Fat girls, they say, are easy.

That’s what they say, anyway. They say we have something to prove. They say that we’ll go all the way to feel like someone loves us. They say we’re like mopeds, fun to ride but you don’t want your friends to see you on us. They say to roll us in flour and aim for the wet spot.

I was not that girl. Yeah, I had a body made for sex, one ex-boyfriend liked to whisper into my ear, his penis accidentally slipping out of his swim trunks. Whoops, he told me later, I am so embarrassed and didn’t know if you noticed. I noticed. What was I supposed to do, lunge for it like I was starved for some deep dicking? In my nineteen-year-old wisdom, I let sleeping dogs lie, as it were. I did have a body made for sex, no doubt, just not with him. Although, granted, the boy was a fantastic kisser.

In college, I suffered from expectation the way that I’m sure cheerleaders suffer, and beautiful girls who like to go to rock concerts suffer. Somewhere along the way, there were previous fat girls who were easy, fat girls who tried to make guys love them by letting them go all the way. These girls made the best girlfriends, they said. The girls who would suck a guy’s cock and make him cookies while he was out trying to score on the hotties at the bar.

I was not that girl, and yet, my dance card was always full because of the association. Full of thick-headed fraternity boys, guys who played football, little dudes who came up to my chin and made me laugh, because yeah, right, I’m going to be seen with a guy who weighs half what I do? Sorry.

The word spread, according to my devastatingly gorgeous and popular roommate. I was frustrating them, because in theory, I was low-hanging fruit that refused to be nabbed and thus, it was making them try all the harder. Boys! If I had had any self-awareness at the time, I would have used this reverse psychology to my advantage, but honestly, I never really believed that anyone wanted to sleep with me, so it never really entered my realm of understanding when guys made passes. I just assumed that it was part of an elaborate prank. “Hey guys, watch while I hit on the fat girl! As if! Let’s see if she believes it!” so I was just shooting them down, left and right. I’d rather be Rapunzel with my chastity locked in an un-scalable tower than be made a fool by some Hypercolor T-shirt wearing dork from the rugby team. So instead, I sat in my dorm room, studied my psychology homework and listened to Robert Smith’s never-ending pain on my Walkman. Maybe I envisioned myself the leading lady in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, but quite frankly, my Isabella would have ended up a spinster rather than go with any of those misogynistic tools.

Back to Mr. Swim Trunks. He got close, damn it, very close, but in the end, I still didn’t trust his motives. What was wrong with him, I would wonder. There had to be something. He made his first move on me when I was wearing a stained T-shirt and no make up (it was move-in day and August, so think of what 97 degrees does to an already oily complexion) and probably smelled more than a little bit like B.O. It came out later that his past break up had been a chubby chick, one that had scarred him. Oh, he was angsty! He had pain! It brought out my codependent dysfunctional need to fix things. And quite honestly, if he had game, he would have played that a little more to his own advantage and not pressed the groin issues as quickly as he did. In my fucked-up head, I probably would have done anything to cure his internal sorrow, to make it all better with my self-sacrificing virginity, but luckily, he just couldn’t resist touching the fun pillows, loved to get lost in the curves and valleys of my thighs, and it set off a warning siren in my head. Don’t be that girl, it said. Don’t be the stereotypical fat girl who is easy. Don’t be the Rizzo!

So I wasn’t. I was a good little fat girl and missed out on a lot of freshman year sex with extraordinarily hot men because of it. Another life and I wouldn’t have worried about appearances, I would have just taken the bull by the horns. Or by the hem of a pair of swimsuit trunks. —Weetabix