The DUFF (Designated Ugly Fat Friend) by Kody Keplinger

Author:Kody Keplinger [Keplinger, Kody]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-24T01:25:53+00:00

16

Dad wasn’t better the next day.

Or the day after that.

He went back to work at the end of the week, but I was sure I wasn’t the only one who noticed the hangovers he took with him. It seemed like there was always beer or whiskey lying around the house now. He was always passed out on the couch or locked in his room. And he never mentioned it to me. As if I didn’t notice. Was I supposed to ignore it? Pretend this wasn’t a problem?

I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell him to stop. To tell him he was making a huge mistake. But how? How does a seventeen-year-old convince her father that she knows what’s best? If I tried to stop him, he might get defensive. He might think I’d abandoned him, too. He might get angry with me.

Since Dad had stopped drinking before I was born, I didn’t really know much about the whole sobriety process. I knew that he’d had a sponsor once. Some tall, balding man from Oak Hill that Mom had always sent Christmas cards to when I was a kid. Dad didn’t talk about him anymore, and I was sure that, even if I tried, I wouldn’t have been able to locate his number. If I had, what would I say? How did that whole sponsor thing even work?

I felt powerless and useless and, more than anything, ashamed. I knew that, with Mom gone, it was my job to do something. I just didn’t have a clue what that something was.

So in the weeks after Mom left for Tennessee, I spent most of my time at home avoiding Dad. I’d never really seen him drunk in my life, so I didn’t know what to expect. All I had to go on were the little bits of conversations I’d overheard as a kid. He’d been an angry person once. He had a temper. I couldn’t imagine this coming from my father, but I didn’t want to start anytime soon. So I stayed in my bedroom, and he stayed in his.

I just kept telling myself it would pass. In the meantime, I’d keep his little secret to myself. Lucky for me, Mom was gullible enough to believe me whenever I told her everything was fine over the phone, despite my less than awesome acting abilities.

Honestly, I thought hiding my secrets from Casey would be the hardest. She could always see right through me, after all. I tried avoiding her at first, ignoring her phone calls and making up excuses when she asked me to hang out. I never called her about that Girls’ Night Out she’d suggested in the bathroom. I was sure she’d bombard me with questions the second she got me alone, so I always tried to use poor clueless Jessica as a buffer. But within a week, I got this strange feeling that Casey was steering clear of me.

She called less and less.

She stopped asking if I wanted to go to the Nest on weekends.

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