The Size of Your Dreams, - [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

I intend to weigh 220 pounds or less by January 22. To accomplish this, I will:

There was a long, dead pause. Darnell’s list hadn’t worked so well for him before, and he clearly had no idea what to replace it with. “Anyone have any thought what I should put down as steps?” he asked.

Mr. Griffin still said nothing. He’d been overweight himself, and I felt certain that he could guide Darnell on a healthier, more successful path. Yet, he preferred to offer Darnell another one of his lessons learned the hard way.

When no one came forward with any answers, Jarod said, “I have no idea what you should put down, but Christmas Eve is tomorrow night, so you’ll want to hurry up and get the answers you need.”

I read the terror on Darnell’s face. I could only imagine what Christmas dinner would be like at his house. With his willpower clearly drained, and his mother now firmly against his diet, it was going to be hard to get through it without his waistline ballooning all over again.

I also didn’t have a strategy to get him moving forward, but I felt a strong urge to help him develop one. “How about if I come over after school today, Darnell, and we try to figure this out together?”

The tight ridge in his brow relaxed. “That would be great.”

* * *

“Can you believe Mr. Griffin saw you failing and didn’t say anything?” I said as Darnell and I walked back to his house that afternoon. “You could have hurt yourself.”

“I did. I bumped my head when I passed out. It’s still sore.”

“Why didn’t you mention that?”

“Guess I was feeling humiliated enough.”

“People give you hell for it?”

“Yeah, Derek hasn’t picked on me in weeks, ever since Jarod stood up for me, but now it’s like Christmas came early for him. He kept pretending to pass out in front of me at lunch today. He also asked, loud enough for everyone to hear, why I didn’t have the number on my chest. Asked if I’d given up.”

“You’ll wipe that smile off his face when you come back from vacation five pounds lighter.”

“If I come back from vacation five pounds lighter, you mean. Like I said, I can’t keep this up.”

“Mr. Griffin lost all this weight himself. You’d think he’d offer you more advice.” My fists clenched. “From his smug look, it’s obvious he knows where you’re going wrong, but doesn’t want to tell you.”

“He’s right about one thing, though. If I do figure it out, I’m not easily going to forget.” Why was I getting so much more upset about this than Darnell was himself? “And he did leave us a clue,” Darnell said.

“‘Smarter, not harder’ hardly strikes me as a clue. He said himself, it can mean something different in each circumstance.”

“So what does it mean in mine? Come on, Kelvin, you’re the bright one.” I didn’t like that claim that I was the bright one. Darnell wasn’t stupid, and he showed this past month that his will was far stronger than my own. I wouldn’t have pushed myself until I passed out. No way. Besides, I couldn’t think of an answer.

“OK,” I said, “we don’t know what the answer is, but we know what it’s not. If Mr. Griffin is right—that willpower is finite—then what I saw on Saturday has got to be a willpower killer.”

“What did you see?”

“I saw everyone eating your favorite foods, while you walked on a treadmill trying not to notice.”

“The worst was when you came over and started eating the nachos under my nose.”

“Sorry about that. It’s not easy to refuse your mom or her cooking.”

“Tell me about it. I go through that every day.”

“It looked like it took all of your strength to keep your eyes on the TV.”

“And then some.” We’d reached Darnell’s house. As we stepped in, he asked, “You want a snack?” Already his mind was on food.

“What have you got?”

“Ice cream, chips, soda. Whatever you want.”

Was Darnell really going to give me crap about eating nachos in front of him and then offer me ice cream? Even if he did offer, there was no way I was going to take it. Not now. “What do you have that we can both eat?”

“Nothing.”

“What about an apple?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve got to have something. Show me.”

Together the two of us went through the fridge, the freezer, the pantry. We found six flavors of ice cream, three kinds of candy bars, four varieties of chips, and three different sodas. The only vegetables I saw were a head of lettuce and a tomato, which Darnell said they put on their burgers. Fruits were completely non-existent, not counting the packets of fruit leather in the pantry.

“Did you tell your mom you wanted healthier snacks?”

“Yeah, that’s why she bought the fruit leathers. But I read the label, and they have almost as much sugar as the candy bars.”

This was worse than I thought. “Remember what Mr. Griffin told Jarod about alignment?”

“You mean with his girlfriend?”

“Exactly. It seems to me that you and your family are misaligned.”

Darnell sighed. “That’s true. And passing out yesterday didn’t help. Now my mom’s convinced that I’m going to kill myself with the diet.”

“That’s right. It’s madness.” Darnell’s mom walked into the kitchen and planted her hand on his shoulder. “A boy like him not eating or drinking for days. What’s that going to achieve? No one can keep that up. And the hours he spends on that treadmill…” She cast a glance at me now. The treadmill had been my idea.

Had the accusations come from a friend, I could easily have responded. But no way was I going to talk back to Mrs. Jones, especially in her home.

Darnell however, had no such compunctions. “I don’t want to be fat all my life.”

“You’re a big boy. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not just big. Don’t you see I’m unhealthy, Mom?”

“Unhealthy?” His mom threw her hands in the air. “It’s this diet that’s unhealthy. When did you ever pass out after eating a good meal?”

“I used to be out of breath just going to class. I don’t want to live this way.”

“If you want to lose weight go ahead. But you don’t have to be so obsessed about it. It’s dangerous.”

The veins in Darnell’s forehead throbbed. “Mom, not again.”

Suddenly, I had an inspiration and turned to Mrs. Jones. “I completely agree with you.”

Darnell’s head jerked back in surprise.

His mom said, “See, even Kelvin agrees. This diet is nuts.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s the problem we were trying to solve today, how Darnell can continue to lose weight, without doing anything dangerous.”

Darnell’s anger softened. His mom’s brow rose in confusion, as though trying to figure out if she’d been tricked.

“One thing we were just wondering was whether it would be possible to get healthier snacks in the house?” I said.

“Look, I’ve told Darnell, if he wants to do the shopping, he’s welcome to.”

Darnell rolled his eyes. “Come on, Mom, obviously I’m not going to—.”

“Great,” I said. “I’ll come with you.”

Darnell’s mouth dropped open. “You want to do our shopping?”

I always hated it when my mom sent me out to buy groceries, but now the prospect of going shopping sounded fun. “Why not? It can’t be any harder than fasting, right?”

Darnell shrugged.

His mom patted his cheek. “Great, I’ll give you a list.”

She wrote down everything she needed onto her kitchen pad. Darnell looked over her shoulder and said, “But Mom, this is all the stuff we normally buy.”

“If you want to get other things, go ahead. But I’m not going to change how I cook just because you do the shopping.”

Darnell groaned. “Then it’s pointless.”

“What if we did the cooking?” I asked.

Mrs. Jones looked down the end of her nose at me. “The two of you are going to do all of our cooking?”

I bit my lip. We were in winter break now, so we’d have the time if we wanted to. But did I really want to spend half my vacation cooking? “We’ll do it tonight.”

“You boys want to give me a night off, I’ll take it. Heaven knows I’ll be cooking more than enough the next couple of days. I’ll give you a list of things to buy for me for Christmas dinner, but you’re welcome to buy anything you want to cook tonight.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Darnell?”

He looked from me to his mother. In the end, he shrugged and said, “Deal.”

“Great,” his mom said. “I’ll go get you my credit card.”

Darnell leaned over to me. “You know how to cook?”

“No. You?”

He shook his head. What had we just gotten ourselves into?

It took us almost an hour of walking around the supermarket to fill Mrs. Jones’ Christmas dinner list. It would have taken a quarter that long if we hadn’t kept picking things up, discussing whether they’d be good to make for dinner, and putting them back.

“Pasta?” I asked, holding up a box of angel hair. “It seems simple enough to make.”

“It’s low cal, but high carbs. My uncle Fred always said if you want to lose weight, stay off the carbs.”

“So what does he suggest?”

“Beef, chicken, eggs.”

I’d heard of those high protein, low carb diets. They never sounded all that healthy to me. Yet, if they worked, was that the way to go? We needed to get out of this gridlock. I turned to Darnell. “What would Mr. Griffin do now?” I asked.

“I guess he’d say go back to your goal.”

“That’s to lose weight. So maybe the all meat diet is a good idea?”

“Well, losing weight is what we put down on the card,” he said.

Losing weight was the measurable goal he’d listed, but his vision for himself had been much more than that. “Right, you also want to be healthy and fit. So maybe just eating meat isn’t the way to go?”

Darnell shrugged.

“What about vegetables?” I asked.

“What, like broccoli? It’s also high carb, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea. And I haven’t the slightest clue how to cook it.”

So we wandered around the supermarket, which felt bigger and more daunting the more time we spent. We