“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.