Hypocrite

Pasha Rivers became who she hated. 

Moreover, she hated that she loved it.

Open up the yearbook, coated in twenty years of dust, and you'll struggle to find her picture until you read the names. You'll do a double take, because the last name doesn't match, but how many parents name their kid Pasha? 

She pulls her yearbook off the shelf, flipping slowly through the pages. A lot of these people are on social media now. She's avoided making a profile so that they can't find her. Her former self is a hypocrite. She's some obese, angry loser with no hope that needed to get kicked into high gear.

Love wasn't supposed to find her. She prided herself on being a loner. Being a loner meant that she couldn't get hurt. Unfortunately, it also meant being lonely. 

Painfully, terribly lonely.

She would usually bury her feelings in cheese puffs and fun-sized Laffy Taffy. The jokes were bad, but made her laugh. They were one of the few things to make her smile. The other was Tommy from chemistry class, with that tight butt and crooked smile. It had turned out that his heart was crooked too.

Her mother had forced her sister to let her tag along to prom. They'd been separated, and she had sat at a table in the corner, wondering what made her mother think that it'd be a good idea to go. Then Tommy had walked by, on his way back from the bathroom.

"Taking the under the sea theme a bit too literally, aren't you, Shamu?" 

His nose bled a lot that night.

For the rest of the school year, post suspension, everyone avoided her. She was a raging bull in their eyes, instead of some hurt girl. She covers her picture with her hand. She can't bear to look.

It's the reunion tonight. It's been twenty years since she's partied with these people. Honestly, it's been years since she partied, period, as she's been preoccupied with her career, and husband and three children.

Past Pasha hadn't wanted a family either. Families meant divorce, like her parents. They'd caught two kids up in it all. She wasn't supposed to risk it, wasn't supposed to pop out a kid. Certainly not three at once. No fertility drugs. Quite opposite, they had used protection, as usual, and somehow, some hole ended up letting him implant three little angels in her.

"Honey, I'm headed down to the pool for a dip before the reunion. Want to join me?" Her husband is there in his swim trunks, towel draped over his shoulder. She makes haste of shutting the yearbook. He's seen the picture once. She makes a point to keep his exposure limited, lest he forget that she has locked that part of her away and goes for a girl who has always been someone he can love.

"I didn't bring a suit."

"I wouldn't mind," he says, tugging at the hem of her shirt. He playfully tickles her stomach. This man loves her body, and has proved it many times over. What if he had ever seen what was cropped out of that shot? All three hundred pounds of it.

She swats his hand away. "I'm going to stay here and build up some nerve. I haven't been home in two decades. It's a bit culture shocky." 

After graduation she had moved to the city on the opposite side of the country. It was her chance to start over. She saved every last penny for the move and got a grunt job in an office while studying in night classes. The goal had been to become a pastry chef. 

The thing was, she didn't stay a grunt for long. Someone had gone out on maternity leave, and she had taken their job temporarily. When they'd come back, she had expected to go back to her old job. She hadn't thought that her boss would suggest her for another opening in the company. It was a different floor, and she'd have to be in early. 

She took it. By the end of the decade, she had worked her way up to enough of a salary to afford a brownstone in the nice part of the city. 

She's a home owning business woman. If you'd asked her where she would see herself in ten years, she would have said living in an apartment, making wedding cakes, because food was her passion, and she could never imagine herself sitting at a desk, dressed to the nines, all day, every day.

Why had past Pasha had such a hatred for success? Was it that she feared failure? If you don't try, you can't fail, and if you can't fail, that hurts less than falling flat on your face.

"Alright. I love you." He kisses her quickly, wiggling his butt in one last attempt of luring her to the pool. She shakes her head and the door closes behind him.

She grabs the book and looks at her picture. Fat had pooled in her cheeks, and she turns to the tv to check her reflection. She knows her cheekbones are pronounced now. She's lost half her weight. When she had arrived to the city, she had no money for a car, and had opted to walk to work. There was hardly money or time for food, and she found herself only eating nibbles of her baked goods from class, or a banana from the cafeteria. Weight was coming off, and for the first time in years, she was starting to see someone she liked in the mirror.

She dropped out of school around the time of her promotion and filled her spare time with going to the gym. That's where she had met her husband, a year later, eyeballing her on the treadmill. By then she had become a strong woman, the type that she had threatened to eat when they'd stare at her second chin. She hated how they spent all their time in the gym instead of out enjoying life.

She didn't know she could enjoy life in the gym.

Teenage her was wrong, so wrong. Now here she is, twenty years later, conflicted by her turnaround. She's become the person that she hated. She's a hypocrite, and they're all going to point it out. They're all going to remind her of who she used to be, that big horrid monster.

She shouldn't have come back home.

Is it too late to join him at the pool and drown in the deep end?

"Turns out some kid peed in the pool, so it's closed for maintenance." He's back, towel still dry as when he left. There must be some look on her face, because he drops it and moves to wrap his arms around her. "You're still worried?"

"Any chance we can just skip the reunion and get dinner in town instead?" There's a pizza parlor that she hopes is still open. Pizza in the city is good, but it can't hold a candle to this place.

He takes the yearbook from her. "They're gonna love you, Pasha. Everybody does."

They've never really gone into depth about her high school life. If they had, he would know that does and did have two different levels, and that nobody did.

Nobody.

"Can we take a walk? I need a distraction."

"You have somewhere in mind?"

"Yeah." Maybe if they walk long enough, they'll miss the reunion and she can avoid the whole spectacle. The last thing she needs is everyone calling her out on being a hypocrite.

He sets an alarm on his phone. He's not dumb. He knows what she's up to, and he makes sure they're back in time to get to the reception hall. Her nails are digging into his palm, and as she takes her name tag from the table, she takes care to tuck it under her hair. 

She takes a deep breath, terrified of what will happen. And then she does the only thing she can do.

She exhales. 

The roof hasn't fallen on her, the floor hasn't swallowed her hole, and corrected her if she's wrong, but Tommy has stopped mid-sentence to stare at her.

Spotting a free table in the corner, that same corner, she scurries across the room to take a seat. It's the Shamu seat.

Her nerves are making her palms sweat.

"Pasha, it's okay. The world isn't ending."

"Did you just say Pasha?" A woman whips around, scanning her from head to toe. "There's no way."

Was he sure about that world ending thing?

"You have got to share your secrets, girl. You really turned yourself around." She's smiling. She doesn't care that she is a hypocrite, because she is a better person than she was before. She has grown.

The night is full of surprise as not a single person calls her out on being a hypocrite. They're all happy for her, envious even. She's tearing off her nylons in the hotel bathroom when it dawns on her. A thought so obvious to every one of them, and yet so hard for her to conclude on her own.

Pasha's not a hypocrite. She's just changed her mind. She decided she was tired of being that lonely, broken girl.

She decided to love herself.