Happily Ever Madder: Misadventures of a Mad Fat Girl

Praise for

Diary of a Mad Fat Girl

“Meet Graciela ‘Ace’ Jones, a wildcat Southern version of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum . . . [a] hilarious debut novel.”

—
Library Journal

“
Diary of a Mad Fat Girl
is bawdy, sexy, Southern-fried fun. McAfee makes a powerhouse debut that readers will love.”

—Valerie Frankel, author of
It’s Hard Not to Hate You

“Fresh and funny. Ace Jones is a hoot! This is what
Sex and the City
might have been if Carrie and friends were looking for love in Bugtussle, Mississippi, instead of Manhattan.”

—Wendy Wax, author of
Ten Beach Road

“Ace Jones is my kind of girl: Her outsize appetite for life, plus a dangerously low tolerance for losers, get her into one impossible fix after another. In addition to involving a delightfully madcap crew of friends and acquaintances in her quest for justice, Ace is aided, abetted, and occasionally bedded by some delicious Southern gentlemen. Ace prevails with humor, heart, and a speed-dial relationship with the pizza guy.”

—Sophie Littlefield, award-winning author of
A Bad Day for Scandal

“Southern-fried Janet Evanovich.”

—
Booklist

“Stephanie McAfee, in creating Ace Jones, has written a character that will grab you by the shirtfront and take you with her on her ride, and oh, what a wild ride it is.
Diary of a Mad Fat Girl
is pure fun.”

—Rachael Herron, author of
Wishes & Stitches

Also by Stephanie McAfee

Diary of a Mad Fat Girl

HAPPILY
EVER MADDER

Misadventures of a Mad Fat Girl

Stephanie McAfee

NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY

N
EW
A
MERICAN
L
IBRARY

Published by New American Library, a division of

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632 New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Stephanie McAfee, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

McAfee, Stephanie.

Happily ever madder: misadventures of a mad fat girl /Stephanie McAfee.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-101-60710-7

1. Overweight women—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Florida—Fiction. 4. Mississippi—

Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

PS3613.C2635H37 2012

813'.6—dc23 2012023780

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

To Brandon
Your patience knows no bounds.

1

I
didn’t think I’d be this nervous. I mean, I knew from the very beginning that this night was going to be stressful, but I didn’t expect it to feel like an all-out near-death experience.

I turn away from the toilet and pick up the bottle. I don’t even like champagne. I like beer. And right now I need a beer worse than I ever have, but champagne is all I’ve got to get me through this, so I turn the bottle toward the ceiling and hammer down.

I remind myself that this is what I’ve always wanted. It’s
everything
I’ve
always
wanted, so I don’t understand why it doesn’t feel
anything
like I
always
thought it would. Maybe because I never thought this moment would actually arrive. But it’s here. Right now. I’m about to walk out in front of a rather large crowd of people and bare my soul for their casual perusal.

Someone knocks and tries to open the door.

“Ace! What are you doing? Come on! Everyone is waiting!” A pause. “Have you got the runs? Please tell me you don’t have the runs!”

“I don’t have the damn runs, Lilly!” I shout at my best friend of going on twenty years. “Jeez, just give me a minute.”

“You don’t
have
a minute! You were supposed to be out there
ten
minutes ago, so come
on
!”

“What am I supposed to say to all those people?”

“I don’t know.” She pauses, then adds, “I hate to be the one to point this out, but maybe you should’ve thought about that already?”

“I did.”

“Great—now get out here and say something before these people start leaving!”

I reach over and unlock the door. Lilly comes in and starts fussing with my hair.

“Here,” she says, handing me a tube of lip gloss. She looks at the champagne bottle in my hand. “Are you drunk?”

“Unfortunately, I am not.”

She takes the bottle out of my hand and sticks it under the sink.

“This is your big night, Ace Jones,” she says, smiling. “Get out there and give ’em the old razzle-dazzle.”

“More like frazzle-dazzle, Lilly. I’m scared shitless. What if everyone hates everything they see? What if they think it’s all complete and total garbage?”

“Ace, if they think that, then they’re idiots, and no one cares what idiots think,” she says, taking my hand. “C’mon, now. You’ve waited your whole life for this.”

I follow her out of the bathroom, through my brand-new office, where move-in junk is still scattered everywhere, and out into the wide-open space of the gallery, my gallery, where clusters of people are drinking champagne and looking at paintings. My paintings.

“And here she is, folks,” a slick-haired fellow says into a cordless microphone. “The star of tonight’s show, Miss Graciela Jones!”

Everyone claps and I smile and wave. I take the microphone from his overtanned hand, gather all my courage, and pray I don’t hurl.

“Hello, everyone,” I say and realize I’ve got the microphone too close to my mouth. “Thank you all
so
much for coming out tonight. Welcome to Mermaids of Pelican Cove.”

I scan the sea of unfamiliar faces, then home in on my pals, who are congregated in the far left corner of the gallery. I see Lilly take a seat on the sofa in between her luscious lover boy, Dax Dorsett, and our mutual BFF, Chloe Stacks. Sitting directly across from Chloe is her new boyfriend, J. J. Jackson, and perched two cushions down is Ethan Allen Harwood, who is chatting it up with his best friend and my fiancé, Mason McKenzie. Mason is sitting on a rectangular ottoman, and I’d give anything to be sitting over there next to him instead of standing up here about to lose my mind. He looks at me and smiles. I feel a little better, but not much.

I look back at the crowd, take a deep breath, and attempt to parlay the speech I spent the past three weeks composing. Instead of delivering the articulate presentation I had planned, however, I sputter random words and phrases in a most disorderly fashion, then get really hot and start feeling like I might pass out. I decide to start thanking people.

“I’d like to thank my fiancé, Mason McKenzie, and all of my old friends who came down to Pelican Cove, Florida, from my hometown of Bugtussle, Mississippi. Thanks, y’all.” I look at them and nod. “And I’d like to thank all the new friends that I make to meet tonight. I’m sorry, I mean, hope to make—I mean, meet tonight.” I look at Lilly, and she looks nervous but flashes me a big smile, so I continue. “Thank you, Mason, for making all of my dreams come true, and thank you, Lilly, for being my BFF since we stopped hating each other the year after sixth grade. And thank you, Chloe, who’s been my other BFF since we met at Mississippi State and me and Lilly moved in with her even though we thought she was a little bit weird.” Then I get too close to the microphone again and mumble, “At first.” I look at Chloe, and her big brown eyes are round like saucers.

I shift my gaze back to the crowd and see that more than a few people look like their underwear just started squeezing them in all the wrong places. My brain feels like it’s swelling up inside my skull and I wish I hadn’t drunk all that champagne. I mop the sweat off my forehead and try to remember what I’d planned to say. I don’t think I meant to thank my friends individually, but since I mentioned a few, I decide to mention the others because I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t appreciate their driving six hours down here to watch me make a fool of myself in front of all these people I don’t know.

“Thanks to Sherriff J. J. Jackson and Deputy Dax Dorsett, who came down with their lady friends, Chloe and Lilly, to see, uh, me and all this.” I wave my arm around in a big circle and try to smile. “I don’t know who is keeping criminals off the street in Bugtussle tonight, but since I moved out of town, I guess the crime rate has gone down considerably.” I snigger and look at Lilly, who is slicing her hand across her throat. I hear a rumble in the crowd and panic. “And, finally, thanks to Ethan Allen Harwood, my best guy friend in the whole wide world and Mason’s best friend in the whole wide world.” I look at Ethan Allen, who is frozen like a statue. “We love you like a brother, Ethan Allen, so I guess it’s a good thing that me and you never hooked up, because that would’ve been almost like incest.”

The crowd is quiet now and staring at me like I have an alien probe sticking out of my ass. Despite my best effort not to, I start laughing hysterically. I look at Mason, who gives me a sweet “you’re so pitiful” smile. He starts clapping, and others do the same. I tug at the hem of my not-so-little black dress because all of that slimming fabric has started to creep. I look around and try to remember what I just said to all these people, but I can’t. “Thank you all for coming out,” I say a bit too loud. “Please excuse my nervousness. Lucky for me, you didn’t come to hear me speak, thank goodness—you came to see my work, so if we could please just move along to that part, well, that would be great.”

I look at the tuxedo-clad slickster, who smiles at me with genuine sympathy. I verbalize my gratitude one more time and then give the microphone back to him. He gives a short and far more graceful spiel, and everyone claps and starts looking comfortable again. I stand there beside him and smile, wondering if the spotlight glaring into my face could scorch my eyeballs and cause me to go blind. I take a little bow, then walk slowly away from the brutal shaft of light, trying to project a sense of confidence that I most certainly do not feel.

Shit. No wonder van Gogh cut off his own ear.

I make a beeline for my pals.