Читать книгу Boys on the Brain - Jean Ure, Stephen Lee, Jean Ure - Страница 13

Pilch came into school today very upset as her mum suggested to her last night that maybe she should go on a diet. Pur-lease! Has her mum never heard of anorexia? It is true that Pilch is a bit on the plump side, but so what? That is the way she is made. It is the way she is happy. Why should she go and change her natural basic shape just to satisfy her mum?

Pilch said gloomily that it’s because of her sister being thin as a pin and going out with all these boys, even though she is only twelve and a half.

“Mum thinks I’m being left behind.”

“So she wants you to starve yourself?” I said.

Honestly! What with my mum going on about boys, and now Pilch’s mum wanting her to starve herself, it’s a wonder we’re not both on Prozac.

Pilch said anxiously, “You don’t think I’m fat, do you?”

I said, “No, you’re just well covered, and even if you were fat, what would it matter?”

“I wouldn’t want to be fat,” said Pilch.

I said, “Now you’re just being sizeist! You’re as bad as your mum.”

Pilch said it was all very well for me as I am what she calls “a fashionable shape”. In other words, thin. I said, “That just happens to be the way that nature made me,” and I got on my high horse a bit and started lecturing her about turning herself into a media creation.

Pilch said, “What do you mean, a media creation?”

“Like you read about in the papers,” I said.

I told her that I was sick of young people always being depicted as lame-brained airheads only interested in the opposite sex, head-banging music, designer drugs and clothes.

“Some of us have a bit more going for us than that! We don’t spend all our time gazing into mirrors and tarting ourselves up and going on diets and making ourselves ill. Your mum ought to be ashamed of herself,” I said.

Pilch cheered up a bit when I said this. She confessed that she had lain awake half the night pinching bits of flesh between her finger and thumb and wondering whether she ought to give up eating entirely, or at any rate stick to yoghurt and raw carrots.

“It was making me really miserable,” she said, as we stood in the queue for lunch. “And oh, look!” she added. “They’ve got macaroni cheese!”

I don’t really like macaroni cheese that much but I ate some just to keep her company. I think it is important that we stand shoulder to shoulder in this crisis.