Fat.

Chapter One

When Corey had said he would be seeing me later, I thought he was joking, or just saying it for the hell of it.

I wasn't used to people being genuinely nice to me. It wasn't a very common occurence; so needless to say, I was never expecting it when it happened.

My only "friend", Kennedy, only talked to me because her mom forced her to. She and my mother had been best friends in high school, and now we were next door neighbors.

Growing up, before kids cared about being fat, our friendship was fine. Easy in fact. After she started getting made fun of for associating with "fatass" though, our public appearances together became less and less frequent.

So when Corey startled me for the secod time that day, I was at my lunch table, alone.

"Do you want to hand out today?"

His voice came out of nowhere.

I swear I jumped ten feet in the air the second his voice rang through my ears, shooting him a glare once it registered who was speaking to me.

Not because I was mad or anything, mostly because he had genuinely startled me.

"Wait, you want to hang out with me...?" I asked slowly, making sure I had heard right.

Corey's cheshire cat grin spread across his face.

"Well, duh. You're the only other person here. Soooooo what do you say?  We could go to the mall or something."

The mall. It was Friday afternoon, so the place would be packed. Did I really want to try to brave the crowds, and face the bitchiness of my schoolmates with some strange kid I had only just met?

Yes. Yes I did.

"That sounds like fun." I admitted shyly, reaching up and self consciously playing with my hair, something I did when I was nervous.

Coreys grin spread wider, if that was even possible.

I could tell that he was younger than me, but he had this self confidence and this happiness that was quite apparent about himself, that I was actually envious of. You could tell he was pleased with himself, but he wasn't overly cocky about it or anything. It was a nice change from the people I saw on a daily basis.

"You have a nice smile." I found myself saying.

He laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

"Why thank you, I've put a few thousand dollars into it, so I would certainly hope that it would pass for decent."

His eyes made their way down to my "lunch" as he spoke, and his lips tipped down in a slight frown as he took it in.

"Is that all you're eating?" he asked.

In front of me I had a small travel cup with a "lunch smoothie" [which consisted of spinach, kale, and some other questionable ingredients I couldn't remember] and a small baggie of saltine crackers.

"Uhm yeah." I said quietly, fiddling with the plastic baggie containing my saltines.

They weren't even the good crackers. They were sodium free.

Gag.

"Aren't you HUNGRY?" he asked, over-emphasizing the word hungry.

"No." I answered firmly, taking a long slurp of my smoothie, hoping to god I didn't throw it up all over him.

That would be embarassing, but this thing tasted so awful.

For the umpteenth time this year, I was trying some new diet that I had found on pinterest; keeping my calorie intake under 600 a day, in hopes of shedding a few pounds off of my 220 pound frame.