Cupcake Read online

  Cupcake

  A modern love story with a bigger-than- average waistline

  By Mariah Jones

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real business establishments, occurrences or people is merely a coincidence. Names, Characters and places within are a product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. © copyright 2011 by Mariah Jones. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without strict permission from the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only legal electronic copies and help protect the author rights and these copyrighted materials from internet piracy.

  For my mother, Sharon, who taught me that real beauty comes from within. I love you.

  Chapter one

  Early life

  My name is Darcy Miller. I am an overachiever and an over-thinker. I can over-bake, overdo, over-examine, overcomplicate, overcorrect, over-explain, overpay, and oversee. Mostly I overeat. Let’s get that part out of the way first. Deep breath…here we go. I’m fat. I’m not a ‘little on the large side,’ or ‘plus sized.’ I’m not ‘a little chubby,’ nor am I ‘a little hefty.’ I’m fat. I’m just plain fat. There, I said it. Now the hard part is over.

  That being said, allow me to emphasize that being fat has not made me an unfriendly or unsocial person. Actually quite the opposite; this might sound so clichéd, but when you are a big girl like me, you almost have to have a great personality and the ability to seem confident, or you won’t survive this superficial world past grade school.

  This is the story of how I went from being a wallflower with nearly no confidence to being the radiant, beautiful woman I am now.

  In order to truly help you understand my former lack of confidence, let us rewind back to my childhood. My earliest memory is being at a birthday party for my sister Katie. I was four and she was celebrating her seventh birthday. I remember the balloons and the music and the yellow and purple streamers. I remember that she got a new pink bike with daisies on the handle bars. What I remember most though, is a comment from my dad’s brother, Uncle Kevin. As we sat down at the picnic table outside and mom handed me my slice, Uncle Kevin took it from me and cut it in half, placing half the slice on his plate. “Gotta start watching what you eat if you want to lose that baby fat,” he said.

  That was the first time I ever heard anyone tell me I was fat, and it hurt me in a way I didn’t really understand at that tender age. All I knew was it didn’t feel good, and I didn’t like Uncle Kevin much after that.

  Flash forward a few years. My mom and dad moved us from Minneapolis, all the way across the country to Portland Oregon. A new kid in a new school usually has a hard enough time blending in, but I had a worse time than most.

  My sister Katie was always the lucky one. She was stick thin, (still is) very athletic, pretty and outgoing. She was instantly as popular in the new school as she was in the former.

  I was fat, shy and wore glasses. I was the exact opposite of athletic. In fact, I had a mortal fear of any kind of sport. Because my sister was three years older than me and went to middle school while I was in elementary, I didn’t even get the comfort of being near her.

  The very first day of school I was probably referred to as ‘that new fat girl’ at least a dozen times. The unfortunate thing is that children that age have not yet learned to sensor themselves the way most adults do. The other kids had no problem walking up and asking me directly, “Why are you so fat?” I learned right away that learning to ignore people’s questions and comments didn’t make them any less painful.

  It was when I got to high school that I really began to devalue myself. If I thought fitting in during elementary school was hard, high school was a catastrophe. My shyness had grown to the point where I was even afraid to speak when my teachers called my name. I convinced my mom to get a doctor’s excuse for me to replace P.E. with an alternate course. I couldn’t handle getting undressed in front of all the cheerleaders and such. I avoided social engagements where I would have to find a date or wear a dress like they were the plague.

  I had one friend, Allie, and she was just about the only person I knew who had it worse than me. She was thin, so she didn’t go through quite the same ridicule as I did, but she was cursed with a disease that did not allow her to grow any hair and once the other kids found out she wore a wig, it went from bad to worse quickly. They called us “piggy and wiggy.” After a while, we grew used to the horrible nicknames, but neither of us ever had the courage to take on our tormentors. We stayed close by each other as much as we could and somehow both managed to survive to graduate, but the constant teasing left a lasting impression on our confidence.

  Since then, Allie has gone on to become a model; most people would never guess that the hair featured in her magazine ads and billboards is not really hers. Still, even to this day, when someone comments on how gorgeous she is, Allie shrugs as if she doesn’t believe it.

  You would think that after a few years in the ‘real world,’ you would meet people who generally behave as grown-ups. Sadly, this is not the case most of the time. When you are big like me, the sniggering and snide comments seem to follow you no matter how old you get. It’s how you deal with it that matters. Unfortunately, it took me until I was thirty years old to learn this.

  After 30, my life took a dramatic turn, which at first didn’t really seem dramatic to me at all.

  Chapter Two

  This will be “brief”

  Two years ago I used all my savings and took out a few loans to buy a business on Meriwether Avenue in Portland. The business is in a nice neighborhood and part of a strip mall. I liked its location immediately because I figured it would mean lots of foot traffic, which is important when you are just starting out. After just finishing four years at the American Academy of Culinary Arts, I was ready to use my new skills. I opened a bakery called “Cupcake.”

  The business excelled faster than I could have imagined. Soon I had no choice but to hire some help because I became so busy that I couldn’t handle all the work by myself. I hired Jenny, a somewhat slow but very nice little blonde girl who was still in high school at the time. Incidentally, she was the first person to respond to the ad I put in the paper. I have never really refined the art of saying no to people who plead with me. Thankfully for me, this time it worked out for the best.

  Jenny and I moved as fast as we could to fill orders of designer cupcakes and eventually listened to the demands of my customers begging me to get into wedding cakes. Once we started making the cakes, the sales at the business tripled and I was once again looking for help to relieve the workload.

  After interviewing what seemed like half the city and coming up with not a single prospect, I called my sister Katie and begged her to come work for me. Katie was a stay at home mom. Her husband Jacob was active duty military at the time and deployed overseas. Reluctantly, Katie agreed to put my nephew Daniel in daycare and work at Cupcake. The business has been steady and sales have been excellent ever since.

  In late July a few years ago, on a warm summer evening, I sent Jenny home early as she was feeling ill. Katie had already left to pick up Daniel and I was alone, just getting ready to print my final receipt of the day and close up shop. The bells hanging on the front door jingled and a nervous looking young man walked in. He was dressed in all black with his hands hidden in his pockets. I could tell by the fearful way he was looking at me that this was not going to be good.

  I glanced around the shop, hoping for what I am still to this day unsure. I said nothing to him immediately, which may have been fear or just common sense. It didn’t take long for him to act. Pulling out a handgun, he held it out in front of him. He was shaking nearly uncontrollably and I feared the gun would go off at
any second, even if he didn’t intend for it to.

  As I stared down the barrel of the gun, I suddenly found my voice, although the roaring in my head came out as little more than a whisper. “You can have the cash,” I said as calmly as I could manage, “just don’t do anything stupid.”

  The young man looked at the register behind the counter and then back at me. At first he looked confused about what he should do; beginning to lower the gun and then raising it to its original position.

  I backed away from the register slowly, trying to allow him a clear path to take what he came for. Then I made a critical mistake. You may not believe me when I say this. Looking back on the situation I can’t believe I did it either.

  I have never yet found a pair of underwear that fit me correctly. They always ride up at the worst possible time. Not even thinking I sunk down a little lower behind the counter and tried to pull my underwear out of my rear end. Why then you ask? The same reason why you do it at the grocery store or when you are hiding behind your car door in a parking lot. It was uncomfortable. Just like a person reaches out and catches a scalding hot dog that rolls off a grill using their bare hand, sometimes you do something really dumb without thinking.

  The young man’s eyes grew wide. “You got a weapon,” he said.

  “No,” I tried to say with conviction, but it was too late.

  “Oh shit, you’ve got a gun,” he said frantically.

  I didn’t get the chance to say anything else. The gun went off and the guy ran from the store through the same door he had come in. The next few hours were kind of a blur. One of the other business owners in the strip mall heard the shot and called the police. Ambulatory services arrived and whisked me away to the emergency room. I woke up an hour later, still sedated and with a burning pain in my left shoulder.

  Oddly, when I woke up, I wasn’t thinking about the young man who shot me. The thought that I had been shot was already an accepted fact in my mind. It turned out the bullet did little more than graze me. I was very lucky the doctor informed me a few minutes later.

  No, I didn’t hate the guy who sent me to the hospital. I wasn’t thinking how lucky I was the bullet didn’t kill me nor do some other serious damage. No. I was wondering how many other people had been shot because their too small underwear had crept up the crack of their too big ass. Who does that? I asked myself. Who takes the time to pull a wedgie out of their butt while they have a gun pointed at them? Who? I’ll tell you. Me. That’s who.

  When the police came in and interviewed me, the first question they asked was, logically, “Tell me how it happened.” What do you say to that when you know the truth is too ridiculous to tell? Well, you lie. I guess it wasn’t technically a lie, more of an omission. I told them everything that happened step by step, leaving out the underwear-related-disaster. When asked what I thought may have spooked the assailant into firing the weapon, I played clueless. I hadn’t lost any limbs. I hadn’t lost any of the cash in my register. I had lost only two things that day of any value. One was my sense of security; the other, my dignity. Perhaps the latter was the less important of the two, but it really didn’t seem that way to me.

  I said I had a life altering moment. I said that my life took a dramatic turn. Bet you weren’t expecting underwear to be at the root of it all huh? Me either. Life has a funny way of surprising you with twists you could never have imagined.

  Chapter Three

  The first attempt at a new me

  Why is it when you don’t want a reminder of something, you suddenly see it everywhere you look? I have never seen as many underwear ads in my life as I did at the end of that July. Was there a national demand for undergarments that I knew nothing about? Was there a shortage of them the year before that the industry was trying to make up for?

  For all of my trying not to dwell on my own stupidity, it turned out there was no way to avoid it. So, I made a decision. I was going to lose weight. Yeah, yeah, you’ve heard it all before. I’d tried it all before. This time was going to be different.

  After getting shot, I immediately decided two things. If God was going to grant me a second chance at life, I was not going to waste it being fat. Secondly, I was for damn sure going to have underwear that fit me properly by the end of the year. I told myself that losing fifty pounds in the five months left until the end of the year was a goal I could accomplish. I wasn’t expecting to become a size six, just hoping for a sixteen maybe, something that would make a difference in my overall health and longevity.

  I talked extensively to Katie about how I could accomplish this. She recommended that I join her gym. She said they offered nutrition classes once a week and that I could get a personal trainer who wouldn’t push me beyond my limit while I was first starting. She was right about the nutrition classes. They taught you how to eat all kinds of things I couldn’t even stand the smell of, many of which I couldn’t even pronounce, and this is coming from a gal who went to culinary school.

  I love my sister more than life itself. I respect her opinion and I would do anything for her. I feel the need to say, as far as the trainer not pushing me beyond my limit, THE BITCH LIED.

  The gym my sister frequents is not your average sweaty-housewife kind of place. It’s more like a country club meant for the already athletic and fit upper elite from the community. I was not just a little out of place there; I stuck out like a sore thumb. Maybe not; more like a blue whale at a sardine convention.

  I will not go into long detail about my first and only nutrition class. Let’s just say that fat free yogurt will never be an equal replacement for mayo, and anything that starts out with organic whole grain is going to taste like cardboard. Sour cream is sour cream and always will be, imitators be hanged.

  I decided right away that I was not meant to be in the room with these people as they discussed better alternatives to average foods. One of the members of the gym went on bragging to the instructor that she was a member of the CRS. Apparently that stands for calorie restriction society. I told her to wait ten more years and I would be a member of the CRS club too. She looked down her nose at my fat rolls and moved to a different seat. These health-nuts have no sense of humor. Maybe it’s all the fiber in their diets.

  Katie met me after the class for my first “healthy meal” at the bistro the gym boasted as “the best place to go for your health.” She ordered some strange looking Greek salad with lots of awful looking olives and unidentifiable shriveled things sitting on top of it like demented raisins. I scanned the menu twice, praying for a cheeseburger and then reminding myself of the fifty pound mark I was trying to hit. I decided on a shrimp salad with dressing on the side.

  “What do you think so far?” Katie asked.

  “About which part?” I asked, wondering how what appeared to be one teaspoon of dressing was going to wet an entire salad.

  “About the gym, do you like the atmosphere here or would you rather we find you another one?” she asked.

  I was watching two overly-orange and obviously spray-tanned diners a few tables away try not to be conspicuous that they were talking about me. “I don’t think it’s going to matter where I go,” I told her honestly. “I’m not going to ‘fit in’ at any health club, until I ‘fit in’ to a smaller size. I’m willing to give it a try though. I really do want to lose this weight.”

  “Good,” Katie said. “You have the first workout with your personal trainer in about thirty minutes.”

  “Have I mentioned you are picking up the tab for lunch?” I asked sarcastically.

  “You’re welcome,” my sister replied.

  ****

  My personal trainer entered the gym from a side door marked ‘personnel only’. Immediately he reminded me of the sergeant from the Beetle Bailey comic strip. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the way he had his spine so straight it looked as if he was nailed to a board. Or maybe it was the camouflage pants he wore. “Ryan Moore,” he said, sticking out one very large hand toward me. I smirked as I thought of
Arnold Schwarzenegger saying “we’re here to pump you up.”

  The first twenty minutes of my workout were spent on the treadmill. I am not a runner. I have never been a runner. Even if I was skinny I don’t think I would like running. I feel awkward just walking at a fast pace.

  Ryan kept upping the speed on the treadmill every few minutes. I was huffing and puffing and panting and truly felt like my heart was going to explode out of my chest. Sweat was pouring down my head and into my eyes, stinging them. I found out that there is actually something I hate more than running. I hate sweating.

  After yelling at me repeatedly that “I was not going to get skinny if I didn’t put my all into it”, and telling me to “pick up the pace sweetheart!” I was finally done on the death machine. I actually thought, that wasn’t too bad, assuming we were done for the day. Ryan’s next words terrified me. “Good. Now we have you warmed up.”

  “I am leaving you nothing in my will Katie,” I said out loud. Ryan smiled. Personal trainers are evil.