Brooke had been having a pretty shitty day in the first place.
Working in an office wasn't anywhere close to what she wanted to be doing with the rest of her life. At least, not at the level that she had been stuck at for the past four years. If she had maybe gotten the promotion that came with a nice, big office then it would have at least been bearable to make that same depressing drive every morning so that she could put in numbers that didn't matter into systems that cared almost as little as her supervisors did.
But that was every day. She'd gotten numb to the kind of soul-crushing monotony that came with being an adult by now.
"Better than some people, anyway..."
No, what had really, really set her off was what had happened when she came home, before she wound up heading out to the bar with Olivia.
"So I dropped my purse on the floor, right?" Brooke was already two beers and a cocktail in after this point, her rage emboldened by alcohol, "And I bent over to pick it up and she just slaps me across my ass and says "there you are! How could I have missed my big sister's big butt?"
"Oh no, that's not..." Olivia grimaced a little, "That's not nice, no."
"So I jump like two feet forward, fall flat on my face, my fucking glasses broke..." Brooke wrapped her fingers around the highball glass before bringing it up to her lips to take another sip, "So I'm gonna be wearing my ugly, clunky spares for the company photo, I'm twenty pounds heavier than I was last year, and my sister's a bitch but what else is new?"
A huffy, grumpy snort escaped her as she took another drink.
It might have been the best thing that ever happened to her today, this cocktail. Getting it at half off after so many drinks may have been sunk-cost fallacy, but damned if it wasn't tasty!
"I'm sorry, hun." Olivia clucked platonically at her friend, offering her a hand on her shoulder, "It's just a bad day though. Not anything to go nuts over."
"But next week is gonna suck for me too, and it's all because of Mikayla." Brooke huffed, ignoring her friend's platitude, "Now she's in my head about my weight, I'm in my ugly glasses... it's just... ugh. You know?"
"She probably didn't mean to break your glasses..." the skinny brunette treaded water carefully, "But that was uncalled for, what she said about your butt."
"So uncalled for." another drink, "I don't know where she gets off. Her uniform's been getting tight."
"I, uh... I haven't noticed..." Olivia shrugged noncommittally, "I don't go to Bean Machine that often."
"Ugh, God, let her start porking out again." Brooke clasped her hands together in mock prayer, "I'm tired of being the Fat Sister."
"You're not the Fat Sister." Olivia said in a comforting tone, "You're the older sister, the smarter sister."
Her Olivia playfully nudged her friend with her elbow.
"The cuter sister." she shimmied, "There's no reason to let some innocuous comment from Mikayla get you down, okay?"
"Okay..." Brooke slumped onto the bar, the stool creaking a little beneath her curvy keister, "It's just... it's not one innocuous comment. She's been making them a lot lately."
"Well, maybe talk to her about how that makes you feel?" Olivia offered with a smile, "If she's hurting your feelings, you should tell her about it. After all, how would she feel if the shoe were on the other foot?"
"Ha! That'd be the day." Olivia chuckled, "Me, the Skinny Sister? I'd get a kick out of that."
"That's not..." Olivia sucked through her teeth, "That's not what I meant, you know."
"I know, I know..." Brooke rolled her eyes and let her double chin rest in her hand, "But a girl can dream, though, right?"
"You should dream about more important stuff. You know, like getting home safe." the second, smaller woman said with a glance at her phone, "It's getting kind of late—you want me to call you an Uber?"
"What? No, I'm doing fine..." Brooke waved dismissively, "You go on home."
There was the slightest pause as Olivia looked over her friend, staring emptily ahead of her. Whenever Brooke got upset, she'd eat. And the last thing that she needed to do was to have to drive back home, only to haul an even more wasted Brooke back home on a full stomach when she could have just gotten it over with now.
"Okay..." she gave her bestie a tight hug, "Love you."
"Love you too." Brooke burbled...
Olivia hadn't left the door before Brooke went back to stewing. Plotting. Planning. Something about the idea of Mikayla being fatter than her seemed to wonderfully cathartic. She had actually been heavier than Brooke up until she hit middle school. Then even less so in high school. And then she'd come back from college all skinny and shit... Ugh. What kind of world did she live in where Mikayla could beat genetics but she couldn't?
I wish she'd get fat again. I'd mess with her all day.
Brooke had said it to herself in a moment of drunken misanthropy, but the idea did sound appealing. It couldn't have been hard, right? She ate like shit and worked at a coffee bar. Mikayla was probably going to pork back out again at this rate anyway...
Brooke sat there brooding on the idea for a good thirty minutes before...
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