For 94% of her life, Sheila has been fat. She started out extremely small but she caught up and passed the growth chart averages by the time she crawled.

Hers was a premature birth, in 1975. She surprised everyone by emerging from her mother almost a trimester early, a frightening little bug of three pounds, and by surviving.

At six months she was a chubby infant. For wrists and ankles she had deeper creases than the other babies, and as she grew her thighs seemed to lengthen less than others in her play group. Her mom had some trouble toting her around after Sheila topped 25 pounds at nine months, but she was so pink-and-white and cute that her mother didn’t complain. In fact, and unlike other babies, Sheila could wear 12-month size then, so she was more fun to dress.

She didn’t know she was fat till she was five, and it didn’t start to bother her until her eighth birthday. That’s when she overheard Jimmy Williams tell Doug Ames that he could never like her because she was a Tubbo. This was at Sheila’s birthday party, the last one her mother made for her.

Sheila really liked Jimmy. She thought he looked cute in the cub scout uniform he wore each Thursday; she always chased him in the playground and tried to grab him by his yellow neckerchief. His words devastated her. She knew he didn’t mean for her to overhear, so they stuck her like blows.

Her party was ruined for her, and she couldn’t wait for it to end. When guests cleared out an hour later, she sat in the kitchen nibbling leftovers. She read the backs of food packages while she munched. She drifted into the words and tastes, and didn’t hear her mother enter the room.

“Sheila! What are you doing?” Her mom whisked behind her to the sink with a load of party garbage. “You’ve had enough to eat; come help me clean up. And wipe off that sour face! I don’t know what’s gotten into you …” Anger shot through Sheila as her mother left the room. “Come!”

Sheila learned. After that event she began smuggling snacks to her room. She loved to sit back on the part of her bed that tucked into the corner of the walls, rereading classic comics or one of a dozen Nancy Drews, eating sunflower seeds or nibbling Triscuits row by row, lost to her family. In time she came to think of the activity as reading-and-eating, two functions indivisible: comfort.

As each year passed she grew taller, heavier, and more likely to stay in her room. Her mother harped: “It’s not that you need to lose weight, honey; you’ll be just fine if you don’t gain any. You’re growing so fast you’ll shed this baby fat in no time.” Her father didn’t harass her about food – she resembled him in coloring and skeleton and appetite – but he nagged her to exercise. “You’re a vegetable,” he said. “No, you’re worse than a vegetable! Get out of here and enjoy the day.”

She was just five feet tall when she entered junior high at age 11. She weighed 120 pounds. That’s not obese, but it’s plump. Too plump for the pants she wore.

She had a sort-of date with Jimmy Williams. He was becoming “Jim” then. They got together to ride bikes one Saturday and ended up picnicking on the side lawn of the school. They were sitting around after their meal when Doug Ames pedaled up on his bike and joined their conversation. Jim imitated their English teacher and they all cracked up. Sheila’s pants were so tight that she passed gas when she laughed. Doug whooped as if it were the funniest joke he’d heard in years. “Sheila farted! Sheila farted!” he sang like a fourth grader. And Sheila was humiliated. She knew it never would have happened if she weren’t fat.