Page 17 of The Love Haters

I’d grown, dammit. Literally and metaphorically. In all the good, bad, and terrifying ways possible.

Which is why that night, in our after-hours office, after I’d just fully committed to a not entirely specified number of weeks in Key West, on a job I wasn’t qualified for, with a man whose own brother thought he wastoo perfect… when Cole Hutcheson raised his hand for a high-five and said, “And don’t forget to pack your bikini!”

I burst into tears.

Three

“YOU DIDN’T,” MYcousin Beanie said on FaceTime when I told her about it.

I winced. “I did.”

Beanie—a personal shopper—had moved from Texas to New York the week before the Lili Ventura scandal broke a year ago.

And, ever since, we’d FaceTimed every day.

The kind of video calls where you chat driving to work with your phone in the cupholder, and then home again with your phone on the passenger seat. Then, at home, you set it in the basket while you do laundry, and balance it on a bunch of bananas in the fruit bowl while you make dinner, and prop it on the sink ledge while you take a shower. The kind of video calls you do with genuine loved ones, where no one’s even trying to look good—and you’re mostly seeing the ceiling fan, or the inside of a pocket, or part of a nostril.

Right now, I was packing for Key West, and Beanie—just back from a super-busy work trip to Paris—was getting all the updates. I had her wedged into the pocket of my suitcase while I packed, and she had me resting on her dresser while she unpacked.

“Did he think you were crazy?” she wanted to know, re: my weeping at the wordbikini.

“I told him it was allergies,” I said.

“Did he buy that?”

“I don’t think he cared much, either way.”

“Maybe it really was allergies.”

“And what would I be allergic to?”

“Um, tobathing suits. Obviously!”

True enough. I hadn’t owned a bathing suit since middle school.

I felt a familiar squeeze of dread. “Also, I can’t swim.”

“That’s not news.”

Of course it wasn’t. Beanie knew more about me than I knew about myself. We’d grown up together on the same block. Our dads were brothers, and after my mom left us and moved away—when I was eleven—I pretty much spent the rest of my childhood trying to live with Beanie and convince her mom to be my mom, too.

Beanie was basically my cousin, sister, and lifetime bestie all rolled into one.

We had “gone swimming” my whole life, of course. It’s too hot in Texas in the summers not to be constantly hitting the neighborhood pool, and the beach, and the lawn sprinklers whenever possible. But “getting wet and splashing around” is not the same thing as swimming.

The summer after my mom left, when all the cousins were supposed to take proper swim lessons, I’d refused to go—in part because the boy cousins kept teasing me about how often I burst into tears.

By thenextsummer, my dad had started dating a lady named Angela, who—I want to emphasize—had some nice qualities, but who also wanted to guide me through puberty by telling me over and over to suck in my stomach.

Beanie knew all about that, too. And she wasnotTeam Angela.

I do think Angela meant well, in her way.

I’m not excusing her. But intentions don’tnotmatter. She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to help. It’s just that her version of helping, as Beanie always put it, was “supremely fucked up.”

She thought the most important thing a woman could possibly be wastiny.

Within six months of marrying my dad, Angela had put me on a diet. I was twelve. Looking back at photos from those years, I’m always shocked at how much I looked exactly like all the other ordinary kids.

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