The Melting of Maggie Bean

by Tricia Rayburn

  She couldn’t believe her arrival had taken so long.

  “Oh God, Aim. I don’t think I can look,” Maggie whispered at the back of the gathered crowd. They’d raced over to the locker room right after lunch but still seemed to be the last arrivals, the rest of the girls having staked out the place like Pound Patroller’s Samuel had for the grand opening of the new Krispy Kreme.

  “I don’t want to look either, but just remember we’ve got as good a chance as anyone else here.”

  Maggie nodded and watched as twenty other girls bobbed, whispered, and eyed one another suspiciously. Maggie checked her watch. The announcement was late. Why was it late? Were there doubts? Had she made it yesterday and now someone was suddenly changing her mind in the logical light of a new day? But too much had happened. This meant far too much for her not to have made it.

  And she couldn’t think about what life would be like if her name wasn’t on the list. She pictured it, Maggie Bean, right above Aimee McDougall.

  The group of girls suddenly erupted in hushed whispers. Maggie and Aimee watched as Ms. Pinkerton came through the pool door with Anabel and Julia close behind.

  Maggie reached down for Aimee’s hand, clutched it in her own.

  “Since you all seem to be here,” Ms. Pinkerton shouted, silencing the group, “if you can shut your mouths for two seconds I’ll go ahead and read the names of the new team members, to save you all from death by stampede and me from death by annoyance.”

  Aimee squeezed Maggie’s fingers.

  “Oh, and in case you care, I’m going to read three names instead of two, because the judges just couldn’t narrow it down any more than that.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows quickly at Aimee. The sympathetic, supportive Ms. Pinkerton of yesterday had apparently withered back into the regular old crank pot overnight.

  “You two got anything to add?” She glared at Anabel and Julia.

  Julia snapped a green gum bubble and shook her head while Anabel silently looked at the floor.

  “Okay!” She sighed and looked down at the list.

  Maggie thought she saw Ms. Pinkerton frown slightly and shake her head.

  “Isabella Parker!”

  Maggie watched J.Crew jump up and down, clap, squeal, and squeeze anyone who’d let her, not seeming to mind that she was still the competition.

  “Next victim!” Ms. Pinkerton shouted.

  Maggie squeezed Aimee’s hand.

  Two names to go. They still had a shot.

  “Aimee McDougall!”

  Maggie’s heart sprung. Aimee’s mouth, initially wide in disbelief, slowly turned up, and she covered it with two hands, her turquoise eyes crinkling in the corners. Maggie raised her arms in excitement, and they bounced up and down in a sloppy embrace. Aimee’s grades had improved enough over the past few weeks that her parents agreed to let her join the team if she made it. Now she had, and deserved it more than anyone.

  “This next one is yours, Mags! It has to be!” Aimee whispered gleefully, squeezing both of Maggie’s hands.

  They turned back toward Ms. Pinkerton. Maggie thought her heart might shatter into a million little pieces if Ms. Pinkerton didn’t hurry and read the last name.

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again when Ms. Pinkerton remained silent, frowned, and shook her head again.

  “Last victim!”

  Maggie bit her lip and tried to ignore the loud silence that had fallen across the group. She thought of the silver bathing suit, the weight she’d continue to lose, the practices, meets, parties. This one moment had the ability to change everything Maggie hated about herself.

  “Jillian Zimmerman!”

  And there it was.

  Her heart pounded once more in protest before shattering into a million pieces and floating defenselessly through her body.

  Double the squeals from the right meant that Lemon Juice had made the team with J.Crew. The rest of the girls burst into moans, groans, and other assorted declarations of disappointment as they turned toward one another in consolation.

  Ms. Pinkerton handed the clipboard off to Anabel with one swift motion to her abdomen and walked back through the pool door in a huff.

  Maggie stood without moving. She couldn’t look at Aimee, who circled around to embrace her, or at Julia, who snapped her stupid minty gum at the front of the group as though she just didn’t care, as though this decision had meant absolutely nothing to her, or at Anabel, who hid behind the clipboard. And she most certainly couldn’t look at herself, her hands, legs, feet, the body that just wasn’t good enough to get her what she’d so desperately longed for.

  She hadn’t done it. She’d worked so hard, tried everything she could think of to make herself look and perform better, and it just hadn’t been enough. It wasn’t her. She was never meant to be one of them. She didn’t know how on earth she’d let herself believe otherwise for even a second. Why she’d let herself even entertain the idea that maybe she might actually have a chance to be something other than the socially crippled, overweight bookworm.

  Because just like that, it was over. Done. The new Maggie Bean had disappeared.

  Just who did she think she was, anyway?

  32.

  “Maggie!” Her dad called through her bedroom door for the fourth time in ten minutes. “You have five minutes!”

  Maggie covered her head with a pillow and rolled over to the wall, as far away from the door as possible. She’d been napping for three hours, since getting home from school. If her dad would only stop making so much noise, she could very easily sleep through the rest of the night, the next day, and every day after that.

  Because two weeks after Water Wings tryouts, energy was in short supply. She’d had way more when she wasn’t eating anything, and now she was eating all the time, whenever, whatever she could get her hands on, and was more exhausted than she ever remembered being. Too tired to get out of bed in the morning, she was either late to school or completely absent. She was too tired to do her schoolwork anyway, so skipping didn’t seem like a big deal. On the days she actually made it, seeing Julia waiting for Peter at his locker made her too tired to stay after for any of her clubs, so she came home, watched soaps, napped, watched more television, and eventually went to sleep for the night. And she was too tired to make any kind of conversation, so she avoided Aimee during the day and her phone calls afterward, carried every single book with her whenever she made it to school to avoid Peter at her locker, and told her mother to tell Arnie she’d call him back, though she never would. Her grades were slipping, her friends and teachers were worried about her, and her mother thought something more terrible than not making the Water Wings had sunk Maggie into this state of nothingness, but none of it mattered. She was just too tired to care.

  “I hope you’re listening,” her father continued. “I know I’ve been easy on you because of tryouts, but it’s time to get focused!”

  She waited until his footsteps retreated to the living room before removing the pillow from her head and rolling on her back. She stared at the ceiling, reached one hand to the ground, and lifted up the first bag her fingers grazed. Whoppers. Not her favorite, but she shoved a handful into her mouth anyway. Her dad would probably knock again in thirty seconds, so she was just biding her time.

  Because she’d go to Pound Patrollers. It didn’t matter. She planned to sit in the back of the room, avoid Arnie, and eat the steady supply of Reese’s Pieces she’d already poured into her purse. Eating, it seemed, was die only tiling she wasn’t too tired for, so it had quickly become her favorite activity.

  Although “favorite” was too strong a word. That implied that she enjoyed eating, which she didn’t. She just did it to do something, because she was too tired to care to do anything else. She knew she’d probably gained back whatever weight she’d lost before tryouts, and that didn’t matter either. It hadn’t made a difference then, so why bother?

  She heard her mother’s gentle knock on the bedroom door. �
��Maggie, honey. Aunt Violetta’s here,” she called softly, apologetically.

  Maggie sighed, willed her legs over the edge of the bed, and lifted her torso up with a grunt. Had she not done it herself, she never would’ve believed that this body was the same one that had gone swimming for fourteen consecutive days. It just didn’t seem to want to move.

  She stood up with effort, reached for her purse, and dropped the remaining chocolate-covered malt balls into the pool of Reese’s Pieces. She’d already removed her wallet for more room, so she slipped a five-dollar bill into the candy, in case her aunt felt like stopping at Ben & Jerry’s on the way home.

  As she felt around the floor for her sneakers, her bare foot bumped into something cool and hard. She bent one knee and dragged the scale out from under her bed.

  How bad could it be?

  Dropping her purse to the bed, she stepped onto the scale and closed her eyes. When the black dial had had enough time to settle in one place, she looked down.

  183.

  Only three pounds from where she started.

  Without stepping from the scale, she pushed a mountain of clothes off of her laptop and loaded the Master Multitasker for the first time in two weeks. She clicked on “Water Wings” and scrolled down the list of weights to the very last one. She’d entered it on the morning of tryouts.

  168. With a smiley face.

  Sighing, she closed the laptop, backed off the scale, and pushed it under the bed. She found her sneakers, dug her feet into them without untying the laces, and let the weight of her heels press down so that her toes were all the way inside but the rest of her feet stuck out. She shuffled into the hallway, ignoring her parents’ concerned looks as she headed out the door toward the car.

  “Mag Pie, sugar lamb, what on earth happened to you?” Aunt Violetta exclaimed, looking Maggie up and down as she neared her on the front walk. Her aunt never got out of the car to meet Maggie—a single horn honking and headlight flashing usually sufficed—but apparently she’d been moving so slowly tonight, Aunt Violetta had been coming to check on her progress.

  “Nothing,” she answered dully, keeping her slow, steady pace down the front walk.

  “Well ’scuse me for saying so, but that sure don’t look like nothing.” Aunt Violetta quickly covered the remaining distance between them and put her hands on Maggie’s shoulders. “Your sweatshirt’s on backward, your pants are inside out, your feet are hanging out of your shoes, your hair’s standing up and out every which way like an electrocuted bird’s nest, and your pretty eyes are sagging, sugar, sagging, like an old basset hound.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You trying to be funny, missy? Because I’m not laughing. I don’t know what on earth is going on with you, but I tell you what—I’ll figure it out by the end of the night, you can count on that.”

  Maggie looked at the ground, her purse growing heavy in the hand hanging at her side. Aunt Violetta dropped her hands from Maggie’s shoulders and sighed.

  “Well, come on. We’ve got a meeting to get to and no way am I going to let your sorry state make us late.”

  At another time, Maggie might’ve been insulted by Aunt Violetta’s sidewalk scrutiny, but she knew she was right. She was a mess. The only difference was that her aunt seemed to care, while Maggie simply couldn’t care less.

  33.

  Maggie let Aunt Violetta grab her by the hand and drag her into the meeting, and didn’t resist until they headed right toward the circle of metal folding chairs around the pink scale. She wasn’t about to join the happy circle, so she dug her feet into the ground and wouldn’t move, like a leashed dog whose owner was trying to take him to the vet.

  Aunt Violetta dropped Maggie’s hand and spun around. “You are sitting next to me tonight.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Yes, you are. Because this isn’t about being shy anymore, Maggie. This is about what’s good for you.”

  What’s good for you. Those words again. What was good for her? She thought she’d known, but it hadn’t worked. She’d thought she’d had a chance, but it didn’t matter. She’d done what was expected, she’d done what she thought people wanted her to do, and it hadn’t made one bit of difference. How in the world would these people know any better? She’d heard Electra’s words of wisdom: Get a goal, eat in moderation, exercise, reward yourself, and the benefits will follow. You’ll be stronger, confident, outgoing, happy. She’d done all these things—had hardly eaten and spent hours exercising every single day—and had ended up with nothing. She knew she hadn’t taken the healthiest approach (as proven by her stellar Mud Puddle Lake performance), but it was supposed to be temporary.

  But Maggie had learned that it didn’t matter what you did; it would never be enough in the eyes of those who’d already decided your fate.

  “Aunt Violetta, don’t bother. It’s a waste of time.”

  Her aunt put her hands on her hips. “That’s an awfully dumb comment from such a smart girl.”

  Other loud, happy Pound Patrollers streamed in. Maggie raised the hood of her sweatshirt over her head, crossed her arms over her chest, and flopped down in a metal folding chair by the snack table.

  From inside her hood she watched her aunt’s polka-dot shoe tap on the floor.

  “Maggie.” The shoe stopped tapping.

  “Aunt Violetta.” She slumped farther in the chair.

  “Fine. Stay here. Nobody can help you but you.” The polkadot shoes spun around and hurried across the linoleum.

  She heard without really listening as the rest of the Pound Patrollers took their places around the circle. She didn’t pay attention to what they said, but she recognized the usual voices: Samuel, Electra, the gray-haired lady, the forty-year-old twins who wore the same outfits but in different colors. The only thing she did halfheartedly listen for was Arnie’s voice, which she hadn’t yet heard. But she’d managed to feign illness enough to skip last week’s meeting, so he could’ve stopped coming or transferred locations, for all she knew. The thought was so disappointing she lifted her purse to her lap, unzipped it, and reached in until her fingers dipped into the reassuring pool of Reese’s Pieces.

  “Water stick?”

  A piece of celery came at her from under her hood and her heart fluttered for the first time in weeks.

  “No, thanks.” She pulled back slightly, zipped her purse, and dropped it next to her chair.

  The celery came an inch closer, offered her one last chance, and disappeared.

  “Water stick with peanut butter?”

  The celery reemerged.

  She shook her head. Felt the beginning of a smile tickle her lips. Almost peeked out when her hood remained empty.

  “Water stick with chocolate chip cookie dough?”

  She laughed in spite of herself. Four celery sticks stuck out of a pint of ice cream whose construction paper label advertised Arnie & Maggie’s Very First Flavor.

  “Not bad, huh?” His face replaced the celery stick.

  “Why’s my name second? Who made that executive decision?”

  “Mr. Al Phabet, m’dear. It’s about the only perk associated with my name.”

  She slid the hood off her head and he leaned back in the chair next to hers.

  “That’s quite a supply you have.” She nodded to the duffel bag at his feet.

  He lifted out white bed sheets, waffle cones, and a head of broccoli.

  “I didn’t know how much selling you’d need.”

  She laughed. “I guess I should’ve held out.”

  While he shoved everything back into the bag and placed the ice cream on the snack table, Maggie sat up straighter, redid her ponytail, and shoved her feet all the way into her shoes. It was the most effort she’d put into her appearance in fourteen days.

  “So,” he said, patting his knees and facing her, “I’d hoped you’d be here.”

  She looked down, felt her cheeks redden. “Yeah, I’m sorry about—”

  “Shh!” He close
d his eyes and covered his ears with both hands, then opened one eye, then the other, and slowly lowered his hands once convinced she was quiet. “Don’t apologize. You did nothing wrong.”

  She bit her lip to keep from protesting.

  “I’m just glad to see you.” He shoved his hands in his sweatshirt pocket. “You’ve been missed. Many people have been worried. Mud Puddle Lake has threatened to freeze over.”

  She sighed. “I’m totally fine. I’ve just been hiding out. It’s silly, I know.”

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t name one person who doesn’t want to hide every now and then—except for maybe Samuel.” He looked toward the circle where the most vocal Pound Patroller talked to a transfixed audience. “He’s a bit of a social butterfly.”

  She laughed.

  “Okay, but here’s the deal. I know you’re going through a thing right now—”

  “It’s not a—”

  “And that’s completely and totally understandable and I could launch into a whole big argument about those idiots at your school, but that’s common knowledge by now, and the important thing is that I need a favor.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Okay?”

  He took a deep breath and bounced his knees up and down. “Okay.” He exhaled. “So our school band concert is in two weeks and every year after the concert is a small party at my parents’ country club and it’s always miserable, but my parents always make me go, and the only way I could possibly even imagine getting through another one is if there was some sort of entertainment.”

  She tilted her head and waited for more. “And?”

  “And, so, not like you’d have to sing and dance or anything, but maybe if you just came with me? And we hung out?”

  She watched his earlobes turn red.

  “I don’t know, Arnie.” She sighed and looked down at her sweats, the same ones she’d trained in, the same ones she’d worn nonstop for three days in a row. “I’m not exactly a fashion maven these days.”

  “We’ll wear togas. I don’t care. Bad publicity is still publicity.”