by Schow, Ryan
At least, that’s who I am tonight.
Do Fat Guys Fart in the Shower?
1
Weekends around the Astor Academy used to be fun, just me and the non-triplets eating, hanging out, talking clothes, purses, shoes and boys. Now I realize how alone I am. How much I miss my friends. How, in part, they define me. Instead of thinking about hanging out, I’m thinking about solitary activities, like reading or watching TV or heading down the hill to the shopping mall to browse for things that in the end won’t make me happy or fulfill me. Of course, the moment I decide to leave campus, all I want is to stay.
Dammit, I have to find my friends!
Maybe that’s why I have been thinking of Brayden so much. He can help. Plus, I really, really like who he has become. How he’s not so much of a toolbag anymore. Rather than fire-breathing hostility on all those posers who are so much better looking and more popular than him, he found his groove. His inner gangster. He’s not all that, but he’s got swag now, and that counts for a lot. That’s what girls like and…that’s what I like.
Yesterday, at dinner, he said, “I read a study that said one of the main factors in teen promiscuity is low self-esteem. Apparently when a teenage girl has little or no self-confidence, she uses sex as a means to build confidence.” Looking at me and Maggie, ignoring Damien and Caden completely, he said, “So basically, if girls didn’t feel so bad about themselves, no one would get laid. That’s why I now believe low self-esteem is essential to the furthering of the human race.”
For some stupid reason, this was funny to me. Caden laughed. It was a good laugh and it made him even better looking to me. Which is insane because with his six foot frame, his square jaw and his GQ face, Caden is the kind of guy girls get wet for the second he walks by. He doesn’t act like he knows it, and he doesn’t work it, and somehow this makes him such a catch.
“That’s probably why no one’s having sex at this place,” Caden said. “Everyone’s self-esteem is through the roof.”
When he said this, I involuntarily glance two tables down where Janine’s ugly four are eating and wonder, if that’s true, then those four must be doing it all the freaking time! My imagination runs wild for a second, and when I think of the über disgusting Sunshine Cranston going down on the emaciated looking Oakley McAllister, I have to choke down my laughter.
I look back to Brayden, who is looking at Maggie in a predatory, kind of seductive sort of way. He’s saying, “It is a statistical fact most adults have sex in the evening whereas teenagers mostly have sex in the afternoon.” He checks his watch then looks back up and says, “You know Maggie, it’s only one o’clock. It’s not too late for a belated nooner, if you know what I mean.”
Maggie, coming alive for the first time since I met her, says, “Did you know male kangaroos have been known to give themselves blow jobs?”
“For real?” Brayden says, shocked and amused. At this point, Caden and Damien are all ears.
“Or that female porcupines have been seen using wooden sticks as dildos?”
OMG, where did this side of Maggie come from?!
“What’s your point, sweetheart?” Brayden asks. The way he’s grinning at her, holding her eyes with his, he’s practically eye-grinding her, which is nearly impossible to look away from. It’s almost…oh, God…sexy? His confidence, that is. Girls dig a guy with confidence. It’s one way semi-decent looking guys get girls like me, girls like Maggie.
“My point is,” Maggie says, smiling back, “you can keep that purple-headed yogurt slinger to yourself. And if you want sex, it’s going to be a solitary affair. Just you, some soft music and a napkin. And the sad, sad thought that you are not nearly as talented as a kangaroo.”
Everyone bursts into laughter, including Brayden.
Done with Maggie, he turns his charm on me, barely skipping a beat. “Abby, darling, they say sixty-seven percent of all girls masturbate in the shower, and the rest sing a song.”
“Uh, that’s interesting?” I say. This is not the Brayden I know. And these are certainly not the kinds of conversations I had with my friends last semester.
“Do you know what song they sing?” I tell him I don’t know the song. He plays like he’s surprised, then he says, “Oh, so you’re one of the sixty-seven percent?”
Everyone at the table, even the gorgeous, personality-deficient Damien, falls apart in laughter. Even I have to admit, Brayden’s joke is pretty dang funny.
“Where did you hear that?” I ask.
“Saw it on a re-run of The Pick-up Artist on TV and I couldn’t resist.”
Anyway, this is the new Brayden and I like him, a lot. But that’s not why I’ve been thinking of him. What I need are his hacking skills to find my friends. The problem is, Savannah knows about his past, but Abby isn’t supposed to know a thing.
So it’s Saturday morning and Maggie and I just ate breakfast. She’s off to take a shower and get ready for the day and I’m on my way back to my room when Brayden catches up to me. He’s in spring workout clothes and he looks sweaty, but not gross sweaty.
“Dude, wait up!” he says, half jogging with a pink protein shake in his hand. The foamy pink stuff is slopping over the sides and he’s trying to drink it up and not waste it, which makes him look hilarious and uncoordinated, but not in a bad way.
Laughing, I say, “Did you just call me dude?”
“Yeah, man. Hold up, my legs are rubber right now.”
“I’ve got places to be, Brayden,” I say, acting like he’s putting me out. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I guess it’s just what we girls do to boys: play hard to get…with all of them.
“I told you to call me Enigma.”
“How about I call you retard instead?”
“Where are you going?” he asks, finally catching his breath.
It’s freezing out here. Pulling my coat tighter around me, I start walking again. “I’m heading back to my room.”
“How come I haven’t been over yet?”
“That’s a big step in our friendship I’m not sure I’m ready to take just yet,” I say, teasing.
He takes a big drink of his pink goop. It leaves a mustache on his face, the first he has ever had, I’m sure.
“Look, I’m not sure I want to go to your room, I’m just curious why you haven’t invited me. It’s kind of, well, it’s not really polite, you know?” I’m about to say something when he holds his hand up, like he’s got more to say. “Look, the truth is, I’m not sure it really matters. You and me, we’re friends, and I’m content with that, but you should know my taste in women varies. In other words, I just don’t like you like that, so don’t get all weird on me.”
I stare at him, all the air pushed out of my lungs with that statement. Brayden was really ugly last year. I mean, with the plain hair, the skinny body and the dopey face, you could hear girls’ vaginas drying up the minute he breezed by them. He rejected me when I was fat Savannah, but he wanted me when I was pretty Savannah, so what’s wrong with me now that I’m even better looking than before? And for Christ’s sake, why the hell do I even care this much?
The voice in my head says, “Because rejection is rejection no matter where it comes from.” I guess that’s how straight guys can get all butt hurt when gay guys don’t find them good looking.
I want to ask what changed him over the break, beyond the physical anyway, but I’m not supposed to know he was every bit a freaking non-band band geek back then. The way he learned to style his hair in a sort of sexy, dangerous way, he’s got some edge now and I admit, it’s kind of magnetic. Like how certain normal society girls have a thing for criminals, dirt bags and sometimes even nerds. For heaven’s sake, he drives a hearse!
Wow, talk about an unexplainable attraction.
With his nearly black hair, his dark eyebrows and guyliner, his face is intriguing. Kissable? Perhaps. His lips aren’t so bad. And now, with some muscle tone and the extra weight, his face and body look fuller and more attractive. Not s
o much like a pre-teen whose balls haven’t dropped yet.
“I think I’m not hard on the eyes,” I say, trying to understand him. “And I’ve got a fun personality—”
“Hey,” he says, holding up his hands, “whatever humps your camel. All I’m saying is you don’t have to worry about me because you’re not my type. In other words, it’s like totally safe to be friends.”
“Don’t you think that’s a little rude? You saying it like that?”
“Girls are always wondering what boys are thinking, right? Well I’m just trying to let you know my tastes aren’t typical.”
“Okay,” I say, my hands suddenly on my hips, defensive. Everything in my posture is antagonistic and I’m biting back the hostility, which for me has become a bi-product of both my new DNA and rejection. “What is your type, if I’m not it? Not that it matters.”
“I like a girl with a few miles on her. A girl who’s more interested in who she is rather than how she looks. You see, at this school, everyone has a look, a certain overdone, plasticized beauty. For me, beauty isn’t everything. For me to find a girl attractive, she has to have three things. One,” he says, “she has to have good energy, which you do. Two, she has to have a good outlook on life. I’m not sure how you view the world and life yet, so that’s going to be important for me to—”
“What’s the third thing?” I ask, impatient, the child in me dying to break fragile things.
“Oh,” he says, “the third thing.” He’s looking at me kind of funny, then his eyes clear and he says, “Damn, I don’t remember the third thing,” and then he starts laughing. Okay, I should find that funny, but I don’t. All I can think about is why he isn’t attracted to me. My inner child is dying for an answer!
“If you don’t even know what you want,” I say, challenging him, “then how do you know I’m not it?”
“Look, you’re just too perfect for me, if that makes sense. I like mysterious, and temperamental. I like a girl with tattoos and maybe a few scars.”
“Is this about the scars on your back and chest? Because they’re not really that big a deal,” I say, getting more mad by the minute, although I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m aiming high with Damien, but now the school’s Average Joe is rejecting me and won’t say why. “And who said you could come over here and pee in my Cheerios this morning anyway? What did I ever do to you?”
I’m saying this, getting on my high horse, the angry side of me preparing to drop f-bombs when I see the stricken look on his face.
“What?” I say, more forceful than necessary.
“Who told you about my scars?”
Oh, crap. Crap, crap, CRAP!
“It was a metaphor?” I say, the fight draining from me quick. I really blew the dog on this one, I know it.
“It’s not a metaphor,” he says, crossing his arms and forgetting about his pink shake. “You cited a specific example.”
Yep, it’s official: my cover’s blown.
“Look, Brayden, or Enigma, I’m freezing cold and maybe my panties are in a bit of a twist over you saying the things you said, but—”
“I want to know how you know about my scars!” he says, fuming. Fun Brayden is officially left the building, his composure so long gone it’s not even a distant memory. Inside, my heart hurts. Inside, I hate that I’ve just done this to him. And I simply loathe my big fat mouth right now.
Finally I let out an exhausted sigh and say, “Alright. Come to my room and I’ll tell you.” I knew I couldn’t keep up this charade forever.
“This should be interesting,” he says, his snide tone reminiscent of the old days when he used to ridicule everyone around him.
“More interesting than you know,” I hear myself mumble.
2
We walk into the girl’s dorms to my room on the first floor. As I’m unlocking the door, he says, “This is Savannah Van Duyn’s old room.”
“Thanks for the 411.”
I open the door and head inside and it doesn’t exactly look like it did last semester, but with so much of the décor already in place before I arrived, it gives nothing away. Even my computer is different, which is where his eyes go first.
After he’s looked around, he leans up against the door and says, “There’s something strange and familiar about you.”
“No kidding, you big dumb ass.”
He straightens up, not understanding.
“I called you twice over winter break but your dad said you were in freaking Vegas of all places. Then I come back here and you’re different and I’m different and so I just sort of thought I’d see what you’ve become.”
Understanding hits his eyes, along with doubt, and maybe even a sprinkle of disbelief. Then, it’s like wonderment wrapped in surprise wrapped in excitement. “Savannah?” he says, stepping forward, hopeful.
“Version 4.0,” I say with a smile and a curtsy.
He gives me a huge hug and I give him a huge one back, and he says, “How did I miss version 3.0?” He steps back, looking me over. “Oh my gawd!”
“That Nazi-looking butthole Gerhard injected me with a physical variant of Caesium-137,” I say, telling him the whole story. Then: “Version 3.0 was horribly ugly. A melted, half-ugly bridge troll.”
“That’s what Damien said. He felt so bad for you.”
“He told you?” I say, embarrassed.
“Uh, yeah. After what we all went through last semester, how the hell does this come as a surprise to you? Plus we’re sort of friends now.”
“I guess I should’ve known he’d say something.” I fill him in on the rest of the story and I can see it’s a lot to take. Still, there’s that overwhelming excitement of having his friend back.
“So what’s with you being a dick back there anyway?” I ask.
“When we were kids, if a guy likes a girl, he throws rocks at her. That was the equivalent of me throwing rocks.”
“And who told you that would work?”
“Trust me, eventually it works. You see, on a scale of one to ten, you’re a full fledged ten, a wet-my-pants ten, and I’m like a five, maybe a six at best. I needed to get you feeling like you needed to win my approval. It’s called a neg. A playful insult that gets girls out of the ‘I’m so much better than you’ way of thinking.”
“Well it didn’t work on me,” I say. Or did it? Holy balls, it did work!
“That’s because you’re you. You’re a ten that still thinks like a five.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“That’s a compliment!”
“Yeah, well wrap it in bacon next time.”
“Okay, I’ll try again. The three things I like in a girl are one, good energy, two, a good outlook on life, and three I like a girl who doesn’t take herself too seriously. You don’t exactly meet the third one, but I’m still sort of crazy about you anyway.” I take a breath to speak, but he quickly says, “but that was before I knew you’re…who you are.”
“What, so now you don’t like me?” I ask.
“Actually I like you even more, but romance between us was never in the cards, so I just kind of came to peace with that. But now…holy cow, I’m going to have to bury my horniness for you all over again!”
There’s a part of me that’s happy to hear he can compartmentalize his feelings; but another part of me wonders if our life will be like the cookie-cutter, PG-13 teen romance movies where the ugly boy and the pretty girl are best friends who only realize they love each other when the girl is about to marry some douchebag in San Francisco, or New York or wherever. Maybe we won’t be those people from the movies, but maybe we will.
Do I really want Brayden to like me? Is his approval in some way validating who I am now? Do I want to be wanted? By Jake and Caden and Damien, yes. But by others? I never knew it could get so complicated! The concept of dating still seems so far away. I’ve barely even kissed a boy. Maybe I’m just too scared to put myself out there.
Brayden says, “Hello, Earth to Savannah.”
I snap out of it and he says, “Hey, where’d you go just now?”
“I’m not sure how to be…me, Brayden. I mean, all my life I’m fat, then I’m in the worst pain imaginable, and then I’m hot, then in pain again, then just about freaking radiated to death, and now I’m this version of myself. I don’t even know who this is! Seriously, I feel like an imposter. Like any day now something’s going to go wrong with me and I’ll end up worse off than before. You don’t know what it’s like to get your dream body then watch half of it deteriorate almost over night. And then, I was like Kaitlyn: put in stasis. I lost weeks to my treatment only to come out of the canister Caucasian for the love of Christ. Caucasian!”
“I didn’t realize you were so attached to your heritage,” he tells me.
“I didn’t either. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to wake up one day and be like, holy shit, I’m Asian. Or Black. Or freaking Norwegian. You trust that whatever color you were when you were shat out of the womb, that’s the color you’ll stay.”
“Tell that to Michael Jackson,” he says with a grin.
I slap him hard in the arm and say, “That’s not funny.” He gives me a hurt look, but really he’s just faking it. I touch his arm again, amazed at the muscle beneath it. “Wow man, how often are you working out?”
“Without a computer, I’m going nuts. I work out to keep myself occupied. Plus, with my dad telling me I couldn’t get Gerhard’s treatments, I had to have a place to put all the anger.”
“I’m glad you didn’t kill yourself over break,” I say. I was never really worried, but anytime someone threatens suicide, you can’t help but wonder if they will be the one who does it for real.
“What kid tries to kill themselves these days anyway?” he says.
“Uh, I did.”
“Crap, that’s right. Sorry.”
“Anyway, it’s not just my skin color. It’s more. Truthfully, and you probably won’t understand this, but that color was really the only thing I had on me to prove I was Margaret’s little girl.”
“But you hate her.”
