want him. But I didn’t care what he said, this session was over. I took my curly black hair off my neck and pulled it up in a bun.
“I feel good,” I lied.
“Okay, I’ll see you this time tomorrow,” he said as he stopped the treadmill.
“Yeah, I guess,” I said as I jumped off the treadmill.
“You guess? Hold up. You trying to getting in shape, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
From the gym I went past my mother Debbie’s house. I’d always lived with my mother and grandparents. My mother was fifty-two with dark roots and blond ends. She had a streak of red blush going up the side of her eggshell-colored cheek and was wearing cherry-colored lipstick. We didn’t even look like we were mother and daughter. I look like my dad’s side, and he is black. My complexion was cocoa-butter yellow, and I had long, black, thick hair. My mother’s hair was brown, short, and thin. I had family on my dad’s side, but they never really accepted me. My dad broke up with my mom when she was pregnant with me.
Growing up, I was really lost. I didn’t really belong. People would put glue in my hair and hide my book bag. And I got it from black and white kids. I’d always had issues with my complexion and being biracial. I had a big nose and crazy untamed hair growing up. I was just an oddball. So I never made a lot of friends or brought anyone home. Kids at my school would say mean things to me like my mother was an albino elephant and ask me if I was adopted. I got into so many fights from first grade through high school. Somebody always wanted to fight me. I used to be so embarrassed when my mother came up to my school and tried to defend me, because she was white and very fat. Her legs used to be the size of boulders and squished together when she walked. She weighed about four hundred pounds and even needed a cane to get around. I loved my mom and I knew she was a good mom, but other kids didn’t see that. My mom and grandparents gave me a lot of love and attention, but that didn’t make me feel any better. So when my mom sat me down three years ago and said she was getting gastric bypass surgery, I was so excited. I knew it would be a new life for her and for me. I no longer would have to be ashamed of her. She lost two hundred pounds in two years, and got a new life and picked herself up a boyfriend. That’s why I knew I had to stay in the gym; it was in my genes to be fat.
“Hey, Mom,” I said as I came through the door.
She gave me a kiss on the cheek as she opened a can of Ensure for my grandfather. He was sitting in his recliner in the living room. My grandparents’ house was filled with decades-old furniture. Mostly wood and crazy burnt orange and green colors. She placed the drink in front of him and he pushed it to the side.
“I don’t like the way it taste. I want some coffee.”
“Pop, the doctor said you can’t have coffee. Drink this thing; you need to gain some weight.”
He looked over at me and took a sip. Henry Sheppard was a stubborn-ass man. Even at eighty-two he didn’t listen to anyone. He was so skinny that his small wife-beater was hanging off his tiny body. My grandmother passed away eight years ago. My mom took care of my grandfather because he was in the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s.
I sat and talked to my mother for a little while and left. I wanted to get home and take a nap and shower before it was time for me to go to work. I was a nurse at the University of Alton Hospital. I’d been there for two years. It wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. Sometimes I got tired of being around sick people; other times I felt more like a maid than a medical professional. I didn’t even really want to become a nurse, but I had to declare a major so I chose that. People were making good money, and I wanted to be assured of a job when I graduated. I worked my way through college and just stayed busy. I went to a community college; then I went to a nursing program at Jefferson University. I was working the four-to-twelve shift tonight. My schedule varied, and I did a lot of doubles. Sometimes it seemed like all I did was work. And when I wasn’t working, I was sleeping to get rested to go back to work. Sometimes I looked in the mirror and saw dark rings appearing under my eyes from lack of sleep. I thought it was a shame for a twenty-five-year-old to look like that.
I entered my apartment building and retrieved my mail out of the box. I had nothing but credit card offers and bills. I climbed up the steps to my third-floor apartment and entered. I had tan carpet and white walls. I didn’t have anything on the walls, just a few pictures of me and my mom and my grand-mom before she died. I said I would get the place together, but the only person looking at it was me. It was drab, and I had enough money to fix it up, but I just didn’t have the time.
Once I got to work my routine was the same. I went to the station and looked at the board to see how many patients I had. The head nurse, Liz, a vibrant Jamaican woman, usually made sure I had the least amount of patients. She looked out for me because she said I reminded her of her niece back home. “Hey, gal, what you got going on today?” she asked.
“Nothing, just a little tired.”
“No time to be tired, you’re a young person, you got plenty of time before you grow old, ya know,” she said as she handed me my charts and I yawned. Then I went into each patient’s room, introduced myself, and let them know I was going to be their nurse, and if they needed anything to call me.
“Hey, girlie,” I said as I saw Stacey. She was a tall brunette with green eyes. She was very nice and the only nurse I could relate to when I started. We were about the same age and on the same page with life. We swapped dating horror stories. Now she was engaged, and I didn’t see her that often.
“You here again? You work so much,” she said as she looked up from entering notes in the computer.
“Us single gals have to work if we want to pay our bills,” I said as I pulled out a chart.
“Whatever. You work because you don’t want a life. Anyway, I have to tell you, do not walk out of the room while 812 takes her medication. Because every shift she’s been saying the pill dropped on the floor and she couldn’t find it.”
“Another junkie,” I said as I peeped into the room. The woman looked like an addict. She was real thin with dark red spots embedded into her brown skin. It was so sad that she was in the hospital for heart and respiratory problems, and still trying to find a way to get high.
“Yeah.”
“Why do they keep admitting them? Let them go get high,” I said as I began to get my medicine list together. It was going to be a long night.
The next day, I went in for my personal training session with Kyle. He was in this fat girl’s face. He was helping her bring her arms down with weights. I don’t know why I was jealous, but I was. He was showing her the same attention that should have been reserved for me. I walked in his direction and he smiled with his one-dimpled-cheek smile. His curly hair was chaotic, being held together with some kind of mousse.
He saw me and his face turned from smiling to a militant glare, and he said, “Get started on the treadmill twenty minutes. At four point oh.”
I just nodded and jumped on the treadmill. I didn’t bring anything to read, so my twenty minutes was going to feel like an hour. I tried to concentrate, but I was distracted by weights clinking together and men doing arm curls behind me, and I was pissed that I could see Kyle through the mirror. He had moved from the fat girl to an anorexic-thin blonde. She was all in his face, laughing flirtatiously. She needed to go drink a protein shake and get out of his face. I walked slowly until he came over and stopped the machine.
“You ready?” he asked as he let his hand caress my waist.
“Yes.”
He instructed me to get off the treadmill so he could take my measurements. He placed the white measuring tape around my waist and told me I lost two inches.
“Two inches. That’s it?”
“That’s good. What are you trying to do?”
“I really just want