Profile picture. That was a problem. Okay, so I had lots of pictures of me, but they didn’t look like the
blonde-haired, green-eyed Olivia Saunders I’d been imagining in my head. I’d have to ask Claire for help fudging this important detail. She would know how to make it look good.
So I called her and told her she had to come over right after work to help me.
I clicked through a few more screens, entered a handful of responses, saved my changes and tada! My new fake profile went live, just like that, ready to be friended by the strangers of the universe. Still, that empty picture box with an androgynous silhouette stared back at me from the screen.
I was eager to see how the virtual world would receive the new, improved me: Olivia Saunders, model and actress. As the other half of the project, I would pit her profile directly against my own real-life one. I made a list of suggested names—men and women who looked fake themselves and a few normal-looking ones here and there—and sent friend requests to them from both Olivia and myself. I typed the names into a spreadsheet, noted the date, and waited to see which boxes I could check. Would one profile appeal over another? Would Olivia’s “exotic” and exciting life be perceived as more enticing? Did it matter that these people didn’t know either of us at all? With nothing left to do but wait, I started poking around Olivia’s profile. I took a few surveys, liked a few supermodels’ fan pages, and made a list of some groups she might like to join.
Just as I was getting bored, my sister arrived.
“Hey, Claire!” I greeted her with a hug and an ear-to-ear grin.
She eyed me suspiciously. “So what’s this super-important task that only I can help you with?”
I took a deep breath then cracked a wide grin. “Want to Photo Shop me into a hot chick?”
“Come on, Jen. Haven’t we talked about the negative effects of your self-deprecating humor enough already?” Claire rolled her eyes, settling in comfortably on my couch.
“Well, if I can’t laugh at myself…”
I mean, nobody’s perfect. When I looked in the mirror, I could admit that I had a nice smile, pretty eyes, and a generally pleasant appearance. I didn’t hate myself, but I definitely saw room for improvement. Especially if my hair wasn’t covering those hearing aids.
“There’s a difference between finding the humor in life and laughing at yourself, Jen. Why can’t you just use a picture of yourself? What’s this hot chick nonsense anyway?” Claire reached over to the arm of the couch, seizing my latest issue of Cosmopolitan and flipping mindlessly through the pages.
“Well,” I began, sitting gingerly into my desk chair. “The whole point of this project is to try to attract people to be my friend. I can’t exactly do that when I look like…”
Claire’s head rose slowly from the magazine, her gaze locking in on me. “Like what?”
“Like this!” I said, gesturing emphatically up and down my body. “Do you really think any guy is going to friend me looking like this? A big, frumpy…”
“Stop it, already. You’re not frumpy. There’s nothing wrong with you, okay? You’re smart, pretty, funny…”
“And overweight, Claire. I’m the fat sister.”
She opened her mouth to chide me again, but froze mid-thought. “Hey,” she straightened up, leaning forward. “What’s that on your shirt?”
I looked down, ready to swat away some giant bug or something, and spotted it. It wasn’t alive, nor had it ever been, as far as I could tell. And it should’ve been in my mouth, not on my shirt.
“It’s just a crumb from my lunch, Claire,” I shrugged, keeping my eyes carefully averted. As I raised my hand to brush it off, she grabbed my wrist in the air. Wow, she can move fast…
“That looks like chocolate cake. Is that…” Her eyes widened as she held my stare. “Oh, Jen! Is that from a cupcake?”
And just like that, Claire set loose on my kitchen, opening every cabinet and drawer, even checking the fridge. She pulled out a whole bunch of carbo-loaded, fat-laden, tasty morsels that I’d been stockpiling for my last year of grad school. I watched in horror as she tossed them all with wild vengeance into my trash barrel.
“Claire! Stop it!” I held my arms out, not sure what to do, what to rescue from certain doom, or how to stop her. “Leave me alone, Claire!”
She rounded on me, clutching a gigantic bag of gummy bears in two white-knuckled hands. “Do you really need these, Jen? Is it worth it to stuff your face with this, then turn around and make fun of yourself for being overweight?”
Stunned, I let my arms fall to my sides. I knew in my brain that she was right, but I also knew in my heart that I’d eaten that Hostess cupcake—the one whose dirty, shameful crumb had gotten me busted in the first place—without even knowing it. I’d hidden the wrapper in the trash, down below a banana peel and an empty low-fat chip bag, just in case Claire spotted it. All of this I did regularly on autopilot, staring mindlessly at a computer screen or lost in thoughts about a life that wasn’t mine.
The truth was, I just didn’t know how to be any other way.
“Claire, please. I’m not…” Tears welled in my eyes but I fought to keep them contained.
“I just want to help you,” she said, letting the gummy bears fall to the kitchen floor. “I didn’t want to upset you. It just hurts me to hear you talk about yourself like that when you could change it, and you don’t. Come here.”
She held out her arms to me, my beautiful and loving big sister, and I went to her. I hugged her, signaling my forgiveness, and bit down on those tears until they stopped threatening to spill.
“I know, Claire,” I said, when I was confident that my voice wouldn’t crack. “But I’m not ready to do this. I know it’s dumb, but I can’t stop it now, Claire. It’s too much. Just let me finish with school and maybe I’ll be ready then, okay?”
Claire let the topic drop for the time being, leaving the junk food wherever it had landed, strewn about my little galley kitchen. She released me from her embrace and shooed me back into the living room.
Within mere minutes, I had gotten her out of rampage mode and back on track to help me. I knew she only wanted what she believed was best for me, but she should know by now that pushing me does nothing. When I was ready, I’d let her know. In the meantime, there was a whole new person waiting to be crafted. Well, cropped, touched up, and airbrushed, anyway.
So I made Claire take a picture of me with my back to the camera, my face turned to the side dramatically. She took it in black and white, so you couldn’t tell that my mousy brown hair wasn’t really dirty blonde or that my brown eyes weren’t green.
“I don’t think we should change this picture. It looks really good just as it is, you know?” Claire tried once again, more feebly this time, to dissuade me from my Photo Shop mission.
“Look, Claire,” I said, exhaling. “Regardless of your feelings on my self-image problems, Olivia’s profile picture can’t look like me. If I’m going to try to friend the same people with two different Facebook accounts, the photos have to look different enough that no one is suspicious.”
Mollified, at least for the time being, Claire pulled out her laptop to work her graphic design magic on the photo. I stood over her shoulder, giving her instructions for every single part of my body. We trimmed things away, enlarged some others (ahem), and put the curves in all the right places. Within an hour, dowdy and boring Jennifer Smith became hot, smoldering Olivia Saunders—a model/hopeful actress/diner waitress. My sister, although resistant to do so, had shaved off about 30 pounds from my frame and basically added them all to my breasts. Olivia looked nothing like me.
She was perfect, at least to me.
“Um, Jen,” Claire said, studying the finished product with her head tilted to the side. “You do know who this looks like, right?”
I looked at the picture hard, squinting my eyes. All I could see was the image I’d crafted back in Dr. Brinkley’s exam room. The New Jennifer that I was going to aspi
re to become, one day. Eventually. For now, there she was, peeking at me from over her slender shoulder.
“It looks like how I picture Olivia, Claire… What am I missing?”
Claire shook her head, looking away. “Nothing. It just reminded me of somebody…”
“Huh,” I shrugged my shoulders and nudged her off my desk chair. “Can I post it now?”
“Yeah, sure. It’s all ready to go,” she said, still a bit distracted. I let it go, thinking she was just scrolling through her mental rolodex to place whomever Olivia’s photo had reminded her of. It pleased me to see this, since that’s exactly what I’d wanted: to give people the feeling that this woman was someone everyone knew or recognized from somewhere. Someone just on the edge of memory.
Of course, it didn’t take long for my genius plan to start back-firing. Because Claire was already in my apartment, working at my desk, she discovered my secret stash of diet brochures from Dr. Brinkley while I was updating my fake Facebook profile.
She was “straightening up” my make-shift office and I had my back to her, clicking away on my laptop, looking for people to send friend requests to and get this project off the ground. To make it look like I was legit, I posted a bogus status update: “Off to another rehearsal for…” What would Olivia be rehearsing on a random week night? Shakespeare? Simon? Ah, I got it. “Off to another rehearsal for Noises Off!”
Olivia would play the underwear-clad Brooke, a young undiscovered actress with virtually no acting instincts. It struck me that Olivia was perfect for this role and I wondered if that’s where I got the idea for her in the first place. After all, Noises Off was one of my favorite movies. Whatever happened to my copy of that DVD? It had to be around here somewhere.
Anyway, with my status updated, I moved on to my recent notifications and learned that three random people had accepted my friend request, bringing my friend total to a respectable 18 in record time. The new friends included Tom Payone, Duncan Montieff, and some guy named Brent Deeper, who might actually be a porn star with a name like that. His location was listed as Hollywood, CA, so I guess anything’s possible.
“Hey Jen, what the heck is all this?” she asked, flipping through the disheveled stack.
“What the heck is what?” I tossed the question over my shoulder, my eyes locked on a long list of possible friends for Olivia to have.
“All these brochures and stuff. Yoga for Plus Size Women? Your Slow Metabolism and You? Come on, Jen, where did these come from?”
I groaned, dropping my head into my hands. I should have hidden it better. It had only been a few days since my trip to see Dr. Brinkley, but my new commitment to fitness had ended almost as soon as it had begun. Hence, my cupcake lunch. It was just like every other time I’d committed myself to fitness in the past. If Claire knew about it, there was only one thing that could happen.
“If you’re trying to lose weight, why won’t you let me help you?” she asked, sounding a bit hurt. I turned to her then, almost feeling bad about all the times I’d refused her help. And not just earlier that day in my kitchen.
“I’m not trying, I already told you. My doctor gave me those last week, okay? Just leave it alone.” My voice sounded strained, but I stayed defiant under her pressuring gaze. “Put them back please.”
For a few moments, Claire complied. She stacked the pamphlets back up, positioning the pile carefully on the corner of my desk, without saying a word. I watched her suspiciously as she finished clearing off the desk, dropping pens into the pen holder and dropping all of my unopened mail into its designated basket. She kept her back to me, but even so, I knew she wasn’t going to stop.
Mentally, I counted down from ten. Right on cue, just as my brain thought the word one, she cleared her throat.
“You know,” she said, with as much nonchalance as she is capable of. “I was really hoping you could finally help me tackle that quilting project I’ve been putting off…”
“What quilting project?”
“Remember when you were going to show me how to turn all those old t-shirts from high school into a quilt? I have a whole tote full of them in my closet and I need to get rid of them. So I was thinking, maybe if you helped me, since you were always so much better at that crafty stuff than I am…”
“Okay,” I said, stretching out the last syllable. I knew that second shoe was going to drop at any moment.
“But I know you’re really busy, so I wouldn’t want to impose. Or, at least, I wouldn’t want to feel like you were helping me for nothing, you know?”
“Uh huh…” I turned my eyes back to my laptop under the guise of working. In reality, I just kept clicking back and forth between two open windows on my screen, waiting for her to finish her belabored point.
“So maybe we could do some sort of… I don’t know… talent exchange?”
I snapped my laptop shut quietly, raising my eyes to her once again. Claire was leaning against my clean desk, arms crossed, and apparently lost in her thoughts. As transparent as her efforts were, I really loved her right then for how hard she was trying.
“Fine, Claire. You can help me.”
“Help you what?” She blinked, playing dumb.
I narrowed my eyes at her.
“Okay, okay,” she caved, looking relieved and truly pleased. “You won’t regret this, I promise. Just be ready to go at 6 am tomorrow. I’m picking you up and we’re getting started right away.”
“Tomorrow? It’s Saturday,” I protested.
Claire was already halfway out the front door. She turned to me, hands on her hips. “Calories don’t take the weekends off, Jen. And neither do we.”
CHAPTER FOUR
So in the morning, I found myself held prisoner by my sister.
“You’re going to love this place,” Claire said, for the fourth time, as she pulled into a parking spot in front of a local gym.
“Tom’s Workout World?” I was a bit skeptical, unable to stop myself from mocking the chosen title of this hole-in-the-wall facility. Located in a rundown strip mall, where his only neighbors were a dry cleaning service and a pet grooming salon—neither of which had any customers at that particular moment, or possibly in the last five years—Tom’s place was more like a workout hut and less like a world.
The sign was cracked, for starters, and the storefront window appeared never to have been introduced to a squeegee. I was less worried about getting a good workout during my visit than I was about the risk of contracting a foreign illness from the place.
“You seriously workout here?” I asked my sister. I couldn’t quite bring myself to get out of the car. Claire, on the other hand, had already parked, turned off the engine, tied her hair into a neat ponytail, and fished our gym bags out of the back seat. She thrust mine into my lap with deliberate force.
“Come on, Complainy Pants. Let’s get your sweat on.”
“I hope that’s all I get on me…” I muttered the words under my breath as we both popped out of Claire’s little Civic, but she heard me. I wish my sister didn’t have super-human ears sometimes. Lord knows, I wouldn’t have heard her, not with my damaged hearing nerves. And because life is so unfair, I got a punch in the arm. “Oww!”
I scowled, reluctantly falling into step beside her as we neared the building. My instincts told me to stop moving, but my arm was already sore. Why challenge Claire when it was obviously so pointless?
“No more whining. I will give Tom permission to torture you for every complaint you utter.”
“And why would he listen to you?” I snapped at her.
“No reason.”
I caught Claire’s shifty look and raised my eyebrows. She looked away, somewhere off into the distance. Interesting.
The inside of Tom’s Workout World couldn’t have been any more different from what I expected. From the parking lot, you’d never believe there were flat panel televisions, state-of-the-art exercise machines, and a staff of at least five super-hot trainers in here. Maybe they left the w
indows grimy on purpose, to keep petty criminals and Peeping Toms at bay. Ha! Toms. Well, it’s a theory, I guess.
Anyway, staring around the gym, I could barely take it all in. Let’s just say I felt more than a little bit out of my element at that moment
Tom himself greeted us at the front desk and I had to do a double-take. He was the most gorgeous man I had ever seen in my entire life. And I’m including the time I met George Clooney in a grocery store during his days on ER. That was pretty hot, but Tom is the kind of guy that makes you want to take a sculpting class. Hard, well-toned muscles from head to toe—that kind of guy. I mean, looking at him, I could see muscles that I didn’t have names for. Granted, I’m not a Master’s candidate for anatomy, but still. Even through a thin Tom’s Workout World t-shirt, his body was visibly defined. I kind of wanted to try squeezing oranges on his pectoral muscles.
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