Chapter 24: Not Enough

The girl in the glass did not look like someone a person would choose on purpose. Wet hair tussled and drying wrong. Eyes still carrying last night. The body I had spent a year sanding down and still could not stand to live in. I looked at her and thought, not for the first time that weekend, that it was not possible. Andrew had seen this and found it attractive. It was not possible anyone could. The pool, the sunscreen, the hard line in his trunks, Sue at the window calling me a lost puppy —none of that survived contact with the face I was making at myself.

I blamed myself for Justin leaving. That was what the simplest math was telling me. I had tried to remake myself into the girl that he wanted, or at least that I thought he wanted. I had lost the weight, I had stopped wearing my glasses most of the time, I had begun wearing makeup, and I had started dressing more like the type of girl he wanted to hold, even though all of it made me so uncomfortable in myself that sometimes I wanted to scream. I had done the list, but it had not been enough. The sex had been bad, and I had been the common factor in the bad sex, so the conclusion wrote itself: I would never find a man who wanted me. Not really. Not past the point where wanting requires a girl who has a body that works the way other girls’ bodies seem to work.