Fat Angie (16 page)

Her chin doubled.

A fly could have nested in her mouth.

Right there in dimly lit but high resolution on her mother’s BlackBerry was a picture of KC and Fat Angie in full lip-lock action. This was very, very bad.

“I sent it to your father,” said her mother. “Not that he’ll do a damn thing.”

Fat Angie’s jaw was still dropped.

Her chin remained doubled.

Wang leaned over his mother’s shoulder and chuckled.

“Way to go, deep-fried,” said Wang.

This did not please his mother.

“How? Where . . . did this . . . ?” Fat Angie asked.

“There is always someone watching us, Angie,” said her mother. “My God. You want me to support you doing this?”

“No . . .” said Fat Angie. “I meant . . . what I was talking about . . . I wasn’t talking about
that.
”

“I don’t care what you were talking about,” said her mother.

“Mom —”

“The only thing I can ever imagine supporting you in is a genuine attempt at losing weight,” said her mother.

“What?” said Fat Angie.

“Don’t think I don’t know you sneak food,” said her mother.

Fat Angie covered her belly. Wang’s interest in the showdown between mother and obese sister diminished with the need to text.

“There’s nothing you won’t pull, is there?” her mother asked. “Nothing you won’t
do
to make us the freak show of the neighborhood. Of Dryfalls.”

“Don’t you have that in reverse?” said Fat Angie.

“Why, because I want to get on with our lives?” asked her mother.

Connie + Get On With Life = Accept Angie’s Sister Is Dead

Fat Angie’s sister was
not
dead.

Her body had
not
been found.

Fat Angie’s cotton socks stuck to —

“Answer me.” Fat Angie did not like confrontation. She especially didn’t like confrontation with her mother.

“I don’t want you talking to this girl ever again.”

“What?” Fat Angie asked.

Wang cut in. “She said you can’t lock lesbo lips with the —”

“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.