Biggie

by Derek E. Sullivan

  Although he’s holding up the phone, I still give in to the urge to check my pockets for it. The only bump I feel comes from a pen in my left front pocket. The early morning walk took forever and I had to rush to get ready for school.

  “Are you even a little bit serious about baseball or was this morning some joke to you?” He tosses my phone onto my lap.

  “I was hungry,” I muster.

  “You just ate five minutes ago,” he says.

  “That’s not enough food. I can’t make it through the day. ”

  “That’s bullshit,” he says. “That’s all I had. That’s all Maddux had. You don’t need to stuff your face all the time.”

  In the twelve years I’ve known Laser, I’ve never been scared of him or worried he’d hit me. Until now. His face has a red glow. I can tell he wants to pound the crap out of me.

  He slides the palm of his hand down his face, traveling over his eyes, the brim of his nose, and his lips.

  “You have high blood pressure,” he says, “It’s way too high for a seventeen-year-old. Don’t you care at all about your health? Do you want to have a heart attack in your twenties? What’s wrong with you?”

  I don’t answer any of the questions. I just squeeze shut the Molly’s bag, holding in the steam.

  “You’re three hundred pounds, Biggie,” he continues. “Three hundred pounds. Listen to that—three hundred pounds. Is there any part of you that is tired of looking—?” Unable to think of a nice word, he stops and shakes his head.

  “I’m sorry” is all I can say.

  “You better apologize to yourself,” he says. “Or to your mom. How can I tell her about this? I mean, you’re going to kill her before you kill yourself. She worries so much about you. Do you have any idea how many times she has cried herself to sleep? She goes to the grocery store to buy you healthy food. She gets up early every morning to make you a nice breakfast. And you repay her by sneaking food behind her back.”

  My eyes look straight ahead, over the steering wheel, on the cars and trucks racing down Main Street. If someone gave me a million dollars, I still wouldn’t turn to look at Laser.

  “Give me the bag, Biggie,” he orders.

  I grip it tighter. “No. If I don’t eat this, I’ll pass out at school.”

  He squeezes my wrist to loosen my hold, but I keep my fingers locked on the paper bag.

  “You will not pass out at school. That’s ridiculous. This bag of grease will just make you fat, not healthy.”

  “You know if people didn’t call me fat or Biggie all the time, maybe I would care more about my weight.”

  “You don’t want to be called Biggie?”

  “Would you?”

  He leans in, rips the bag out of my hands, and says, “This ends now. You are going to play baseball next summer, and you are going to weigh two hundred pounds doing it. You want people to stop calling you Biggie? Well, do you?”

  With my eyes focused on the floor at the Mountain Dew that Laser has yet to secure, I offer a small smile.

  “God damn it, Biggie, talk!”

  “I don’t want to be called Biggie anymore.”

  “You want something in life, you have to earn it. You don’t want me, Maddux, your teammates to call you Biggie, then you have to earn it.”

  He reaches forward, grabs the Mountain Dew, and gets out of the truck.

  I drop my head against the steering wheel and grip it tight. As I shake the steering wheel like I might yank it out and grind my teeth, a thought boils inside me and I lean back and scream at top of my lungs.

  “God damn it, Mom. Why did you rip up that note?”

  I dig my fingernails into my forehead and scratch down my face, almost cutting open skin. When I reach my neck, I whisper, “My life’s over.”

  Chapter 10

  #Friends

  I don’t sleep much anymore. Most nights, I stay up until two, talking online and then lying in bed until three or three thirty. And since I agreed to get up at five to work out, my nightly shut-eye has dropped to an hour and a half. Thank goodness for the caffeine in Mountain Dew or I would fall asleep in class or behind the wheel.

  Tonight all I can think about is Annabelle. Ever since eighth grade, I have known she would be my first date, my first kiss. Now I’m a junior and I’ve done nothing about it.

  Earlier I peeked again at her Gmail account. I know that makes me a creepy stalker, but I have good reasons. One, I’m planning the perfect date, which will be a night she’ll never forget. Yes, I’m snooping, but the way I look at it is that when we’re eighty years old and reminiscing on how we met, I doubt she’ll care how I put together the night we fell in love. Second, I’m addicted to her poetry. She sends all of her poems to her cousin, Margaret, who lives on an air force base in Germany. The first poem of hers I read is called It Felt Like Being Drunk. The poem itself sucks. It rhymes but the rhymes are not good. The first two lines go like this or something:

  Tuesday was a blast. Wednesday sucked ass.

  Thursday flat out stunk. Friday, I will get drunk.

  I always wonder if she drank when she was a seventh grader or if it is a metaphor for doing something else, something seventh graders do. I don’t know how to explain it, but the idea that she might’ve gotten drunk when she was thirteen made me like her then, and now, five years later, I still like her. I just can’t find the perfect time to ask her out.

  If I’m going to be Annabelle’s boyfriend, I’m going to have to lose weight. I know that. I’m not stupid. She’s beautiful—dark hair with red streaks, little nose, green eyes. She’s about five-foot-six with massive breasts trapped inside those amazingly tight V-neck shirts, my favorite. She has her ears and nose pierced. The nose piercing, a little silver stud centered on her left nostril, makes me melt every time I see her. She probably weighs around 160 pounds—not anorexic, but not fat either. Since I fell for her five years ago, she’s had five boyfriends. Three of them easily weigh more than two hundred pounds, so she doesn’t like skinny guys.

  I figure if I can get down to 250 pounds, she would go out with me. And if television diet shows have taught me anything, it’s that fat people lose weight at a faster rate than skinny people. With Laser training me, I should lose fifty pounds in a few weeks.

  Once I reach 250, I need to quit being a pussy and step up and ask her. I have all the research I need; I just need to pull the trigger and ask her out. But how do I do it? How can I ask out someone who I’ve never had a single conversation with? She comes into the convenience store most nights, so I could just ask her then. But what do I say? Hey Annabelle, want to go out with me sometime? No, I need a more open-ended question. It’s a girl’s reflex to say no when asked out by surprise. Maybe I’ll ask her what she’s doing on Friday night. That’s pretty open. She can’t say no to that.

  But what if she tells me she’s going out on a date, which would be worse than her saying no. I guess I could ask her if she’s still dating Mike, but then I might come across as her dad, wondering what she’s up to. This is so difficult.

  My problem is that I’m trying to accomplish this the hard way—in the real world. Nothing good ever happens in the real world—at least not to me.

  As I think about her, I feel the urge to see that smile, those eyes, those V-neck shirts. I roll out of bed and flip open my laptop.

  I pull up Twitter and log out of my account. As I go to log in with her information, I stop. For years, I’ve scrolled through her private, protected photos with her password, but now, after the perfect game, I wonder if I could just be her Twitter follower and see the photos that way. I’ve never sent her a follow request. In fact, I’m not friends with anyone at school on any site. I keep my online and school worlds apart.

  Not that I haven’t thought about sending her a request. I mean, we do go to school together. I doubt she wouldn’t accept it. But then a
small part of me worries that she would find it weird that I asked. Maybe she would take a closer look at me and figure out that I’ve been logging on to her account for years. Whenever I’ve considered sending a follow request, I’ve decided it’s better to remain invisible.

  But tonight, I send the request. It happens so fast. Half of me wants to take it back, but the other half is curious. What will happen next?

  The message comes across the bottom of my screen: @Annabelle has approved your request. And then I get another message: @Annabelle is now following you. I immediately click on her photos and start scrolling. The pictures are ten times hotter now that I can look at them because she wants me to see them. There’s no way I’m sleeping tonight. I’m too excited.

  Chapter 11

  One Hundred Ounces Of Mountain Dew

  While Laser never told Mom that I was sneaking junk food, he did convince her to send me to Dr. Pence. There’s nothing worse than being fat in a doctor’s office. When people walk into a waiting room, they scan the room and wonder what each person has. It’s human nature. In most cases, no one knows. But when someone sees a fat ass sitting there squeezed like a sardine into a chair built for someone half his size, it’s pretty easy to figure out why he’s there—because he’s fat.

  As I sit there, I watch people look at me and lift some pity smiles. They feel bad for me like it’s horrible being fat. I hate those pity smiles. I want to scream, “Don’t feel bad for me. I’m a hell of a lot smarter than you.”

  “Henry Abbott,” a nurse shouts out.

  “C’mon,” Mom says with a rub of my thigh.

  The last time I went to this doctor, I weighed 275 pounds. It was February 16, and I told Mom the weight gain was due to Valentine’s Day chocolates.

  I know the first thing the nurse’s going to do is have me step onto a scale, which will likely put me on the wrong side of three hundred. I try to wear baggy clothes, sweatshirts and sweatpants, and stay out of sight, so Mom won’t know, that despite her best efforts, I’ve put on weight. She’s not stupid, but I’m sure she believes I’ve put on five or ten pounds. I doubt she realizes that I’ve crossed three hundred pounds. The doctor says she should weigh me every couple of weeks, but Mom doesn’t. I think it’s because when she sees the numbers 270, 280, 290 pop up, she’ll start to cry or be embarrassed. Instead she makes me low-calorie meals and hopes the granola, fruit, and baked chicken work wonders.

  There’s little I can do now. I’m three steps from the scale and all the baggy T-shirts in the world aren’t going to help me now.

  I step on the scale. It immediately flashes 319 pounds, then drops to 313 before settling at 317, a new record. Wow, I really thought missing out on a week of Molly’s and walking a few miles would lower my weight, maybe to even less than 300.

  Mom smiles at me as we walk to the exam room to wait for Dr. Pence. Her smile is the same pity smile the old ladies and little girls shared with me in the waiting room.

  Dr. Pence is a jackass, know-it-all old man who treats me like a cancer patient. He loves to tell me that if I don’t stop eating junk food, I’ll die. I would believe him except for the fact that dozens of people come in and buy shit from me every night in the convenience store. All we sell is crap food: potato chips, Twinkies, pop, beer, beef jerky, and greasier food than a fast-food joint. Sure, I eat fried food at Molly’s and drink Mountain Dew like water, but so does everyone else in Finch. I wonder if Killer, who loves Dew as much as I do, gets the you’re-going-to-die speech.

  In the past few years, I have figured out a way to keep from being made fun of at school. All I have to do is keep quiet and to myself. The plan works. Everyone leaves me alone, except for Dr. Pence. He’s the only person who talks about my weight, who tells me I’m too big. No matter how hard I try, I can’t keep him from mocking me. And he does it in front of my mother. Is he doing his job? Maybe. But that doesn’t make me feel any less worthless when I’m in his office. When he knocks on the door, I just want to scream: Leave me alone!

  Dr. Pence smiles as he sits. I’m not falling for it. I know I’m going to get some typical jackass lecture from him.

  “How do you feel, Henry?” he asks.

  “Fine. I’ve been working out, so it’s good,” I mumble like an idiot.

  “You’re working out. I’m happy to hear that.”

  I hate this so much. I want to walk out so bad, but I’m trapped. He’s going to ruin my day. I know it. He’s going to make my mom cry. I just know it.

  “Henry, your high blood pressure has gotten worse, and I assume when we get your blood work back, that your cholesterol will also have gotten worse. You’re now six-foot-three and a half inches tall and you weigh three hundred seventeen pounds.”

  He leans back into his chair and presses down on the edge of the table with the tips of his fingers. I stare at them and try to ignore what he’s saying.

  “What worries me and your family is that when your mom brought you in here in February, we put you on a diet—remember?”

  I say nothing. I just sit there with a blank look on my face. He can look in my eyes, but he’s not going to see me sweat.

  “Answer him,” Mom commands.

  With jumbled and practically unrecognizable words, I mumble, “I remember.”

  “Now your mom says that you’ve been on this diet for eight months, but I don’t see any indication of a person on a diet. What I see here is a person addicted to eating—or a person trying to commit suicide with food.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I can see a tear roll down Mom’s cheek.

  I knew it, I think to myself. I knew it. I knew it. I knew it. He made her cry. My mom’s crying, which makes me want to cry. I fight it. I can’t cry in front of Dr. Pence.

  “We’re going to run tests next week to see if you have adult-onset diabetes,” Pence continues. “I’m scared to death that the results will come back positive. I’m worried that you’re doing damage to your heart and especially to your kidneys. Are you thirsty a lot?”

  I stay quiet and continue the staring contest. He wouldn’t have asked if he didn’t already know the answer.

  “Henry?” Mom waits for an answer.

  I look at my hands. I twist my wrists and stare at my palms as if the veins and vessels will tell me if I have diabetes. Of course I do. Of course I have it. I’m fat. And no doctor, not even Dr. Pence, would use that word around me if he wasn’t 100 percent sure.

  “Are you thirsty a lot?” Mom asks again.

  “I only drink liquids when I’m tired or need to stay awake,” I answer with little thought. I’m on autopilot right now.

  “Do you drink water or coffee?” Dr. Pence asks.

  “Water,” I say.

  “Kari, could you leave us alone for a second?”

  “No, I want to hear this,” Mom says through a hand now pressed against her face.

  “Okay. Henry, when we met last time, you told me that your favorite beverage was Mountain Dew and I told you that you needed to drink healthier liquids. Are you still drinking Mountain Dew or other sugar-based sodas?”

  “Sometimes,” I say.

  Dr. Pence gets up and walks to the front of his oak desk. With his shoulders curled and his hands clasped, he stares right into my eyes. “Henry, I need you to be honest. This isn’t a game. Do you drink pop in the morning, during school? Do you drink pop at lunch, for dinner, before you go to bed, or whenever you body craves it? Do you drink sugary pops?”

  “Most days, I drink five twenty-ounce Mountain Dews.”

  “That’s one hundred ounces of pop,” he says to Mom as if she couldn’t calculate the answer herself.

  I look at Mom, but she looks away, crying. I hate this man. I hate everything about him. He’s an asshole. Fuck him and his dumb questions. He should have forced Mom to leave the room before this inquisition.

  “But I haven
’t had a Mountain Dew in days.” I try to save the situation and stop the crying. “All I drink is water and juice. I’m in training.”

  Dr. Pence gets a box of tissues for Mom. “Henry, come in Monday for the test. You will need to fast for six hours before. Kari, if the results come back positive, we’ll have to meet again and talk about treatment.”

  Mom blows her nose and nods.

  “Henry, I truly hope the results come back negative and this training you’re talking about works,” he says. “I’m going to tell you what I tell every one of my obese young patients.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The last thing I want to do is attend your funeral.”

  Chapter 12

  Stipulations

  It’s weird when someone discusses your death. Sitting at the convenience store, all I can think about is diabetes.

  Although I don’t feel sick, I decide to not eat any junk food and I’m only drinking bottled water. There is nothing to get you off the Dew like hearing your gray-haired doctor say he will be going to your funeral.

  As I start to feel completely depressed at my unraveling life, a bright light walks into the store: Annabelle. She skipped school today, so this is the first time I’ve seen her since she accepted my follow request at three in the morning. So even though I’ve known her since I was five and have been in love with her since I was twelve, this is the first time we’ve officially been friends.

  She grabs her Lo-Carb Monster drink and picks up a Kit Kat. I guess she’s going to buy it. My boss would hate that I’m bummed she doesn’t steal anymore. It was our thing. She drops the junk food on the counter.

  “Three twenty-five,” I say, breaking my routine of not saying the total out loud. She pulls out a five and I count out her change. I should say something. We’re online friends now. I should ask her about her day, her clothes, working at Molly’s, something. She takes the dollar bill and three quarters and puts them in her small purse, black with a red flower, cuter than the massive tub-sized one she carries sometimes. Time’s running out. I need to say something. What are friends if they don’t talk to one another? I don’t know, but they aren’t friends. Biggie, say something.