Good Luck, Fatty?! Read online

  I shoot a glance over my shoulder, back toward school. Right before it happens, I get a surge of adrenaline. A final tug of conscience. A whisper I’ve trained myself to ignore.

  I prop the Schwinn against the trunk of the tree and start seesawing up the makeshift ladder. From the ground, Malcolm cups my ample bottom in his hands (girly hands that are three sizes too small) and gives me a helpful boost. Then he scampers up behind me.

  As always, the tree house is drowning in refuse: a mountain of stubby cigarette butts; jagged, menacing beer bottles; fast-food wrappers galore; a number of spent condoms.

  I’ve been on The Pill since I was twelve, when Denise carted me off to the clinic for a “big girl” checkup. There was nobody else to take charge of such matters except Orv and, back then, Gramp, both of whom were pretty old-school when it came to the vagaries of the female cycle. Sometimes I worry about diseases, but not too much.

  Behind me, Malcolm unbelts his jeans (I can tell by the way his buckle jangles against his button-fly) and then starts pawing at the elastic waistband of my shorts. I make to turn around, figuring he’ll want to get on top. Missionary is the preferred position of boys around here. But Malcolm grabs my hips, keeps my back to his front, pulls me to my knees.

  Only one other boy has screwed me doggie-style: Justin White, Industry High’s star quarterback. It’ll be two now, I guess (though it’s probably no coincidence, since Malcolm is Justin’s go-to receiver).

  Malcolm tugs one side of my shorts down in a careless, offensive way that makes me feel more like a prostitute than a needy tubbo with a flat-lined sense of self-worth. But that’s not the worst of it. When he goes for the other side, my shorts and underwear stick between two rolls of flab and refuse to come down.

  He hangs his chin over my shoulder and says into my ear, “Hey, Billy, a little help here?”

  Billy? As low as I am, you wouldn’t think I could sink any lower.

  I yank my shorts back up. “My name is Roberta Josephine Cotton!” I spout as I spin around. A look of pure bewilderment shoots across Malcolm’s concave, eyebrow-dominated face. “Excuse me!”

  Malcolm fumbles with his pants, and I shove past him for the tree house exit. He grabs for my arm but misses. “What…?” he mutters as my toes hit the first rung of the ladder.

  Three feet from the ground, I fling myself off the tree and dive for the Schwinn, which I mount sloppily and race to pedal away. My heart bangs in my ears, and tears spurt from my eyes like a pinhole leak from a garden hose.

  I don’t look back.

  * * *

  My parents have shown their faces in North Carolina exactly once in the nine years since they left, and that was six years ago. And only because they were nominated for a humanitarian award that was up for grabs in Washington, D.C. Apparently Industry was a convenient stop-off on the way to or from the ceremony. They spent forty-five minutes with me at a McDonald’s, every second of which they wasted yammering about orphans and droughts and a freaky flesh-eating bacterium. It broke my heart.

  “Where are we going?” I ask Orv and Denise in a whiny tone I hope wears on their nerves as much as it does mine. If they’d just answered me the first four times I’d asked, we could be cruising along in blissful silence right now.

  Orv steadies his eyes on the road and curls his spindly fingers around the steering wheel, which bucks and shimmies whenever the Royale surpasses sixty miles per hour.

  Denise twists sideways in the passenger seat, smiles all the way up to her eyes. “Don’t you like surprises, Roberta?”

  Not only has Denise dolled me up in a poufy polka-dotted skirt as if I’m a prized sow she plans to show at the county fair, but suddenly she’s calling me Roberta? “It’s Bobbi-Jo,” I say flatly. “And, no. Not particularly.”

  “We’re almost there,” Orv says. “Just keep your britches on straight.”

  I want to be mad, since I sense something unnerving on the horizon. But all I can do is laugh, which raises Denise’s hopes. “That’s the spirit,” she says, chuckling right along with me. “Relax and be yourself.”

  I give a confused half-shrug.

  The highway is deserted. Orv tucks the Royale into the slow lane behind a clattering dump truck and locks the cruise control on fifty-five. It occurs to me that, once upon a time, way back when Gramp rolled this car off the dealer’s lot brand new, it was a pretty spiffy machine.

  A few minutes pass with nobody saying a word, time I spend watching rocks jump out of the bed of the dump truck and ping off the Royale’s sun-bleached hood (and wondering what Orv and Denise have cooked up).

  An eighth of a mile before the next exit (to a place called Hollyhock) Orv hits the brakes and glides the Royale toward the off-ramp. For no reason, my muscles tense. “I don’t feel well,” I say. I crank the window down, and a cool breeze washes over me. But it’s not enough to quell the jags of nausea gulping through my gut. I plead, “Can you pull over?”

  Orv shakes his head. “Here?”

  We are now on a two-lane country road with long stretches of muddy tire tracks crisscrossing the pavement. A gob of vomit spits from the back of my throat into my mouth. “Anywhere.”

  Denise scans the shoulder of the road and settles on a bare, sandy patch of land she indicates by poking at the window glass. I grip the door handle as the Royale eases over, every ounce of my energy concentrated on suppressing my gag reflex. Before Orv has a chance to reach across the steering column and shift the Royale into park, I pull the door handle and eject. The Royale comes to a full stop as my palms and bare knees press into the sand, a splash of vomit painting the brown grass before me.

  My eyes are pinched shut, so I don’t see Denise when, from somewhere behind me, she spouts, “Holy Toledo!” (She has an aversion to cursing.) “Are you all right?!”

  I steal a sideways glance and spot Orv’s good tennis shoes, the navy-blue ones with bright white laces, heading in my direction. The shoes stop. “Here you go,” says Orv. He shakes a handful of crumpled napkins at me, which I weakly accept and use to wipe my mouth. Denise helps me dust myself off, and then we get right back into the Royale and press on.

  Past a delinquent gas station and a field of mangy pumpkins is one of those old-time dining cars with a giant neon sign beckoning customers to “Eat at Pablo’s.” Orv slows the Royale, makes the turn into the lot without signaling. I take a few deep breaths in hopes of settling my stomach. “We drove all the way out here for this?” I mutter.

  Denise frowns. “Just give it a chance,” she says. “I bet you’ll be happy you came.”

  Orv leads the charge as we shuffle up the cement steps, which lend a sense of stability to what otherwise resembles a fly-by-night affair. Inside the diner, I am so distracted by the glinting of stainless steel (which covers nearly every surface) that, at first, I don’t notice Duncan and Marie. When I finally spot them curled up at a circular tufted-vinyl booth in the corner, my brain does a double-take. The rest of me freezes.

  “Roberta Josephine!” my mother squeals, her warm brown eyes pinned on my stunned expression. “Get over here!” She throws her arms up haphazardly. “Let me have a look at you, sweet darlin’.”

  I stay put, move my gaze to my father’s face, searching for an explanation. But all I find is an apologetic grimace that might as well be a shrug. “Hello, Bobbi,” he says. “Lovely to see you.”

  Stiffly I force my lips to utter, “Hello, Duncan.” I throw a nod my mother’s way. “Marie.”

  Orv and Denise plunk down and start making chitchat, but I am struck with a rabid case of fight-or-flight. After a couple of minutes of shifting around awkwardly on my kitten heels, though, I’m left with no choice but to join them. From the edge of the booth, where I reluctantly perch, I watch Marie dazzle Orv and Denise with tales of untamed bushmen, cobra close-encounters, and wild-elephant stampedes, all the while tossing French fries into her carefree, smiling mouth and gesticulating with crazed abandon. The oversized shawl she wears—colorful and o
bviously handmade—sways violently as she speaks, its fringed trim picking up French fry grease and depositing it across the table in streaks and dots.

  My father is the opposite of my mother, this much I remember from my younger years, a time when my wellbeing somehow trumped my parents’ medical ambitions (they’re both trauma surgeons) and even their spiritual calling to the ministry.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask Duncan, who adjusts his eyeglasses and regards me as if I’m a bacterium upon which he has unexpectedly stumbled. Or maybe a new species of subhuman worthy of a field study.

  He locks eyes with Marie, his face tense and twitchy, the half-smile he offers me forced. “Pookie,” he says in an uptight-yet-sugary tone, “didn’t you tell Bobbi we were coming?”

  My mother pops her shoulders into a shrug, rolls her eyes as if my father is being dramatic. “I told Denise.” She wags her hand through the air. “I can’t help it if she didn’t…”

  “But…what are you doing here?” I repeat. Under the table, I slip my hand into my skirt pocket and withdraw a Milky Way, which I tear open and begin chomping.

  Instead of answering me, my mother nudges Orv out of the booth and slinks out behind him, the shawl trailing in her wake. My eyes widen as she straightens her hunched frame, her stomach protruding. She runs her hands lovingly over her belly and, sporting a wide grin, yelps, “Surprise!”

  I blink.

  Stare.

  Blink.

  Stare.

  Unless I’ve consumed tainted candy and am now hallucinating…

  Marie is pregnant.

  chapter 3

  MY PARENTS are hypocrites. After years of lecturing everyone on the virtues of Namibia, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia, they hightailed it back to the good ol’ US of A to pop out the newest Cotton. (A boy, they tell me. They’re naming him Roy.)

  And while Roy finishes cooking in Marie’s volcano of a belly, they want me to move into the barn they’re renting (yes, a literal barn) in Hollyhock and help them “feather the nest.”

  What I want to do is hang with Harvey at The Pit, train for the Yo-Yo, and maybe kiss Tom Cantwell again.

  * * *

  I mope into The Pit, the normally peppy bell dinging halfheartedly over my head. Out the side of my mouth, I mumble, “Hey, Harvey.”

  Something strange has been happening since I painted that folksy ad for the Yo-Yo on the display window: actual customers (!) one of whom has Harvey’s rapt attention. “This model should suit you just fine,” he tells the woman, a middle-aged teacher-type with a mop of fake blond curls. He taps the bike’s fender encouragingly. “Don’t you think?”

  The woman seems more enamored with Harvey than the bike. She smiles, twirls her hair and, with a flirtatious lilt, says, “Does it come with riding lessons?”

  I amble over to the counter, absently hook my fingers into the fishbowl for a Milky Way but end up withdrawing them in surprise. Harvey has swapped my favorite candy for some crinkly-wrappered, fruit-and-nut-clustered granola bars.

  Another middle-aged woman—this one petite, brunette, and a bit biker-chick around the edges—strides into the shop with a boy of about ten, who is tugged as if by a magnet toward our new skateboarding section.

  I stay put at the register, wait for Harvey to steer the teacher-lady my way, which he does swiftly and with finesse. When I offer her our bike-repair plan for an extra thirty dollars, she accepts with a vigorous nod and a “Why, thank you!”

  Ten minutes later, I ring up a vintage orange Penny board for the kid, who pays me with a fistful of crumpled ones and fives and a bunch of loose change. Once the kid clunks out the door, Harvey and I again have The Pit to ourselves.

  “What’s up with these?” I ask, dangling one of the granola bars between my thumb and forefinger and wearing a sour face.

  Harvey gives me a sly smile. “Nutrition,” he says. “Fuel.” He moves in and drapes a supportive hand over my shoulder. “You can’t keep eating junk,” he tells me with a wave at the windows, “if you’re going to win this race.”

  I glance down at my vast jellyroll (known in normal-sized folks as the upper abdomen), which overhangs the counter and blocks whatever view I might have had of my shoes. “Come on,” I say, despite my disappointment. “There’s no way I’d ever…”

  “We don’t know that,” Harvey snaps. “It depends on who signs up and how hard you’re willing to work to beat them.”

  “But…look at me,” I say. “Don’t you think…?”

  Harvey shakes his head. “No, I don’t. What I think is that you have a challenge in front of you. A challenge you can meet with the right mix of effort and determination. The only way to fail is to quit—or never to try in the first place.”

  Once in a while, Harvey slips back into his principal persona, and I just follow along. “You’re probably right,” I say, trying to conjure an upbeat expression. “When do we start training?”

  Harvey studies me for a moment and then breaks out in a wide grin. “Whenever you give the word.”

  I grin back. “Word.”

  * * *

  The girls at school hate me. Not just because I’m a tubbo, but because I’m a tramp. Because I let their brothers and boyfriends screw me with impunity. Rumors have been floating around Industry High since halfway through last year, when I let Alphonse James take my virginity, opening the flood gates.

  Most of the guys know the rumors are true, because either they’ve screwed me, or one of their buddies has. The girls seem reluctant to believe that any boy would dip a toe in my pond, let alone the caliber (I use the term loosely) of guy who’s been known to skulk around my shore. Mostly the girls loathe me out of suspicion. And fear. I can sense the shudders roll through them in the hallways, when, for the briefest instant, they realize I’m not so different from them.

  I have special permission from the principal (Harvey made sure of it before he abdicated the throne) to take my lunch in the band room with my kissing buddy, Tom, who plays a mean clarinet, and two or three rotating band geeks, depending on the day. Realistically, this is my pool of friends at Industry High.

  I slide my backpack off my shoulder and drop it to the gritty floor, trying to balance my lunch tray one-handed. As I rock my way onto a wooden stool, a dented apple skips across the tray and threatens to jump overboard. I catch it just in time. “Hi,” I say to Tom, who seems oddly mesmerized by my lunch selections. I chomp a big hunk out of the apple. “How goes?”

  Tom shrugs.

  Our fellow diners today are Ruby Talent—an amiable flautist with severe corrective lenses, a chipmunk’s overbite, and a name more suited for Broadway than the Industry High marching band—and Bernard Jenkins, a chunky (not quite tubbo) trumpeter with an effeminate voice and a futuristic watch that beeps every half hour to remind him to ingest his various medications. I murmur greetings to both of them and then turn my attention back to Tom, who, when compared to the rest of our motley group, looks—dare I say?—normal. “Are we still on for Saturday?” I ask.

  When I told Tom about the Yo-Yo race, and, particularly, my plans to compete, he vehemently disagreed. He said I didn’t need to lose weight (yeah, right), like that was my sole reason for entering. I’m beginning to suspect, based on his attraction to someone of my enhanced voluptuousness, that Tom may be a closet fatty-lover. “I guess,” he says, begrudgingly agreeing to uphold the practice session we’ve scheduled prior to my first real training with Harvey, “but I promised my dad I’d help him rake in the morning, so it’ll have to be after three.”

  Tom’s father and stepmother own a trailer park a couple of miles north of Industry High, where they lord over their single-wide tenants (in a benevolent way, of course) from their snazzy, top-of-the-line double-wide. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll bike over. It’ll be a good warm-up.”

  Bernard’s watch beeps. He flips open one of the compartments of his pill organizer and gnaws through a disc-shaped yellow medication that reminds me of a Necco wafer. Ruby eyes the pill
and asks, “Can I have one?”

  Bernard grimaces. “My mother counts ‘em.”

  “You could say you dropped it,” she suggests.

  I glance at Tom, whose soft lips part as if they’re poised to comment on the potential drug deal. Instead, he says to me, “If you come at four, nobody else’ll be home.”

  Why doesn’t he just come out and say, Can I screw you at four on Saturday? At least that would be more dignified than the weaselly game he’s playing.

  I clamp my knees together. “I’ll see you at three.”

  * * *

  I coast through the entrance of the Ocean Gates Mobile Home Community (Seriously? Industry is in the boonies, nowhere near a salty body of water), my stick-straight hair matted to my damp back, sweat crusted over my downy eyebrows, a random bug or three splattered across my tent-sized tank top. Tom’s house is on the left, immediately following the turnoff from the main road, which I remember from a previous visit here for an end-of-school shindig.

  I lean the Schwinn against the steps and rap on the door. Then I wait. No one answers, so I knock again. A few seconds later, a motor turns over behind the trailer park’s office, the only permanent structure on this patch of North Carolina woodland, its A-frame design reminding me of a teepee.

  The tail end of a battered pickup reverses into view, then its full body. Inside are Tom’s father and stepmother, windows down, stereo cranking out some old fogie hits. From a trio of sun-browned, grease-stained fingers, a cigarette hangs out the driver’s window.

  Tom’s father catches sight of me, and I wave. “Oh, hey there…Bobbi,” he says with a twang and a grin. He pulls the truck onto the lawn. “Tom’s feedin’ the chickens.” He gestures at the stockade fence with his cigarette, spilling a puff of hot ash onto the grass. “Go ahead back.”