Jenni and the Cookies

Jenni comes to terms with missing her high school prom.

Jenni peeked through her bedroom blinds and nibbled her chocolate chip cookie.

 

"Just look at them," Jenni said more to herself than her cat, Sam, fast asleep on her lap. "Doing their hair and nails and makeup. My, won't they look pretty at prom?"

 

Her neighbor, Patti , and Patti's best friend, Beth, took turns on each other with a hot curling iron. Jenni pulled another cookie from the Chips A'Hoy tray, intently watching the show. Crumbs tumbled onto Sam's head below as she took a bite of the cookie.

 

"They'll get theirs, all right," Jenni said. She knew how the system worked. Her own mother had been thin as a rail in her teens. A perfect size 10, she'd said. Now, Mom looked nothing like the pictures of herself in her high school yearbook. Four chins hung from her face and she couldn't bend down and tie her own shoes!

 

And, Aunt Nellie, she was just the opposite. Fat and overlooked in her youth, she was the Queen of the Social Scene now. Aunt Nellie was a slim size 6 and whenever Jenni went to the mall with her, men broke their necks to get a second look at Nellie's behind.

 

Jenni smiled inside. That was how God worked. If He gave it to you early in life He'd take it away later on. Jenni nibbled on her third row of cookies, glad she was missing prom. Twenty years from now she'd be a size 6, breaking necks at her high school reunion! Patti and Beth would be fat as old cows-just like Jenni's mother.

 

A horn honked in Patti's driveway and Patti's bedroom light quickly dimmed. She watched the two girls saunter down the front steps and slide into the back of the limo.

 

Jenni closed the blinds and ate one last cookie. God, it tasted sweet!