October 5th

Eight o'clock came and went without so much as an annoying friend's call, or even a wrong number. Nine trawled by bringing with it, one minute at a time, swollen waves of both the good kind and the bad kind of anxiety. Would Simon ever call? First Beah had absolutley convinced herself that Simon was an hour ahead of her and that she had missed his call. Then she wrapped herself warmly in the possibility that Framingham was an hour behind, and that he'd call at any minute--any of about one hundred minutes that she'd already spent waiting. In the worst case scenario, she worked out, he was really only twenty-five minutes late with the call. Twenty-five minutes can easily and understandably translate into a long line at the supermarket or traffic or, better yet, a long line at the supermarket AND traffic. Or, if you're a light sort of person bound by uncontrollable dark tendencies, which is how Beah fancied herself, twenty-five minutes can easily become the first fifteen hundred seconds of heartbreak.

Beah had a Wal-mart mirror duct-taped to her dorm room door. Above the mirror was a plastic sticky-hook useful for hanging notes to her roommate, or keys, or a visitor's jacket, or a bedsheet...Beah had only done that once this month; she was diligent in keeping track of her progress. The sheet idea actually helped some. Ironically, it came from a magazine Beah read while waiting at health services to see her real doctor (real is such a relative term). Incidentally, Beah had to wait for three hours to see the doctor that day and she barely noticed it. The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with Beah, and suggested that she drink plenty of water and take a walk whenever she felt anxious. It's not hard to see why Beah placed more stock in her magazine.

In a few steps, Beah crossed the small room and touched the sheet. The linen floated to the ground to reveal Beah's reflection staring at her gut. Beah turned on her toes to her left, her eyes never leaving her midsection. The same move (to the right) allowed her to study herself evenly. Beah's brow and lips curled up in a defeated frown. She was still ugly. And she was just getting started. Beah locked the door and glanced behind her. The venetian blinds were slanted upwards, and nobody could see in. She lifted off her shirt and stared at the fat girl in jeans and the bra and. Ugly still. Sexy underwear didn't do its job right either. Shedding her pants only revealed a fat pelvis oozing out of the sides of her bikini bottom. She grabbed at the flesh and smoothed it away imagining what a thinner pelvis would look like. If anyone else had been in the room, they'd have seen Beah's peaceful look. She only got this look whenever she drifted far away in her mind. If that same person could have been an observer in Beah's mind, they'd have learned something quite shocking. "Thinner" was indeed the operative word. Contrary to an educated man's guess, Beah's ideal vision of herself was not a cold and angular frame with sunken features and spindly limbs. In her fantasy, she was only a few inches smaller and simply daring enough to wear clothes that didn't hide her curves, but hugged them. In fact, Beah's vision of "thinner", may easily have been another girl's vision of "ghastly". Naturally, it goes almost without saying then, that Beah's current vision of "ugly" very well may be the plateau of perfection in a larger dreamer's cross-hairs. But other girls never mattered to Beah, because Beah had it fixed in her mind that she was ugly. And why would Simon want to call an ugly girl? Not caring at all to gaze upon her own fat cleavage, Beah closed her eyes, knelt for the sheet, and hung it back on the hook. Beah would have to remember to make a note that now she had used the bedsheet twice this month.