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emotions, as long as you’re the winner or busy congratulating the winner.
    So few moments in life live up to your fantasies of how they’ll be. But that moment, when I was crowned homecoming queen and my parents were so proud of me and Jett loved me, lived up to every fantasy I had ever had. I looked out at that sea of happy faces—even Danny was smiling up at me—and I thought how I had known most of them forever, and now they had picked me to be their queen. I felt surrounded by so much love, just waves of it coming up to me on that stage. I was a part of all of them, they were a part of me.
    And then, out of the corner of my eye. I saw Patty Asher coming in the gym door. She stared up at me. She wasn’t smiling.
    If you get crowned queen, it’ll be the highlight of your pathetic little life!
    Poor Patty. She must be so miserable.
    I sent up a little prayer of thanks. That I had won. That I had Jett.
    That I wasn’t anything like poor Patty Asher.

“H oney, are you gaining weight?” my mother asked as she slid a blueberry pancake from the skillet onto my plate.
    It was a month later, the Sunday morning before Halloween, and we were having our usual Sunday morning breakfast of blueberry pancakes and turkey bacon.
    Not that Mom ate any kind of bacon at all. Ever. Every morning she had the same thing: one half of a whole-wheat English muffin with one teaspoon of all-fruit jam. Half a grapefruit. Two cups of coffee, black.
    “She’s a warthog,” Scott said, reaching for the butter.
    “That’s enough from you,” Mom told him. She sat down and cut into her grapefruit.
    “Do I look fat?” I asked anxiously.
    “Of course not,” Mom said, spooning up some grapefruit. “But your jeans look a little tight, sweetie.”
    She was right. They
were
a little tight. A
lot
tight.
    Right after homecoming I had started getting hives almost every day. Sometimes my lips and my eyelids swelled. My parents took me right to the doctor. Stress, he said. But I didn’t feel stressed. I felt fantastic. It didn’t make any sense.
    When my hives wouldn’t go away, my mom took me to an allergist, who put me on a drug called prednisone, which seemed to work. But the prednisone made me retain water. So I’d stop taking the prednisone, and get the hives back, and then I’d go back on the prednisone.
    According to my scale, I had gained ten pounds.
Ten pounds!
In a month! I now weighed 128. It was more than I had ever weighed in my life.
    I could hardly zip up my jeans. My stomach pressed against the zipper. The tiniest roll of skin poufed above the waistband. I looked over at my mother. She had on white leggings and a cropped white T-shirt. Perfectly slim and perfectly aerobicized.
    “That’s it, I’m on a diet,” I said, pushing my plate away. Scott grabbed it and dumped the pancake on top of his own plate, then drenched it with maple syrup.
    Mom frowned at him. “You don’t need all that sugar.”
    “Oh yeah, I do,” he said, his mouth full.
    I poured myself a cup of coffee and resisted the urge to add cream and sugar. I took a sip. It was so bitter. I eyed the package of English muffins and decided to toast the other half of my mom’s.
    “Your very first diet,” Mom said, sipping her coffee. “Now
this
is something we can definitely bond over.”
    “All it takes is willpower,” I said coolly. “I’ll up my workouts. It’s not a big deal.”
    “Try skateboarding,” Scott suggested, his mouth full of pancake. “It’ll take the lard off you real fast.”
    “Your sister doesn’t have any lard, it’s from the prednisone,” Mom told him. She lit a cigarette.
    “It was a joke,” Scott explained. “You know. Humor?”
    “Well, it wasn’t funny,” Mom said. “Gaining weight is no joke.” She turned to me. “I can write out a great diet for you, if you want.”
    “Mom, I know how to diet.”
    “I just meant that you never had to do it before, and I could help you,” she explained. “Believe me, I know