Chapter 9 Cheat Day

“Wanna have a cheat day?” Mel asked when she woke up beside me. It was a late Saturday morning. She had stayed over after kickboxing the night before. We tried to do a sleepover once a weekend, either at her place or mine. That weekend it was my turn. My parents didn’t mind her spending the night. My mom actually liked Mel a lot. She showed Mel all of my embarrassing baby photos and even gave her one. Baby photos made me cringe.

“Hey, I’m talking to you.” Mel poked my forehead. “Wanna have a cheat day?”

“What’s a cheat day?” I asked.

“It’s when you take a day off from exercising and treat yourself with snacks and junk food. Honestly, I feel like pizza and chips, AC. Let’s go to the grocery store. You’ve been doing so great. You deserve a treat.”

It took me a moment to let that sink in. I didn’t think I was a cheat day kind of guy; I barely ate enough as it was. Mel didn’t know that though.

“Ahh, yeah, maybe. I just have to head to the bathroom first.”

I got out of my bed, but she held on to my hand as I tried to walk away and said, “Let’s spend the day together.”

“Yeah. Let’s spend the day together.” I smiled at her.

I made it to the bathroom, I took off my t-shirt and shorts and jumped on the scale to watch the zeros flash in my face. I’d have a cheat day on one condition: If my weight was lower than usual, and it was. The scale said 226.5 pounds. That was a relief. I hadn’t purged the night before because Mel was over, and I didn’t want her to hear me. She couldn’t find out about what I was doing.

I made my way back to my bedroom and laid down beside her.

“Let’s have a cheat day.” I smiled.

She smiled back, then stuck her tongue out at me. I stuck mine back out at her, then she flicked me, and I flicked her back, and then she found my weakness by tickling me. She started with my arms, and then ended at my stomach.

“Stop, stop.” I pleaded playfully through the giggles, when really, my stomach felt sore when she tickled it.

“Fine.” She smiled as she wrapped her arms around me.

We began playing with each other’s hair, admiring our features, touching skin.

“We’re both brown.” She said. “But different kinds of brown.”

She was darker than me. Deep down, I wished I were darker than I was. Being mixed was weird, for both of us. Mel and I related heavily because of that. I often times felt like I had to prove my blackness to feel comfortable in my identity. But I began to learn that there was no certain way to be a certain color, you just are who you are. The rest of the world didn’t understand that though. I always found it weird that students at school thought I had to act a certain way to fit their expectation of being “really black.”