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she’s always going to the mall with her friends and coming home with these really cute out fi ts. It’s just — her life’s so great and mine . . .” Jessica’s eyes pleaded with Vicki. “Sometimes I want to kill her.”
    “I don’t blame you.”
    “I don’t see why she gets to have all that and I don’t. It’s like I’m being punished and I didn’t do anything wrong.”
    “ Th ere’s no justice.”
    Jessica nodded grimly, as if she’d fi gured that out a long time ago. “You want to see something?” She picked up her phone, took a couple of swipes at the screen, then handed it to Vicki. “I mean, look at this.”
    Even on the small screen, the photograph was heartbreaking. It had been taken on prom night, the two Grasso sisters — the fat one and the pretty one — standing side by side on the stoop of a pale blue house, the camera far enough away that their bodies were visible from the knees up: Jenny in a slinky, low-cut yellow dress, not smiling but looking deeply pleased with the world, Jessica in a tentlike hoodie, grinning till it hurt, her face at once large and indistinct, one beefy arm draped over her sister’s delicate shoulder.
    Poor thing, Vicki thought as she handed back the phone.
    “I know,” Jessica said, as if Vicki had spoken the words aloud. “Story of my life.”
    “Believe me,” Vicki told her, “I know just how you feel. I mean, I was never petite or anything, just normal-sized. But then I put on fift y pounds when I was pregnant with my son. Fi ft y pounds, can you believe that? And I couldn’t take it o ff . I did Weight Watchers, I fasted, I exercised, I tried every diet in the world, but I just got bigger and bigger. It was like my body was saying, Guess what, this is how it’s gonna be from now on. Better get used to it. My husband told me he didn’t care, said he loved me no matter what, but a few years later he le ft me for a Chinese woman, I don’t think she weighed a hundred pounds. Th ey have three kids now.”
    “He sounds like a jerk.”
    “I loved him.” Vicki fl icked her hand in front of her face as if it wasn’t worth talking about. “ Th at was almost twenty years ago.”
    “You ever get married again?”
    “Nope.”
    “Any boyfriends?”
    “Nothing serious. I was a divorced working mother. Not young and not thin. My phone wasn’t ringing o ff the hook.” Vicki hesitated long enough to realize she was making a mistake, then kept going. “For a lot of that time, I had a crush on another teacher.”
    Jessica’s eyes widened. “At Gi ff ord?”
    “I was crazy about this guy. He was divorced, too. We ate lunch together every day, went to the movies with a group of other single teachers, even played on a coed so ft ball team. It was a lot of fun.”
    “Was it Mr. Oberman?”
    “Mr. Oberman?” Vicki couldn’t help laughing. Dan Oberman was a slovenly history teacher, a sadsack who lived with his mother and had been wearing the same three sweater vests for the past ten years. “You think I’d have a crush on Mr. Oberman?”
    “He’s not so bad.”
    “Anyway, I got really motivated about walking every day and watching what I ate, and I lost about twenty pounds. I could see he was looking at me in a di ff erent way, complimenting my out fi ts, and you know, just paying attention, and I fi nally decided to go for it. At the faculty Christmas party, I took him aside and told him how I felt. He said he had feelings for me, too. He drove me home that night and we . . .” A bit late, Vicki’s sense of decorum kicked in.
    “You hooked up?” Jessica pretended to be scandalized. “Was it Mr. McAdams?”
    “He’s a married man.”
    “Come on, just tell me.”
    “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we had that one night together and I was so happy. I could see my whole life laid out in front of me.” Vicki laughed at herself, a short, scornful bark. “But he didn’t call the next day, or the day a ft er that . . .”
    “Or the day