by Brian Rowe
I felt like he might kill me, that he would take me to the Nevada desert, shoot me in my fatty stomach, and bury me in a ditch wide enough for the morbidly obese.
It didn’t seem that out of the question.
---
The waiting room was bigger than I remembered. There were more than a dozen chairs shoved against the dark brown walls, and the bouquets of flowers—at least four that I could see—were filled to the brim with yellow lilies.
I sat in the seat closest to the exit, weary of what I was getting myself into. I tapped my feet against the carpet and kept running my hands through my hair. I was more nervous now than in the final minutes of my last basketball game.
A Barbie clone of a woman sat in a chair in front of me reading Cosmopolitan. She looked to be in her mid-forties. Her breasts were gigantic, and her lips looked inhuman. She tried to smile at me but clearly struggled to do so.
There wasn’t any music playing in the room. The silence, just like it had been in the car with my dad, had become excruciatingly awkward.
Finally I said, “Good morning.”
“Morning,” she said, reluctantly.
“So tell me,” I continued in my nervousness, “are you going bigger or smaller?”
She reacted by looking away from me and darting her eyes back to her girly magazine.
I wasn’t sure if I could sit in that chair for another minute after the embarrassment of my lame-brained question. Thankfully, a female assistant opened the door to the surgery room and took a step toward me.
“Mr. Martin?” she asked. “Your dad’s ready.”
“OK.”
As I walked in to get prepped for surgery, I could tell that the assistant was trying to get a proper look at my stomach. I hid it the best I could, even though I knew once I was put under anesthesia, she could probe me for all I was worth.
The whole prep for the surgery was fast, so much so I started becoming more worrisome. There were no forms for me to fill out. There were no consultations or Q&As. My father had clearly taken this assistant aside to let her know that this surgery was going to be quick and to the point.
I was wheeled in and helped up to the surgical table. A man I’d never seen before pulled the curtain shut, and my father, in full surgeon mode, grabbed hold of my right hand.
“Cameron, this is gonna be super fast,” he said. “And don’t worry. You’re not gonna feel a thing.”
The third person in the room, an older man who looked ready to keel over and die, put a device on top of my face that looked like it was going to suck my tongue out.
“All right, young man,” the guy said. “I want you to count back from one hundred for me. Can you do that?”
“Do you want me to start with one hundred or ninety-nine?”
“One hundred.”
“But if I’m counting back, then wouldn’t I start with ninety—”
I drifted to sleep before I could complete my sentence.
---
As I woke up I could feel myself being wheeled into another room, this one with less intense overhead lighting.
“Mr. Martin, it’s all over,” the old man said. “You’re awake now. Everything’s going to be just fine.”
After giving me an awkward pat on the back, the man left and was replaced by the attractive thirty-something female assistant.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m fine. I don’t feel much pain at all, actually.”
I took a deep breath, closed one eye, and scarily examined my stomach area. It was sore and tender all over, but the redness wasn’t as gruesome as I thought it’d be.
“That’s good to hear,” she said. “Everything went perfect. Do you have any questions for me?”
“Sure, yeah. When can I go back to school?”
“I would recommend at least one day of rest. But we actually encourage you to start moving around as soon as possible. Sitting for too long can cause complications. I would say you could go back to school as early as Thursday.”
“OK.” I tried to think of another question. “And what about the swelling? How long until that goes away?”
“Now actually that differs from patient to patient,” she said. “You’re young and in relatively good shape. I imagine within the next few weeks.”
“A few weeks?”
I sat up in bed and almost hit my head against a lamp on the nightstand.
“Well your father insisted on closing your incisions with stitches and opted not to use the open-drainage technique. This way you can resume your normal activities faster, but the actual swelling will last longer.”
“OK, that’s fine, I guess.” Now the real question: “Will I still be able to play basketball?”
She smiled. “Absolutely. Just don’t go crazy these next few days. I wouldn’t resume intensive exercise until next week.” She took a step backward. “Will there be anything else?”
“Don’t think so. Thanks for your help.”
“You’re welcome. Your father will be taking you home later today. For now, just relax.”
She started walking out of the room when one more vital question popped into my head.
“Oh, wait! One more thing!”
She turned around at the end of the hallway. “Yes?”
I didn’t mean to shout it but I didn’t want her to have to walk back over. “How long do I have to wait before I can have sex?”
She didn’t answer right away. I could tell she was trying not to giggle. “Oh… umm… well… there aren’t really any restrictions. I wouldn’t recommend you do it today.”
“No, of course not.”
“Liposuction doesn’t really interfere with that. All your equipment should be in working order.”
I thought shouting the word ‘sex’ across the room was awkward, but her comment about my twigs and berries left both my cheeks red with humiliation.
“Glad to hear it,” I said.
She continued walking down the hallway, a bit faster than before. She probably wanted to turn the corner before I started asking for sex toy recommendations.
I rested my head against the pillow and started thinking about the next few days.
I was going to have a speedy recovery.
I was going to trim and groom my thick, requested beard.
The worst was definitely behind me.
7. Twenty-Eight
I decided to wait until Friday to make my big return to high school life.
I brought my beard trimmer to my bathroom granite counter top and analyzed my hairy face in the mirror. It was perfect. The beard was still full, but the homeless look had vanished, and I appeared to be a whole new person, mature and a bit older than my seventeen years seemed to suggest.
I glanced at my stomach one more time before tucking in my collared shirt. It was toned and slim, without a trace of extra fat. The swelling had gone down, and the redness had faded considerably. My dad told me in all his years performing liposuction he had never seen someone recover so fast. He attributed it to my younger age and my healthy eating and exercise habits.
The drive to school took half an hour, when on a typical day it took no more than ten minutes. I kept hitting every red light. Making matters worse, every minute was killing me. There was somebody I needed to see right away.
Charisma had text me twice since Tuesday, asking if I was OK. I told her, as I did Wesley, that I had been struck hard by a brutal stomach flu. Wesley, after witnessing my track field episode, had been skeptical about my disappearance. But I promised him I was totally fine and that I’d be back at school by the end of the week as good as new.
And I wasn’t lying.
As I stepped out of the car, I was met with plenty of friendly stares. Even some guys were staring at me, I hoped just out of jealousy. I could’ve sworn I saw Aaron drooling at me from afar, but my imagination might have been running a little too wild with that one.
The bell rang as I inched my way toward Charisma’s first period classroom. I
figured I would try to steal her away when the teacher wasn’t looking, as if that task hadn’t been attempted and failed a hundred times before. I left her a voice-mail last night, then again this morning, but I hadn’t heard anything from her yet.
I peered through the window to see a crowded classroom of students, but, oddly enough, no Charisma. Her chair at the front of the room was empty.
“Nice beard, Mr. Martin.”
I felt like Coach Welch had punched me in the gut again. This time, I didn’t want to keep breathing.
Please don’t be who I think it is. Why can’t this woman just leave me alone?
I turned around to see Mrs. Gordon, a condescending smile on her face. Her wardrobe was as dull as any other day, but with one big difference. She was sporting a pair of over-sized sunglasses that covered most of her gargantuan head.
“Thank you,” I said, wondering if her compliment was sarcastic or not.
“I’m totally kidding. You look ridiculous.”
There’s my answer.
“Mr. Martin,” she continued, “you should look on the outside like you do on the inside. On the inside, you are a stupid, selfish little man incapable of feeling or thinking anything worth a damn. So this new putrid professor look doesn’t seem the least bit logical. It doesn’t suit you now, and it won’t suit you when you’re forty years old.”
I was trying to wipe the spit from my left cheek because of Mrs. Gordon’s decision to emphasize ‘putrid professor.’ “I’m sorry you feel that way, Mrs. Gordon. By the way, speaking of stupid, did you know you’re still wearing your sunglasses?”
She laughed as she pulled them off, brushing them past her hair as if she was posing at a modeling agency. I couldn’t believe I was thinking it, but the sunglasses had actually made the mean old librarian seem a tiny bit cool.
“Thank you,” she said. “I bet you thought I was too old-fashioned to wear sunglasses, didn’t you?”
“It did cross my mind, actually.” And then it occurred to me. “Wait, what happened to your eye-glasses?”
“Welcome to the twenty-first century, you little twirp,” she said. “I do happen to wear contact lenses from time to time, I’ll have you know. There’s the way I think about you, Mr. Martin, so I know there’s the archaic way you think about me. And let me tell you something. You’re way off.”
I nodded, ready for this weird conversation to be over. “Can I go now? I need to get to class.”
“Yes!” she shouted. “By all means! What are you doing standing around talking to me for?”
She marched around the corner, breathing heavily against her sunglasses as if she meant to clean them with the foul stench that emanated from her mouth. I shook my head, trying to remember the amount of days I’d have to set eyes upon that bizarre woman.
Sixty-two?
I continued walking down the hallway, managing to evade a couple of teachers who were turning my way with suspicion. I was almost to the back of the school, ready to forget about Charisma for a few hours and just surrender to my first class of the day, when I heard giggling coming from a classroom.
I turned to my left to see the last door at the end of the hallway. This was the room used for Wesley’s film class. I only knew this because Wesley had brought me into the room a few times to screen his experimental, sleep-inducing movies.
I heard the giggle again. It sounded familiar. I took three giant leaps toward the door and kicked it open.
First my eyes caught the camera on the tripod.
Next my eyes caught Charisma and Wesley kissing on the desk in the far corner of the room.
“What the—”
They stopped and darted their eyes at me, their lips still pressed together, caught in the act so clearly that an excuse on their part seemed unthinkable.
“Get off of her!” I shouted, running toward Wesley, successfully jumping over two desks like a movie stunt man. I tried to grab him but he rolled to the ground before I could bury my fingernails into his groin.
“Cam!” Charisma shouted. “Calm down!”
Wesley jumped to his feet and tried to run out of the room. I leapt forward and grabbed him by the back of his shirt.
“Goddammit Wes, you promised me you wouldn’t kiss her! YOU PROMISED ME!”
I raised my fist into the air. I wanted to punch him. I wanted to clobber him in the face and send him out the window, up into the air, out of the Earth’s atmosphere, to another universe where he could mess around with someone else’s girlfriend.
“I’m sorry,” he said, waving his hands in front of his face. “I needed to do it. Without the kiss, my movie makes no sense.”
“That’s a load of crap, and you know it.”
“No, I swear.”
“Well why film it in here, huh? Where I could catch you?”
“The scene had to take place in a classroom,” Wesley said as I brought him down to the cold floor. “There was no other empty classroom during first period. Please don’t hit me, Cameron. It was a kiss for the sake of art!”
I pulled Wesley up and pushed him against the wall, my right hand holding his curly brown hair in a death grip. I turned to Charisma. She looked at me like I was an idiot.
“Is he telling the truth?” I asked.
“Good job, dickwad,” she said with sinister undertones. “You just ruined the shot. Now we have to do it again.”
“No! No more takes!”
She scooted off the table and took an exaggerated step toward me. She looked rough, like she hadn’t slept in weeks. “I know you think what I do is stupid, Cam, but this character’s journey is important to me. I know it’s hard for you to understand because you don’t have a single creative bone in your body. But I have to do this. Do you understand me?”
“Of course I do. It’s just… do you have to kiss him?”
“Just let us finish this scene,” she said. “This is one of the last scenes we have to shoot. We’re almost done.”
“You’re almost done?”
“Yes.”
I sighed and looked back at Wesley. He appeared legitimately apologetic.
It hit me from both sides that I had made a terrible mistake. Charisma was my everything, and I didn’t want to look like the kind of possessive boyfriend who liked to stomp on his girlfriend’s dreams. If she had to kiss a guy in a movie, fine. Besides, I preferred her kissing Wesley to, say, someone like Ryan. I could trust Wesley, and I could trust Charisma.
Right?
“OK,” I said. “Finish the scene. Do what you need to do.”
Charisma smiled big. “Thank you.” She grabbed my hand, unexpectedly, and pulled me all the way up to her chin.
“What?” I asked.
“You did it.”
“I did what?”
“You grew the beard.” She brought her hand to my face and started caressing my bushy hair. “It looks good, Cameron.”
In all this craziness, I had completely forgotten that Charisma had yet to see the new me. I smiled and kissed her hand.
Wesley stood up. “Yeah, Cam. It looks a lot better. You look older, more mature than before.”
“Before?” Charisma asked, confused.
“It’s nothing,” I said, and I kissed her again, this time on her forehead. “Can I meet you after school?”
“Umm—” She looked at Wesley, strangely, as if they were hiding something more from me. “Just call me later, Cam. We can figure something out. Is your flu all gone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never felt better.”
I didn’t want to press the sex issue too much in front of Wesley. I figured I would call her later and meet up with her before dinner. I imagined tonight had the potential to be the most magical night of my life.
I started making my way out of the classroom when I noticed the lack of a person next to the camera.
I had to ask. “Say, Wes, quick question,” I said, turning around with confusion. “There was nobody operating the camera. How’d you manage to fi
lm the scene without someone filming the two of you?”
Wesley leaned up against the table, Charisma brushing up against him like she was counting the seconds until I left the room.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “That’s actually a good question. I just played the whole scene in a wide. All I had to do was hit the record button, and we could start.”
I looked back at the camera. “But doesn’t your camera blink that red light when it’s recording?”
“Well, yeah.”
I took a moment before turning around again. I tried fighting my suspicions, but to no avail.
“Wes?”
“Yeah?”
“That light isn’t blinking.”
“I know,” he said, without a moment’s pause. “I turned it off when you came in.” He pulled a remote out of his left pants pocket. “I have a remote control.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.” Pretty convincing, Wes, but I still don’t buy it.
“Yeah,” Wesley said, a punctuation to the word as if to signal to me to run, not walk, out of the classroom.
“Can you let us finish the scene now, Cam?” Charisma asked. “We need to finish so I can get to my next class.”
“No problem,” I said, tiptoeing toward the door.
Wesley and Charisma turned around to start re-dressing the cluttered desk. I looked over my shoulder to see Charisma with a strange grin on her face.
All lies.
I had to see for myself.
I’d played with Wesley’s camera before. I took a step toward it and examined the right side. I gently pushed the eject button and stared down into the empty abyss.
There was no tape in the camera.
“Hey!” Wesley shouted from the table. “What are you—”
I pulled Wesley’s video camera off the tripod with a forceful tug and kicked the tripod to the ground.
“Hey!” Wesley shouted, jumping to his feet. “Don’t touch my camera!”
“You want your camera?”
I hoisted it up and brought my right arm back as if I was participating in a round of shot put.
Wesley made a leap for it, but he was too late. I tossed the camera into the air, over Charisma’s head, and watched it smash against the chalkboard behind them.
“Oh God!” Wesley shouted.
