MEGAN. BEFORE SCHOOL.
No replies from Lauren or Kay when she woke up.
Megan went through her morning routine, feeling just as nervous and apprehensive as the day before, which sucked, because that was just supposed to be a first-day-of-school problem.
Still. It was her own fault, so she just tried not to fret too much and focused on looking nice. She wouldn’t be able to approach the day with the confidence she needed if she was unhappy with her appearance.
First thing, shower. She’d forgotten to the night before.
After showering, she brushed out her tangled mess of hair, counting the strokes, trying to approach the day with mindfulness, and to not drive herself crazy with her thoughts. By the time she was done, it was much straighter than usual, with only the ends of each thick sheath of hair curling into a single loop at the end, like a normal person’s hair, rather than the perfect multiple loop coils that she managed to achieve out of just a couple of twisted buns.
The brushing left her hair hanging to the back of her knees, which wasn’t going to work. Megan proceeded to acquire many hairpins in several varieties, and set to work, twisting and twirling her hair into a large, artfully messy bun—it was a little like having a big ball of yarn attached to the back of her head. It wasn’t her best look, but it was kind of cute, and it would have to do.
While doing her hair and make-up, peering at herself in the mirror on top of her vanity, Megan’s mind set off down familiar paths. A soft-looking, pretty girl of largely Europic descent looked back at her, with big, blue-violet eyes and long, blonde, nearly invisible eyelashes to go along with her silver-gold blonde hair. (Without mascara she looked like a weird alien.) She had lovely round apple cheeks, and a well formed oval face. A smattering of freckles, “the perfect” quantity according to some, dotted her nose and cheeks. She wasn’t merely pretty, apparently. Her features were those of a masterful work of beauty, like a perfect porcelain doll or a marble statue.
So she’d been told. A lot. Sometimes by total strangers.
But when taken with the rest of her body, Megan thought she looked more like a fertility spirit idol than a doll: a nymph-of-the-valley sort of figure, or a corn queen. Pear-shaped, with hips that were wider than her shoulders, let alone her bust. At least at her current weight. It had happened fast, when she was not quite thirteen. She still had silvery stretch marks all around the pale skin of her waist.
Her mother was a curvy woman, and quite a bit bustier than Megan, so far. She'd maybe never quite made time to get back into the shape she’d been in before giving birth to Megan. She kept in certified shape[1], but no more, prioritizing her career as first a doctor of emergency medicine, then the director of emergency medicine at Harborview Medical Center, over regaining the athleticism of her militia days. Megan’s father, on the other hand, was a slender man. When she and they were all in the same place, one could tell that the particular mixture of genes that formed Megan O’Sadie had somehow matched up her father’s upper half with her mother’s lower half.
[1] Citizens of the Fredonian Union are required to meet a series of physical fitness standards adjusted to the citizen’s individual body shape and health assessment. They are not typically arduous to meet for anyone capable of doing their normal errands and commutes to school or work by foot and transit, which is the bulk of the citizenry by necessity. Those with medical conditions and disabilities are given reasonable accommodations.
Luckily, when Megan’s hips had happened to her, she’d already become friends with Lauren. Megan had thought clothes and fashion were fun and all at that age, but she’d known nothing compared to Lauren, who had helped both Megan and Beth figure out how to dress their changing bodies. Beth had remained slender, for her part—she’d just gotten taller, tall enough that “willowy” was a good descriptor for her now. Lauren had had an easy enough time helping Beth figure out how to dress, since Katier wasn’t that differently shaped, just shorter.
It had taken more work to figure out how to find clothes that would fit Megan’s dumb hips, let alone flatter them. Finding clothes that could work with her figure had taken a lot of work—and the help of a good tailor, who Lauren had also been essential in finding. She simply didn’t fit into most mass produced clothing. It was all designed for warriors and models, and she wasn’t either.
Megan owed Lauren a lot. She could hardly believe the same girl who had shown her so much kindness had done what she’d done to Angie and the boys. She was going to force Lauren to explain herself. Even if the idea of doing so scared her a little.
Megan wrapped up her make-up and shook her head. Loose ends of her hair swayed and swung, swishing across her shoulders. She’d known what she wanted to wear before she’d gone to bed, and tried not to let her dream, in which she’d been wearing the same outfit, dissuade her. Since it would have been folly to do makeup before putting it on, she’d already put on her favorite camisole blouse: extra lacy, plum-colored to make her eyes seem more purple, and cut well enough that she could also wear a low-key pushup bra without it being obvious.
She was nervous. About whether Evan would forgive her, but there was nothing at all to be done about that until she saw him. And about whether Chris might possibly be interested in her, which she could potentially affect now. Despite herself, she’d spent some of her fretting the evening before thinking about the way Circe Pendergast and other girls had been looking at him. Megan may have been as pretty as everyone said, but a guy like Chris could have his pick of pretty girls, and they wouldn’t be in short supply at Persephone.
And pretty or not, Megan was also… heavier than a lot of girls. She sighed, hanging her head, looking down at her lap, sitting at the vanity in her underwear, since she hadn’t wanted to risk getting makeup on her skirt. She glared at her thighs. Poked one. Poked her stomach through the satin of the camisole.
Love this story? Find the genuine version on the author's preferred platform and support their work!
She couldn’t really call herself pudgy, because that had had a connotation of heaviness in the face that she didn’t have (as people always reminded her when the subject came up). And she should count herself lucky, as Katie Kay often said while bemoaning her own stomach pudge. The layer of fat that lay under most of Megan’s skin, particularly around her upper arms, across her stomach, and around her thighs and butt, didn’t bunch or sag really. It was well distributed. It just made her soft all over. It still made her feel self-conscious in a way that had only come with puberty. It still made her look with envy upon toned, strong girls like Lauren and Nisha, or delicate girls like Beth or Katier or Circe, or Angie even, who had that cute little butt now, that running was paying off for her—
Megan shook her head again, pushing herself to her feet. She needed to be on her game. She might be doomed because of her shape, as she had no idea what sorts of girls Chris might be interested in, but if she had any chance she wanted to make the most of it. Hell, she didn’t even know if he liked girls, not for sure. It was the safe bet of course, but you never knew.
She grabbed a deodorant bar shaped object, her noStik, and ran it up and down the insides of her thighs. This would help keep them from being too annoying when they rubbed against each other while she walked, a problem for her since age thirteen. Then she pulled out her skirt, a lightweight, swishy, gray-patterned pleated number that really worked with her hips, flattering them and her waist while hiding her thick thighs.
She felt like there’s been a spark, with Chris—that first meeting, with the bells, had been something, and he’d seemed to feel it too—but he could have just been interested in the confluence of their birthdays or whatever, and not felt it as... romantically... as she had. After he’d gone home rather than hanging out with them… she was afraid of… well. She was afraid of what had happened in the dream. Of him deciding she was terrible because of what she’d done to Angie and them in middle school, let alone what she’d let happen.
Or of Circe, or some other pretty rich girl snatching him away. Hell, of the junior class Light Bearer, Quinn Karga, taking a fancy to him. Derrek was dating someone else, and the senior, Charlie Stormheart, only liked boys, so Chris was the only Light Bearer available if Quinn wanted to pair up with another one—assuming Chris didn't also only or mostly like boys.
As Megan’s thoughts meandered, she pulled on her favorite cardigan—the white one, with the lace cuffs, which would emphasize the faint summer tan she’d managed to develop. She had no idea what Quinn Karga wanted, of course. It was as stupid a thing to worry about now as it had been the night before. She’d talked to Quinn once at one of the Bakili’s parties, and found the experience overwhelming. Quinn had been so cool, and gracious, and her ensemble had been to die for—such a beautiful dress! Megan was reasonably sure she had come off like a stammering idiot.
She started to grab her favorite pair of “sexy” gray heels, with little silk bows on the tops of each, which she’d intended to wear that day, but the dream rushed back into her mind, despite her best attempts to let her mind wander along familiar paths so that she wasn’t actively thinking of the dream, or the fears underneath it. The taps of those heels as she’d walked down the stairs and out onto the lane had felt so visceral, so real, even if the dream had shifted to Asphodel after that, like dreams do. It was going to damage the overall effect of the outfit, but she couldn’t. Instead, she picked up a pair of cute black summer weight flats and slipped those on. It’s not like her hair wasn’t different anyway.
She checked in with the full-length mirror mounted on the back of her door one last time before leaving her room, like always. The girl looking back at her was gorgeous. People weren’t wrong. Her silver-gold hair in its messy bun somehow looked elegant. Her eyes looked big, bright, and very violet when highlighted by her camisole, which she knew was unusual, envied. Kids she didn’t know asked her where she’d gotten her contacts sometimes, or if she’d gotten her eyes enchanted because “they look so natural!”
Megan knew it was just her genes, but she sometimes felt like she’d been put together by some god or spirit that had been paying more attention to her aesthetic appeal than to her functionality as an organism.
And it all just didn’t seem to matter very much when all of her friends had had boyfriends (or girlfriends, in Nisha’s case), multiples of them, throughout middle school, while all she’d ever done was crush on various guys, stand alone or with the girls at dances, and try to flirt with cute guys from other middle schools at parties. Last year, she’d thought that flirting would bear fruit a couple of times, but it didn’t in either case. She’d been told, repeatedly, by everyone it came up with, that she was just too intimidating for middle school boys.
Megan had a different theory, now. Boys hadn’t dated her because they didn’t want to risk being caught in a lie about the Exiles. They’d been right to worry. Megan would have fucking destroyed any boyfriend of hers who she found out had kept this from her.
Megan sighed, shook her head at herself again. She tried not to dwell on her S.O.-lessness too much. She hadn’t much that summer, or the day before when she’d been getting ready. She’d been dwelling on Angie and Ryan and Evan, instead. She didn’t want to be one of those people who defined herself based on their romantic relationships. She didn’t want to define herself based on her looks either, even though lots of other people seemed to.
She glanced at the clock. She had been far too slow with all this ruminating. She needed to get going if she was going to have any time before class to see if she could work things out with Evan.
Which had been the real reason she had been worrying about all this—that, and Chris suddenly entering her life, of course, which still hardly felt real. It was easier to think the same thoughts she’d had a thousand times over the past couple of years than face the fact that she might have already blown it. If Evan was upset enough that he told her to shit off… The afternoon before, with Angie and Ryan, had been so fun, but if Evan didn’t want to make up, it would all fall apart. Angie had made that much clear the day before. Ryan and Evan had to both accept her back, and she was afraid Evan might be too hurt to do so. That she’d blown her chance to show that she cared about them, about him, by getting distracted by Chris and that magical meeting.
The dream had seemed so plausible, except for the murder part. That once Chris found out what she’d done to them—exactly, rather than just in allusions—that he’d want nothing more to do with her. That he and Evan could start going out hunting. That they could both die, like Virginia.
She had to get going! She wrenched open her door and headed downstairs.
She stepped out into the kitchen just in time to see the front door click closed. She considered hurrying over to open it and say bye to her dad, but she’d been up for a while and he hadn’t bothered to stick around, so whatever. Instead, she made breakfast.
After she was done and had cleaned up, Megan drifted over to the front window, leaning forward to peer through the drapes. She froze.
Outside, standing exactly where they’d been in her dream, under the same elm tree across the lane, in the same square, were Angie and the boys—all three of them.