Page 51 of A Curvy Girl’s Hurricane Survival Guide

“I’ll be gone until then, so you can take the next two weeks to collect your things.”

“You’re being so dumb. I didn’t do anything. I could’ve, but I didn’t.” He sounds like a petulant teen.

“You can leave the key in the apartment. I don’t think there’s anything else that needs to be said.” I begin gathering my things and throwing them into my purse.

“Is this because you met someone else?”

I stop for a moment to look at him. No way does he know about Sonny; how can he? Nah, he’s grasping at straws.

“Trevor, I don’t know why I bothered to have this conversation with you. I should’ve known you’d be a jackass.”

Trevor takes my response to be confirmation. “Oh, that’s rich! You want to give me shit about Cecilia, and meanwhile, you’ve been slutting it up with someone else. I left an island full of baddies, fucking Jenna Ortega-level hotties, to come here and talk to you! Well, let me tell you something, I might be a jackass, but I know men, and he isn’t going to put up with a woman who brings as much drama as you do and has an ass that wide.”

I know Trevor is trying to hurt me, lashing out in an attempt to get me to say something or change my mind. But instead, all it did was make me cringe at the person I had wasted the last year with.

“Thank you,” I say and begin to walk away.

“Wait!” Trevor calls out.

Now, who was being dramatic? I turn around slowly.

“Don’t you want to know why?” He adds, smiling smugly as if this is the ace up his sleeve.

I think about this question for half a second. “No,” I say simply. “I really don’t care.” I meant it, and I understand now what Sonny meant about the “why” not mattering when I was really over him.

With that, I turn on my heels and walk back to my family with the man I thought was the one, standing outside a refurbished gas station, with his mouth open, watching my “wide ass” walk away from him.

SONNY

The conversation with Ben kept me engaged until we reached the tiny executive airport. Once on the plane, I take out my laptop and join the dev team on a virtual call to discuss improvements they are working on based on the focus group feedback.

The call’s led by a guy who goes by Mack, a brilliant developer, but he always sounds uninterested, bored even, when he has to present information.

“So, per the results we received, we started with some of the most easily executed and clearly defined points to task out first. Namely, the female character model for the story quest, Maggie.”

The character model fills the screen. Brown, stick-straight hair and a body type that closely resembles the male character model. “And this is a stagnant option, right? It’s part of the story mission, so they can choose Maggie or Mark, but there’s no customization from the player?”

“That’s correct,” Mack confirms. “The feedback we got was that Maggie seemed generic, unremarkable, and boring, and players rarely choose her as an option, even by players who described themselves as more likely to choose a female avatar.”

“Well, I can see their point,” I say. “I think originally we thought she would allow players to mold them to their appearance, but it looks like we neglected her a bit. What have you come up with?”

“Right, so we made some adjustments and…” The image on the screen shutters briefly but appears to be unchanged.

“What am I looking at here?” I ask.

“Oh, we uhh… added to her hair.” Mack spins the avatar so that I can better see that the bottom quarter of her hair is now pink. Mack is a good developer, but creative he is not.

“Ok, we can do better than that,” I say, leaning in to get a good look at the screen. “Let’s start with the proportions; let’s exaggerate them for now at 32/26/40, and then we can adjust as needed. We want the two character models to be obviously different even without seeing their faces.” Mack types on his end, and the image sputters back with a more hourglass form.

“Ok, great. Now the hair is too flat. Do you have the design we did for the hair in the Aquarius game’s underwater scenes? Let’s try that on her, but lower the shine and make it static.”

Again, more typing and the image changes. She now has a wild head of golden hair.

“Let’s do Black with flecks of gold.” A few clicks are heard, and the hair color switches to black.

“And the face is wrong too. Her eyes should be bigger, more dazzling. Her mouth should be smiling. She should look like she’s finding the humor in things, even if they’re not intentionally funny. She should also have a softer feel about her curves. They should be more inviting. Maybe we pose her with a hand on her hip so that she looks like she has some spunk to her, a little more sex appeal, and are we tied to this outfit? There might be some pop culture tees we could…” I stop talking, suddenly realizing that the clicking and clacking have stopped and nothing is changing on the screen.

“Uhhh…” Mack starts. “Do you maybe have someone in mind we could use as a character model? It sounds like you have a very specific idea of what you want…”