What is it about fall that makes me so basic?
Well before the sticky summer days have cooled, I’m salivating over leaf-peeping and farmers’ markets and cider tasting. At the stroke of midnight on the eve of autumn, I turn into an apple-picking, pumpkin-spice-craving, boot-and-oversize-sweater-wearing fanatic.
Autumn is when my sleepy Massachusetts town sheds its old life: the leaves become a symphony of reds, oranges, and golds, then let go. I love the colors; the crisp breeze; the pumpkin patches; the bonfires; the delicious scent of apple cinnamon; the melody the trees make when they rustle in the wind.
Fall is catharsis: it’s paying tribute to what was while making room for what’s to come. It’s possibility, wrapped in a crimson bow.
The season is honestly in my top five favorite things ever.
Whit Rivera’s All-Time Faves
- My tiny little family: me, Abuela, Abuelo (who we miss every single day), my little sister, Lily, and our cat, Patch.
- My ride-or-die besties, Sophie and Marisol, and my (super-hot) boyfriend, Aiden.
- Fall and every single thing about it, including the high school’s beloved Fall Fest, a weeklong celebration.
- My notebook collection and all my infinite lists
- Gilmore Girls.
- (And a final, secret sixth addition: Intonation, the bestselling boy band that Lily, Abuela, and I have loved since I was in eighth grade. Shhh.)
At this time of year, everything feels hopeful. And right about now, I could use a little hope—because my summer kind of sucked.
I had been ready for a productive yet charming summer. I pictured hard days at the coveted internship I’d secured at Empower(ed) Teens—a selective summer program for aspiring special needs educators and therapists—where I’d be praised for my organizational skills, leadership, and compassion. I envisioned late-night bonfires, spontaneous road trips to the beach, the sweet taste of ice cream cones, refreshing dips in the pool, sandy toes, and laughter with my friends and boyfriend.
How incredible does that sound?
But I didn’t get any of it.
Because my summer kicked off with a heartbreaking goodbye. My boyfriend, Aiden, moved two hundred miles away for his mom’s new job at the University of New Hampshire.
This then made me feel like a fifth wheel with my best friends, who turned out to be joined at the hip with their partners from May straight through August.
And then came the doctors’ appointments . . . which I was too embarrassed to talk about, so maybe I retreated a little.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that the second my junior year concluded, my whole body suddenly felt off. Actually, if I’m honest with myself, I had been ignoring signs that something was wrong for a while. I could no longer pretend it was normal that I hadn’t gotten my period in months. I was sprouting body hair everywhere, and I was gaining weight really fast, mostly in my belly.
It was like I’d lost total and complete control over every facet of my life, in a way no Whit Rivera list or color-coded binder was going to fix.
I couldn’t even work up the courage to tell Sophie and Marisol, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell Aiden: the move had put enough of a strain on our relationship. I didn’t even tell Abuela—too ashamed, too fearful, too reluctant to add anything to her already full plate. She had enough to worry about between being the sole provider, her own health, and her business.
But Abuela sensed something, as Latina matriarchs always seem to, and a few obsessive internet searches later, we had three words to describe what might be wreaking havoc on my body: polycystic ovarian syndrome, or PCOS.
I should’ve been relieved to have a name for this experience, to be able to point to a reason why my body no longer felt like my own. But the more I read about the syndrome, the more I realized that the medical world seemed utterly mystified by it. There were few answers and no treatments.
Still, we diligently went to doctors. In appointment after appointment, under offensively bright lighting with parts of my expanding body spilling out of a blue gown, I’d be told the same thing: lose weight.
The whole summer vanished as we careened from doctor to doctor. They couldn’t—or wouldn’t—confirm that there was anything medically wrong with the soft brown girl standing before them, insisting instead that it was the circumference of her hips that was her grave undoing. Over the course of the summer, I was referred to four nutritionists, two different fat camps, and no less than seven bariatric surgeons.
I spent so much time in and out of doctors’ offices trying to get a confirmed diagnosis of what I knew was polycystic ovarian syndrome that I ended up having to resign from the Empower(ed) Teens internship I’d been so excited about. I burrowed into the comfort of our family shop instead, working there whenever I could.
It was the nail in the freaking coffin of what was supposed to be Whit’s Perfect Summer.
Excerpt from The Fall of Whit Rivera / Text copyright © 2023 by Crystal Maldonado. Reproduced by permission from Holiday House Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Fall of Whit Rivera will be published on October 10, 2023, but you can pre-order it right now.
Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB.
