Then there was the little one, Jasmine. She kept trying to get people to call her Jazz, but no one did. Jasmine was a red-haired bowling ball with crazy teeth. It would be cute except that Jasmine wasn’t nice. She wasn’t charming. She was a little monster and she liked being a little monster. People didn’t let her be around their pets.

That left Dahlia.

Her.

Pretty name. She liked her name. She liked being herself. She liked who she was. She had a good mind. She had good thoughts. She understood the books she read and had insight into the music she downloaded. She didn’t have many friends, but the ones she had knew they could trust her. And she wasn’t mean-spirited, though there were people who could make a compelling counterargument. A lot of her problems, Dahlia knew, were the end results of the universe being a total bitch.

Dahlia always thought that she deserved the whole package. A great name. A nice face. At least a decent body. A name like Dahlia should be carried around on good legs or have some good boobs as conversation pieces. That would be fair. That would be nice.

Failing that, good skin would be cool.

Or great hair. You can get a lot of mileage out of great hair.

Anything would have been acceptable. Dahlia figured she didn’t actually need much. The weight was bad enough; the complexion was insult to injury. But an eating disorder? Seriously? Why go there? Why make it that much harder to get through life? Just a little freaking courtesy from the powers that be. Let the gods of social interaction cut her some kind of break.

But . . . no.

Dahlia Allgood was, as so many kids had gone to great lengths to point out to her over the years, all bad. At least from the outside.

No amount of time in the gym—at school or the one her parents set up in the garage—seemed able to shake the extra weight from her body. She was fat. She wasn’t big boned. She wasn’t a “solidly built girl,” as her aunt Flora often said. It wasn’t baby fat, and she knew she probably wouldn’t grow out of it. She’d have to be fifteen feet tall to smooth it all out. She wasn’t. Though at five-eight, she was a good height for punching loud-mouth jerks of both sexes. She’d always been fat and kids have always been kids. Faces had been punched. Faces would be punched. That’s how it was.

But, yeah, she was fat and she knew it.

She hated it. She cried oceans about it. She yelled at God about it.

But she accepted it.

Dahlia also knew that there was precedent in her family for this being a lifelong thing. She had three aunts who collectively looked like the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. Aunt Ivy was the biggest. Six feet tall, three hundred pounds. Dahlia suspected Ivy had thrown some punches of her own in her day. Ivy wasn’t one to take anything from anyone.