First published by The Writer’s Coffee Shop, 2011
Copyright © C.M. Smith, 2011
The right of C.M. Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Writer’s Coffee Shop
(Australia) PO Box 2013 Hornsby Westfield NSW 1635
(USA) PO Box 2116 Waxahachie TX 75168
Paperback ISBN- 978-1-61213-042-2
E-book ISBN- 978-1-61213-043-9
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the US Congress Library.
Cover image by: Jomann
Cover design by: Jennifer McGuire
www.thewriterscoffeeshop.com/csmith
C.M. Smith doesn’t remember ever not writing or reading. Like so many young children, her mother and grandmother read to her every night before she went to bed and before long, she’d decided to try her hand at writing something of her own. She has spent the better part of her life writing short stories or novels that she’s only shared with a few select people. She finally took the plunge in late 2009 and decided to publish her first novel, Fourteen.
C.M. lives in upstate New York with her family.
First, I’d like to thank everyone that has this book in their hands for reading. I want to say that a size fourteen, in my opinion, is not a big or bad size. I’m a size fourteen, in fact, and I happen to think that there’s nothing wrong with that. I hope that this was evident in my writing, as it was never my intention to imply fourteen was anything other than a size. I chose that size simply because I was close to it and was able to relate to that more—not for any other reason.
I hope that everyone who has read this has been able to realize that you’re all beautiful, no matter what size you may be. Never let anyone tell you differently.
Thank you for reading,
C.M. Smith
Fourteen.
It was not a bad number.
It was not that great, either.
It used to be an eighteen; so really, a fourteen was pretty damn good compared to what it was a few months ago.
It was still a big number, and staring at the jeans lying on my bed, they looked pretty damn big, too.
I wasn’t thin. I was moderately pretty and had more personality in my left toe than most of the girls at school had at all.
Arianna Weller was my name, synonymous with size fourteen, and no one was able to see past that. At least, the guys couldn’t. Most of the popular girls couldn’t, either.
Christina did, and she was popular. It continually surprised me when she hung out with me or sat with me during lunch. Her boyfriend—third baseman, Vince—was one of the few guys that actually didn’t make fun of me behind my back and would freely walk up and talk to me if he saw me in the hallway. Kyle Mahon would sometimes, too, but that was only if no one else was around to rag on him about it.
I didn’t even consider a size fourteen that big, to be honest. Marilyn Monroe had been a size fourteen, and she’d been considered a beautiful woman. Of course, that was many years ago, and society’s image of a beautiful woman had severely changed since then. I’ve learned that if you’re above a size four, you have to have some severe personality quirks to fit in—be a class clown, or you just have to be lucky enough to be confident with who you are and what you look like. I am neither of those things.
I didn’t have many friends. I had acquaintances that I talked to during the day, but none of them were anything near a friend for me. It was by choice more than anything. I’d gotten used to being picked on and put down or betrayed by people I thought were friends. They either told secrets that I’d rather they kept—well, secret—or they just distanced themselves from me because I was no longer cool enough for them.
I didn’t know what it was about me that pushed people away. I didn’t do it on purpose, but it happened more often than not. Maybe I was just too . . . me. Though I often thought about compromising to fit in, to be “enough” for them, I just couldn’t.
I’d gotten used to not being good enough, and at the end of the previous school year, I’d done myself a favor. I’d kept myself as far away from as many people as possible in this tiny shithole. I was off to college next year—New York University—and if I could get through my last year at Collins Point High as peacefully as possible, I’d be a very happy person. The fewer attachments I had when I left, the easier it would be to move somewhere and start over.
I was all about starting over.
Shuffling my feet against the carpet, I grabbed the jeans from my bed, sliding them on over my legs and wiggling into them, then buttoning them and grabbing my long-sleeved red sweater and pulling it on over my head. I sighed in disappointment as I looked down at the small roll of flesh around my waist. I walked over to my dresser and ran a brush through my shoulder-length dark brown hair a few times, briefly looking at my reflection in the small mirror propped against the wall. I’d never found
