Wonder When You’ll Miss Me by Amanda Davis

flowers, Mrs. Ibarista said. I was a natural. It made me very happy: the delicacy of the icing, the careful way I had to squirt food coloring to mix just the right shade of pink or blue or peach; the smell of the worn back room, all sugar and sweetness that seeped into my clothes when I left. And I loved the flowers themselves, spun on small plastic platforms, dainty and fine.
    But I quit when I started my sophomore year of high school. I told her it was because I didn’t have enough time for my homework, but really it was because so many high school kids came to Ibarista’s when classes let out and I saw how they looked at me, fat as I was, surrounded by cakes and pastries and pies. I saw the pity and disgust that flashed across their faces like sudden pain.
    But I couldn’t tell Mrs. Ibarista that was the reason. She would have said, Faith, you gotta not listen to these kids, okay? They don’t know you, what do you care what they think?
    She couldn’t understand how much I did care. How desperately I wanted to avoid drawing attention to my enormous size. Or, as Mrs. Ibarista liked to say, “my chunkiness.” There was little room for pity in Mrs. Ibarista’s world. Life was about being tough and accepting whatever gritty hand you’d been dealt by a fierce and vengeful God, then just getting on with things.
    When I quit, Mrs. Ibarista was rolling flaky dough for lemon custard tarts. She gave me a long hard look, then wiped her hands on a cloth andpulled me to her and hugged me. She drew her lips together and sighed heavily.
    â€œFaithy,” she said. “You do what you gotta do. I will miss you and the customers will miss you.”
    Then she went back to rolling the dough.
    At first I stopped in and visited after school. She had a new girl working there then. A pasty blond girl named Tammy, from the private Catholic school, who didn’t quite meet your eyes when you spoke to her.
    But after Homecoming I never went in again. I had this sense that Mrs. Ibarista would take one look at my face and know. She’d always known the truth without my telling it and I couldn’t bear to have her narrow her eyes the way she did, and put her hands on either side of her floury apron and shake her head in disappointment. Or throw her head back so that her dark hair almost touched her back and shout at God in Italian. I couldn’t and I didn’t. I never went in again.
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    I wanted to leave like an explosion. It was no longer a question of whether or not to go. It was just a question of when and how.
    I bought a small blue notebook and began to jot down ideas. Leaving, it seemed to me, was both incredibly simple and heavily complex. Whatever idea for escape I had, I wrote it down: Train. Bus. Cruise ship. I felt like the answer was just ahead of me somewhere, but I had no idea what it was. I jotted down ideas for money as well, jobs I could do, skills I had: clerk, cashier, waitress, baby-sitter .
    Of course, I did not mention any of it to Fern Hester.
    The fat girl coached me on the way to Fern’s office. “Nothing,” she kept saying. “Nothing at all.” On the bus, “Faith, I mean it—you watch what you say.” And in the elevator up, “…because you just let things slip sometimes, Faith, and we can’t risk that. Especially if everything goes as planned.”
    As planned.
    As planned meant striking back . As planned meant leaving like you mean it. As planned meant something to remember you by.
    We had not yet reached an agreement about what was planned.
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    I applied to be a cashier at the SaveLots, at Bandy Drugs, at the local U-Haul, at Mitler’s Grocery. I applied to stock inventory at a ball-bearingwarehouse, answer phones at a clinic, and sell encyclopedias. I even applied to do absolutely anything at the Gleryton animal shelter.
    â€œYou can volunteer,” the tired woman who took the application clipboard from me said.