"I'm so fat," Shanna complained, frowning at herself in her bedroom mirror.
I had to stop and push the door open when I heard that. She'd left it cracked and was pouting at her reflection, a t-shirt on over her bikini, her long brown hair back in a ponytail. The two of us were about to walk to the neighborhood pool.
"What are you
talking
about?" I asked my sister. "Have you been taken over by some alien from another planet? Are you trying to develop an eating disorder? You look great."
I wasn't lying. Shanna had curves, but not nearly enough to be called "fat," or "heavy" or even "plump."
"Miles! You can't just barge in here," she said, scowling. "I might have been naked."
Don't I wish,
I thought. "Yeah, with the door half open. That would really be like you – geez, you can't even wear a bathing suit without something on over it."
I walked in and stood next to her, trying to see what she saw in the long mirror over her closet door.
"Where's all this fat?" I asked. "I don't see it."
"You're kidding, right?" Her hands went to her stomach, squeezing it through the fabric of her shirt. It was true that she could pinch some flesh there, but I'd seen her in just the bikini before, and in my view her belly had exactly the right gentle swell to be alluring. Unless you were the kind who liked his girls to have a rock-hard six-pack, it looked fine. But she went on anyway: "It's like I'm wearing a tire made of blubber."
I shook my head, glad that I was wearing baggy trunks and not something tighter. Shanna's body drove me crazy, and I could feel myself thickening up in my shorts with every second that I examined her in the mirror.
"It's a girl's tummy," I told her. "It's supposed to be a little soft. Look at your waist. It curves in just like it ought to."
"I'm starting to have a muffin top when I wear my jeans," she insisted.
"That's ridiculous."
"Well look at my thighs!"
I'm trying not to,
I thought. But out loud, I said, "You're just searching for an excuse to get out of going to the pool with me. If you don't want to go, all you have to do is say so."
She only stared down at her legs in the mirror – her perfectly rounded, sleek legs that curved seamlessly into glorious hips and an absolutely mouth-watering heart-shaped ass. What the hell was she seeing that I wasn't?
Frustrated, I snapped, and crossed a barrier that common sense would say I probably shouldn't have.
"Look," I said, and without even thinking about it, I leaned over and ran the backs of two fingers up the smooth white arc of her outer thigh. The feel of her leg, soft against my knuckles, almost made me forget why I'd done it, and I had to blink a couple of times before I went on, "Not even a hint of cellulite. There are tons of girls who'd kill to have legs like these."
With a twitch, she stepped to the side, away from me. Her expression had a strange look to it, and she took a minute to say, "Don't touch me like that. What a perv."
Her rich brown eyes didn't look angry or offended, though. They held something deeper – uncertain and confused.
Suddenly, she narrowed her gaze out of that uncertainty and said, "You're right."
But just as my heart fluttered upward with the hope that I'd actually made her feel better about herself, she went on: "I don't want to go to the pool after all. You have fun while I put on my fat pants and mope around here."
***
At the pool, I stared at all the girls in their suits and tried to use their bodies to get my mind off of Shanna's. My sister was a year older, nineteen and still in high school because she'd failed a grade during our "bad times," as we called the years between sixth and eighth grades. I guess it was actually two grades that she failed, but she made one up in summer school once they put us in a better foster home and she got out of her depression. So we ended up in the same grade all through high school, and behaved ourselves well enough to stay with the same foster family, the Petersons. But as great as the Petersons were, we never really lowered our defenses around them – we knew all too well how bad it hurt to lose anyone you really cared about.
Celia Kwan and her sister Ilse were both laying out on lounge chairs when I walked in through the pool gate. The Kwans were amazing, exotic, luscious, unique, brilliant girls with a Chinese-American father and a Nigerian mother, and ordinarily I would have been drooling over them the entire time I was at the pool. But today their cream-and-coffee flesh and hourglass figures barely held my eye. As I walked past them, Celia was saying something to Ilse in French, and they both broke out laughing, but I didn't even glance over for a look at their vast smiles and glittering teeth. The Kwans were untouchable – they'd both be going to Harvard in the fall, taking their voluptuous bodies and joyfully intellectual brains with them. I'd be going to community college, assuming I managed to scrape together the money. I'd spent a great many hours masturbating over fantasies of the two of them draping themselves naked upon me, roaming my body with their mouths and breasts and crotches – I'd even looked up on the internet how to say, "I'm coming," in each of the four languages they spoke, just to give my jerk-off daydreams a greater level of realism. But they were so far out of my league that thinking about them almost always depressed me (after I finished getting off), and I expected that to be especially true today, so I mostly ignored them. To the extent that two bodies like that could be ignored, I mean.
Nearby, Leila Auden lay face-down with her top undone, which I thought should have been against the rules. Not the pool rules, but the don't-deliberately-drive-boys-crazy rules. Lying on her front, she mostly concealed her unbelievable breasts (widely considered the best rack in our senior class), and to have her bikini bra untied just seemed like taunting. I didn't more than glance at her, though, despite her back and ass being almost as perfect as her boobs – her twin brother Dane was sitting next to her, and he had a habit of glaring at any guy who ogled his sister too long.
Dropping my towel on a chair well away from the Kwans and the Audens, I turned to the pool and saw Julie Plunkett splashing her little brother in the shallow end. Unlike Shanna, Julie really was overweight, with a waist that barely crinkled in at the middle instead of curving, and enough of a belly that most people would have said she shouldn't wear a bikini in public. But she also had enormous knockers and an ass that would not stop – hence her nickname around school, Junkett in the Trunkett. It was mean, and I would certainly never have said it to her face, but that's how all the guys talked about her. I'm pretty sure it reflected the fact that every one of them would secretly have loved to bend Julie over and plow into her from behind, with both hands on that broad, smooth, ample bottom, watching her long blond hair swing forward and back with every bump of his groin against her snatch. I had gotten myself off to thoughts like that of Julie even more often than the Kwans – Julie wasn't out of my league the way they were. But she'd had a steady boyfriend since tenth grade, Scott Fester, so I'd never asked her out. I'd just looked plenty, like I was looking today.
Her brother was splashing back now, and she shrieked and giggled, trying to block the spray with her hands held out. Julie always wrinkled her face up when she laughed, in a cute way – and it was a pretty face, and that full, pale, sleek body of hers definitely made me hot as it glistened under a sheen of chlorinated water and sun-block. I sat on the edge of the pool with my lower legs in the water and pretended to be casually looking around while I kept my eyes mostly on Julie's bobbling, splashing breastiness.
Unfortunately, seeing an actual semi-fat chick only made me more baffled at Shanna's complaints about her weight. Julie looked great, and I'd envied Scott Fester ever since I found out they were a couple, and I knew for a fact that half the guys in school wished they were Scott so that they could get a piece of that oh-so-generous tail. Shanna, meanwhile, probably weighed twenty or thirty pounds less than Julie, despite being taller, and had an even prettier face besides. How in the world could she think there was anything wrong with how she looked?
Maybe she doesn't,
I thought.
Maybe she just tells herself that, for the same reason you probably wouldn't ask Julie out even if Scott was nowhere in the picture.
I held my breath and slid off the rim of the pool into the water. The cold shock managed to distract me for a bit, and I swam several laps thinking about nothing at all – which was good, because that last thought wouldn't have led anywhere productive. The bad years had done something to me and Shanna both: first losing our parents, then living with Uncle Sal for six months while he drank away half our inheritance before disappearing with the rest – and finally, the series of nightmare foster homes that we went through before having the good luck to land at the Petersons' near the end of eighth grade.
We just weren't cut out for getting close to people anymore. We had friends, but no best friends. And the handful of dates we'd either one of us been on always turned into disasters.
It was no wonder I had the hots for my sister. In the whole world, there wasn't anyone else I could trust well enough to want to touch.
***
When I got home the house was quiet. The Petersons had gone off for the weekend, to a marathon for some charity halfway across the state. Not for the first time, I felt guilty walking into the place and knowing how much they had done for us, how much they cared about us, and how much faith they put in us. Now that I'd turned eighteen, neither one of us brought them a foster-care subsidy from the state. Shanna hadn't done so in over a year. But they'd told us we could stay until we graduated, and even though we both worked part-time, they wouldn't let us pay rent. The Petersons were great people, and we liked and respected them.
They just weren't our parents.
