Who You Know by Theresa Alan Page B

with my head in his lap . . . We talked . . . He began stroking my arm . . .
    I looked over at Les, who was still smiling happily.
    â€œLes, you know I was wasted last night. You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?”
    His smile faded. He looked confused.
    â€œLes, promise me you won’t tell anyone about this.”
    â€œI promise.”
    â€œI’m not feeling very well. Would you please go? Please?”
    â€œYeah, of course. I . . .”
    I turned over and covered my eyes with my hand. As I listened to him get dressed, all I could think was, I’ve slept with a fat man named Lester. Or did I sleep with him? Maybe we just slept slept. Naked, granted, but otherwise innocently slumbering. Yes, that was most certainly what had happened. Even if that was all that had happened, if anyone found out I was fraternizing with a naked fat boy, it would ruin my chances with Tom and it certainly wouldn’t help my chances for a promotion. Weren’t managers supposed to be responsible and do things like only sleep with their accountant husbands?
    â€œCan I get you anything before I go? Some water? Some aspirin?” he asked.
    â€œOh god, yes. The Advil’s in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Bring five, no six.”
    Tell me I didn’t sleep with a fat man named Lester. Tell me I didn’t sleep with a fat man named Lester . . .
    He brought the handful of pills and a large glass of water.
    â€œCan I call you?” he asked.
    â€œCall? No! I mean Les, you and I are just friends. Acquaintances really. We work together. I was drunk. This was a mistake.”
    My head felt like it had lost a fight with a chainsaw and Les’s presence was doing nothing to curb my nausea.
    â€œI’m sorry I . . .”
    â€œPlease, just go.”
    I listened to him leave. He shut the door quietly behind him.

RETTE
    Hindquarters of a Wildebeest
    I always hoped I’d be the kind of person who would have an affair with a dark-eyed stranger whose name I never bothered to get to know. Maybe we’d be on the Eurail going through Italy or France and we’d have sex in the bathroom without ever saying a word.
    The thing was, I was getting married before I’d done crazy stuff like that. I’d only seriously dated two other guys besides Greg. I was too shy and too self-conscious to flirt. While Jen, flirt extraordinaire, never missed a school dance, I spent every dance at home with a book in one hand and a candy bar in the other, under the admonishing eye of my mother.
    As soon as I started my job and I had a normal schedule, I’d start working out regularly. I’d finally get serious about getting in shape.
    True, I had said this once or twice or three million times before.
    I was nine when I went on my first diet. It didn’t go well. For about three days I worked out and starved myself, then I ate Fritos and chocolate chip cookies for a week straight.
    When I was eleven, I stood in front of the mirror with Seventeen magazine opened to the special Beauty Plus section. The article, complete with illustrations of thin, healthy girls measuring themselves, detailed the proportions of the ideal body. My waist, according to this, should have been ten inches smaller than my bust, and so on. I was mostly proportional, though on a large scale, but I was a little thick-waisted. I made charts and goals. Over the years, I started many, many diets, not based on any fad, but merely a regimen of serious deprivation to the point of near starvation (or at least so it felt) and then binging, a cycle I repeated so many times over the years that my metabolism became schizophrenic, terrified of a mythical starvation conspiracy, and eventually, my body refused to let go of my bloated fat cells, clinging to them like a drowning person to a life preserver.
    Now, I had thighs that were dimpled like the hood of a car thrashed by a hailstorm, slashed by angry lines and riddled with bumps