by Allen Zadoff
The bell rings, and the hall fills with a loud groan.
“We’d better go,” I say.
“You’re not getting off that easily. I expect a full report later.”
Eytan swings his backpack up on one bony shoulder. Sometimes I think we shouldn’t hang around together. You know how big things look bigger when they’re next to small things?
Eytan is halfway down the hall when he calls back to me: “What’s her name?”
“Who?” I say.
“Your girlfriend.”
“April.”
My whole body tingles when I say the name. Suddenly I’m back at the wedding yesterday with music playing, surrounded by the smell of Mom’s food.
Remember April, the note said.
And I do.
what happened yesterday.
It was Sunday afternoon, and I was in the function hall at Temple Israel, standing in front of a table of 380 mini éclairs. The éclairs were stuffed with cream. I was stuffed into my suit pants.
Another Sunday, another wedding. That’s what it’s like when your mom’s a caterer.
Mom’s not just any kind of caterer. She has a specialty: mini food.
She does platters of mini cheeseburgers, mini club sandwiches, mini pizza bagels, mini muffins. She’s famous for her Skinny Mini Caesar Salad, which is a whole Caesar salad made on one piece of romaine lettuce so you can pop it into your mouth with your fingers.
Everyone likes small things. Take my sister, for instance. She’s got a waist like a stalk of asparagus, and she’s very popular.
Small food, small people. Extremely hard to resist.
Anyway, there was a platter of mini club sandwiches sitting on the table in front of me, and they were calling my name.
Andy, they said. Eat us.
I looked around to make sure nobody was watching me, and I scooped one up in my fist—
“I saw that,” a girl’s voice said.
It was an Asian girl, and she was looking right at me. She was about my age, wearing boxy black glasses that made her look like a genius. I glanced down at her cleavage—it was kind of hard to miss with the dress she was wearing—and I realized she was a beautiful genius.
Suddenly I got this strange feeling in my chest. I have to be careful with strange feelings because I have asthma. When I have an attack, it usually starts as a tickle in my chest. The next thing you know, there’s a giant fist clenched around my lungs and I’m gasping for breath. That’s why I keep an inhaler on me at all times.
“What did you see?” I said to the girl, and I reached in my pocket to make sure the inhaler was there. Like Mom says, better safe than sorry.
“I saw you snag a sandwich. You’ve got nice moves.”
“Not true,” I said, even though it’s obvious that I did it.
“Why do you have to hide it? Why don’t you just eat one?”
“My mom made them,” I said. “And she’ll kill me if I eat her stuff.”
“Your mom’s the caterer?” She picked up a mini éclair and popped it in her mouth like it was no big deal, like a person can just eat a whole mini éclair in public, with everyone looking.
“This is delicious,” she said. “What’s it like to have a mom who’s a caterer?”
I glanced down at my stomach. It was hanging over my belt like a muffin top. That kind of answered the question, right?
“Hello,” the girl said. “Anybody home?”
“What?” I said, kind of annoyed. Sometimes I get lost in my head so it’s hard to keep up my end of the conversation.
“I’m just being friendly,” she said. “Don’t pop a blood vessel.”
“April,” an Asian man with graying hair called.
That was the first time I heard her name.
“Coming!” she said.
“Now,” the man said. Then he spit out some rapid-fire foreign sentence.
“Is that your dad?” I said. She nodded. “He’s pretty tough, huh?”
“Imagine Kim Jong-il as a dentist,” she said.
I got a flash of the Korean dictator drilling a molar, and it made me laugh. This girl sounded like one of the Model UN geeks, funny and smart at the same time.
I really liked her. That was my first problem.
She smiled at me, and I noticed her teeth were super white, whiter than any human being’s I’ve seen.
“You have nice teeth,” I said, which even I have to admit was a pretty stupid thing to say.
April lowered her voice to a whisper: “I had teeth-whitening.”
“You mean like those strips?”
“No. The real thing. With the laser. Just like the actresses get.”
“Are you an actress?”
“No.”
“Then why did you do that?” I said.
“I used to look … different,” she said.
“Different how?”
Before she could answer, a stream of angry Korean came flying across the room. Her dad.
“Shoot,” April said. “I have to go.”
“Wait,” I said.
She was a little surprised. So was I. I’d never told a girl to wait before.
“Wait for what?” she said.
I had to say something. I couldn’t let her go thinking I was just a fat kid with a caterer mom. I mean, I am a fat kid with a caterer mom, but there’s a lot more to me. I don’t know why, but I wanted her to understand that. I wanted to tell her there was more to me that she should know.
“I’m a jock,” I said, which was a complete lie.
“You are?”
“Seriously,” I said. “I’m an athlete.”
“That’s cool,” she said, but it didn’t sound like she believed me.
“You know the sumo wrestlers in Japan?” I said.
“I’m Korean,” she said. “Everyone assumes all Asian people are Japanese, but we’re not. We’re a lot of different things.”
“I know that,” I said, even though I didn’t know. “But you’ve seen the sumo wrestlers, right?”
“Only on TV,” she said.
“You know how they look big, but they’re really not big? I mean, they are big, but they’re big in a muscular way. Like they’re famous for being big.”
“Okay.”
“I’m like them.”
“You’re a sumo wrestler?”
“No. I’m a jock. A big jock.”
“You’re a big jock?” she said, then she looked across the room. “I really have to go.”
She smiled again. It was like looking into car headlights.
I wanted to say something else. I wanted to say a million things, but I just grunted …
… and April walked away.
the pitiful life of a narrow.
That’s what happened yesterday.
So when Eytan asks me, I tell him I have a girlfriend. I even say her name.
But it’s all a lie.
I’d never seen April before yesterday, and I’ll never see her again. That’s what happens when you’re a coward. You don’t speak up. Even when it’s the perfect time. Even if it’s the only chance you’ll ever get.
“You know my theory,” Eytan says. “Hot girls are always named after months, cities, or flowers. You meet a girl named Magnolia or Dallas—guaranteed hotness. And if you name your daughter April, she’s going to have a prom date. It’s like you’ve cut fate completely out of the picture.”
Eytan gives me a double thumbs-up and disappears into the crowd.
Sophomore year is ten minutes old, and it’s already messed up. Ugo is on the warpath, I lied to my best friend, and my stomach is killing me.
To hell with my diet. I grab the protein bar out of my backpack. I tear off the wrapper and take a huge bite. I hold the backpack in front of my face for camouflage. I don’t want people to see me eating. A fat kid chewing with chocolate smeared on his face? That’s a bad first impression.
Just as I’m swallowing, a crowd of football jocks walks by. They’re laughin
g, relaxed, slapping each other on the back and grunting like they own the place.
Who am I kidding? They do own the place.
In the center of the group is this one guy, O. Douglas. If we had kings in high school, O. Douglas would be king. He’s the quarterback, a senior, and a superstar. That’s three out of three. They say he’s being recruited by a bunch of colleges, which I guess is really unusual for Newton. I don’t follow sports, so I couldn’t tell you which colleges or if they mattered.
When I look at O. Douglas, I feel like I’m from another planet or something. He’s from Earth, and I’m from some planet where everyone is fat. Elephantania. On Elephantania, I’m normal-sized, and all the skinny people like O. are the equivalent of midgets. We don’t call them midgets. That would be insulting. We have some PC name for it like “narrows.” I’m normal, and they’re narrows, and everyone feels sorry for them. That’s how it is on Elephantania. I get all the girls but nobody wants to date the narrows.
As the jocks pass by, O. Douglas looks in my direction for a second, and I get this thrill in my stomach like I saw Brad Pitt or something. Even if you’re a guy and you don’t like other guys, you kind of want to know Brad Pitt, right? Sheer cool factor.
O. Douglas lifts his hand in a wave, and I’m just starting to wave back when this girl behind me says, “Hey, O.!” in a really desperate voice.
He wasn’t waving to me. He was waving to the girl behind me.
the physics of fat.
God has it in for me. Let me tell you how I know.
I am not the fattest.
You might think that would be good news for a kid in high school, but it’s not. There is actually something much worse than being the fattest: I am the second fattest.
It’s true. I am the second fattest kid in the history of Newton High School. At least if you’re the fattest, you have something to brag about. You’re the very worst. You’re the bottom of the barrel. You are King of the Freaks.
But second fattest? What is that? That’s just another fat kid, a sad statistic of America’s obesity epidemic. Everyone cares about obesity in general, but nobody gives a crap about the second fattest kid at Newton High. I saw a documentary on the BBC Channel the other night called The 687-Pound Teenager. It was about this kid in Britain who is the size of a small mountain range. That’s the kind of world we’re living in. You have to weigh more than a quarter ton to get any attention. Being second fattest is hardly worth a mention.
Who is the fattest? His last name is Warner. That’s God’s other little joke. He’s Warner and I’m Zansky, and nearly everything in our high school involves alphabetical order. That means the two fatties are always in proximity, orbiting each other like planets in a gravitational tug-of-war. Warner and Zansky. Zansky and Warner.
As I walk into homeroom, I say a silent prayer that Warner has moved away over the summer. But the minute I get through the door, I see him. He’s standing in the back of the room, flipping through a Trig textbook and smiling. Warner is always smiling. It’s like he’s happy to be fat or something. It’s insane. Today he’s smiling and sweating. Not just a little bit. He’s sweating like a rodeo bull.
I stop dead in my tracks. I see why he’s sweating.
They changed the desks.
They’re not the folding-desk-and-chair combo we had last year. Those were the kind where you can choose to flip up the desk or keep it down, sort of like a tray table on an airplane. These new desks are not like that. They’re the ones where the chair has a half desk locked into place on the side. With this kind of chair, you either fit or you don’t.
Warner doesn’t. At least he’s not sure if he does. That’s why he’s milling around the back of the room. He’s acting like he’s at a party, relaxed and casual (not that he’d ever be relaxed and casual at a party), but I can tell it’s an act. I hate that I know what he’s thinking. I hate that I’m thinking the exact same thing.
Will I fit?
This is the Physics of Fat. Where do I fit? Each new situation is a science experiment. Chairs, desks, doorways, amusement park rides, airline and movie theater seats, pants, elevators—they all raise the same question. What mass will fit into what volume of space, and what amount of force will it take to get it there?
Today’s experiment: Homeroom.
An empty desk awaits the mountain of Warner, and two seats away, another waits for me. Between the two desks sits Nancy Yee, a Chinese girl built like a plastic drink straw, and Chen Yu, another Chinese girl who outweighs her by eight ounces or so. The poor girls are doomed to spend high school sitting between Warner and me. Even on a normal day, the back row of our homeroom looks like this:
It can’t be good for Nancy or Chen’s reputation, but I have to say it doesn’t seem to bother Nancy Yee. She doesn’t care that three Yees could fit into a desk that holds half a Zansky and one-third of a Warner. She just sits there drawing in a sketchbook, staring down at the pages through glasses thick enough to focus a spy satellite. She’s wearing plaid shorts over purple tights and some kind of vintage green sweater with sparkly purple flowers all over it. My sister watches, like, twenty-seven modeling shows a week. This is a combo that would definitely make her head explode.
“Hi, Andy,” Nancy says like she’s happy to see me. She flips her hair back, and I see a double streak of acne, both sides of her face breaking out where her greasy hair rubs against it. “Did you have a nice break?” she says.
“It was okay,” I say.
“What do you think of the new desks?”
I think Nancy just won the Stupid Question of the Year Award. But I don’t say anything. I have to remember that Nancy is oblivious. A girl who has the body mass of a Twinkie can’t imagine not fitting into a chair.
“Take your seats, please,” Ms. Weston says. She’s really dolled up for the first day of class, almost like she’s going to a party rather than school. Some guys call her Desperate Doris because she’s always trying to look younger. Even worse is that fact that she’s the Spanish teacher. There’s something sad about a woman without romance teaching a Romance language. It makes me want to cry and eat a paella.
Ms. Weston calls roll. People are starting to look at the fat kids standing in the back of the room.
Goddam Warner. I wish he would sit down or quit school or change his last name. Something. Anything. But no, he only sweats and pretends to read the stupid Trig and shuffles from one elephant hoof to the other.
“Aren’t you going to sit down?” Nancy says. I want to kill her, too.
Ms. Weston calls, “Tackenberg, Thomas, Tiburon …”
It’s now or never.
I suck in my gut, say a quick prayer to the god of physics, and aim my bulk towards the narrow opening between the desk and the chair …
Plop.
I’m in.
It takes a little adjusting, a few grunts of effort, and an embarrassing shifting of blubber around my belt—but I fit.
Ms. Weston’s at the end of the alphabet, and she calls Warner’s name. He answers from a standing position. She looks at him strangely, then looks at the empty desk. She’s about to say something, when she decides to move on. I’m kind of relieved for him.
“Zansky,” she says.
“Here,” I say proudly and from a sitting position.
I fit, and Warner doesn’t.
For now.
a revised history of fat and fifteen.
Good news. I’m in AP American History this year. They started a new pilot program where they moved some of the top sophomores into AP a year ahead of time. Me, Eytan, Nancy Yee, and a couple other kids are actually mixed in with juniors and seniors.
Even better news. The AP American History classroom has tables rather than desks. And there’s a new teacher, Ms. Hartwell. She’s younger than all the other teachers. Someone said she just got out of graduate school. That means she’s not giving us the same tired old lesson plans. She has fresh ideas.
“History is subjective,” she an
nounces in the second minute of class. “Who can tell me what that means?”
I want to raise my hand. I want Ms. Hartwell’s first impression of me to be special. I’m not just some fat sophomore who got accelerated for good grades. I’m an intellectual. I’m going to get a PhD someday, too, but I’m not sure what subject it will be in. I look around, and none of the other sophomores are raising their hands. Everyone’s afraid, especially with these older kids around. There’s a super high potential for embarrassment.
A senior with wire-rim glasses pops his hand up. I think his name is Eric. “‘Subjective’ means it’s an important subject,” he says.
“Not quite,” Ms. Hartwell says with a smile on the corner of her lips.
That makes the class laugh, and Eric looks pissed off.
“Anyone else?” she says.
I’m thinking as fast as I can, looking for some way to get into the game, but I’m coming up blank.
“That means it’s not objective. It’s someone’s opinion,” a girl says.
The voice sounds familiar. I shift around to see who said it, but there’s a big guy in front of her blocking my view.
“How can history be someone’s opinion?” Eric says. “I mean, it happened, didn’t it?”
“No,” the girl in the back says. “It didn’t happen.”
The class laughs uncomfortably. Whoever she is, she’s got serious attitude. Ms. Hartwell raises an eyebrow. I look over at Eytan, and I can see he’s excited. He’s rubbing his hands together like he’s ready for some action. He lives for this stuff.
“That’s stupid,” another guy says. His name is Justin. I recognize him because he was vice president of Model UN last year, and that’s my only club. Eytan’s, too. Eytan nominated me for chairman of the Botswana Election Committee, but Justin was a dick and blocked me. He said a freshman didn’t have enough experience to be chairman. Then he gave the position to some cute girl.
Now he tries to block the girl in the back. He says, “Things happen, and people write about it, and those things become history, right? That’s what history is.”
