Read Camp Utopia & the Forgiveness Diet (9781940192567) for Free Online Page A

way,” she said. “You don’t want to read it.”
    Not the best thing to say because now Doug had to read it. Read them all. He ripped the bucket from her lap and Jackie screamed. And then I screamed. Then Jackie angled across four lanes of traffic and squealed the Odyssey onto the shoulder. Then the van rocked when she flung it into park and the door ding ding dinged because she didn’t even bother to close it when she flew out her seat and began chasing Doug around the car. Doug laughed. Yes, laughed. He thought it was funny, a game. Until he grabbed a different napkin from my spilled-all-over-the-highway forgiveness bucket and unfolded it, gently, like something delicious steamed inside.
    Later, after they had read everything, ev-er-ry thing, after Doug had unfolded most of the napkins, and formed the words with his mouth, I couldn’t help wondering if TJ’s boss and Doug’s mom and everyone else who’d tried The Forgiveness Diet had this kind of experience. They say losing weight is hard, but good God. This hard? When Doug’s voice cracked not on the word “baby,” but “mine,” I thought the price for being thin, well, it was sky-high. When Jackie finally climbed back into the van, defeated, tears streaking down her cheeks, she flung her head on the steering wheel. The horn blared. Then she looked in the rearview mirror—where she saw me.
    Of course she crawled over the seats in one deft maneuver and beat the holy mother effing Jesus out of me. Did I retaliate when she smacked my face with the heel of her hand? Nope. Did I fight back when she whacked me with her industrial-sized straw purse? No. Did I even yelp when she twisted my hair around her fingers so hard I heard the roots give?
    Not at all.
    Why?
    Well, I’d forgiven her.
    I felt lighter when Jackie liberated that knot of hair. After all this , I thought, wiping the tears that poured from my stinging, tender eye, Doug in the front seat weeping like the baby he never knew, this forgiveness crap just might work .

9
    EXIT RIGHT
    THE NEXT WORDS Jackie said to me were at California University of the Pacific. “Just think. By the time I pick you up, you’ll be beautiful.” She hadn’t spoken to me since Ohio, the state where she threw my forgiveness chicken bucket out the window, climbed in the backseat, and nearly killed me. She did ask if I had to pee once in Kansas, but that didn’t really count. It wasn’t a sentence in the traditional sense. Doug had been just as mute. When he flushed the toilet (twice) while I showered in a Colorado motel, he didn’t apologize. When Jackie accidently-on-purpose stepped on my face inside our tent in Reno, she smiled but didn’t laugh.
    Now that we’d arrived at C.U.P., my sister’s words were dumb anyway. Even if I were thin I wouldn’t be beautiful. She knew it. I knew it, but I’d kept quiet anyway. I was just glad she was finally talking to me after what was, without a doubt, the singular worst road trip in the history of all humankind. Ever.
    She lifted my duffle bag from the trunk and placed it by my feet. Doug,who still refused to speak to me, waited in the car. Jackie didn’t turn the engine off; she just let the van idle in front of a dormitory building and said, “Here we are,” like I was twelve, and she was dropping me off at the mall.
    A lumpy fog wrapped itself around all the trees and hovered over the stiff grass.
    â€œWow,” Jackie said, eyeing a scene so spooky it looked like one of those haunted log rides. “This place just oozes intelligence.”
    Jackie wouldn’t know oozing intelligence if she slid in it, but now was not the time to point that out. I’d caused more than enough trouble already.
    Instead I turned to face the immaculate, sprawling campus that housed, according to their website, the best weight loss camp in America. Looking around, I felt every last one of