boy I’ve always adored pops in and out of my life in an ever-platonic nightmare, am I really in control?
Or am I just a passive spectator of my own life?
God.
I am.
That stupid Miles St. Claire and his smug lecturing about my out-of-shapeness being a symptom of my lack of control over my own life is freaking true.
I’m not one of those girls dumb enough to think that a certain number on the scale or certain size on my dress label is going to bring all kinds of happiness. I mean, my sister is a stick and sometimes when she thinks nobody’s watching, she looks thirty seconds away from a breakdown.
But I am sick of feeling like food controls me.
The ice cream and the candy and the chips and, yes, the damn Coke.
