Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
PART ONE ZOOM IN
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
PART TWO EXPOSURE
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
PART THREE BLUR
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PART FOUR FIELD OF VIEW
CHAPTER TWENTY
Acknowledgments
Copyright Page
To my sister Nancy, for being there when I needed you most.
PART ONE ZOOM IN
CHAPTER ONE
I don’t know how you can see something before it’s actually there, but you can. I guess it’s the signs, right? Like little pieces of a gigantic invisible puzzle, all coming together, but you don’t see what you’re supposed to see, don’t know what there is to know, until they’re all attached and you step back to look at it. And then you think, I should have known. But the thing is, you already did.
Here’s when I knew but didn’t really know:
When she hadn’t come to the phone the last couple of times I had called home.
When Dad picked me up from fat camp all by himself.
When he acted like he always did when she was gone, like nothing was wrong, when in fact, everything was wrong.
When we both avoided bringing her up the whole car ride home.
And then I came home and saw what I already knew.
Mom had left us . . . again.
The day before the first day of school, I’m hanging out at my best friend Ahmed’s house, anticipating what the year will be like.
“You’re money, baby!” Ahmed tells me as he stands staring into his closet dressed in his blue velvet smoking jacket. Ahmed has been my best friend since the fifth grade, and yeah, he actually owns a smoking jacket. I laughed my ass off the first time I saw him in it. I thought I was looking at a pimp or something, but now it seems totally normal. It’s totally Ahmed.
We’re in his room when he says he thinks I might actually have a chance with a girl this year. I swivel around in his chair, staring at the Rat Pack posters on his walls for the millionth time. Ahmed is obsessed with the Rat Pack. There are posters and postcards of them all over his Las Vegas–themed bedroom, and there’s actually a really funny one where Ahmed went to all the trouble of taking a picture of his face, cropping it to size, and pasting it on the poster so he looks like he’s crooning into one of those old-timey microphones with the rest of them. He’s the only guy I know that has pictures of old men in suits up on his walls. Anyway, Ahmed tries to be smooth and cool like those cats but he’s not. He’s gangly and completely ADHD, always bouncing around or fidgeting, which must be why he’s so damn skinny, like his metabolism is on turbo speed.
“Trust me, baby, this is going to be your year,” he says.
“Yeah, doubt it,” I tell him, although I hope he’s right.
“No, I’m serious. I mean, okay, so I know you were hacked when your parents sent you to Camp Fit but . . .”
“Fat camp. Just call it fat camp, like it really is,” I say.
He was right. I was pissed that my parents shipped me off like that. Actually, it was more so my dad, after he and Mom had a big fight in the beginning of the summer. I should’ve known at dinner that night, when I reached for my third helping of meat loaf and mashed potatoes, or when I followed that with two helpings of chocolate ice cream, courtesy of Mom who always kept the freezer stocked (when she was around). Dad didn’t say anything as I stuffed my face, but I could feel the way he kept looking at me, and then how he kept looking over at Mom. And later as I hid in my room, I couldn’t help but press my ear up against the wall to get a better listen to Mom and Dad’s muffled voices on the other side of the wall.
It had been awhile since we’d all sat down to eat together, so maybe Dad forgot how much I could put away, or maybe I forgot to hide it from him the way I usually did, but did he have to make me sound like such a mess? We have to help him, Carmen. Did you see how much he ate? My God. His words made me cringe, and my face and ears got hot and sweaty as I pressed them harder against the wall. Mom insisted he was being ridiculous and that nothing was wrong. They went back and forth, Mom making light of everything Dad said, which, of course, made Dad even more pissed, and the whole argument ended with an emphatic decision for an immediate intervention.
He actually used the word intervention. Like I was an addict—a screwed-up food equivalent of a meth head. I pictured myself panhandling on the streets for money to buy a box of Ho Hos, scrounging up a couple of bucks, and heading to the nearest gas station to buy the vanilla crème–filled goodness. The clerk would recognize me and shake his head as I shoved it in my face, making grunting noises like a wild boar.
Intervention.
My dad thought I needed professional help. I’d never felt like such a fuckup in my life.
So when he came in my room the next day and proposed I go to fat camp, giving me some bullshit spiel about starting off my senior year on the right foot, along with a bunch of other motivational crap, there were two things I could have done instead of just shrugging my shoulders and saying, “sure.” I could have told him the last thing I wanted to do was go to Fatties Anonymous where I would talk about my excess corpulence and see my gross self reflected back at me through all the other fat losers there. Or I could have sided with Mom—but I’ve learned to never side with Mom, which basically means there was only one option.
See, siding with someone usually means I have your back and you have mine. It usually means you might be wrong but we’ll pretend you’re right because there are two of us and majority rules. But siding with Mom doesn’t mean that. Siding with Mom means siding with the current mood or state of mind that she’s in, and Mom’s moods and state of mind change at lightning speed (which means that whoever thinks for one delusional moment that she might have their back is dead wrong). The one who thinks they are on the same team with Mom is left totally fucked when she prances on over to the other side or leaves the field altogether.
“Okay, fat camp,” Ahmed says, “but look at you. You look good, my man! Might even get a little hey-hey with that chickie that moved in down the street.” Ahmed says this in his usual Rat Pack lingo. Sometimes it makes him sound like a dumbass, but he doesn’t seem to care, even when people look at him funny. I think Ahmed has convinced himself that in all his Rat Pack glory, he transcends even the coolest teenager. I don’t give any indication that what he’s said means much to me, though he has just voiced what has become my secret mission this year: getting Charlotte VanderKleaton to notice me (in a good way).
The first time I saw Charlotte VanderKleaton was a week before I left for fat camp. I was walking to Ahmed’s to tell him about Dad’s messed-up plan when I saw her and her family moving into the McGoverns’ old house. She was sitting on the front porch swing, holding a flowerpot with reddish-orange flowers the same color as her hair. She was just sitting there swinging, and I swear it looked like she was talking to these flowers, petting their little petals. She was the most amazing girl I’d ever seen. I don’t usually believe in all that crap about auras, but I swear, she kind of glowed.
Okay, it had been an unusually hot day for early summer in North Carolina, and with all
that extra weight on me, some could argue that I was simply overheated and hallucinating, but I know I saw somewhat of a glow surrounding Charlotte. I came to a dead stop, my mouth hanging wide open. When she looked over at me on the other side of the street and waved, I could’ve died because I could only imagine what I looked like in all my sweaty, fleshy wonder. I stared at the cement, pretending not to see her, and continued to Ahmed’s. But secretly, in the darkest recesses of my mind, in those places we have embarrassing thoughts that we’re glad no one else has access to, I made a decision. I thought, if Dad is going to make me go, I’ll lose this weight for just a chance with this girl. I’ll come back a brand new person, someone who could actually talk to someone like her. So I didn’t wave back because I didn’t want her to remember this guy ever again.
I never thought girls like her actually existed. She’s not like other pretty girls that guys jack off to in the secrecy of their beds at night. She’s different. She doesn’t walk; it’s more like she floats. And every time I’ve seen her, something always sparkles, her skin or her hair or her lips (God . . . her lips). I thought it was bullshit that people met someone and instantly fell in love with them. But that’s how I felt about her.
“Although . . . ,” Ahmed breaks into my thoughts, “she and Mark have been cozying up this summer quite a bit. I don’t get how that fink got to her so fast. He doesn’t even live around here.”
Ahmed wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t already know. I’d seen Mark Delancey’s car over there enough since fat camp to know something was going on. And I wondered how Kennedy High’s notorious prankster and all-around glorified jerk had managed to weasel himself into her good graces.
“Whatever. It’s not like it matters. Like Charlotte would ever give me the time of day anyway,” I tell Ahmed, leaving out my plan to him, so when it doesn’t work out, I don’t have to feel like such an ass. I try to play it cool. But now Ahmed’s got me thinking about Mark, and I start to wonder just how close those two have gotten. The thought of Charlotte with another guy, especially someone like Mark, makes me feel like someone is squeezing my lungs.
“Listen, Charlie, if you’re gonna get with the ladies this year, you gotta act like you’re the shit—know what I mean? Be smooth, toss a little smile her way, say hello, and when she smiles back, act like you don’t care. What happens then, you ask? Well, then you got the little chickie just aching for you, wondering if you’re gonna look her way again. Know why? Girls like drama. They want to yak and cluck with the rest of the hens about whether you looked at her or talked to her or brushed up against her in the hall. They don’t want guys who are there no matter what. The last thing you wanna do is let them know you’re into them. If they know that, it’s all over. Then, they thrust their heels right into your stupid little heart and stomp all over you. Trust me. I know.” He taps his foot on the floor and smacks his hand against his thigh incessantly.
Ahmed is heavy on relationship advice now because he dated Tina Capelli for exactly three months and two days last year. Tina was Ahmed’s first real girlfriend, and he’d fallen hard for her. I thought it was pretty interesting that he was telling me how to be such an ass when he had totally gone all gaga over Tina—bought her flowers for no reason, opened the door for her, walked her to every class even though he ended up getting a ton of detentions from being constantly late to his classes. He even dropped me for a while because he was spending so much time with her. He’d gone the whole nine yards, but it wasn’t enough. They broke up right before summer because Tina was going to Jersey for the entire vacation. She told Ahmed she couldn’t have fun, real fun, if she had to worry about a boyfriend back home. Basically, it was her way of telling him she was going to be hooking up with other guys left and right all summer long. Nice. Ahmed was devastated. He even cried. But we made a pact never to talk about that again—and I mean he wrote an actual pact and made me sign it. Ahmed’s Rat Pack Pact, he called it, and he outlined a creed of appropriate Rat Pack behavior, one of which was never cry for a chickie—and if that should happen—never, never, never discuss the incident.
It’s not like I don’t appreciate the advice Ahmed gives me. God knows I could use it if I really wanted to get with Charlotte. What former fat boy couldn’t? I should be taking notes. I should be scribbling away like he’s freakin’ Hugh Hefner. But sitting here talking about her, thinking about Mark, knowing tomorrow is the first day of school and the last day to set my plans to get Charlotte VanderKleaton into effect, I feel sick.
The truth is, I hadn’t come up with an actual plan. Even though I’d lost some weight (though I could still stand to lose a good twenty pounds more) and I’d gotten a few new items in my wardrobe, I still didn’t have the smooth skills to actually talk to this girl. And talking to her would probably be a prerequisite to getting with her. What was I thinking? I’m suddenly glad I never told Ahmed about how Charlotte was my motivation for losing weight. I’m glad he doesn’t know that as I jiggled my fat ass in a frenzy of jumping jacks and sprints, I was thinking of her. And now, I really didn’t want to hear Ahmed talk about girls and how cruel and heartless they can be.
“Tina back from Jersey?” I ask. I know it’s a low blow, but I put it out there anyway. After Tina, all Ahmed did was go on these long, random tangents about girls and, ironically, the best way to stop it was to mention Tina.
Ahmed stops twitching and straightens up.
“Don’t know. Don’t care. I don’t talk to that dame anymore. She couldn’t handle the sophisticated stylings of a man like myself. In fact, my man, I have no idea what I ever saw in her anyway.” He pulls up the collar of his smoking jacket. I don’t bother to tell him that, in fact, we both know exactly what Ahmed saw in Tina Capelli since it was impossible to miss the two swelling mountains on her chest that every boy in school wanted to conquer.
“Hey, how do you know that new girl’s name anyway?” he asks, his mind backtracking to something I said five minutes ago, which is usually the case with Ahmed. He abandons his search for the perfect button-down shirt and skinny tie that will let all the ladies know he’s back on the market and throws himself on his bed, props his feet on to the wall, and proceeds with an improvised tap dance.
“Heard her mom calling for her,” I tell him, which is true. I’d actually started jogging around the neighborhood when I got back from fat camp with the pretense that I had to stay in shape and lose more weight, but really, for the more important purpose of getting another look at Charlotte. And it was on one of these jogs that I passed her house and heard her mom calling her from the car to help bring in the groceries. Charlotte. Beautiful, amazing, intoxicating Charlotte. And I thought maybe it meant something that her name is Charlotte and mine is Charlie—both beginning with “Char”—and then I got lost in the thought that we were destined to be together.
“Aha, so you got the nerve to do a little stalking did you? Get a little peekaboo in her window, too?” He grins.
“Shut up.” I get up from the swivel chair at his desk. The idea of peeking into Charlotte’s window makes me feel ashamed and excited at the same time.
“I gotta jet,” I tell him. “My dad will be home soon, and I told him I’d take care of dinner tonight.”
“All right, Betty Crocker. Pick you up tomorrow. Be ready, my man, it’s our senior year! Senior year! Woot!” Ahmed jumps off the bed and does some crotch-grabbing Michael Jackson moves. “Watch out, ladies, here I come!” he yells in a high-pitched voice.
“See you later, Freak,” I say as he moonwalks across his room.
I walk home thinking of what tomorrow will be like. I hope Charlotte is in some of my classes. I wonder if she will remember the fatty on the sidewalk that didn’t wave back to her that day and figure out it was me. When I think of that day, I’m secretly grateful Dad did this, even though at the time I could’ve decked him for insisting I was going to enjoy it.
I mean, sure, it was true that once I got there it was kind of nice not being the only fat ki
d around. For once, there were others much bigger than me, and I didn’t look completely out of place. But the truth is, I couldn’t stand being surrounded by those rejects. They were all so pathetic and weak. And since I didn’t want to make any new friends, I sure as hell couldn’t partake in the black market of Ring Dings and chocolate bars that ran through the place like a freakin’ drug cartel, so I had to suffer all summer long with no one to talk to. But screw them. I chomped on my lettuce, did the exercises, and the weight actually started coming off, and then I thought, wait . . . I can do this. And I did.
I should’ve been ecstatic when the last day of camp finally came and Dad drove up in his black SUV and threw my suitcase in the back. I should have been grinning from ear to ear that I’d lost thirty pounds of fat that had apparently put me in the category of immediate intervention. I should have been pissing myself that my pants were falling off, that I’d shown Dad I wasn’t as pathetic as he thought, and that I had actually learned some stuff and was determined to go home and continue this shit on my own. I should’ve been dancing because I would never have to see these freaks again. But I wasn’t, because despite this momentous and felicitous occasion, as I got in Dad’s car and listened to his congrats and what I think looked like a glimmer of pride in his eyes, I already knew. Mom was gone.
Maybe she left because Dad made me go to fat camp. Maybe she left because I didn’t side with her. Maybe she left because the moon was half-full or because there was a 30 percent chance of rain. Who the hell knows. I’m tired of trying to figure it out because here’s the thing: my mom is a perpetual runaway.
I know, that doesn’t make sense to anybody but me, but that’s what she is. She just runs away. I don’t know why; I don’t know where. We just wake up sometimes—and poof!—she’s gone. Then we wake up—and poof!—she’s back. Dad pretends not to notice or care. Mom pretends not to notice or care—or maybe she really doesn’t. So I have to pretend not to notice or care. And that’s just the way it is.
The Downside of Being Charlie Page 1
