The Downside of Being Charlie

by Jenny Torres Sanchez

  “Hi, everyone, I’m Mr. Killinger,” which we already know since it’s printed on our class schedules. “Most of you know, Mr. Pratt has retired, which means I get to take his place, and I am truly excited about getting to know all of you and your work.”

  Blah, blah, blah. The standard introduction crap. Pretty soon he’ll have us playing the name game. Didn’t he realize this was our fourth year of photography and the class pretty much ran itself? I’m weary of the new guy and probably a bunch of “new and exciting” things he’ll want to put in place. I study the rest of my schedule and try to figure out the quickest routes to each class.

  “I’m sure that you all are quite serious about the art of photography.” I look around wondering if anyone else is buying this. Instead I notice how most of the girls are all smiles and looking at each other like, “yes!” They’ll probably be swooning over him all year.

  “. . . so, I’m not going to give you guys a lot of little meaningless stuff. Instead, I have loftier plans . . .” This guy must read poetry and listen to obscure music—what do they call it? Adult alternative?

  “. . . is the director of the fine arts department at Rennington College. He’s also an amazing photographer and my mentor, which means every once in a while he’ll do me a favor. Now, it took some convincing, but he’s agreed to display the best collection among my high school students alongside student and faculty art at the college’s annual winter exhibit.” He pauses and looks around. The class is listening pretty intently, especially since he mentioned Rennington College, one of the most prestigious colleges in the area with a solid reputation for its Fine Arts department. I have to admit, he’s piqued my interest, but isn’t this a bit much for the first day of school? Hadn’t this guy ever heard of the freaking name game? I listen, but I’m thinking this might be one of those projects teachers come up with that totally fails. You know, the kind that sounds great until you suffer through it and then plans fall through and it somehow blows up in the teacher’s face, then they don’t end up grading it and you realize you just did a whole bunch of crap for nothing.

  “The work displayed at this exhibit is quality stuff, guys. So, you should start thinking about what you’d like to do and you better help me prove to Dr. Hoyt that high school students can produce some fantastic stuff. I know this is a lot to go over on the first day, and it’s still a few months away but, well, what else is there to do, play a lame name game?” He laughs. There’s a round of smiles and laughs in agreement.

  “The winter exhibit is in early December, and you have to have at least five quality, well-thought-out and executed frames that are great individually, but also come together to tell a story in your collection.” Mr. Killinger goes to his desk to grab a stack of papers and starts handing them out to the class. “This is something that I’m only opening up to Advanced Photography IV students, so while the odds are in your favor, the competition is stiff.” He goes over all the components and requirements of the assignment. Everyone asks a thousand questions, most of which are all similar questions stated in a bunch of different ways, which are also already answered in the handout. No wonder Mr. Pratt retired. But then Rod Stevens ask the bonus question of the day—“is there a prize?”

  “Actually . . . ,” Mr. Killinger stops and thinks for a minute before going on, “I was going to wait and use this as incentive later, but okay,” he continues, “in addition to having your work on display, Dr. Hoyt did mention something along the lines of a possible scholarship, if and only if the work is of exceptional quality.”

  Everyone seems excited. Mr. Killinger looks out at the class and smiles, satisfied with the reaction. He’s got the whole class buzzing. He’s won. He’s popular. They love him. And it’s annoying.

  I thank my lucky stars that Ahmed has a car, even if it is the tiniest car on the planet, and people laugh and point as we drive by them. Ahmed loves the attention. I don’t, but whatever, I’m just glad I don’t have to ride the bus this year because according to the unwritten laws of Kennedy High, you officially reach loser status if your senior-ass hits the green vinyl of a bus seat. You’re pushing your luck even as a junior.

  We get in the Roller Skate, and I pull the itty-bitty weightless door shut with too much force. The car shakes like crazy. I look over at Ahmed.

  “Don’t worry about it, Chuckie. It’s all good.” He clicks on the engine, and we zip out of the parking lot, weaving through and cutting off monster cars left and right.

  “So, what do you wanna do?” he asks, “Hungry?” I nod.

  “Biff’s?”

  “Burgers? Dude . . .” I look over at Ahmed.

  “Sorry, I forgot. But . . . aw, man, come on! They have sandwiches and turkey burgers, too. Can you get something like that?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” I tell him, already thinking of the torturously greasy aroma at Biff’s.

  I envy Ahmed who can order a double cheeseburger with extra cheese, large fries, a large coke, and apple fritters sprinkled with powdered sugar, and he still looks like a praying mantis. So looking like a praying mantis isn’t every teenage boy’s dream, but when you’ve looked like a fat green caterpillar your whole life, you envy the mantis. Being fat is brutal. The names for one—Chunks, Chunky, Chubs—almost anything but Charlie. And you just have to laugh and pretend like you’re in on the joke. It’s even difficult to enjoy a slice of pizza because everyone looks at you like “no wonder.” It gets old after awhile.

  “Turkey burger, no mayo, no cheese, on a whole wheat bun and . . . a side salad,” I tell the guy behind the counter. I feel like a girl right now.

  “Dressing?” he asks.

  “Got low-fat?” He looks at me funny.

  “Low-fat Italian,” he says. I nod.

  “Drink?”

  “Just water . . .” I’m totally a girl. “Football season,” I lie. He looks at me and shrugs.

  We scan the place and spot an empty booth. Ahmed unwraps his dripping cheeseburger and takes a huge bite of it. The ketchup and mayonnaise squirt out of the bun and drip down his chin. My mouth waters as I open the wrapper of my burger. It looks nowhere near as juicy or delicious as Ahmed’s. I take a chomp out of it, chew, and wash it down with water.

  We’re talking about our different classes, when Tanya Bate walks in with her mother. She looks just like Tanya, but with long frizzy gray hair instead of brown. They both wear the same thick glasses. The only difference between the two is that Tanya’s mom apparently doesn’t have an obsession with Gandalf or Bilbo Baggins.

  The staring and giggling start as soon as they walk in. They order their food and within minutes, a fry full of ketchup lands in Tanya’s hair. She claps her hand to her head and snaps around, looking for the culprit. When she notices Mark and his sidekick Danny, she glowers at them like some kind of medieval dragon and mutters under her breath. She wipes at the ketchup smeared in her hair.

  “Good one!” she yells while rolling her eyes.

  Tanya’s mother doesn’t seem to notice. Their order is up and a minute later they’re out the door. The room fills with fits of laughter coming from the table where Mark and Danny sit with a couple of girls. I watch Tanya and her mom get in the car.

  “This totally sucks,” I tell Ahmed as they drive away.

  “What? Tanya?” Ahmed asks as he shovels fry after fry in his mouth. “I know,” he manages to say when he comes up for air. I take a bite from my salad and shake my head.

  “Dude, you okay?” Ahmed asks. I chew on the watery mess in my mouth. “Oh . . . woops, sorry. This isn’t cool for you, is it?”

  “You think?” I say.

  “Right.” He shoves the last bit of apple fritters in his mouth and slurps the last of his Coke, “ah fun,” he manages through his grotesquely full mouth. He swallows. “Sorry, all done,” he repeats.

  “Thanks. You can make it up to me by trading lockers,” I tell him.

  “Hell no! Tanya Bate is anthrax. Get near her and you’re asking for a death sentence.”


  I groan. “Don’t remind me, man. You got room in your locker?” I ask, willing to be tardy for every class and serve detentions from now until the end of the school year since Ahmed’s locker isn’t near any of my classes.

  “Yeah, right! Wait . . . I didn’t tell you! Oh my God, I can’t believe I haven’t told you!” Ahmed starts twitching like he just stuck his finger in an outlet. “Guess who my locker partner is? Janie Hass, man! Freaking Janie Haas,” Ahmed says with a grin and puts two fingers to his head to resemble devil horns, “and Katrina basically has rights to it, too because you know how girls are.” Ahmed shakes his head and stares off into space. “This may be it, Chuckie, the start of a whole new outlook. These girls will reinstate my faith in womankind.” He sighs, presumably at some fantasy that involves him and the two hottest senior girls in our school. I can’t believe it. It totally figures.

  “You realize that you are Janie’s Tanya Bate,” I tell him.

  “Doesn’t matter, my man. By the end of the year, those two foxy honeys will be putty in my hands. You think it’s a sign that Janie Hass’s name includes the word ass? Gonna be a great year with the ladies!” He is beaming like a little kid who just got a puppy for Christmas, delivered into his arms by Santa himself.

  I eye Ahmed’s remnants of fries. “Man, why did this have to happen to me?” I ask him. “I had plans, you know? This was supposed to be my year.”

  “Shake it off, my man, and whatever, just carry your books.”

  “Right! You know how many books I’ll have this year? I already have five for my two AP classes.”

  Ahmed whistles low and long, “That’s what you get for being stupid smart, my man.”

  I notice Mark heading over to our table.

  “Hey, Chunks, sorry about the shit earlier today,” he says. “No hard feelings, right?”

  “Right,” I mumble even though I notice I have a clear shot at his jaw and nothing would please me more than to land a punch on his smug face.

  “Come on, that was hilarious! When Danny suggested it to me, I was like, hell yeah, man, we gotta do it! And for a split second, I thought about backing down when I found out you were her locker buddy, but . . .” His laughter comes harder, verging on uncontrollable as he tries to finish his sentence. “We just had to do it, man,” he finally finishes.

  I hold up my hand and nod. He gives me a hard slap on the back. “I knew you’d understand, Chunks. And don’t worry, the next one won’t be so bad,” he says and walks away.

  Great.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The following Thursday is my birthday, which only reminds me of last year, even though I had truly spent most of my time blocking it out of my mind since then. Mom always used to make me skip school on my birthday, declaring that how in the world could I be expected to pay attention to a bunch of boring teachers on a day meant to celebrate my life?

  When I was younger, skipping school with Mom had actually been cool because she always had something planned. A movie, a beach trip, the Fun Zone, and one time we went bowling. But that was when it had stopped being cool. It was the year I turned nine and our bowling game ended with her flipping out because the guy at the counter overcharged her for the games we played. They kept arguing back and forth, and she caused a big scene that made me hate bowling forever.

  I’d seen Mom get angry in public before and noticed how she sometimes acted out if other people rubbed her the wrong way, but usually they would just give up. Not this time. This time, each nerve in my body stood on high alert, warning me that something bad was going to happen. It wouldn’t have been that big of a deal if the place had been empty. As it was, though, there was a large group of league players practicing that day, and Mom’s yelling drew a lot of attention to herself. People were staring at us, but she just kept getting angrier about the five dollars the guy insisted she still owed. He wouldn’t give us back our shoes until she paid it. She looked at the guy like she wanted to strangle him, getting angrier and angrier to the point of literally shaking. But the guy seemed to be enjoying it all and at some point actually chuckled.

  I swallowed hard and closed my eyes. My heart raced as I waited for Mom to go ape shit. But instead, she stopped yelling. Just like that. I opened one eye just in time to see her slam five dollars on the table and say, “Here you go jerkoff. Now give me back our shoes.” She spat those last words out hard and slow. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Mom took him by surprise, which is probably why he made the mistake of giving us back our regular shoes before Mom handed over our rental shoes. One by one, Mom started chucking them at the guy’s head. She yelled at me to make a run for it as the league players started coming toward us and the shoe guy cursed her out. By the time we got to the car, Mom couldn’t stop laughing, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. I remember worrying all night if the guy behind the counter was going to find us or call the cops. We never went back again, and I never told Dad about it. Between the laughs and the insistence that the guy deserved it, Mom told me not to.

  It would seem that nothing could top the bowling shoes incident, but last year Mom really outdid herself. As usual, she had insisted I stay home, especially because seventeen is your last official year of being a kid, Charlie! We should go to an amusement park! We can ride roller coasters all day! she had said, but the anxiety and dread that came along with Mom’s unpredictable behavior, and the idea of spending the whole day with her was too much.

  “I can call your teachers and tell them we have some kind of emergency,” she said over huge Belgian waffles she’d made for my special birthday breakfast.

  I shook my head no and made up some lame excuse about a huge test I couldn’t miss. And before she could come up with a way to keep me home, I was out the door. It quickly became one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.

  Most of the day went smoothly . . . a little too smoothly. A quiz I was actually supposed to take in history got postponed, and we had a sub in another class who had us watch a video. I was thoroughly enjoying my good day until I realized these were signs. Something was not right.

  I could have just chocked it up to luck, and maybe this had been the universe’s way of saying Happy birthday, Charlie, I know your life sucks, so the cosmic forces and I have come together and we hope you have a nice day. Enjoy!☺. But I knew better. By lunchtime, my stomach was in knots, with that feeling your gut gives you when it’s saying, Hang the fuck on, brother! Some stuff is about to go down—and all too soon I realized the universe is really a sadistic bitch that’s been setting me up for the biggest birthday fuck ever.

  I can still picture Mom perfectly on that day. Well, at first I didn’t quite see her so much as the insane amount of helium balloons that were headed toward the front office, bouncing off people and taking up most of the walkway. She reminded me of an old underwear commercial where these guys dress up like fruit and one of them is covered in purple balloons to look like a gigantic cluster of grapes. But Mom was three gigantic clusters of grapes in Technicolor.

  “Hi, honey!” she yelled from down the hall, waving, and peering around the balloons. People laughed and pointed at me as Mom started making her way toward me and Ahmed.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered to Ahmed.

  “Wow. Okay, just relax, no biggie,” Ahmed said. No biggie? Had he seen what I saw? This was a freaking humongous, insane biggie!

  “Surprise!” she yelled. More laughter, more pointing.

  “Mom . . .”

  “Isn’t this great! I wanted to make it special just for you. After all, it is your last year as a kid, officially!” she gushed and then she did the only thing that could have possibly made her plan worse than it already was. She cleared her throat and started singing. My blood raced up to my face like the red stuff in a thermometer on a sweltering day. I felt like I was going to die. People laughed harder. I remember how incredibly loud her voice had sounded and how I wished I could magically transform into a gnat and fly away. I remember thinkin
g this couldn’t possibly be happening and how long could the seemingly innocent freakin’ birthday song possibly be? Since then I’ve figured out that it takes approximately fourteen seconds to sing “Happy Birthday” to someone, but it felt like an entire hour. And I really hate that song now.

  “. . . dear Charlie . . .”

  More people who were laughing and pointing and staring at me formed around Mom, Ahmed, and me. And to his credit, Ahmed didn’t even pretend to not know me.

  “. . . to you . . .” Thunderous applauses and deafening whistles exploded from the crowd as Mom finished, and she was so damn pleased with herself that her face was beaming. She looked like she just sang at Carnegie Hall and didn’t even notice how my heart had stopped beating, how my lungs didn’t work, how I was actually dying of humiliation.

  She gave a bow and thanked the crowd, and they cheered her on even more. A nervous teacher who had seen everything finally broke it up by announcing loudly that everyone should get to class. Very slowly did the cheers die down and the crowd finally dispersed. I heard a few whispers and lingering giggles as everyone left the Fuck Your Son’s Birthday Show.

  “I was going to try and convince them to let me take these to your class and sing to you so you’d really be surprised, but, oh well. This works too. Here you go, honey!” she said. Was she serious? Yes, she was. I couldn’t move. I was the Tin Man left out in the rain.

  “Charlie! Take them,” she said, laughing. “Told you I was gonna do something special!”

  I lifted a rusted arm and took them before she said anything else. I stood there like an idiot as she grinned from ear to ear like she’d just done the most spectacular thing in the world. I wanted to kill her. But the bell rang and I had to get to my next class, so I told her I had to go.