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she?’
    ‘Cheryl Cole needs a bloody good meal inside her.’
    ‘Please, Mum. I want to lose weight too.’
    Maggieknew her daughter needed to lose a few pounds. Nothing like her own massive excess, but perhaps it would help. So they went together.
    ‘You never know,’ said Maggie, turning the car into their road. ‘This might be a whole new beginning for us both.’
    Maggie hoped her words were true. But she knew deep down that this new diet club probably wouldn’t make any difference.
    When they got home, Gordonlooked up from the sofa with a smile. ‘How was the shopping?’ he asked, keeping one eye on the football match on the television.
    As Lucy stomped upstairs, Maggie smiled back at her husband. ‘It wasn’t great,’ she said as she sat down next to him.
    ‘Have one of these to cheer yourself up,’ said Gordon, handing her the biscuit barrel.
    Maggie sighed and helped herself to a chocolate digestive.
    Lucy shut her bedroom door and threw herself on the bed.
    She had spotted Nicola Bowles and her gang on the drive home and had slumped down in her seat to avoid being seen, though she didn’t know how they could miss her at over twelve stone. No wonder they took the mickey out of her. She was the size of an elephant.
    How the hell was she going to lose three stone? She glanced down at her stomach,straining against the T-shirt and leggings. It would take years to get rid of all the fat she was suffocating under.
    Her mum had been surprised that she had wanted to go to the stupid weight-loss class. But Lucy was getting increasingly desperate. She wanted so much to be the lively teenager that she knew was buried deep inside somewhere. She didn’t tell her mum how unhappy she really was. Howone day last summer she had sat down in the bathroom with a packet of Nurofen and had stared at the pills, wondering what would happen if she swallowed them all. In the end, she put the packet back in the bathroom cabinet and felt even more miserable. If she didn’t have the strength to attempt suicide, what hope was there for her to lose three stone?
    She grabbed her sketchpad and skipped throughall the fashion designs until she found the page she had scribbled on a few days ago.
    Lucy had drawn a silhouette of herself as she was at present. And then had drawn her dream silhouette inside it. That was her goal. The dream body shape. The kind of person who could wear skinny jeans and cropped tops. Who could wear any fashion they liked.
    But Lucy knew it was just a dream and would nevercome true. It was too hard to achieve on her own and there was nobody else to help her.

Chapter Six
    THE MORNING AFTER the weigh-in, Violet had a job interview. She had six pieces of toast with butter and marmalade in deference to the horror ahead. The diet would start later. Now she had to worry about what to wear.
    Glancing at the kitchen clock, she realised it was nearly half past nine. Only an hour until the interview. She hurtled upstairs in a panic about her outfit and thenhad to spend ten minutes sitting on the bed, trying to get her breath back before opening the wardrobe door.
    First things first. She needed to put on the control pants. She had bought a pair for the Christmas party at work but had bottled out of going, saying that she had the flu. Violet had never been a party kind of person, especially since she had put on so much weight in the past couple ofyears.
    She got the knickers out of the packet. Great big ugly beige things that looked like bicycle shorts. She heaved and toiled and eventually got them over her fat knees, but there was no way they were going to make it past her thighs. She lay on the bed, yanking at the knickers but only succeeded in breaking a couple of nails.
    It was no use. She was too fat. She gave up and spent the nextfive minutes trying to get the damn things off.
    Still huffing and puffing from the exertion with the underwear, she squeezed into her black trousers. The waist button was straining but if