Size 12 Is Not Fat

“Um, hello. Is anyone out there?” The girl in the dressing room next to mine has a voice like a chipmunk. “Hello?”
Exactly like a chipmunk.
I hear a sales clerk come over, his key chain clinking musically. “Yes, ma’am? Can I help you?”
“Yeah.” The girl’s disembodied—but still chipmunklike—voice floats over the partition between our cubicles. “Do you guys have these jeans in anything smaller than a size zero?”
I pause, one leg in and one leg out of the jeans I am squeezing myself into. Whoa. Is it just me, or was that really existential? Because what’s smaller than a size zero? Negative something, right?
“Well, ma’am,” the sales clerk is saying to Less Than Zero. “These jeans are stretch fit. That means that you’ve got to try two sizes lower than your true size.”
“What?” Less Than Zero sounds confused.
I don’t blame her. I feel the same way. It’s like number lines all over again. “What I mean is,” the sales clerk says, patiently, “if you normally wear a size four, in stretch jeans, you would wear a size zero.”
“Why don’t you just put the real sizes on them, then?” Less Than Zero—quite sensibly, I think—asks. “Like if a zero is a really a four, why don’t you just label it a four?”
“It’s called vanity sizing,” the sales clerk says, dropping his voice.
“What sizing?” Less Than Zero asks, dropping her voice, too. At least, as much as a chipmunk can drop her voice.
“You know.” The sales clerk is whispering to Less Than Zero. But I can still hear him.
“The larger customers like it when they can fit into an eight. But they’re really a twelve, of course. See?”


Size 12 Is Not Fat by Meg Cabot