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Brooke Stanley: Part Three
| Wednesday, Jan 9 2008 4:00 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Jan 25 2008 5:43 PM
PART ONE ... PART TWO ... PART THREE
Like a street merchant hocking black-market goods, a small brunette girl comes over to Brooke Stanley and her friends’ lunch table at Liberty High School displaying her wares in a cardboard box.
M&Ms. Snickers. Butterfingers. Milky Ways.
All for $1. And all for a good cause: the upcoming Halloween dance.
Brooke, an outgoing 15-year-old who immediately makes anyone feel like a friend, is still debating if she’ll go.
She has to find the perfect costume, which can be hard when most stores only dedicate a small rack for overweight spooksters.
At 5 feet 6 inches tall and 268 pounds, Brooke is almost twice her ideal weight.
“Will you share some M&Ms with me?” friend Jessie Mitchell asks the group.
Brooke shakes her head. She’s saving her money, hoping to buy the clothes and wig needed to pull off Tracy Turnblatt, the big-haired and big-boned star of “Hairspray.” She saw the recent movie five times over summer.
“They do it for everything,” friend Sara Fidler says of the candy traffickers. “You see them all over.”
Brooke wears a black headband with skulls to hold back her short red hair. Black skull hoop earrings hang down.
She lazily picks at a spicy chicken sandwich. (13.55 grams of fat, 361 calories.) She washes it down with a chocolate milk.
Next stop: Chillin’ before class.
The group of girls strides over to Brooke’s locker. They laugh and tease one another.
“He’s on varsity, but he rides the bench a lot,” Brooke says of Sara’s boyfriend, who plays for Centennial High School.
Sara crosses her arms, feigning anger but smiling.
The bell rings, and Brooke heads to history class, passing four more candy pushers on the way.
A period later Brooke is in gym class.
She lines up with about 35 other kids as teacher Bill Richardson gives them directions for the run.
“We grade them on improvement,” he says, watching his students from under a wide-brimmed straw hat. “It might be 15 seconds, 10 seconds of improvement.
Brooke puts on a happy face for the class. She jokes with some other students. But as she runs, her head is spinning with worry.
If one person can be slower than me, that would be heaven. But I’m always the one in the back. And I’m always just a loser.
Her brave face, though, has impressed Richardson.
“She’s always had a great attitude,” he says.
Richardson has helped Brooke enjoy the class more than previous years. He doesn’t judge or exclude her for her weight, she says.
Brooke comes around the corner shuffling her feet, trying to keep up the pace. Sweat beads on her forehead and runs down into her gray Liberty Patriots T-shirt.
At the beginning of the school year she could only do five laps, she says. Now she’s up to seven.
“Today I was in front of some people so that makes me feel good,” she says, out of breath.
It’s a little after 4 p.m. in late November. Brooke is just getting home from school.
The family is back in its Rosedale home after a stay at Brooke’s grandparents’ house early in the school year when Brooke’s parents, Robin and Christopher Stanley separated.
Nine-year-old twins Chelsea and Chase pop in and out of the house. It’s Brooke job to clean up until her mother Robin, an administrative assistant at an accounting firm, gets home.
“When is dinner going to be done,” Chase asks Robin as walks in.
Some vegetable oil goes in the pan and then a pound of 85 percent lean ground beef with a few generous shakes of salt, pepper, seasoning salt and garlic salt. Brooke opens an 8.5 ounce can of Rosarita spicy jalapeno refried beans.
“I want to make sure they eat early enough,” Robin says. “I only have a couple hours with them before they need to go to bed.”
The meat is soon browned and each person makes plates of tortillas topped with the meat, beans, cheese, lettuce and ketchup.
“We don’t have any Taco Bell sauce,” Brooke says.
The house is quiet with only the hum of the television.
“There’s a show about how to look good naked for overweight girls,” Brooke exclaims.
“No way,” Robin says. “That is so rude. What is cable TV coming to?”
Brooke and Robin sit in front of the television. Chase and Chelsea sit at the counter.
Brooke tells her mom she is interested in trying out for Liberty’s softball team. She gets up to clean after dinner while Robin watches her.
“When she would clean, she would eat off the plates,” Robin says. “Ever since then, I watch how she cleans the kitchen.”
Brooke has grown closer to Robin in the last few months after her parents’ separation in October quickly led to divorce.
Robin now has a new boyfriend and Christopher has proposed to another woman.
“It used to be where me and my dad were really close,” Brooke says. “But it totally changed. Me and my dad don’t fight, but I don’t feel comfortable around him.”
Since the separation, Robin has lost 17 pounds, she says. Robin, like Brooke, was obese but had gastric bypass surgery six years ago and is now a willowy size 4.
“I would like to go through a depression where I didn’t eat,” Brooke says with a laugh. Throughout the turmoil, Brooke says her eating hasn’t changed, and her weight hasn’t noticeably fluctuated. She’s not one to eat her feelings, she says.
The conversation turns to bariatric surgery, a frequent topic.
When Brooke turns 16 in May, Robin agrees to bring her to a surgeon — a birthday present with the chance of a new life, as Brooke sees it. If the surgeon agrees and insurance pays, Brooke may get the surgery just as she gets her driver’s license.
Robin is hesitant about seeing Brooke on the operating table, but for the moment, the decision is in the future.
“For me, it was a really hard surgery. I don’t know how she would take it,” Robin says. “And at some point she’s going to want to have babies.”
“I can just adopt for the rest of my life,” Brooke replies.
No more talk of diet and exercise.
This is Brooke’s solution.
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