Big Girl: a Novel by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: Liveright

The Outside Weight

THE NEXT MORNING, Malaya couldn’t get up. It wasn’t just the usual longing not to go to school. This feeling was different. It was as though along with the weight of her body, there was another weight on top of her, a larger weight from the outside, pinning her to the bed, pressing on her from the hallway skylight, pulling at her from the floorboards. Her skin felt heavy, her shoulders felt heavy, all the pulp of stuff from her head to her muscle to her bone and nails felt anchored, impossible to lift. It was like nothing she had ever felt before, and yet it was familiar, a deeper shade of a feeling she had known forever.

It was warm for February, but the brownstone’s old, failing pipes couldn’t keep up with the winter, which made it seem colder in the house than outside. Malaya lay in bed under stacks of blankets, waiting to hear her parents leave: first Nyela, then Percy. She tried to plan the lie she would tell later if they noticed she wasn’t getting ready at her usual time, but even that exhausted her. Percy seemed to linger longer than usual, but eventually, hours after the clock radio buzzed its alarm downstairs, both were gone. Still, Malaya couldn’t move. It took three more hours of lying there before she could push herself from the covers and out to the bodega for dollar pies and plátano chips.

Outside, the sun was too bright and the music too loud. Someone was playing bachata from a car near Broadway, and it grated on her. The sounds of men joking on the corners scratched at her ears, and for a reason she could not explain, the children popping gum and the smell of roti from the Jamaican spot—things she usually enjoyed—now made her want to cry. It must have showed, because when she walked into the bodega, Mr. Gonzales said, “Mija, you okay?” The question surprised her in a vague, distant way. She nodded and said, “I’m fine,” smiling faintly. By the time she rounded the corner with her bag of food, her small store of energy was gone, and all she could do was drag herself back up to her bedroom.

The next morning was the same, and so was the next, and the rest of the week after that. By the following Monday, Malaya called the school to explain that she had been ill and would be bringing a doctor’s note. Galton High prided itself on its progressiveness, and it treated students like young adults. If you said you were sick, the administration was inclined to believe you with little drama, provided that you kept up with major assignments and didn’t miss tests. Even in those cases, an absence note signed by a parent was sufficient, and no one seemed to inspect the signatures too hard. The goth girls and the Mandys forged absence notes often, and so, Malaya figured, she should be able to do it, too. She didn’t have a choice.

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