Page 2 of Our Forever Starts Tonight

She shook her head and scoffed a little. “Don’t you think it’s that attitude that makes it so bad?”

“Yeah, Mom. I think all the popular kids attack and ridicule me because I don’t have a good attitude about school,” I snipped back.

Her coffee cup hit the table with a thud and I glanced over at her, seeing her annoyed expression. “That was your old school. This is going to be different.”

“I think you have too much faith in people.”

“Aria. I transferred jobs and bought a house probably a little more expensive than I can afford just to give you an opportunity to go to a school that will be better for you. The least you could do is be grateful.”

That wasn’t really a fair position to put me in. I didn’t ask for any of that. “Mom, if you’d told me that you were going to put yourself in a bind just to send me to a different school, I’d have told you not to bother. Just like my old school had bullies, this school is going to have them too. For as long as I’m alive and fat, I’ll be bullied. I’ve made my peace with it.”

“You’re notfat,” she hissed back. “And I have a very hard time believing there are going to be more kids just as vile as the ones at your last school. You’re incredibly beautiful and charismatic, and if you aren’t so pessimistic and actually give people a chance to see that, itwillmake a difference.”

“It’s so easy for you to say when you’ve never been larger than a size two, even when you were pregnant,” I snapped as I dragged a couple of plates down to plate up the food I’d cooked. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

“I know what bullies are like, Aria.”

“Yourbullies are very different frommybullies.Mybullies have access to social media and cell phones to really get all their best insults out in record time. If someone wants to upload a picture of me to the internet with a trough of pig slop in front of me and a snout photoshopped on, they can do it with ease. I just don’t give them the time of day. They have stuff they wanna say, I let them say it. They want to laugh at me, I let them laugh. I appreciate what you did for me, but I regret to inform you, it probably isn’t going to make much of a difference.” I slid her plate down onto the table in front of her, “but if it makes you feel better, I’ll exclaim once I’m in the door that I’m in a really good mood and positive that this is the United States’oneschool where the cheerleaders and football players love palling around with the overweight debate dork.”

Instead of a response, my mom let out a drawn out, frustrated sigh. “I don’t understand you. Your outlook on life can change things.”

I looked down at her, right into her eyes so she knew I was serious. “Mom. I don’t hate myself. I like what I see when I look into a mirror, which is why people who actuallydoget to know me call me confident. I’m not projecting some sort of self-hatred onto people around me, these kids are just disgusting human beings. You can’t throw a rock without hitting one these days, and as much as I wish my perspective changed that, it doesn’t. It’s much better to be cynical and prepared for what’s to come than overly-optimistic only to be shot down when people behave exactly as I expect them to.”

I walked back to the pan in the kitchen, and instead of keeping my ingredients separate, I stacked them to make a sandwich. I wrapped it in foil, grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and started for the door.

“You’re not going to sit and eat?” my mom called after me.

Slipping my feet into a pair of my white sandals I called back, “I’ve lost my appetite.” Then I grabbed my backpack and keys and left.

My car was a twenty-year-old beater Toyota that I’d bought off of Craigslist after saving my earnings from work for close to a year. It wasn’t the most luxurious vehicle on the road—and definitely not in our new, ritzy neighborhood—but it was made of tough stuff, so it did better to contain my screams as I slammed into the driver’s seat and let out as loud a howl as I could muster. My mom had always been beautiful and stick-skinny. I’d gotten her looks in the face, but always held onto extra weight. It didn’t make me unattractive, at least I didn’t think so, but society had long since decided that the more you weighed, the less beautiful you were, and her ‘just see the good in the world’ attitude wasn’t going to change that core tenet. If my outlook on the world was going to change the way people treated me, I wouldn’t have been so bullied by the kids at my old school that my mom was hearing about it at her office job ten miles away. Maybe it made her feel better to think the world wasn’t so bad, but I knew better.

My phone rang, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Amazing timing,” I said out loud. I quickly plugged my phone in, setting it up in the rigged-up hands-free mode I’d created and then started my car. “Hello?”

“Hey!” my best friend Lucky’s voice came across the car’s speaker. “Good morning.” I imagined his freckled face and blond hair, smiling at me and waving like a dope.

It actually did make me feel a little better.

“Morning,” I grumbled.

“Uh oh,” Lucky responded. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh nothing. Just my mom thinking thatI’mthe reason I’m bullied. Because I’m pessimistic.”

“I’m sure that’s what it is,” Lucky replied in a deeply sarcastic tone, making me laugh.

“I said the exact same thing.”

“Great minds,” Lucky replied. “So I take that to mean you aren’t looking forward to your first day?”

When I got to my first stoplight, I unwrapped my sandwich, ripped a piece off, and popped it into my mouth. “I’m never looking forward to school. It’s just not my place.”

“You would look forward to it when I was there,” he replied, and there was genuine sadness in his voice.

“Correction,” I said. “I looked forward to seeingyou, but I can also see you at work, or anytime we decide to hang out. I don’t have to be at school for that.”

“I know what you mean,” he responded. “I already wasn’t a huge fan of this school, but now knowing I won’t get to see you makes everything worse. That being said, I already know you’re gonna knock ‘em dead. I’m worried you’re gonna make a bunch of new friends and forget all about me.”

“I could never,” I said. “Besides, we still work together.”

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