Chapter one
My name is Nicole Sparks. Welcome to the first day of the worst summer of my life.
“Colie,” my mother said with a sigh as she walked down the train platform toward me. She was in one of her FlyKiki workout suits, purple this time; she looked like a shiny grape. Her assistant, standing by the station door, took a not-so-subtle look at her watch. “Will you please try not to look so tortured?”
I fake-smiled at her, crossing my arms more tightly over my chest.
“Oh, that’s even worse,” she said. Another sigh. “With your hair that color and that thing in your lip you look terrible even when you’re smiling.” She came closer, her sneakers making squeaky mouse noises on the concrete. Like everything else, they were brand-new. “Honey, you know this is for the best. You couldn’t stay by yourself at the house all summer. You’d be lonely.”
“I have friends, Mom,” I said.
She cocked her head to the side, as if she doubted this. “Oh, honey,” she said again. “It’s for the best.”
The best for you, I thought. The thing about my mother is that she always has good intentions. But that’s as far as she usually gets.
“Kiki,” said the assistant, whose name I hadn’t even bothered to learn because she’d be gone by the time I got back, fired before they even reached the airport, probably, “we’ve got to go if we want to make that flight.”
“All right, all right.” My mother put her hands on her hips—the classic Kiki Sparks aerobic stance—and looked me up and down. “You’ll keep up your workouts, right? It would be a shame to gain all that weight back.”
“Yes.”
“And you’ll eat healthy—I told you I’m sending along the complete Kiki line—so you’ll have your foods with you at Mira’s.”
“You told me.”
She let her hands drop to her sides, and in that one brief moment I saw my mother again. Not Kiki Sparks, fitness guru and personal trainer of the masses. Not the talk show Kiki, the infomercial Kiki, the Kiki that smiled out from a million weight-loss products worldwide. Just my mom.
But now the train was coming.
“Oh, Colie,” she said, and she pulled me close, burying her face in the jet-black hair that had almost made her have a total breakdown when I came to breakfast that morning. “Please don’t be mad at me. Okay?”
I hugged her back, even though I’d told myself I wouldn’t. I’d pictured myself stony and silent as the train pulled out of the station, my angry face the last image she’d take with her on her European Summer FlyKiki Fitness Tour. But I was the opposite of my mother, in more than just the fact that I always had bad intentions. And that was as far as I got.
“I love you,” she whispered as we walked toward the train.
Then take me with you, I thought, but she was already pulling back, wiping her eyes, and I knew if I said it the words would fall between us and just lie there, causing more trouble than they were worth.
“I love you too,” I said. When I got to my seat I looked out the window and found her standing by the station door, her assistant still fidgeting beside her. She waved, in all that purple, and I waved back, even as the lump formed hard and throbbing in the back of my throat. Then I put on my headphones, turned up my music as loud as I could, and closed my eyes as the train slipped away.
It hadn’t always been like this.
In my first real memory, at five, I am wearing white mary janes and sitting in the front seat of our old Volaré station wagon in front of a 7-Eleven. It is really, really hot, and my mother is walking toward me carrying two Big Gulps, a bag of Fritos, and a box of Twinkies. She’s wearing cowboy boots, red ones, and a short skirt, even though this is during what we call the “Fat Years.” Being obese—she topped out, at her worst, at about 325 pounds—never stopped my mother from following fads.
She opens the car door and tosses in the loot, the bag of Fritos banking off my leg and onto the floor.
“Scoot over,” she says, settling her large form in beside me. “We’ve still got half a day till Texas.”
The rest of my early memories are all of highway, coming toward me from different landscapes: flat, dry desert; thick Carolina pines; windy coastal roads framed by dunes. Only a few things stayed the same. My mother and I were both fat. It was usually not too far to the next place. And we were always together, us against the world.
The last of our stops was Charlotte, North Carolina, three years ago. It’s the longest I’ve ever stayed in any one school. It’s also where my mother became Kiki Sparks.
Before, she was just Katharine, college dropout and master of a million small talents: she’d pumped gas, peddled cemetery plots over the phone, sold Mary Kay cosmetics, even arranged appointments at an escort service. Anything to keep us in food and gas money until she started itching to travel again. But after a few days in Charlotte she applied for a job at a dry cleaner’s which she didn’t get and, in a fit of frustration, accidentally rear-ended a Cadillac in the parking lot. Since we were flat broke, she talked the owner of the car, who ran a gym called Lady Fitness, into letting her work off the cost of the repairs. She started by cleaning the machines and answering phones, but after a few weeks the woman liked her so much she gave her a full-time job and a free membership. A week earlier we’d been back to ketchup soup and ramen noodles, sleeping in the back of the car; now, we had a steady income and a decent apartment. Back in the Fat Years, things always seemed to work out at the last minute.