Fat Girls Are Not A Bet Chapter 06
The whole room went dead silent.
“What?”
“Olivia?! *The* Olivia from the group?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Nico’s eyes bugged out, mouth opening and shutting, unable to string a sentence together.
He instinctively pulled up the high school photo of me and held it up, comparing frantically.
The girl in the photo had her neck swallowed up in her chin, her shirt collar stretched to the tearing point.
The girl in front of him had defined collarbones and a lean, healthy figure.
Nico swallowed and looked at the photo again.
“This… this is really the same person?”
Nobody answered him.
Because everyone in the room was doing the exact same thing.
Look at the photo. Look at me.
Look at the photo. Look at me.
From the corner, a girl whispered,
“The eyes and nose really are identical.”
“It’s just once she got skinny, her whole face…”
She didn’t finish, but someone else did.
“This is insane.”
The boys who’d been mocking me the loudest looked like they’d swallowed something rancid.
To my right, that cake with **[Welcome, 330-lb. Olivia]** in red icing was still sitting on the table.
Someone reached out to grab it and move it out of sight.
They moved too fast. The cake slid, spun halfway around on the table—the red writing ended up facing me dead-on.
The silence was suffocating.
One of the guys quickly stretched out a hand to block it from view.
“Olivia, don’t take it seriously, we just made the cake as a joke.”
“We were trying to keep things fun.”
I looked at him without saying anything.
If the girl standing here today were still three hundred thirty pounds, they’d probably only be complaining that the cake wasn’t bigger and the joke wasn’t cruel enough.
The only reason they were embarrassed now was because I’d gotten thin. Because I’d gotten pretty.
Ethan was the last one to snap out of it.
He stared at me, lips moving several times before he could speak.
“Olivia?”
I lifted my eyes to him and made a small sound of acknowledgment.
Hearing my voice, he was suddenly certain.
He shot to his feet.
“It’s really you?”
“When did you lose the weight? Why didn’t you tell me?”
There was even something accusatory in it.
As if not telling him ahead of time had been my way of setting him up for public humiliation.
I didn’t answer.
The moment he’d posted my photo in the group and let everyone tear into me, we’d had nothing more to say to each other.
Whispers began rising around us.
“So she really is Ethan’s online girlfriend?”
“He was willing to bet a girlfriend this pretty away to somebody else?”
“Dying. Ethan must be losing his mind right now.”
Every word landed cleanly in Ethan’s ears.
His face darkened, but the look in his eyes only grew hotter.
Serena noticed too, obviously.
She leaned closer to Ethan and smoothed things over with a smile.
“Olivia’s changed so much—it’s totally normal that no one recognized her.”
“And Ethan didn’t mean anything by it. Tonight was just friends joking around. Olivia, you’re not upset, are you?”
One sentence, and all the malice was papered over.
The people who’d been heckling loudest jumped on it.
“Right, right, just a joke.”
“We’re all classmates from tomorrow on, don’t hold a grudge.”
“Olivia, someone as gorgeous as you wouldn’t stoop to it, right?”
I looked at them, and it struck me as funny.
If I were still three hundred thirty pounds, this wasn’t the response I’d be getting. There’d be no explanations, no apologies.
They weren’t sorry for mocking someone. They were only sorry they’d mocked the *wrong* person.
I didn’t answer. I turned and walked over to Adrian.
“There are still the couple’s challenges, aren’t there?”
The room went silent again.
Ethan’s expression changed instantly.
Adrian looked down at me, checking.
“You want to?”
I nodded.
“A bet is a bet.”
As the words left my mouth, Ethan’s hand clenched hard at his side.