seeming like just a guy who happened to be around. Only Harriet and Kayla had commented on how much he was around, and they seemed satisfied enough with the explanation that he was a friend from home. They were sure Alex was into her, but she’d shunted that idea aside by suggesting that Alex had dated her older sister, so she’d never date him herself.
As Lia tore the wrapping from her plastic fork, Kayla cast a skeptical eye over her tray. “How much more do you want to lose?”
“I’m not really trying to lose any more. It wasn’t a diet, it was a lifestyle change.”
That was fairly true. She’d been dieting in some form or another since she was thirteen, but this was the first one that seemed to have clicked. It had been hard at first, and she’d been resentful of the deprivation, but now it was just the way she ate. She felt weirdly anxious when she ate more; it threw off her whole day.
It wasn’t entirely true because she did have a quiet thought that she’d like to lose ten more pounds and get to one-ten, but people had been telling her lately that she’d lost enough, so she kept the last bit to herself now. She hadn’t lost enough. Not yet.
All her life, she’d been a little pudgy. Like her mom. Mamma always insisted that Lia was beautiful and that being healthy and strong was the most important thing, and she’d made sure that all the kids were active and ate sensibly, but that only went so far. What people thought mattered. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it did.
Plus, Elisa, Carina, Ren—they were all skinny. Elisa was built like a runway model, almost six feet tall and a fucking size 2. It had not been easy to grow up among siblings who could eat, as Nonna used to say, like they had a hollow leg, when she, like Mamma, put on a pound if she walked past a muffin.
Papa liked Mamma’s curves—it was kind of gross how much he liked them, especially now, when they were both old and grey—but in Lia’s experience, a man who liked a woman with extra weight was the exception, not the rule. At least, none of the guys she’d ever liked had liked her back.
Since she’d dropped twenty-six pounds, though, guys were paying attention to her. The evidence therefore suggested that being healthy and strong wasn’t the only important thing. Unless Lia wanted to die alone. Which she did not.
She’d be twenty in October, and she was still a virgin. Part of that was the burden of being Lia Pagano, yes. No boy in Quiet Cove was going to deflower the don’s teenage daughter, whether she was hot or not.
Now here she was at college, as Leah Maddox. Nobody knew who her father was—except, possibly, Jackson Crenville, now. Last year, no boy she’d liked had returned the sentiment—so being Lia Pagano was not the real obstacle.
But this year, she was thin—or thinner, anyway. In addition to finally landing a featured role in a play or musical, now that she had the ‘look’ Professor Gottschalk demanded, she meant to find a boyfriend and have some sex. In that order preferably, but not necessarily.
All those thoughts were Lia’s constant companions these days, so much she barely registered she was thinking them. Ignoring Kayla’s disapproving look, she lifted the top from her small garden salad and squeezed the lemon wedge over it.
Watching her use the fork to toss the juice around the greens, Kayla said, “Intermittent fasting suggests that there’s some point that the fasting stops. That’s what intermittent means.”
Lia shoved a forkful of kale and spinach into her mouth. Around that mass of greens, she said, “Like now. Not fasting.”
Kayla lifted her phone to her mouth. “Siri, what’s the calorie count of a small garden salad?”
“I found this on the web,” Siri answered. Kayla turned the phone so Lia could see it.
She didn’t need to look; she knew the calorie count of everything she put in her mouth. But she looked anyway and saw the first hit, which showed a range of thirty to one hundred calories for a cup and a half of carrots and leafy greens. This salad was about eighty. But it wasn’t like she wouldn’t eat again after her dance class. She got about eight hundred or so calories a day. That was plenty.
She swallowed her mouthful and washed it down with San Pellegrino. “Don’t be a mom, Kayla.