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Chapter Twelve: Dirty Secret


In Los Angeles, when you bring a girl to dinner, they order a salad then pick at your plate for the rest of the night and drink your beer while their water glass with a lemon slice sits there collecting dust. They say 'no thank you, I'm watching my figure' and wave away the dessert menu, then eat half your dessert and spend at least fifteen minutes complaining that they went over their day's alloted calories.

Becky ordered the same steak and beer as me, refused the starter salad and asked for soup instead, and happily agreed to order dessert. She got chocolate lava cake with strawberries. She actually finished her beer and ordered a second one. It was kinda refreshing to see a girl pack away food like that. I understood where the extra weight was coming from. But obviously the weight wasn't completely unmonitored. I mean, she obviously worked out a little at least because her thighs and arms weren't flabby or nothin'... I grinned up at the surprised look on the weighter's face when he dropped her second beer in front of her and found she'd finished dessert. Apparently he wasn't used to girls who eat, either.

We talked the whole time, too, which was something that was a little new to me because usually when I went out with a girl all we talked about was me, but since I wasn't being me, and I already knew how Becky felt about BSB, we didn't hardly talk about me at all. Instead, we talked geekdom. And I found out Becky was an avid basketball fan, that she literally requested time off for March Madness and spent the week on her couch screaming at the television. She was a Celtics fan, like me, but had a thing for college ball. "It's more interesting," she said, "There's more at stake for the players personally, so they try harder. They're not a bunch of overpaid asshats running around," she explained.

It was nice actually having things to talk about with a girl. My last girlfriend had asked me which sport the Celtics played in and when I told her basketball she said, "I thought the Super Bowl was the last episode of the season on basket ball?"

After we wrapped up at the restaurant and I'd insisted on paying - even though Becky had pulled her wallet out and tried to pay too - we headed back to the Slyyymer and I told her to drive out to the boardwalk. The lights were bright and a bunch of different songs mixed together in the air until there was sort of a music of its own on the boadwalk. She parked and we climbed out and walked along, the salty air breezing by and the roar of the ocean not far off. Piers stretched out across the beach and down below people were sitting on blankets near controlled campfires as the sun was extinguished for the night.

The arcade on the boardwalk is a hot mess of lights and sound and we went inside and I bought us a couple bags of tokens and we walked around laughing and playing the games. She beat the crap out of me at Whack-A-Mole, but I proved way better than her at Ski Ball. We found a couple multiplayer arcade games to play side by side and racked up prize tickets, which we hung around our necks to carry like they were mantles of greatness. I saw little kids watching us, awed by the amount of tickets we'd picked up. We cashed them in for a couple free games of laser tag.

"Do you wanna play now or wait for another time?" I asked.

Becky smiled, "You think there's gonna be another time?"

I shrugged, "Isn't there?"

She laughed, "I guess so. I mean, I can't play laser tag alone." She slipped her pass in her pocket.

Outside it had cooled down. "Shit it's cold," she said, rubbing her tank-top clad shoulders.

"Here," I said, and I pulled off my plaid shirt and held it out to her.

"Now you'll get cold," she complained.

"I have sleeves at least," I said, gesturing at my plain white undershirt. "The crisp air feels good," I added. Becky tugged my shirt on over her shoulders. It hung about fifty lengths too long and she rolled it and tied at at the waist.

We walked out to the end of the pier and leaned against the wood balcony, the ocean thundering below us, the moon turning her skin blue like the people in Avatar.

"So what's your dirty secret, Nate?" she asked, clutching the wood and leaning back, then forward, back, then forward.

"My dirty secret?"

Becky nodded. "Why are you still single, what's wrong with you? Because every nice guy left on the planet is already attached." She shrugged, "What's your dirty secret? Are you an axe murderer? In the closet? A sexaholic? Are you dying of cancer or AIDs or something? Escaped the padded rooms they've kept you locked in since they came to take you away - ha ha, ho ho, he he? Might as well 'fess up, I'm gonna find out eventually, and we might as well know the dirty stuff now."

I shrugged, "There's not really anything, I guess," I said, "I'm just a bachelor. I've just always liked the single life, you know? Not answering to anybody, not having to grow up. I can do what I want, when I want. Nobody bitching I spend too much time on video games and stuff. Plus work keeps me busy."

"What do you do?"

I said the first thing that came to mind. "I work at a recording studio." This wasn't a complete lie.

"Very cool," she said. She stared out at the water.

"What about you?" I asked. "What's your dirty secret?"

Becky blinked in the silence for a moment. Finally she turned to me and rolled up the sleeve of my shirt from her wrist and held it out to me. I looked at it. There were scars all along her wrist and forearm. Thin diagonal stripes, faded with time, but there none the less. She was staring at me, waiting for a reaction but I didn't know how to react, what to say. It was like my ability to speak had been taken. After a long moment, she shook the sleeve back down and turned back to the ocean.

"Why?" I asked. It was the only thing I could think to get out.

"I weighed over three hundred pounds in high school."

"Damn," I said. And I wanted to smack myself the moment the words had come out because that was not the response that needed saying at that moment. "I mean... because you lost the weight and all, that's impressive. I didn't mean it like --"

"It's fine if you did, I'm not who I was in high school anymore," she said, shrugging.

"So how did you lose it?"

"I started throwing up," she said. "Every time the kids at school made fun of me I'd throw up and I took these crazy diet pills. I tried so hard to lose weight but it never seemed to come off. And they'd laugh at me and yell boom bada boom bada boom when I walked through the halls. They called me Big Becky. For senior prank they tied me to the flag pole out front and stuck an apple in my mouth in the morning before class and nobody noticed or came back for me until fifth period."

"Jesus," I said.

Becky shrugged.

"High school kids are assholes," I muttered.

"I started cutting in senior year," she said, "I'd get so depressed and I'd lock myself in the bathroom during lunch and cry and cry in the stall... Everyone in my family was heavy, we're Italian by descent and my grandmother was a chef so... And when I'd cry to my mother and tell her about the kids calling me Big Becky her response was always that in time things would smooth out, that I was beautiful like I was, that they'd see that in the world after high school I'd be the one that triumphed. But that didnt help when they made fun of me and threw food at me in the cafeteria, you know?" Becky's eyes were tearing up. I felt a hollow pain in the pit of my stomach for her. I wanted to make it better, I wanted to take the tears away. She swiped at them with the back of her hand, "When I started cutting, my mom sent me away for treatment. They found out about the throwing up, and even though I was super overweight I was technically anorexic because I hadn't been eating and my insides were hella messed up... It took a long time for me to get better. It's an ongoing recovery." She looked out at the ocean again, leaned against the wood railing.

"Well, I think you're gorgeous," I said.

She closed her eyes.

"I ain't just sayin' that either," I added. "You really are beautiful. Really."

"Thanks," she said, her voice only just above a whisper. "I wish I believed you."