Butter (2 page)

Breakfast the next morning was the usual fare: egg-white omelets and turkey sausage for Mom and Dad; pecan waffles, Canadian bacon, and poached eggs for me. No syrup for the waffles this morning, though. I didn't ask why because I could guess the answer. Mom was trying to sneak the sugar out of my diet again.

When it came to feeding me, Mom bounced between whole grain and whole fat, vegetables and cupcakes, hope and resignation, the way I bounced between binging and purging.

I shoveled the dry waffles into my mouth and tried to catch my dad's attention over his newspaper. “What's the word, Dad? Anything interesting in there?” I poked the back of his paper.

Dad directed the answer at Mom. “The Cardinals are never going back to the Super Bowl if they keep playing like this.”

Mom, who could not have been less interested in sports, merely hummed.

I tried again. “Do they have anything about the jazz fest in there? They're supposed to announce the lineup this week.”

Dad grumbled something to himself about preferring the Beatles and lifted his paper higher in front of his face.

Mom may have stopped talking to me about my weight, but around the time I tipped over four hundred pounds, Dad stopped talking to me altogether.

When I was growing up, he said my big frame was built for playing football. When I started growing
out
, he just didn't know what to do with me. He tried to get me into the gym, shove his nasty egg-white omelets down my throat, and tell me I wasn't a lost cause. But all that led to was a bunch of shouting matches.

I was actually pretty relieved when I hit four hundred pounds and he finally just shut the fuck up.

I still tried to talk to him at breakfast sometimes, though, just to see if I could trip him up and get him to say something directly to me. It was a little game I liked to play.

I finished my plate and stood up to kiss Mom on the cheek. She handed me my backpack and waved me out the door, humming under her breath, as always. I smiled. I bet she had no idea the song she was humming was “Parker's Mood.”

• • •

Ten minutes later, I parked my BMW in a handicapped spot in the school parking lot. Yeah, BMW—
my
BMW. I know.
Poor little rich kid. Maybe he's big, but at least he drives a Beemer
.
And look, if I lived anywhere else, I'd agree, but where I'm from—Scottsdale, Arizona—seeing a teenager driving a BMW is about as common as seeing a one-armed cactus. We're everywhere.

When I got my driver's license sophomore year, I got called down to the school nurse's office, where they gave me something I didn't ask for—a handicapped sticker for my car. Apparently, my mom had requested it. I didn't even think to be embarrassed or offended. I just remember thinking there was no way I would tarnish the Beemer with that ugly blue sticker, so I refused to park in the handicapped spots.

That only lasted through a few episodes of me running late for school and having to park at the far end of the lot and huff and puff half a mile to the building. One time I nearly collapsed right there in the parking lot. That was almost twenty pounds ago. So junior year I started using the spots.

The stall I always picked was right on the edge of the student lot where it spilled over into the faculty lot, so the first person to greet me when I got out of my car was the Professor. Professor Dunn, that is, but everyone just called him “the Professor,” because if you spread out his credentials, side by side, they would stretch around the world twice or something like that.

The guy had played with the Boston, Philadelphia, and New York symphonies, among others. He had the highest degrees from Juilliard and honorary degrees from every other impressive musical school you could imagine. But he'd come back to his roots in Arizona to settle into semiretirement as the
Scottsdale High band director. I wondered if he'd gotten more gray hairs from his years of performing or from the teenagers he now taught.

He waved. “Morning, Butter!”

He was the only teacher who called me Butter, and I didn't mind it coming from him. I think he suspected how I really got the name, but he always told people it was because I made the alto sax sound as smooth as butter.

“You pick your classes for next semester yet?” he asked, falling into step with me.

“Everything but those electives. I'm still trying to decide between underwater basket weaving and leprechaun hunting.” I grinned. I knew exactly which elective the Professor wanted me to take, but I had to have a little fun with him first.

“If only your comedy were as impressive as your music.” The Professor sighed. “At least the comedy you are willing to share.”

“Hey! You make it sound like I'm being selfish. I told you, Prof, I'll come jam with you and your Brass Boys anytime. But the school band? That's just not my style.”

Mom had forced me to join band freshman year. Both she and the Professor acted like it was the sinking of the
Titanic
when I dropped out after one semester. I think the Professor started letting me crash Brass Boys rehearsals in hopes of luring me back in, but all it did was introduce me to jazz and cement my decision that school band was not for me.

We reached the east entrance to the school, the one the teachers used, and the Professor stopped with his hand on the door. “I only ask that you think about it, Butter. You could
help me make the selections; we could pull some solos you like. Maybe a little Charlie Parker, huh?” He nudged me, then opened the door with a wink. “After you, big guy.”

• • •

First period. Composition. Anna.

I loved that my day started out with a perfect view of her long, straight blond hair and her lean tan legs. That day she was crossing and uncrossing those legs impatiently. She kept tapping her pen on the edge of her desk and glancing up at the clock.
What's the hurry? School's just begun
. I was so focused on Anna and wondering what had her so pent up, I didn't even hear the teacher call on me.

“Huh?”

The teacher repeated the question with more patience than she would have offered any other student. Teachers pitied me and apparently thought I had enough to worry about without getting in trouble at school. I answered automatically—and correctly. I was practically a straight-A student; I aced everything but math. That kept the teachers off my back too.

I wanted to follow Anna after class, but what ever was on her mind caused her to put on her running shoes. She bolted out the door the second the teacher dismissed us, and I just couldn't keep up with her in the hallway. Besides, I felt like a stalker. It's not like Anna and I had ever talked in person, so I couldn't very well ask what was wrong. I sucked it up, deciding I could make it through algebra and chemistry before seeing Anna again at lunch.

No classes ever passed so slowly. By the end of two hours,
I had algebraic proofs in my chem lab book and chemical equations doodled all over my algebra spiral. I couldn't have cared less. At eleven thirty, both notebooks tucked securely in my backpack, I trudged off to the cafeteria.

She should have been hard to spot. The Scottsdale High cafeteria was a sea of tall, tan, and blond. But I could always pick Anna out of a crowd. Her smile stuck out among the faces of other girls trying hard to look bored or annoyed. And her genuine laugh sounded like a melody while other girls' cackles struck sour notes. She was as fake blond and fake tan as the rest of them, but something real still shone through.

I scanned the pale bobbing heads of giggling girls clustered at tables and knew in an instant Anna wasn't there. I felt an irrational surge of anger at her, like we'd had a lunch date and she'd stood me up.

Or maybe she was just late, I reasoned. With that thought as comfort, I began skirting the cafeteria, headed for my usual table in the back. Most of the tables in the cafeteria were round, surrounded by slim plastic chairs that made those airline seats look downright roomy. But in the back there were a few large rectangular tables with freestanding benches you could pull out as far as you liked.

One table was empty, left open for me as usual. I used to be certain someone would play a trick on me, like fill up my table with a bunch of kids and force me to sit in one of those fragile plastic chairs, but no one ever did.

I was rarely picked on at school. At a whopping 423 pounds, I was just that pathetic—that pitiful. Most people couldn't
bring themselves to be cruel to me … at least, not anymore. Sometimes I felt sorry for the kids who were just fat enough to be targets but not big enough for anyone to feel bad about taking aim. I sat with some of them freshman year, with all the outcasts—the overweight students, the ones with acne, the kids who wore the wrong clothes. We mostly ate in silence. Just because we were all victims didn't mean we had anything else in common. I really didn't mind when I outgrew their table.

I pulled out my bench and settled in, digging into my backpack for the soft-sided cooler at the bottom. Mom had stuffed it with all my cold favorites. I think she somehow knew I couldn't stomach standing in the hot-food lunch line, with everyone watching to see what I'd pile on my tray. Cold pizza, Canadian bacon from that morning turned into sandwiches on little rolls, a thick slab of turkey from Thanksgiving the week before—I sniffed it; it smelled okay—fried rice, two cans of Coke, and a prepackaged cup of …
sugar-free Jell-O? Okay, Mom, what ever
. I tossed it aside.

Once the cooler was empty, I scanned the cafeteria one more time. Still no sign of Anna. Then I dug into my spread and tried not to watch people watching me.

“I'm here to see Dr. Bean.”

“Who?”

“Doc-tor Beeean.”

The receptionist pulled her wire glasses to the tip of her nose and eyed me over the top rims. “I'm afraid there is no Dr. 'Bean' at this office.”

I rolled my eyes and jammed my finger on a pile of business cards with my doctor's name blazoned across the top. “This guy.”

The receptionist made a show of pulling a card off the stack and studying it. “Ahh! Dr.
Bandyopadhyay
. Yes, just sign in here.” She shoved a clipboard at me and turned away. I thought I saw a private smirk hit her lips before she spun all the way out of sight. She knew exactly who I was. I'd been coming to see Dr. Bean—excuse me, Dr.
Bandyopadhyay
—for years, and lately I'd been in every two weeks.

See, that's another awesome side effect of being 423 pounds: type 2 diabetes. The bigger I got, the harder it was to control my blood sugar. When it got really out of whack, I'd hit one of these spurts when I'd have to see the doc every other week.

I didn't mind so much. Doc Bean was the coolest dude I knew, next to the Professor. He spent more time asking me about girls than he did about how I was feeling. It got on Mom's nerves sometimes, but she always said Bean was the best, so she put up with his quirks. We had a lot more fun when my mom wasn't around, so I looked forward to the appointments when she wasn't there.

This wasn't one of those. Mom stepped into the lobby just as I finished signing in.

“Hey, Ma.”

“Hi, baby. Sorry I'm late.”

She wasn't late. Mom was never late for anything. She just wasn't ten minutes early, and to Mom, that was late.

“I just got here,” I told her.

I settled into an overstuffed leather couch while my mom poured herself some coffee from a side table. A big-screen TV was tuned in to a medical network, while faux flames burned blue in a big stone fireplace. Expensive doctor equaled fancy-schmancy office; another reason I didn't mind my appointments with Doc Bean. We weren't waiting long before a nurse appeared at the side of the couch.

“Ready?” she asked quietly. I always liked that they didn't shout your name from a doorway like at other doctors' offices.

“We're ready,” Mom answered for both of us.

Mercifully, the nurse led us past the scale where most doctor visits began and straight to a treatment room. We manned our usual posts, me leaning against the patient's table and Mom tucking into a chair by the door.

“How was your day?” she asked me.

Boring, stressful. The girl I love disappeared after first period, and I didn't see her again until after school, when she was surrounded as usual by a team of plastic Barbies and meatheaded Ken dolls who totally blocked my view of her perfect face. Oh, and everyone stared at me when I showed up at gym class, which I had to do because my health teacher was out sick again, and instead of getting a substitute, they just sent us all to PE. Seriously, they should fire that woman. What kind of health teacher is sick three times a month?

I shrugged. “Fine.”

Her cheek twitched, and she looked down at her hands. I knew she wanted more than just fine.

“The Professor is pressuring me to take band as an elective next semester.”

Mom lit up at the idea. “Oh, you
should
take band. Dad and I always loved coming to your recitals.”

I wasn't sure Dad loved anything of the sort.

“And we'd love to hear you play for a crowd again. You never play anywhere but your room anymore.”

That's what you think, Ma
.

“And Professor Dunn just adores you. I bet he'd give you all kinds of solos.”

She had me there.

But I didn't want solos. I didn't want to play in public at all, let alone under a spotlight. It didn't matter if people loved my music. All they would see is how winded I got afterward, how much I struggled just to get from the front of the stage back to my chair. Then they'd all leave saying, “Man, what a waste. That big kid can blow, but imagine what he could have become if he hadn't gotten so big and lost all his lung capacity.”

Or something like that. No thanks.

I didn't have to protest to Mom, thanks to my doctor's perfect timing. He swung open the door with his usual exuberance and bounced around the room, shaking our hands and saying hello in his thick accent that reminded me of the slushy guy from
The Simpsons
.