Read Online Skinny by Donna Cooner - Free Book Online Page A

around my arm, ignoring my question completely. She snaps it into a tie above my elbow and slaps my forearm. The fat of my arm jiggles as she frowns down at what she sees.
    “That may be a good one there.” She prods at my arm, searching for a place to stick the waiting needle.
    I try to look sympathetic. I don’t know if I should apologize or what. What am I supposed to say? I’m sorry my veins are all covered up in fat just like the rest of me?
    “I’ll be right back.” She’s going for help. The first one always goes for help. Everything that is alive and pumping inside of me is somewhere underneath all of this.
    “The odds of death are one in two hundred. That’s pretty slim,” Rat says. He’s sitting on the end of the hospital bed in the pre-op room.
    “Thanks,” I say.
    “But I guess if one hundred and ninety-nine people had the surgery this week then . . .” He doesn’t smile. He isn’t kidding.
    “That’s not helping.”
    “Where’s your dad?” Rat asks, and I know he’s trying to change the subject.
    “On his way. Got called in for a traffic accident.”
    “Bad?” Rat asks. We both know that a town with I-45 running through the middle of it at seventy-five miles an hour always has the potential for deadly accidents.
    “Could have been, but it turned out okay. Larry Joe Green’s three cases of beer were strapped into the child safety seats instead of his two kids.”
    Smiley Face returns with a helper and they set to work on my arm again. I feel the prick one more time and then a sharp pain as the needle digs in deeper.
    “Ah, there we are. I was afraid for a moment we were going to have to call this whole thing off.” Smiley Face laughs like she has just told a hilarious joke. Helper Nurse bustles around the bed, hooking up tubes and bags to my arm. She slides a metal cap over my finger and moves the monitor stand over closer to the bed. Numbers flash on the screen accompanied by an occasional beep. I watch the monitor and hope the line doesn’t go flat. I’ve probably watched too many medical dramas. I know flat lines are not a good thing.
    The song playing over and over in my mind is “The Point of No Return” from The Phantom of the Opera .
    The nurse asks Rat to move over to the chair by the windows. She pushes the thin blanket off my legs and starts fiddling around with my feet. First she pulls a pair of stockings on me, then straps on some leggings over the top.
    “These are the hottest things out there.” Patting my legs, she smiles at me. “Lovely, aren’t they?”
    She plugs the leggings into a machine under the bed and they start to fill up with air, squeezing tightly against my calves over and over again with a weird pumping sound. The sound masks the scared panting noise of my breathing.
    “It’ll help your circulation,” Rat says. “So you don’t get blood clots.”
    The nurse looks at him in surprise. “You’re a smart boy. Want to be a doctor someday?”
    “Not a medical doctor, if that’s what you mean,” says Rat, “although I will probably get my PhD in nuclear physics.”
    The nurse doesn’t know what to say about that, so she just nods and leaves again. Rat continues to read the booklet we received at the informational session.
    “Is this going to work?” My voice shakes a little.
    “Probably,” says Rat, pushing the glasses back up his nose, his big blue eyes unblinking behind them. “Most people lose from thirteen to twenty pounds in the first month, and most of this weight is lost in the first two weeks because of the diet. It takes about a year to lose the rest.”
    “But is it going to work for me?”
    “The odds are that it will,” Rat says solemnly. “It says there is plenty of time for weight loss after the gastric bypass surgery has healed.”
    And then he smiles. One of those rare “Rat Smiles” that so few people have ever seen. The angles of his face soften, his eyes crinkle, and two huge dimples appear out of nowhere. I