High School Boy Teaches Fat Girl About Her Body
By Haley Osier
My thighs are slick against the leather of the passenger seat as I try to slide more of my denim shorts down over them. The afternoon sun slanting through the windows of Jonathan’s car is unforgiving. We are grabbing coffee on the way to study for our AP history exam. Jonathan is talking about something—politics, a tennis match, what he had for lunch? I’m thinking about how it’s only April and already I want to be anywhere but here. Texas summers aren’t made with fat girls in mind. Despite the fact that everything is supposed to be bigger here, the heat makes it unbearable to take up any extra space.
'Are you listening? What do you want? We’re almost at the speaker.' Jonathan pokes my leg a few times to get my attention.
My thighs move like a thick chunk of jello balanced on a cafeteria spoon as he pokes. There isn’t any denim left for me to pull at to cover the gelatinous quaking. Jonathan has probably never felt his body move without him like this, how the pockets of fat pulse, push, and pull against the skin, willing you to stretch with them, daring to expose you. Jonathan is thin, tall—twiggy, even. He is muscle and bone and brain. At 16 he’s the smartest person I know, and he has so much time to think interesting thoughts and say intelligent things without ever worrying about what his thighs look like sausaged into denim cutoffs.
'Don’t do that. Look how much my thigh jiggles when you do that.'
'That’s what thighs are supposed to do,' he says.
That’s what thighs are supposed to do. What I don’t know as we sit in the Starbucks drive-thru line is that Jonathan knows what thighs are supposed to do because someone has poked at him before, too. In middle school a girl called him boney, called him bird-like, in front of her friends. He heard the chorus of laughter that followed.
Haley Osier (she/her) is a writer and artist living in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work explores the concepts of family lost and found, the journey home to the self, and the marginalization of being a lesbian in the South. She is currently getting her MFA in Creative Writing at Belmont University, where she is also an adjunct professor.
