CANKLES

     Her nickname was Cankles. She had rosy cheeks, a beautiful complexion. By most standards, she was a gorgeous girl. Perfectly round breasts, olive skin and a thin physique. The only thing people focused on were her thick ankles.
     While in high school, she did everything she could to de-emphasize them. She never wore skirts for that very reason, even in summer. Trips to the beach were absolutely out of the question. During the winter months, if that was all that was clean in her closet, she’d resort to the skirts, but only with the appropriately matching leg warmers.
     As an adult, the taunts were but a memory, but she occasionally went out with utter pricks who would bring up her cankles in passing conversation to break the ice, and in her mind, the future of that particular relationship would always be around the bend.
     Her life was completely perfect apart from that. She worked out every day, had a job she loved, had a wonderful apartment, a cat named Pokey, everything she ever wanted. But the cankles looked up at her every morning that she stepped onto the scale or taunted her from the full-length mirror on her bedroom door.
     Then, one day she saw an ad on TV advertising a new, corrective surgery called the SoHo Method, a tried and true, fat-sucking outpatient procedure that claimed to slim down any part of your body. She dialed the 800 number and uncomfortably asked if it could do anything for her cankles. By the time she got off the phone, she was scheduled for a SoHo appointment at the clinic around the corner from her apartment.
     The next day, she withdrew all of her savings and met with the doctor, who said that she would be done within three hours if she felt like going through with it immediately. They prepped her, put her under and by the time she awoke, she was a new woman from the calves down.
     Flash forward to a year later. Her 10 year high school reunion comes up and she is psyched. She is in the middle of the perfect relationship with Greg, an ad writer who supports her in every aspect and loves everything she loves: bad Japanese horror movies, Chai tea, the cheesy Percival Trinidad crime novellas. Every guilty pleasure she always thought she’d never share, he loves.
     Greg was also excited to meet the people she went to school with. It was the only area of her life that he had never heard her speak of. When she brought up going to the reunion, he couldn’t have been happier.
     They arrived dressed to the nines, Greg in his best black suit with maroon tie and her in the slinkiest, most costly spaghetti-strap number off the rack from Belvedere’s.
     The first person they encountered at the makeshift reception table was Ashley Panzer, an astonishingly beautiful, former head cheerleader from the high school pep squad. She didn’t recognize the couple at first and shuffled through pictured nametags, thinking that Greg was the alum she was supposed to be searching for. Then, after an exhaustive search, she glanced back up, about to tell him that his tag wasn’t there, then shifted her attention away from Greg to his date.
     "Oh!" Ashley yelped. "Cankles!!! Oh my God, I didn’t recognize you!" Ashley then got up and balanced her sleek figure over the table to glance down at "Cankles’" legs. Ashley let out a laugh and her nametag from the table. On it was the name "Rhonda Clements" with the word "Cankles" in italics below it.
     Rhonda grabbed it from Ashley, then grabbed Greg by the arm and spun around, headed for the double doors they had just come from.
     "No, it’s this way," Ashley whined, pointing up the door to the banquet hall behind her.
     On the ride home, Greg begged Rhonda to explain what Ashley meant by "Cankles." Rhonda said nothing through her tears. She soaked the nametag with them. Even the greatest man in the world couldn’t erase this memory. It was back in front of her now, as if it had never left. The past would always taint the present.
     Rhonda would always be 15.




-SLL