“Shut up, rice muncher,” Fat Angie said.
“Fatty Acid —”
“Enough!” said their mother, turning to Wang. “You will go to therapy or no more cell phone or computer.”
“I don’t care,” Wang said, slipping his cell in his jeans pocket.
“If you don’t go, the court has the very real option of taking you out of this house. Is that what you want?” said Fat Angie’s mother.
She held her place, toe-to-toe with her adopted son. They were both five foot nine and of a similar build.
He scratched the end of his nose, made a you’ve-got-me-pinned face, and looked away. Defeating Wang had not simmered the explosion that was Connie as she turned back to her daughter.
“No more girls with tattoos,” Fat Angie’s mother said. “No more anything. You will do whatever it takes to be normal again.”
Fat Angie looked to Wang to say something — anything — from his arsenal of piss-Mom-off comments. He rubbed the end of his peach-fuzzed chin and offered nothing in the way of a distraction.
“This isn’t . . .” Fat Angie shook her head, breathing deep. “You’re never — when do you . . . even care what we do? You’re never . . . here.”
Wang sipped his Coke. Fat Angie took note because she was unusually thirsty.
“Listen. This is not a democracy. You will do what I say,” warned her mother.
“No,” Fat Angie said, her voice not filled with the confidence it needed.
Fat Angie’s mother got in her daughter’s grill.
“You will not shame me again,” said her mother. “This picture is sick.”
Fat Angie shook her head, an almost uncontrollable gesture.
“I am not sick. I am —”
Fat Angie’s mother hooked her by the elbow. “Mom . . . ouch!” Fat Angie said, completely surprised by her mother’s monster grip.
She dragged Fat Angie down the hall, past the framed photographs of Fat Angie’s once perfectly posed family.
“Mom, stop!” squealed Fat Angie.
Wang followed behind them. “Mom, cut it out,” he said.
Her mother trampled through piles of dirty laundry and paperback novels on Fat Angie’s floor, a pigsty the girl referred to as “in a state of constant change.”
“Let’s look,” said her mother, tearing a collage of clippings, mostly about Fat Angie’s sister’s disappearance, off the closet mirror. “Let’s see the real you.”
Her mother crumpled the newspaper page featuring Fat Angie’s sister winning the state championship and the color printout of the first beagle to win best in show.
“Mom,” said Wang, pulling at Connie. She shoved him back.
“Look,” said her mother, forcing Fat Angie in front of the mirror.
Her mother turned Fat Angie’s wrists out, yanked off her Casio calculator watch, and revealed the scars of her attempted suicide.
“Look at them,” said her mother. “Look at you!”
Tears ran down the girl’s flushed face. Despite the weeks of training with Jake and the leafy greens, she saw that she was still big enough to be ugly. Scarred enough to be crazy.
Fat Angie saw Wang’s reflection in the mirror. Wang was not smiling. He was not grinning in the least.
“You are sick,” her mother continued, squeezing Fat Angie’s fat roll. “And you’re fat.”
Fat Angie sobbed in a big way.
“At least your sister tried to do something with her life. She died doing something —”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” Fat Angie cupped her hands over her ears.
Her mother yanked her hands away. “You play crazy all you want in these four walls. You play your little game. But it stops when you go out that door. You hear me? I won’t have it anymore, Angie. I won’t.”
Fat Angie began to count in her head. She had to calm down. Shut down. Cool down. Don’t react, she thought. Don’t scream. Don’t make so much as a move. Don’t let her know she has reached inside and strangled your heart. Just don’t even try to breathe.
When Fat Angie opened her eyes, her mother was gone. Only she and Wang were reflected in the mirror. Him noodle-skinny and her undeniably fat.
“You OK?” Wang asked.
“Just leave.” Fat Angie’s lip trembled.
Fat Angie had revealed to her therapist, “I miss how Wang was. It was different when she was here. She was this sticky glue. She knew how to keep us all together. Not like people who have babies to stay together. That’s stupid. You know?”
The therapist had made a note: Fantasizes about birthing rituals.
The sound of Wang’s overpriced in-style boots clunked down the hall and disappeared behind his bedroom door. An Italian cooking show blared from his room.
Wang did not speak Italian.
Wang did not like to cook.
Fat Angie’s cell phone beeped. KC had texted, U cool?
Fat Angie looked out her Pretty in Pink curtains. Jake was at his computer, not at The Backstory. Fat Angie went from devastated to full-throttle angry in zero-to-hero speed. Jake had taken the picture. Jake had set her up. He hated KC. He had never cared for Fat Angie.
The next morning Fat Angie walked through the halls of William Anders High as the center attraction. The picture of her and KC had gone miniviral and was all anyone could talk about. She stopped short of her locker. Plastered in laser color copy was the pic of the two girls lip-locked with the words WACKO DYKE in red across the top. In that moment, Fat Angie’s life had finally reached the equivalent of Carrie’s with the gym class throwing tampons at her. Only she did not have the likes of Stephen King scripting her a cool telekinetic power.
None of that mattered. Her so-called life as a crazy fatso was over. This one moment, captured in high-resolution digital quality, would be the nail in her coffin, she thought. People might forget crazy. They might even forgive fat. But dyke. Throw that into the teen mix of conservative Dryfalls, Ohio, and there would be no escape.
Hushed giggles surrounded her.
Smirks spread like swine flu.
Kids elbowed one another.
Fat Angie ripped the image off her locker and sprinted, at Fat Angie speed, to the gym. She flew past Wang’s friends, who oinked in unison. Wang reluctantly followed her.
“Angie,” Wang said, grabbing hold of her arm.
“Leave me alone,” she said, wiggling from his grip.
Down the hall. Past a cell-phone snapshot and a video geek chasing her with a handheld camera, she ran. Shouldering a door and cutting across the school yard, she made for the gym.
Catching her breath, Fat Angie stood with her hands pressed against the gymnasium trophy case. The picture that had frequented the news the most. Her sister wore an All-State medal around her neck and clutched the state trophy in her arms. Everything had been in front of her. A scholarship. A college of significant stature. And she had chosen camouflage and artillery. She had chosen the world over all of those things and, most important, over Fat Angie.
Now her sister was just a face behind a recently Windex-washed case. Spotless and held in time, forever smiling. Fat Angie opened the crumpled color printout from her locker. That was the happiest she had been since her sister — the happiest ever, maybe. She was not sure. No. Of course she was sure. It had been her happiest personal moment with someone who was not her sister. Right then, happy seemed more than wrong. It seemed sick. Like all the thoughts in her head.
Fat Angie’s cell phone beeped. A text from KC read, Where R U?
She turned her cell phone off and stuffed it into her tight tattered back pocket. The notion of hiding was extremely appealing; however, she would have to attend the second and final day of basketball tryouts to vie for a spot on the team.
The pressure was too great.
She stared at her sneaker toe.
She scrunched her face tight.
She —
“Angie,” Coach Laden called from down the hall. “You OK?”
; “Umm . . .” said Fat Angie. “Yeah.”
Fat Angie unclenched her face.
“You sure?” said Coach Laden.
Fat Angie was hesitant to reveal any information that might bar her from the team.
“Coach Laden. If you . . .” Fat Angie worked to say the words. “If you were different . . . would that make you sick?”
She had asked that very question of her therapist, who had replied, “Why would you want to be different?”
Fat Angie had elected not to speak for the remaining fourteen minutes of the session.
The therapist had made a note: Struggles with notions of community.
Coach Laden motioned Fat Angie toward her office. Reluctantly, Fat Angie lagged toward the sacred Mecca of championship headlines and dense playbooks. A framed newspaper clipping of Fat Angie’s sister was the centerpiece of the office.
Coach Laden sat behind her desk and popped the lid off her steaming coffee. “What’s up?”
“Um . . .” Fat Angie sighed. “Is it normal to wonder? Wonder what you’re supposed to be?”
“Sure,” said Coach Laden. “It’s what we do our whole lives.”
“That’s kinda extreme,” said Fat Angie.
Coach Laden grinned. “Except, we substitute the ‘supposed to’ with ‘who we are.’ Right then. That’s what defines an exceptional person. Like you.”
“I told you, I’m not special,” said Fat Angie, her tone distinctly on guard.
“Hey, I didn’t say special,” said Coach Laden, leaning on her elbows. “I said exceptional.”
The word exceptional had never been used in reference to Fat Angie. After her sister had joined the armed forces, after the divorce, and after her sister’s highly publicized disappearance, Fat Angie had been reminded how “special” she was. But it was said through so much politeness, so false and insincere. While fighting against the “special,” another part of her had started to believe it. Believe that she was “special” and had to be protected from the world and everyone in it.
She found this to be incredibly lonely.
“Angie, I know it’s not easy for you,” said Coach Laden. “For a lot of reasons.”
“Definitely a lot.”
“But you don’t quit,” said Coach Laden. “That’s a standout trait.”
Uneasy, Fat Angie arched her back. “I tried to kill myself in front of hundreds of people and several local networks. Trust me, that’s quitting in my family.”
“That’s not quitting,” said Coach Laden, sipping her coffee. “Quitting would have been if you had stayed in the bathroom. You didn’t want to quit. Right?”
Of course, she had not wanted to die. Suicide, as some might say, would have sucked! Still, Angie had not wanted to live, especially thinking that her sister was dead.
“Angie, I’m not a therapist, OK?” said Coach Laden. “And maybe you’d be better off talking to the guidance counselor than me.”
“Doubtful,” Fat Angie said.
“You don’t try to be anyone else and that is a very hard thing in this world. It may seem unimportant right now when fitting in would be so much easier. But later you’ll see. Being who you are is everything.”
Fat Angie did not know who to be. Not from one moment to the next, as if every path were paved with eggshells.
“Angie?” said Coach Laden. “See you at tryouts, right?”
“Yeah,” she said, biting the inside of her cheek.
With her shoulders dropped forward, she hauled herself out the door and resumed her place at the trophy case, her forehead pressed against the glass. When she exhaled, the glass steamed. She wiped it away and there was her sister smiling back at her.
Fat Angie did not want to go to class. However, she would have to suck it up because her sister would be home soon. She was quite certain about that and she simply could not quit. That was one thing her sister never did. She never ever quit.
Fat Angie sat in the cafeteria with the usual seven empty seats surrounding her. She had opted for the vegetarian lunch, referred to as Pop and Energy. She eyed the iceberg lettuce with overly processed cheese.
Gary Klein, a couple of tables away, flicked his tongue wildly between the triangle of his fingers and thumbs.
Jake parted through a crowd and strutted toward her. He played it high-school cool, sitting at the end of the table with his back to her.
“What do you want?” said Fat Angie.
Jake half-smiled to a group of girls watching from the food line.
“What were you thinking letting KC take that picture?” said Jake.
“What are you talking about?” Fat Angie slammed her chair back, crashing it into the guy sitting behind her. “You took that picture.”
“What?” Jake said, facing her.
“You’ve been part of some get-the-wacko-fat-freak plan, haven’t you?” she asked. “Admit it. Stacy Ann put you up to this whole do-gooder, I-care-about-Angie crap.”
“OK, I loathe Stacy Ann, for starters. And I didn’t take that picture,” said Jake.
“Right. You’re the only one who knew I was there,” said Fat Angie. “You think Stacy Ann is so pissed at me that she’s tagged me with a tracking device?”
The two paused to consider the probability of that statement. Improbable.
“I mean, you just showed up,” said Fat Angie.
Jake squirmed. Squirmed in the sense of shifting his weight from one leg to the other and jamming his hands in his front baggy jeans pockets.
“Why would I help you practice every day after school for weeks — taking crap from my parents? My friends?” said Jake.
“Your life must be so difficult now.”
“Will you stop it?” Jake said. “Just stop attacking me for fitting in.”
Jake dropped his head. He seemed to be in a dilemma as to what to say.
“I promised your sister, OK?” Jake said. “If something ever . . . happened to her, I’d show. For you. But then I messed it all up. I knew, even before the whole suicide thing. I knew you were in trouble. I just . . .”
Fat Angie glared at him. She was becoming quite talented at glaring.
“Look, I don’t come from a family with all kinds of weird sadness. I’m not so good at — I totally screwed it all up, all right?”
Pause.
“But I didn’t mean to,” Jake said. “And I’ve been trying —”
“To get rid of your guilt?” said Fat Angie. “Because you were just like the rest of them before?”
“I was never like them,” Jake said. “Never.”
“Someone took that picture,” Fat Angie said.
“Hey,” KC said, coming up behind Angie. “Where have you been?”
Angie put distance between herself and KC. She thought that would somehow erase the image of their impassioned kiss from the minds of the cafeteria kids.
“Look, I didn’t take that picture,” said Jake. “I’m not like that. I wouldn’t hurt you.”
“You’re a jock,” said Fat Angie. “You suddenly care because of some alleged promise.”
“I. Didn’t. Do. It,” he said.
“OK” said KC. “Everyone, cool your jets. First, Angie, you’re acting like an ass. You haven’t texted me once. That is grade A bad form. And second, though it’s unbelievable to me, Jack didn’t take the pic.”
“Jake,” he said.
“Whatever,” said KC. “Apparently, Wang’s ex-girlfriend told a girl in my history class who passed a note that I intercepted . . . your brother’s the origin. He snapped the pic and made it go viral.”
Fat Angie was stun gunned. “He acted so concerned. . . . Of course. We both knew where Mom was.”
“So what?” said KC, reaching for Angie’s hand. “We’ll fight viral with badass coolness.”
“It’s a big so,” said Fat Angie, pulling back.
Jake dipped his head. “This isn’t San Francisco, KC. Dryfalls, Ohio, isn’t exactly rainbow friendly.”
“And you’re
the designated go-to guy about all things oppressive?” said KC.
“Hey, I’ve seen kids get hurt. Taunted and pushed around. I’ve seen what they do to Angie just for being herself without you —”
“Shut up!” said Fat Angie. “OK? I’m not invisible.”
“Good job on scoring the dyke vote for student council this year,” a guy said, walking past Jake.
Jake looked at the two girls. The awkward heavy pause planted itself among them.
“KC, I’m not . . . pretty. I’m not . . . normal,” said Fat Angie. “This just gives everyone something else to stack against me. And I’ve gotta make the team. This is so important to me.”
“So being with me . . . like, that — that’s what?” KC said.
Fat Angie did not take the necessary time needed to think through all the possible responses. She was under the gun. At least in her mind.
“I made a mistake, OK?” said Fat Angie.
KC nodded. “Mistake. Hmm. Wow.”
Fat Angie’s heart was 199.5 percent breaking. And while that estimate felt unbearable and possibly not properly equated, she said, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.” KC leaned in to Fat Angie. “You break it. You know? My heart.”
Fat Angie’s eyes fell to the purple heart tattoo on KC’s neck.
“I thought you were different,” said KC, walking away. “Good luck. Assimilating.”
Fat Angie stood with her stomach protruding over her jeans. Watching KC become smaller and smaller as she stepped out the glass double doors into the courtyard.
“Angie, we can fix this,” said Jake. “I think.”
Fat Angie’s eyes shot left, then right. In a film, the camera would have circled around her as she searched for one thing: Wang.
Wang’s friends motioned at the dark-haired fury closing in with venomous rage. He lowered his head and pretended that he was involved in the pointless chatter of his underachieving friends.
Wang forgot the most important rule in war:
Never take your eyes off your opponent.
Fat Angie cracked Wang over the head with her plastic tray. Lettuce and fat-free milk rained onto the table, pears and cutlery slap-clanging to the floor.
“What the hell are you doing, freak?” said Wang, backing away from her.
Fat Angie Page 12
