Tall

Five feet eleven inches. One hundred sixty-seven pounds. Size six.

I was the freak. All the girls weighed a hundred pounds. A hundred five, at the most. Size zeroes all the way around, like they were holding a royal flush of attractive and desirable. Bitches.

When we had our physicals, it was a big deal, but not that big a deal. When all the other girls shared their weights, like winning lottery tickets, I cringed. I outweighed them all by at least sixty pounds. Not to mention the fact that I towered over most of them by at least eleven inches, but I never factored that into the equation. Those eleven inches didn’t matter, but my weight did.

I ran out of my physical, pretending sickness. I avoided the whole weight issue with grace (at least in my own mind.)

During basketball practice, I heard our coach praising someone. “I ask for one thing. I ask for you to get low, and the only one able to follow instructions is the biggest girl on our team.”

He meant me.

He never elaborated and said “the tallest girl on our team” which is what he meant by ‘the biggest’, but in my mind, he had just called me the thing I’d always called myself while looking in the mirror. The thing I dreaded most. The thing I knew was the fucking elephant in the room. Fat.

I was the only freshman to make the varsity team.

That didn’t matter to me. When I played, the only thing I ever thought of was that phrase. The biggest girl on the team. When my picture made the paper, I’d look at that grainy print and judge how big I looked, especially against the girls who were never more than five foot seven. Being good didn’t matter. Being good enough to be the only freshman on varsity didn’t matter either.

The only thing that mattered was that phrase, the one that was the last thing I thought of before I went to bed every night. The biggest girl on the team.

I exercised every day. I couldn’t be anorexic; I loved to eat too much. Bulimia was the worst kind of wastefulness; that too was a no-go. I enjoyed eating way too much to commit that particular crime. I had panic attacks every time I went on that court, thinking of every angle people could see me from, every disgusting angle which was probably making them pay more attention to how big I was, how I was the Sasquatch taking up room on the team of fragile non-sizes.

I quit.

My sophomore year, I met that coach at another school, the one with that God-awful phrase. He asked me why I wasn’t playing. I looked at him, his keg belly, hating him, and I said, “I couldn’t stand being the biggest girl on the team. Being the fattest.”

When he looked at me, he said, “Fattest? Who called you that?”

“You,” I said, “that’s why I quit.”

“You were the tallest,” he said, his eyes understanding, sad, “I just meant you were the tallest.”