| Chubby Chicks Rule |
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CHAPTER 1
Jessica Smith stood on the sidewalk gasping, even though it was a cool seventy-one
degrees, her cotton blouse clung to her back, adhered to it by a strip of sweat. She
had asked her driver to drop her off two blocks away from the school and she had
walked the rest of the way. I don’t think that was such a good idea, she thought while
struggling to catch her breath. She glanced longingly over her shoulder, her limo was
nowhere in sight. “Okay Cinderella suck it up,” she muttered then looked around.
The area swarmed with girls and boys. Her eyes widened as though she had just
walked backstage at the MTV Movie Awards and had just seen Justin Bieber, Will
Smith, and Chace Crawford. Middleville High School, so different from the all-girls
private school she had attended for the last seven years.
She waddled up the stairs to her new high school and side-stepped a group of kids
standing in front of the door. They look so old, like they should be in college, she
thought while looking at them out of the corner of her eyes. The boys were just as tall
as her father and the girls looked like they had just stepped off the cover of Cosmo.
Shuffling past them she felt their gazes on her, then the snickers, there were always
snickers; they felt like little darts in her back. Jessica self-consciously tugged at her
poncho. The bright pink material had looked chic and sophisticated in the store, but
now she felt like an elephant wearing a tent.
“Excuse me!” she heard. “Excuse me! Ex-cuse ME!” The voice became more
insistent with each syllable.
Jessica turned and goose bumps the size of marshmallows popped out over her
arms. Grinning at her was a Jesse Metcalfe look-a-like. Jessica’s eyes darted to his
close cropped chocolaty colored hair, dimples and kissable lips.
He pulled himself away from the group and sauntered over to her. Her eyes widened
with awe. He stuck out his hand, Jessica stared at it, not knowing what to do, boys,
especially cute boys, never introduced themselves to her. “Hi, I’m Darryl.”
“Hi I’m Jess-i-ca,” she stuttered mesmerized by his bluish green eyes.
“Don’t be nervous,” he answered with a grin. “I’m an ambassador for the school.
I’m here to welcome you.”
Jessica nodded. “That’s so nice,” she croaked. She didn’t remember that program
being mentioned during orientation, but having a personal escort sounded exciting,
especially a cute one. “Are you going to show me around?” she asked shyly.
“Show you around?” Darryl snickered. “I can barely see around you!” he shouted and
his group of friends howled with laughter. “You’re so big that it’ll take us half a day to
get inside the building and you’re so big that I’ll probably spend all the time trying to
squeeze you through the front door.”
Jessica stumbled back her mouth frozen in a horror. “What?”
“You’re fat!” a girl called from the group. “Didn’t you hear him?” All Jessica
remembered was that the speaker had blond hair with streaky highlights before she
whirled on her heel, raced into the building, pushed her way through groups of
students and scurried into the first girls’ restroom she saw.
Jumping into the first empty stall, she pressed her back against the door and the
tears that she had been holding, slid silently down her face. High school wasn’t
supposed to be this bad. Her body trembled as she cried silently. The only time a
sob or hiccup escaped was when she was sure it would be swallowed by the sound
of the flushing toilets. She grabbed the hem of her poncho and dabbed at her face.
“Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.” Martin Luther King’s quote rang in her
ear. Ever since she was old enough to understand, her father had drummed Malcolm
X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy’s sayings into her. “They’re making it
hard,” Jessica mumbled. “Very hard.”
Taking a deep breath she stepped out of the stall and walked in what she could only
call a beauty pageant dressing room on steroid. It looked as if every girl in the school
had decided to change clothes, layer on makeup, squirt on perfume, and sneak a
smoke.
“Darn it, I was in the bathroom for only a couple minutes, but it filled up faster than a
Beyonce concert,” she mumbled as she eyed the mob in front of the sinks and
sighed. “Excuse me,” she said as she eased her way between people as she made
her way to the bank of sinks.
She was washing her hands when she heard, “He’s a butt wipe.”
“What?” She glanced in the mirror and locked eyes with the girl next to her. She had
shoulder length dreadlocks, big brown eyes, caramely colored skin and was big all
over. Jessica guessed that the girl weighed twenty pounds more than her.
“Darryl, he’s a butt wipe. Can’t stand him or his little crew.” The girl turned off the
faucet and grabbed a fistful of paper towels. She handed some to Jessica.
“He’s not very nice,” Jessica admitted, while drying her hands.
The girl narrowed her eyes. “Gurl, where you from? You’re not from my
neighborhood, ‘cause if he had said something like that from my part of town, he’d be
shot, no questions asked.” Jessica giggled, suddenly feeling a little better. “Good,
never let ‘em see you cry.”
Jessica self-consciously dabbed at her eyes. “It’s okay if your girls see you do it. Just
not them,” the girl hissed then jutted her chin toward the door. “I’m Samantha. You
can call me Sam or Sammie, I’m cool with either one,” she said, finally introducing
herself.
“I’m Jessica. I didn’t think high school was going to be like this. Everybody is so
much older looking…” she grimaced. Then, “And mean, just so mean. I wonder
where Tamia is.”
“Who’s that?” Samantha asked. She had secured her spot in front of the mirror and
glared at any girl who dared to look at her as though they wanted her to move.
Jessica watched in fascination as she applied purple eye shadow.
“My best friend. We haven’t seen each other all summer,” she gushed.
“Why not?” Samantha glanced at her before turning her attention back to her face, her
blush was next.
“She went out of town. I guess…I don’t know…her whole story is so sketchy. Her
mother told me she went to visit her grandmother.”
Samantha arched an over tweezed eyebrow at Jessica. “You don’t believe her?”
“Of course I do,” Jessica answered quickly. “But for the whole summer? She couldn’t
stand spending more than two days with her grandmother. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as
she thought.”
“Maybe,” Samantha shrugged, dismissing the subject. “Remember don’t let Darryl
punk you. He’s like a dog, as soon as he smells fear, he’s all over it. But just like a
dog, you have to smack him on the nose when he misbehaves.”
“How do you know so much about him?” Jessica asked curiously.
“That butt monkey lives down the street from me and he bullies everybody.”
“Even you?”
Samantha snorted. “What do you think? That butt cloth knows better.” Then, “What
are you?” she asked while squinting at Jessica.
Jessica chuckled at that question, she had been hearing it her whole life, normally it
irritated her, but Samantha made her feel so comfortable that it didn’t bother her. Her
corkscrew brown and blonde kissed hair, full lips, hazel eyes and butterscotchery
complexion always made her stand out. “I’m half White and half Black. My mom is
Black and my father is White.”
“Cool, I love your hair,” Samantha said.
Jessica smiled. She used to hate her head full of a million curls. She always thought
she looked like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons. “At least my hair is in style,” she
joked while giving her head a shake. The school bell rang.
“See ya!” Samantha said as she lumbered out of the restroom.
“Bye!” Jessica called, suddenly feeling lonely. “I can’t wait to find Tamia.”
Jessica pushed her way through group after group of giggling girls, who were
dressed like they were starring in a Lady Gaga video. Even though it was the first day
of school she immediately noticed that nearly all the girls had cliqued. And the boys
sniffed after them as though they were the latest PlayStation. The scene mirrored her
years in middle school where if you were bigger than a size ten you were considered
a pig. “Where’s Tamia?” Jessica wondered as she miserably continued her trek
down the corridor to her homeroom.
After walking up a flight of stairs, slicing through group after group of kids, and re-
tracing her steps twice, she found her homeroom.
She hesitated at the door. Some students sat by themselves and some of them had
carried the party in to the room and they sat in little clusters as though they were at a
cocktail party.
I wonder what homeroom Tamia’s in, she thought as she fell into the first empty
seat. She flung her pill box size purse on the desk. “This looked so cute in the store,”
she mumbled. She snatched up her purse and lowered it onto her lap.
Suddenly she heard a sound that she had heard for the past fourteen years. A cross
between a hoarse chicken and a screaming poodle. Tamia! Tamia’s here. Her self-
consciousness evaporated as she turned around in her chair and scanned the
room.
It took a minute but Jessica found her best friend. She was clustered with a group of
girls. Her honey colored skin was radiant. Leggings? A pair of bright red leggings
clung to her friend’s legs…and they looked nice. Jessica’s eyes traveled down,
Tamia had ankles, dainty little ankles. Her eyes traveled up, belly button? Between
the red leggings and an off-white belly baring sweater was Tamia’s belly button. And
it was pierced.
Jessica waded across the room; she stopped in front of Tamia. The group of girls
instantly stopped talking as though someone had flicked an off switch.
“Jessica? I-I-I,” Tamia stuttered.
“Tamia?”
Her friend nodded and they fell into an awkward hug.
“Tamia? You look awesome,” Jessica said softly, awed by her friend’s appearance.
Over the summer her best friend had morphed into a beautiful young lady. Gone
were sixty pounds that had weighed her down, gone was the unruly head of curls
which was replaced by a veil of sleek brown hair. Her usually makeup less face was
tastefully made up. She was small and lithe. “What happened?” She asked stunned
by her best friend’s new look. “And why didn’t you call me all summer? Every time I
called your house, all you mother would tell me was that you were at your
grandmother’s.”
Tamia darted a look at her new friends, then pulled Jessica to the side. “I’m sorry I
didn’t call. My parents sent me to a fat camp during the summer,” she hissed. “And
they didn’t allow us to call anybody other than our family.” Tamia twirled around. “So
how do I look?”
“You look so-so-so,” Jessica faltered for words.
“Hot?” Tamia crowed.
“Yeah.”
“Come on T, Brittany’s gonna tell us about her summer,” someone called across the
room.
T? Jessica stared at her friend as though she was a stranger.
Tamia glanced over at her new friends. “I got to go Jessica. I’ll talk to you later.”
Jessica’s mouth dropped. I’ll talk to you later? She recovered fast enough to ask her
friend, “So what lunch period are you in?”
“I ummm don’t know.”
Jessica Smith stood on the sidewalk gasping, even though it was a cool seventy-one
degrees, her cotton blouse clung to her back, adhered to it by a strip of sweat. She
had asked her driver to drop her off two blocks away from the school and she had
walked the rest of the way. I don’t think that was such a good idea, she thought while
struggling to catch her breath. She glanced longingly over her shoulder, her limo was
nowhere in sight. “Okay Cinderella suck it up,” she muttered then looked around.
The area swarmed with girls and boys. Her eyes widened as though she had just
walked backstage at the MTV Movie Awards and had just seen Justin Bieber, Will
Smith, and Chace Crawford. Middleville High School, so different from the all-girls
private school she had attended for the last seven years.
She waddled up the stairs to her new high school and side-stepped a group of kids
standing in front of the door. They look so old, like they should be in college, she
thought while looking at them out of the corner of her eyes. The boys were just as tall
as her father and the girls looked like they had just stepped off the cover of Cosmo.
Shuffling past them she felt their gazes on her, then the snickers, there were always
snickers; they felt like little darts in her back. Jessica self-consciously tugged at her
poncho. The bright pink material had looked chic and sophisticated in the store, but
now she felt like an elephant wearing a tent.
“Excuse me!” she heard. “Excuse me! Ex-cuse ME!” The voice became more
insistent with each syllable.
Jessica turned and goose bumps the size of marshmallows popped out over her
arms. Grinning at her was a Jesse Metcalfe look-a-like. Jessica’s eyes darted to his
close cropped chocolaty colored hair, dimples and kissable lips.
He pulled himself away from the group and sauntered over to her. Her eyes widened
with awe. He stuck out his hand, Jessica stared at it, not knowing what to do, boys,
especially cute boys, never introduced themselves to her. “Hi, I’m Darryl.”
“Hi I’m Jess-i-ca,” she stuttered mesmerized by his bluish green eyes.
“Don’t be nervous,” he answered with a grin. “I’m an ambassador for the school.
I’m here to welcome you.”
Jessica nodded. “That’s so nice,” she croaked. She didn’t remember that program
being mentioned during orientation, but having a personal escort sounded exciting,
especially a cute one. “Are you going to show me around?” she asked shyly.
“Show you around?” Darryl snickered. “I can barely see around you!” he shouted and
his group of friends howled with laughter. “You’re so big that it’ll take us half a day to
get inside the building and you’re so big that I’ll probably spend all the time trying to
squeeze you through the front door.”
Jessica stumbled back her mouth frozen in a horror. “What?”
“You’re fat!” a girl called from the group. “Didn’t you hear him?” All Jessica
remembered was that the speaker had blond hair with streaky highlights before she
whirled on her heel, raced into the building, pushed her way through groups of
students and scurried into the first girls’ restroom she saw.
Jumping into the first empty stall, she pressed her back against the door and the
tears that she had been holding, slid silently down her face. High school wasn’t
supposed to be this bad. Her body trembled as she cried silently. The only time a
sob or hiccup escaped was when she was sure it would be swallowed by the sound
of the flushing toilets. She grabbed the hem of her poncho and dabbed at her face.
“Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.” Martin Luther King’s quote rang in her
ear. Ever since she was old enough to understand, her father had drummed Malcolm
X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John F. Kennedy’s sayings into her. “They’re making it
hard,” Jessica mumbled. “Very hard.”
Taking a deep breath she stepped out of the stall and walked in what she could only
call a beauty pageant dressing room on steroid. It looked as if every girl in the school
had decided to change clothes, layer on makeup, squirt on perfume, and sneak a
smoke.
“Darn it, I was in the bathroom for only a couple minutes, but it filled up faster than a
Beyonce concert,” she mumbled as she eyed the mob in front of the sinks and
sighed. “Excuse me,” she said as she eased her way between people as she made
her way to the bank of sinks.
She was washing her hands when she heard, “He’s a butt wipe.”
“What?” She glanced in the mirror and locked eyes with the girl next to her. She had
shoulder length dreadlocks, big brown eyes, caramely colored skin and was big all
over. Jessica guessed that the girl weighed twenty pounds more than her.
“Darryl, he’s a butt wipe. Can’t stand him or his little crew.” The girl turned off the
faucet and grabbed a fistful of paper towels. She handed some to Jessica.
“He’s not very nice,” Jessica admitted, while drying her hands.
The girl narrowed her eyes. “Gurl, where you from? You’re not from my
neighborhood, ‘cause if he had said something like that from my part of town, he’d be
shot, no questions asked.” Jessica giggled, suddenly feeling a little better. “Good,
never let ‘em see you cry.”
Jessica self-consciously dabbed at her eyes. “It’s okay if your girls see you do it. Just
not them,” the girl hissed then jutted her chin toward the door. “I’m Samantha. You
can call me Sam or Sammie, I’m cool with either one,” she said, finally introducing
herself.
“I’m Jessica. I didn’t think high school was going to be like this. Everybody is so
much older looking…” she grimaced. Then, “And mean, just so mean. I wonder
where Tamia is.”
“Who’s that?” Samantha asked. She had secured her spot in front of the mirror and
glared at any girl who dared to look at her as though they wanted her to move.
Jessica watched in fascination as she applied purple eye shadow.
“My best friend. We haven’t seen each other all summer,” she gushed.
“Why not?” Samantha glanced at her before turning her attention back to her face, her
blush was next.
“She went out of town. I guess…I don’t know…her whole story is so sketchy. Her
mother told me she went to visit her grandmother.”
Samantha arched an over tweezed eyebrow at Jessica. “You don’t believe her?”
“Of course I do,” Jessica answered quickly. “But for the whole summer? She couldn’t
stand spending more than two days with her grandmother. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as
she thought.”
“Maybe,” Samantha shrugged, dismissing the subject. “Remember don’t let Darryl
punk you. He’s like a dog, as soon as he smells fear, he’s all over it. But just like a
dog, you have to smack him on the nose when he misbehaves.”
“How do you know so much about him?” Jessica asked curiously.
“That butt monkey lives down the street from me and he bullies everybody.”
“Even you?”
Samantha snorted. “What do you think? That butt cloth knows better.” Then, “What
are you?” she asked while squinting at Jessica.
Jessica chuckled at that question, she had been hearing it her whole life, normally it
irritated her, but Samantha made her feel so comfortable that it didn’t bother her. Her
corkscrew brown and blonde kissed hair, full lips, hazel eyes and butterscotchery
complexion always made her stand out. “I’m half White and half Black. My mom is
Black and my father is White.”
“Cool, I love your hair,” Samantha said.
Jessica smiled. She used to hate her head full of a million curls. She always thought
she looked like Sideshow Bob from the Simpsons. “At least my hair is in style,” she
joked while giving her head a shake. The school bell rang.
“See ya!” Samantha said as she lumbered out of the restroom.
“Bye!” Jessica called, suddenly feeling lonely. “I can’t wait to find Tamia.”
Jessica pushed her way through group after group of giggling girls, who were
dressed like they were starring in a Lady Gaga video. Even though it was the first day
of school she immediately noticed that nearly all the girls had cliqued. And the boys
sniffed after them as though they were the latest PlayStation. The scene mirrored her
years in middle school where if you were bigger than a size ten you were considered
a pig. “Where’s Tamia?” Jessica wondered as she miserably continued her trek
down the corridor to her homeroom.
After walking up a flight of stairs, slicing through group after group of kids, and re-
tracing her steps twice, she found her homeroom.
She hesitated at the door. Some students sat by themselves and some of them had
carried the party in to the room and they sat in little clusters as though they were at a
cocktail party.
I wonder what homeroom Tamia’s in, she thought as she fell into the first empty
seat. She flung her pill box size purse on the desk. “This looked so cute in the store,”
she mumbled. She snatched up her purse and lowered it onto her lap.
Suddenly she heard a sound that she had heard for the past fourteen years. A cross
between a hoarse chicken and a screaming poodle. Tamia! Tamia’s here. Her self-
consciousness evaporated as she turned around in her chair and scanned the
room.
It took a minute but Jessica found her best friend. She was clustered with a group of
girls. Her honey colored skin was radiant. Leggings? A pair of bright red leggings
clung to her friend’s legs…and they looked nice. Jessica’s eyes traveled down,
Tamia had ankles, dainty little ankles. Her eyes traveled up, belly button? Between
the red leggings and an off-white belly baring sweater was Tamia’s belly button. And
it was pierced.
Jessica waded across the room; she stopped in front of Tamia. The group of girls
instantly stopped talking as though someone had flicked an off switch.
“Jessica? I-I-I,” Tamia stuttered.
“Tamia?”
Her friend nodded and they fell into an awkward hug.
“Tamia? You look awesome,” Jessica said softly, awed by her friend’s appearance.
Over the summer her best friend had morphed into a beautiful young lady. Gone
were sixty pounds that had weighed her down, gone was the unruly head of curls
which was replaced by a veil of sleek brown hair. Her usually makeup less face was
tastefully made up. She was small and lithe. “What happened?” She asked stunned
by her best friend’s new look. “And why didn’t you call me all summer? Every time I
called your house, all you mother would tell me was that you were at your
grandmother’s.”
Tamia darted a look at her new friends, then pulled Jessica to the side. “I’m sorry I
didn’t call. My parents sent me to a fat camp during the summer,” she hissed. “And
they didn’t allow us to call anybody other than our family.” Tamia twirled around. “So
how do I look?”
“You look so-so-so,” Jessica faltered for words.
“Hot?” Tamia crowed.
“Yeah.”
“Come on T, Brittany’s gonna tell us about her summer,” someone called across the
room.
T? Jessica stared at her friend as though she was a stranger.
Tamia glanced over at her new friends. “I got to go Jessica. I’ll talk to you later.”
Jessica’s mouth dropped. I’ll talk to you later? She recovered fast enough to ask her
friend, “So what lunch period are you in?”
“I ummm don’t know.”