As I spoke, she started jotting notes on a pad of paper, saying, ‘Go on.’
When I had told her everything I could remember, she said, ‘You don’t, by any chance, have a photocopy of your diet, do you?’
‘No, sorry,’ I replied.
She asked me if I could maybe remember to bring the original in on the following Friday, so she could have a proper look. ‘I’m just curious,’ she added.
And that was the day I learned that some grown-ups are very interested in diets. Her interest felt like a warm glow in my chest. Approval, I think they call it.
I felt approved of.
I liked that feeling—a lot.
Over the summer, I followed my new diet to the letter. I learned to cook all the recipes in the book. I weighed and measured my food to the gram, using the scale. I cut the fat off my meat and then weighed it, and then my brother James taught me how to smash it with a mallet so it went thin and was easy to cook. (Although I learned the hard way that this technique shouldn’t be used with white fish. What a mess!) I even steamed my own cauliflower, and then mushed it with a musher, and sprinkled it with curry powder, just like the recipe said.
And every week, when Mum and I showed up at Dr Von Thinburger’s office so I could be weighed and measured, I was filled with glee when I saw him marking down my decreasing weight.
He kept saying I was doing extremely well. And whenever he said it, I felt that warm feeling again. Thrilling.
As the summer rolled on, my clothes started getting looser, and my running started getting faster. I did feel tired sometimes, though. I was growing taller and much thinner at the same time, and I sometimes felt a recurrence of my old childhood fear that I had done something very wrong, except I couldn’t remember what.
One time, when I looked down at my legs, I noticed my knee bones for what felt like the first time ever. Automatically, I thought of Rowena, of her thin legs, her thin arms. She was skinny. So skinny. These same thoughts came to me at night when I felt my ribs resting on my bed. They felt like hauntings, these thoughts. They made me wonder, and keep wondering, if getting thin was a good thing or a dangerous thing. Sometimes, my new body felt so small it scared me. I told myself I shouldn’t think such things. These are not normal thoughts, I said. And I kept them to myself.
I didn’t want to worry my parents.
As the summer rolled on, and I began to adjust to my new body size, my feeling of fear was slowly replaced with more of that proud feeling, the one I had when Mrs Wool or Dr Von Thinburger complimented me. Now everyone was complimenting me—neighbours, people at church, ladies at the shops. Everyone told me I was doing a great job. Everyone seemed very happy I was losing weight.
On my final visit to Dr Von Thinburger before school started, he told me once again how pleased he was with my progress. On my weight-loss chart, my achievement was marked now as a long descending line on a piece of graph paper. He said I was no longer obese, or even overweight. I was normal. I was the normal weight for my age for the first time in my entire life. And now, he said, I could begin reintroducing old foods back into my diet again.
‘Peanut brittle?’ I asked.
‘No peanut brittle,’ he said. ‘Not yet. But you can have an extra orange if you want, and you can even have some hard cheese instead of cottage cheese. Would you like that?’
I nodded, even though he and I both knew that what I really wanted was peanut brittle.
When I walked through the school gates on my first day of Year Five, I was wearing a brand-new school uniform. The old one no longer fitted me.
The first person I saw was Mrs Smith, the usually friendly librarian, who walked straight past me.
That was strange, so I yelled out after her, ‘Mrs Smith, how was your summer?’
She turned and, smiling curiously, said, ‘Lovely! Sorry, dear, I don’t have my glasses with me. Who is that?’
‘It’s me, Mrs Smith—Clare Bowditch!’ I replied.
I watched then as her mouth opened and closed like a puffer fish gasping for air. She came right up close to my face, stood back, looked me up and down, and said, ‘Clare Bowditch? Is that really you? Where did you go? My goodness! You are so tall! And so thin!’
So thin. For as long as I could remember I’d longed to hear those words. I was so excited, I jumped up and down, laughing.
That day, it was as if my whole life changed.
Before assembly, my friend’s mother, Mrs C, came over to me and said, ‘I had no idea how beautiful you were!’ My face flushed pink. Really? I was shocked and I didn’t know how to respond, so I stayed silent. But I felt her words curl up inside my heart like a small warm animal.
At the assembly, a teacher made a joke, asking, ‘Who is the new girl?’, pointing at me. Everyone laughed.
After the assembly, Renee, the most popular girl in Year Six, came and looped her arm through mine. We had never spoken before, but she said that she was proud of me.
Weirdest of all was when a friend came over at lunch and said that Jimmy—the guy I’d loved since kindergarten—wanted to ask me out, although he was too scared. Again, I turned pink and went mute. Jimmy took this as a sign that I wasn’t interested in him, and we never spoke of it again.
At the end of the day, as I collected my bag in the corridor, I learned that Mrs Wool was not the only woman who wanted a photocopy of my
