I always feel uncomfortable when people who aren’t Black say anything about my skin tone, but Christina is Korean American, and she seems nice enough.
She cups my face, staring into my eyes. It’s oddly erotic. She smells like flowers and rich people. Then she grabs the dress, snapping at Meghan, who holds open a door across the room for me.
I’m only able to get it on because I suck in my stomach. If Meghan can tell, she doesn’t say anything. There aren’t any zippers, so she just clamps the dress up. The slit doesn’t fall against one of my legs like it would for Angelina Jolie. It’s somewhere between them, gaping wider than it’s supposed to.
I don’t want to look in the mirror. I don’t want Marius or Christina to see. Marius will smile and be nice, like usual, but I know he’ll regret even suggesting I try it on. Christina will be upset that her design looks like such a mess on me when it was so beautiful on the hanger.
Meghan does the honors of opening the door. No one gasps, like the moments in the movies or Say Yes to the Dress. Christina’s eyes roam over me, lips moving, even though nothing comes out. Marius stares for a moment. When he sees me looking, he looks away.
Tears clog my throat. I shouldn’t even be crying. A boy didn’t jump up and down when I wore a dress. So what?
“I’ll make the proper changes,” Christina says. “I’ll have to let it out, since it wasn’t made with you in mind, you see. But you make the dress, Josie. I’ve found its rightful owner.”
My eyebrows rise. She can’t be seeing the same thing I see—how the dress practically folds under my body, like it’s not enough for me.
“I don’t know where I’d even wear it,” I say instead, shrugging. Christina’s face is nice to look at. She feels like someone I can talk to. “I don’t really go anywhere that requires a dress this beautiful.”
“Oh, please.” She barely acknowledges the compliment. “We’ll have to find somewhere for you to wear it. Meghan, will you grab the tape measure?”
“Maybe prom,” Meghan suggests, stepping toward me. “Do you mind?”
I shake my head. As she holds the tape measure around my hips, I resist the urge to scoff. Forget the fact that I could never actually afford this dress. Marius doesn’t have to worry about paying, since he’s basically borrowing the clothes for some award show, but I don’t have anyone to sponsor this dress. No one even knows who I am.
“I don’t think so,” I say instead. “I wasn’t really planning on going.”
“Oh,” Meghan says, in a way suggesting that she’s already tired of this conversation. She starts to mutter numbers under her breath.
“I never went to my prom,” Marius says. I almost forgot he was here. “And I sort of wish I had. You might regret it if you don’t go.”
“I don’t think I’ll care,” I say. Meghan gestures for me to lift my arms, so I do. “High school isn’t a place I want to remember.”
For the first time, Meghan looks like she agrees with me.
@JosieTheJournalist: why comment on someone else’s weight when you can just be quiet
Our six a.m. flight on Wednesday is only three hours, which isn’t nearly long enough for a nap. By the time we get to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, I’m basically dead on my feet.
“Come on,” I say, pulling at Alice after we’ve gotten our luggage. “Let’s stop at Starbucks.”
She groans. “I just want to go to the hotel.”
“I have to do that roundtable thing today, remember?”
“Yeah,” she says, stepping around me as I stumble with my suitcase. “The roundtable thing is at the hotel. Since you don’t need me, I was gonna binge all the Real Housewives episodes I’ve missed and eat a ton of junk food.”
That actually sounds like heaven right now. I shove down my jealousy as we near the Starbucks.
“Fine,” I say. “You don’t have to come, but I need something to help me stay awake.”
“Can’t we just go to the hotel?”
Jesus. My face feels weird and my entire body is just waking up after being confined to the plane. All I’m asking her to do is stand in line with me. Why is everything a fight with her?
“No,” I say. “You owe me after telling Marius about my anxiety without even asking me first.”
I don’t know what I was expecting—maybe for her to at least look like she feels bad—but she just shakes her head.
“Oh, please,” she says. “It’s not like I told him you used to wet the bed. I told him something that would be helpful to know. And he wasn’t mean about it. Right?”
He wasn’t, but that’s not the point.
“I don’t care what you thought,” I say instead. “It’s my information to tell people. What if I told him about—I don’t know—your heavy periods or something?”
“It’s not the same thing. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not,” I say. “You’d be pissed if I told him something personal about you. It’s not fair of you to just go around—”
“See, this is why you’re impossible.” She slaps her hands against her thighs. “I try to do something nice and you’re so ungrateful—”
“Whatever,” I say, heading over to the Starbucks. “Forget about it.”
When I was little, flying in an airplane sounded so fun, being up so high and looking down on the clouds. Now it just seems like a chore, an annoying way to get from one place to the next. I almost wish we had a tour bus. One without Alice on it.
After a few minutes waiting in the Starbucks line, Alice appears next to me.
I roll my eyes. “Did you change your mind?”
“No,” she says. “Maggie wants to talk to you, or whatever.”
The person in front of me walks away, leaving me as the next person in line. I step forward.
“Hello,” the barista says. “What can I get you?”
I order quickly, then step aside. Alice shoves the phone in my face.
“Josie!” Maggie’s face appears on the screen. She’s wearing her uniform, which means she could be at home or slacking off. “How was the flight?”
I fumble around for earbuds before Alice reluctantly hands me hers, fisted in her hands.
“Did you pull these out before giving me the phone?”
“Come on,” she says. “Why would I do that?”
She’d totally do that.
“Josie!” a barista calls, setting my chai on the counter.
I’m not awake enough for this.
“Here,” I say, giving the phone back to Alice. “Hold on.”
After I’ve grabbed my drink, I turn back to see that Alice has somehow snagged a table, our bags strewn around it to claim our territory. She has both earbuds in and is nodding at something Maggie must be saying.
“She’s back,” Alice says, taking out one earbud and shoving it in my ear. “Do you see her?”
I fix the earbud, moving my head. “Hey, Mags.”
“Josie!” she says again, like she didn’t see me before. “Alice tells me the boy you’re interviewing is really cute?”
“I didn’t say that,” Alice says. “I said you would probably think he’s really cute. Josie does.”
My cheeks burn. “I never said that.”
“Oh, Josie.” Maggie wiggles her eyebrows. “It’s bad, huh?”
“It’s not like that,” I say, picking up my cup. “I’m just interviewing him.”
I should be thinking about Marius. It’s just that I’d rather not.
“Are you sure you don’t have a crush?” she asks, leaning closer to the camera. “A little, itty-bitty one?”
“You’re spending too much time watching Paw Patrol,” I say. “It’s not a crush.”
I refuse to call it a crush. Maybe that’ll keep one from developing. In the p
ast, I’ve tried to squash my feelings before they got too big by ignoring all the fluttery thoughts and focusing on the negative aspects of a person. It’s just hard to do that with Marius.
“Tell me more about him,” Maggie says. “The pictures of him online are cute. Is he as cute in person?”
“Maggie,” I hiss. The idea of her looking him up to appraise him is cringy. “He looks fine.”
“He’s definitely fine.”
“Maggie.”
She snickers.
“Ugh.” I toss my head back, running my hand through my hair. “I’ll talk about him once with you. Just to get it out of my system.”
Gagging, Alice gets up and walks to the line.
“Excellent.” Maggie nods, solemn. “A great plan.”
“I can’t with you.” I roll my eyes, but I’m smiling. Something about Marius is fun to think about. Maybe it’s because I’ve been avoiding thoughts of him since we last met. “I don’t know where to start.”
“I want to hear everything.” She steps back, revealing the break room in the background. “You really should purge all of these feelings before you go do your next journalism thing.”
“I mean, he’s…” I shake my head, grinning. “Even his name. Like Marius just sounds gorgeous, you know?”
“I definitely know.” Maggie smiles her crush grin. She looks like she’s watching a romantic comedy. “What else?”
Talking about Marius when he’s not here makes me feel shy.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He said there was something romantic about movies, but there’s the same romance around him. He’s…God, Maggie. He’s stunning and beautiful and mysterious and different from anyone I’ve ever met.”
If Alice were here, she’d make fun of me or scold Maggie for encouraging me. Maggie just squeals. I open my mouth to say more, but Alice drops back into her seat.
“What?” she says, waving around a white milkshake-looking thing with red and green sprinkles. “The line was short.”
She grabs the earbud she left dangling and sticks it in her ear. I try my best not to pout.
“What are you talking about now, Mags?” Alice asks. “Still on the boy? Has Josie written any love poems yet?”
“God,” I say. “You’re actually the worst.”
“Yeah, she is,” Maggie says. “Come on, keep telling me. What’s it like talking to him?”
“He’s just like every other boy Josie’s had a crush on.” Alice holds her drink. “They all look the same.”
“That’s not true,” I say. I can’t help the anger that flares in my chest. “You act like you know everything about me, but you don’t.”
She folds her arms. Maggie shakes her head.
“It’s fine to have a type,” Maggie says. “Just make sure he knows you’re better than him from the start. It should even the playing field.”
“How does that make it even?” I ask. “If I’m better.”
“Well, maybe even isn’t the right word.” She cocks her head. “I guess it just makes things easier.”
Maggie has always indulged my crushes too much. Every time something doesn’t work out, she says, “They knew you were better than them and they couldn’t handle it.” But I can’t deal with her saying all of these profound lines about love that worked for her. I’m different. I don’t look like her and I don’t know how to talk like her.
“I don’t know why you’re always into these skinny, slinky boys,” Alice says, leaning her head back against her seat. “You’ll snap him in half.”
“Alice, come on,” Maggie barks. “Really?”
Alice says something in response, maybe an apology, but I don’t hear it. My heart has already sunk. Something builds in my throat, and I struggle to swallow as I stare down into my plastic cup of tea. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see my suitcase. I try very hard not to think about the pair of Spanx I know Maggie slipped into it before I left home.
I’m sure she doesn’t mean anything by it. Maybe she doesn’t realize I already worry about being bigger than whoever I end up with, about people always staring at us and wondering what my person sees in me.
Being fat is hard sometimes, but especially during the holidays. It was hard when Mom kept looking at me at Thanksgiving dinner. It was hard when the websites I read started posting diet tips or “inspirational stories” about people (mostly women) losing tons of weight by starving themselves or doing a bunch of crazy eating things that I’m trying to learn my way out of.
I don’t want to hear about people’s diet tips or weight-loss stories. People just see my body and automatically assume that I’m dying to know how their niece lost forty pounds on Weight Watchers or the new lemonade diet.
Most of the time, I can handle myself. Sometimes I slip. It feels like everyone is trying to tear down my self-esteem and I’m barely able to hold it up.
“Josie?” Maggie says. “Do you want to keep talking?”
I shake my head. I’m trying not to blink. If I do, tears will spill over, and Alice will say she didn’t mean it and that I’m too sensitive and she didn’t really say anything so bad.
I know why thinking about Marius makes me so uncomfortable. It’s not just because the movie was sad. It’s because I see Marius whenever I try not to think about him. It’s because I’m trying to train myself to stop wanting something I can’t have. Just like being on a diet.
“Come on,” I say, standing up. “We should head over to the hotel.”
@JosieTheJournalist: if you don’t see race you don’t see all the ways black people are (a) super cool (b) suffering from racism every day! #themoreyouknow :)
I don’t know why I thought I’d be exploring Austin. According to the itinerary, we’re doing something called a press roundtable. That means a bunch of members of the press show up at a fancy hotel—the same one Alice and I are staying at while we’re here—and eat lunch in its fancy conference room and basically get treated like royalty.
“Stop looking around like that,” Alice says. Somehow, I got her to come with me, despite the better plans she shared in the airport. “Try to look natural. No one looks as impressed as you.”
It’s hard to look natural. First, they gave us both bags of swag, even though Alice didn’t have a press badge on and I had to explain to the security guard that she was my chaperone. The bags have stuff like a flipbook with hi-res photos from the movie, a bottle of alcohol (which Alice will probably steal from me when we leave), a branded notebook, a branded pen, and something called a “self-care kit,” which is pretty much a little pouch filled with small containers of ChapStick, lotion, and bath salts. I guess it has to do with the fact that in the movie Peter sees a therapist who talks to him about self-care.
It’s still a little weird, but I like free stuff.
Now we’re eating “lunch,” which arrives on plates that look like the china we have at home. It’s not even normal food. We already had two courses—an avocado caprese salad and a creamy roasted red pepper and cauliflower soup with goat cheese—and now everyone has fish or chicken. Even the conference room is fancy. Gold—or what looks like gold—trims the chairs and the walls. There’s fancy wallpaper with pretty flowers. The windows are wide, and we can see the fountain and green, green grass outside by the main entrance, with its towering Greek columns.
“I’m trying, but it’s hard. Like, is it just me,” I whisper, leaning closer to Alice, “or does this feel like a wedding?”
“I guess the director has money, huh?” She glances at my salmon. “Do you want that?”
“Not the director, exactly.” I slide over my plate. “The studio. Maybe they spent a lot on this because of the combination of Dennis Bardell and Art Springfield.”
Alice nods, but she’s too busy tucking into my lunch to really be ingesting any of this. I turn my at
tention to the rest of the room. Alice is right—no one looks as impressed as I feel. Most people are typing on their phones while they eat. Some people chat with each other. A few people gather their things and head toward the door. The security guard standing there nods at them before glancing away.
“Hmm,” Alice says. “Do you think they’re leaving early?”
I glance back at the empty table. It isn’t the only one here; there are at least two more without any jackets or chairs or backpacks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “I think they’re calling us to interviews in small groups.”
“When do you go?”
“I don’t know.” I tap my fingers against the table. “When they call me, I guess.”
Instead of eating, I busy myself with looking through my questions. I wrote some for the director and every member of the cast, even though I’m not sure how many I’ll have a chance to ask.
The longest page in my notebook has questions for Marius. Some of them verge on being too personal, though: asking if he used any of his own experiences when playing Peter, how close he is to the material, and which scene in the movie he connects to most. But those are the sorts of things I want to know about him. I figure everyone else will want to know them, too.
Maybe I’ll try during our next one-on-one interview.
“Excuse me.” A woman dressed in a suit appears in front of us. “This section is next.”
There isn’t anyone else sitting at our table, but there are three other tables in this section, making about twenty reporters. Everyone gets up and grabs their stuff. I fall toward the back of the crowd as we leave the warm, bustling room, heading down the hallway.
I wish I weren’t so nervous. I’ve already done this before—well, not a roundtable exactly, but something close to it. But I get scared to talk to people every time. I don’t know if it’ll ever go away.
“Here we are,” the woman says. “Hope you enjoy.”
Off the Record Page 8