[Featured February 2018]
Tough Skin is a community project that aims to promote body positivity through collaborative pieces from all different people on wattpad to celebrate and honour the physical differences we all have.
Thunder Thighs by FallonDeMornay A contemporary short story
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When the kids of new girl Maria DaSilva's high school get nasty, she fights back with all her plus-size, brace face, glory.
Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring. ~ Marilyn Monroe
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Maria DaSilva had always been what you'd call ... thick.
Thick, thighs, thick waist and, thankfully, thick-skinned. Being the new girl in school is never easy. It's so much harder when you're a curvy plus-size with braces and an accent as heavy as your body mass.
Moving back to a small Canadian town after spending six years living in the hot, breathless beauty of Brazil wasn't an easy transition. And the kids in her high school weren't inclined to make it any easier when one of the hot, popular bad boys—Paul Hills—plucked one of her Instagram photos and blasted it all across the entirety of not only this school, but three others.
A photo of her lounging in a string two piece bikini on Ipanema beach they'd photo shopped a pig's nose onto her face, a curling tail from her butt, and captioned it with the hashtag #THUNDERTHIGHS. Within two days that photo inspired a tsunami of hate flooding twitter, Facebook and every other form of social media the little bastards could get their hands on. Telling her she was fat and worthless. That her life held no meaning and she should just die.
But Maria isn't the type to bury her head in the sand. Not anymore.
Once upon a time, perhaps, when she was the shy, chubby kid sitting alone in the play ground, she might have curled into a ball and wept. Or shoved her fingers down her throat after breakfast, lunch and dinner—anything to lose even a couple of pounds with the hopes she'd finally fit in. Wondering if maybe she was blonder, thinner—maybe, maybe the world would be less cruel.
That had all changed when her parents had relocated to Rio Di Janiero for a short-term contract and she'd discovered it was a place where a curvy body wasn't anything to be ashamed of, but celebrated. A place where she'd learned to hold her head up, to embrace the fullness of her arms, stomach and thighs with belly baring shirts, shorts that showed off every dimple, and stringy bikinis.
She'd learned that the standards of beauty she'd faced as a child in North America did not apply globally. That there were parts of the world where being full figured was the shape to aspire to, and for six years, she'd forgot about the need to watch her weight, to measure her waist and thighs, to forget about obsessively reading food labels and counting calories.
