Divine Phoenix(Divine Creek Ranch 10)(69)

“I was scarred for life, you know.”

Lily chortled with glee. “You were so cute in your widdle clown costume.” The ensemble included a pair of floppy shoes, peaked hat with fluffy ball on top, and full clown makeup. Lily turned to him and kissed his cheek. “I remember you handling that humiliation with a lot of dignity. I think you knew it would’ve hurt your mom’s feelings if you’d rejected the costume after she’d spent so many hours sewing it. Ugh, look at me, all tubby.”

Clay took the picture from her and pointed at her legs, which were really all that could be made out of her with the costume and mask covering her. Clay pointed at one of the other girls. “There isn’t really that much difference, Lily. See?”

Lily scoffed. “Whatever. She was a little chunky, too, as I recall.” Lily remembered the way her mother had complained, trying to find a costume in the store that would fit her.

They leafed through the pictures and found some from a weekend trip to the Texas Gulf Coast she’d gone on with the Cook family the summer after sixth grade was finished. Mrs. Cook had been kind enough to give her several pictures from that trip, including this one. She remembered looking at it years and years ago and being so embarrassed. She’d been wearing short-shorts in the picture, which revealed just how fat her legs were. She’d taken the pictures home, given them to her mom for safekeeping, and never looked at them again.

“I remember this,” Clay murmured. “Mom and Dad let us stay up and watch MTV all night. That was a lot of fun.” Clay’s words barely registered as she frowned at the picture. “You okay, honey?”

She nodded as she laid the picture aside from the others. They soon reached the pictures that were taken after her family had moved away when she was in seventh grade, and Clay was particularly curious about these.

There was a picture of her in a long dress from a middle school choir concert when she was an eighth grader. That had been a hard year, making the adjustment to a new town. She’d felt like a whale in the lime-green dress with the scratchy blouse underneath. In the softness of her rounded cheeks was a hint of the woman she now saw in the mirror every day.

“You looked so unhappy.”

Lily frowned and replied, “Mom made me wear that dress. I hated it because it didn’t fit right. The neck was tight on that blouse and I felt like I was being strangled. Mom complained because it came from the Misses’ department and was more expensive.”

She gazed at the dress and remembered how she’d felt but couldn’t reconcile it with what she saw in the picture. She felt Clay’s eyes on her, but when she glanced up at him, he had a tender smile on his face. She laid the picture aside and continued on.

She flipped the next picture over to check the date. “This was taken my freshman year in high school.” It was a formally posed portrait, and the memory that stood out the most about it was her mom asking the photographer if he could position the wicker chair in front of her a little to hide her heavy thighs.

The photographer had been kind to her and winked when he positioned the chair and arranged her hands on the back of it and asked her to smile like a supermodel. Uncertainty had shown in her teenaged eyes, but she’d smiled for him anyway, showing too much teeth.

“You look as though you’d grown several inches taller by the time this was taken.”

The outfit she’d been wearing in the picture was a scratchy two-piece polyester outfit she recalled shopping for with her mom in the clearance racks at the local department store. Lily remembered her mom griping that she couldn’t find anything in her size. She’d felt so ashamed that there weren’t any clothes in the store that fit her.

Lily had a realization, remembering that time as an adult now. Her mom complained because of the lack of selection on the clearance racks. They’d never ventured to any other department, and her mother had eventually decided on an ill-fitting outfit with a skirt that was so short Lily had never felt comfortable wearing it. Her self-consciousness showed in her eyes in the head-to-toe portrait.

Clay took the portrait from her and traced his finger over the long expanse of her legs. “Wow.” A lump burned in her throat at the admiration in his tone.

She sifted through the pictures, finding one from a football game, shot with friends in the spectator stands. Her mom had been about to take the picture but had mouthed to her to angle sideways so she would look thinner, dressed as she was in her sweatshirt, blue jeans, and high-top sneakers. She bit her lip and winced when she nearly drew blood.

She also found a snapshot taken of her at the beach the weekend after she graduated from high school. Clad in a one-piece bathing suit, she’d waved self-consciously at her dad as he’d taken the picture. Her mom had griped at him for not giving her a chance to pose so she looked thinner. In the picture she simply faced the camera, standing in the surf, with the wind blowing her long hair in her face.