Chapter 14: The Answer

He didn't look away.

He didn't take a breath to get ready, either.

That was how I knew he wasn't going to dress it up.

"I thought you were laughing at whoever was holding the camera," he said.

I waited for the rest.

"That's it?"

"That's the first thing. You had powdered sugar on your chin and you were laughing so hard your eyes were shut. I wanted to know what was funny."

"It was my mom," I said. "She'd just stepped in a funnel cake somebody dropped."

He laughed, quietly, at the ground.

"Okay. That's funny."

"What was the second thing?"

His face changed.

"The second thing was what he'd written under it," he said. "And the forty guys laughing. And the three who wanted the login."

"I thought, she's laughing at something real, and he's going to wreck it for a joke."

"And I was so angry I couldn't see the screen."

The steps were cold through my jeans.

Somewhere behind the union, a bus hissed at a stop.

"You didn't think anything about," I said, and stopped.

"About what?"

I made myself say it.

"About how I looked."

He was quiet for a second.

"Rule three," he said. "The first time you ask."

"Yes."

"I thought you looked like somebody I'd want to sit next to at a fair," he said. "That's the whole thing. I'm not leaving anything out."

"I've thought about it for three months. I know what's in there."

I looked at him for a long time.

He let me.

He didn't fill the quiet up with anything nice.

All summer I'd known the number on the scale every single morning.

I'd typed it to nobody.

He'd never asked it once.

"You never asked for a picture," I said. "All summer."

"I already had one."

"That's not why."

Keep reading free with an account. Start I Lost 90 Pounds, Only to Find He Tried to Give Me Away from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.