Chapter 1 : Part 5

The Frog Prince
by Jane Porter

(Page 5 of 5)

Olivia's waiting at the front door with Sara and a couple of other girls who work in various City Events departments. "You look great," Sara says with a big smile. We both know she's lying, but that's how we women are. Practical and impractical. Helpful and cruel.

We leave our loft office, take the elevator down, and exit from the building, and Olivia's cell phone rings before we've even crossed the street.

"The Barrio," she says into the phone, "and if we're not there, then try Lucille's."

The phone rings three more times during our five minute walk. She gives the same info each time. Try the Barrio, and if not the Barrio, then Lucille's. Olivia always makes the decisions, but then, she is the queen, and everyone wants to know the queen and they want to keep the queen happy.

We reach the Barrio. "How many people are coming?" I ask, as the club's salsa vibe pulses out the windows and the Laffy Taffy purple front door.

"Five, ten, fifteen." Olivia shrugs. "Who knows?" And twenty minutes later I wish again I'd just gone home. I feel huge. Plain. Horrendously fuddy-duddy. The salsa music is hot, sultry, sexy, and Olivia and her circle feel it, slim shoulders shaking, amazing toned bodies in the groove.

I stand at the tall red-and-stainless counter holding my drink, feeling like a Popsicle stick. I don't really know what to do with salsa music. Or reggae. Or rap. Where I come from, it's country or hard rock. Jocks and goat ropers. In Visalia I was exotic, but here I'm just white and self-conscious and uncoordinated.

Olivia laughs and I glance her way. She's sparkling, and her laugh still hangs in the air. Despite the loud music, the raised voices, the speakers thumping, Olivia commands attention, and her dramatic coloring just plays off the crimson-and-ocher-painted walls. Here at the Barrio she looks tall and thin, and as she leans back against the bar stool, even more of her stomach shows.

I hate her.

No. I hate me.

Olivia was right. I am fat. Whenever I stop tucking my shirt in, that means I'm fat. And I've given up belts. Another sign of fat. The long, loose skirts-fat. Fat, fat, fat.

Rejected, dejected. I'm beginning to scare even me. This has got to stop.

I need my old jeans back. I need the old me. The one who was fun. The one who laughed and didn't take herself so damn seriously. The one who didn't spend an entire Saturday in bed reading Oprah Winfrey's Book Club novels in which every child either drowns or gets abducted, which I read crying and sniffling into my pillow because, while I haven't drowned or been abducted, I do feel lost. Really lost, and I'm not sure how to find where it is I'm supposed to go.

How pathetic does that sound? Snap out of it, Holly, I say, taking another sip from my icy salt-rimmed margarita. You're not Hansel or Gretel. Not Snow White, or Belle from Beauty and the Beast. You can't be lost. You're an adult. Twenty-five. College educated. There's a way out of this, and you're going to find it.

The thing to do is keep it simple. Take it a step at a time. Maybe Olivia is right. Start a diet. Then join a gym. Then get the legs waxed and, you know, reclaim the self.

I take a bigger sip from my hand-blown margarita glass, thinking it wasn't so long ago that I had a decent body. Eighteen months ago I was that wide-eyed bride, and I'd worked hard to look magnificent for the wedding. Slim, toned, fit. Ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

The wedding photos never made it into an album. I still have the photos, though, in a big brown mailing envelope, a stack of glossy photos that will never get looked at, a stack of photos of a bride and groom laughing, smiling, photos that should have been cherished but won't be.

I wish I'd known then that it wasn't going to last. I wish I'd known what he was thinking. Feeling. Funny, when I look at the photos now, especially the one where we're dancing-our first dance-Jean-Marc's unhappiness is so obvious. If you look at his face, you can see it there in his eyes. If you know Jean-Marc, you can see the emptiness behind the smile, the distance there. He's not actually smiling. He's already detached himself. He's already divorcing me.

"Another drink?" Aimee, Olivia's friend, director of fund-raising for the Met Museum, is gesturing to me and my now nearly empty glass.

I look up at her, but I don't see Aimee; I see Jean-Marc, and we're on our honeymoon in the South of France.

We're doing everything big, everything splashy, and I'm standing in the doorway of our suite's living room, wearing a Victoria's Secret pink lace teddy and not much else (but the hair's done, lots of sexy tousled curls, and flawless makeup). I'm smiling at him even as I try not to cry.

You don't like this?

It's fine.

You don't want this?

You look great.

But you don't want me.

I'm just not in the mood.

It's our honeymoon, Jean-Marc.

Holly, I can't.

Why not?

He says nothing. Why not? I shout.

Because I don't love you that way.

I drain the rest of my hand-shaken fresh-fruit-juice margarita. Tequila's good. It works. "One more," I say to Aimee, blinking hard, refusing to cry, refusing to think about the disaster honeymoon, refusing to think about the pile of sexy lingerie that never got worn, refusing to accept that I own more Rosenthal than common sense. That way? What the hell does that way mean? Touching my tongue to the edge of the salt-rimmed glass, I'm suddenly hugely grateful for tequila and lime juice and mariachi bands. California would be nothing without Mexico.

Copyright © 2005 by Jane Porter

About the Author

A UCLA grad with an MA in Writing, I am one of those original book geeks, the girl with the coke bottle glasses that sat with a novel next to the classroom door rather than play during recess. I wrote my first story in first grade, my first picture book in second grade and my first novel in 4th, and I've just continued to write from there - bad poetry, passionate essays, romance rich novels and poignant, bittersweet contemporary fiction.