Fat Angie (2 page)

Fat Angie skipped showering. She rolled a chalky stick deodorant over her sweaty armpits and sniffed for a smell check. It would do. There were only three and a half hours left in the school day. Three and a half hours and seven months. Give or take a few days for socially awkward holidays and the off chance of a snow day. A snow day in Dryfalls, Ohio, was highly unlikely. Highly, highly unlikely.

Fat Angie struggled to fasten her blue jeans. She stretched out on the bench, held her breath, wiggled, and . . . success! She had triumphed over her jeans once again, despite her couldn’t-be-bothered mother. A woman who had vowed during a recent text argument that she would not buy her daughter another pair of pants until she lost twenty-nine pounds. That day, Angie had eaten three doughnuts and two Big Macs. And a small fry. And a Diet Coke. And a Hershey’s bar and a bag of Mr. Peanuts. And three Taco Supremes from Taco Bell. And an Andes mint from her mother’s nightstand drawer.

Fat Angie had not been hungry.

When Angie dragged herself out of the locker room, the girls were running stands. This was the same as bleachers. Up and down the squeaking steps they huffed. For some reason, the image incited the memory of Fat Angie watching the movie
Carrie
at Halloween.

Angie recalled this brief synopsis while watching the girls in her gym class run bleachers. Despite how they treated her, especially when they mocked her in the locker room, she never wanted to have telekinetic powers to destroy them the way Carrie does in the movie. Besides, Angie had already gotten her period and they had never thrown tampons at her.

Coach Laden yelled at the girls, “Faster! Faster!” as Angie walked over to her.

Coach Laden was a very voluptuous woman with slim hips and muscular thighs. Fat Angie wondered what that kind of body felt like when it moved.

“You can sit in study hall until fourth period,” said Coach Laden to her.

That was when
she
walked in.

She was the kind of girl who didn’t exist in Dryfalls, Ohio. She was 199 percent
wow
!

She crushed the gym floor with her pair of eighteen-eyehole black combat boots. Skull-and-crossbones fishnets swirled up her legs and disappeared at the hem of her red plaid skirt, which was far shorter than the regulated dress code but, based on her stride, she was the kind of girl who could get away with it. Her tattered white button-down with custom-cut sleeves revealed slender arms masked by a soft gray shirt for layering. While it was much too hot for layering, the girl did not drip a bead of sweat. There, in the gymnasium of William Anders High School, was the girl that sound tracks played for whenever she stepped into the room, and Fat Angie was . . . well, moved.

The new girl handed a yellow slip of paper to Coach Laden. “I gotta be here,” she said, her chestnut eyes cutting to Fat Angie. “Hey.”

And when the new girl said that simple word, she smiled with something no one smiled at Fat Angie with: interest.

Coach Laden said, “Angie’s having a hard day,” and scooted Angie off the way Mr. Apall did the special-ed kids when they did something on the “special” side.

But Fat Angie could not take her eyes off the slim tall girl standing only a few feet away. The whole moment clicked into slow motion as the girl whipped her hair to the side. The ivory stem that was the nape of her delicate neck revealed a purple heart tattoo. Fat Angie’s eyes widened. The new girl grinned at Angie, her elbow in tow by Coach Laden. The coach’s gab on mute.

All the obese girl could do was lock in on that grin glowing . . . at her!

Then . . .

Stacy Ann tapped the new girl on the shoulder and the moment between Fat Angie and the girl severed. Stacy Ann, in an evil Grinch grin, muttered something to the new girl. As the new girl listened to the loose-lipped Stacy Ann, her eyes occasionally cut back to Fat Angie’s. Fat Angie’s fate was surely sealed. No doubt Stacy Ann would make it her personal mission to enlist the new girl into her army of Fat Angie loathers. She’d get the new girl on day one before Angie ever realized she was supposed to grin back.

“Angie?” said Coach Laden, the mute button released to blaring volume.

The sound of the world returned. Girls’ sneakers pounded the bleachers. Gabbing echoed throughout the gym. And the mysterious new girl, led by Stacy Ann, walked away from Angie. Beyond Coach Laden’s shoulder, Angie caught Stacy Ann’s beautiful blue eyes and wondered how so much evil thrived behind them. Then Stacy Ann’s middle finger appropriately shot Fat Angie the rod.

“Remember, Angie,” assured Coach Laden. “You are a special girl.”

Fat Angie grimaced as she walked out of the gym.

Fat Angie’s dad had also said she was a special girl when he’d left the house a few months after her sister had completed basic training. Two pieces of Samsonite luggage and a rollaway waited at the door. He was not interested in the furniture, the extensive Blu-ray collection, or the Superpop popcorn maker that Angie had saved for a month and a half to buy him for his forty-fourth birthday. He merely wanted her to know that she was special, and then carried his things out to the car.

Fat Angie did not like being special.

Fat Angie did not go to study hall after leaving the gym. Instead she went to the vending machine, sank in four quarters, and punched in

1 7 3

on the number pad, and out dropped a pack of Little Debbie Swiss Rolls. They were cheaper at the Five ’N’ Go Gas two blocks from her house, but a girl had been shot there three and a half weeks earlier and Angie’s couldn’t-be-bothered mother had been bothered by the incident. She was adamant about Fat Angie not going anywhere near that place. The criminal element could still be lingering, she’d texted.

Tearing open the package with her teeth, Fat Angie considered her couldn’t-be-bothered mother’s theory and strongly disagreed. No one who shot another person would wait around the Five ’N’ Go Gas to be apprehended. It did not fit the logic of the criminal mind. Whereas Wang was of the criminal mind, or so it had seemed since her sister had flown the nest. Even though Wang’s court-appointed therapist had assured Fat Angie’s mother after a hearing, “Wang is just acting out. He isn’t really headed down the wrong path.”

Fat Angie’s brother began selling pornography ripped from the Internet shortly thereafter and was apprehended by an undercover investigator. Wang was, in fact, headed down the wrong path, Fat Angie was convinced, but she didn’t argue this with her mother. Her mother had enough on her plate dating Wang’s therapist, supposedly without either one of the kids knowing.

The bell rang. Fat Angie finished off the last bite of the Swiss Roll and disposed of the wrapper in a trash can. Students poured from their classes, filling the breezeway for lunch. Fat Angie hated lunch. Fat Angie hated high school. Most of all, Fat Angie hated that her classmates consistently reminded her of what had happened at the beginning of the school year.

BODY FOUND

had flooded the Internet — the T V cameras, microphones, everyone swooping down. Fat Angie Humpty Dumpty cracked. A pack of razors in her pocket and the song “Free Fallin’ ” on her iPod. She ran onto the court during a football pep rally with slit wrists and screamed, “We’re all killers!” while the high-school band played a boy-band hit.

Images of her meltdown flooded front pages of newspapers and national evening news. Images of the grieving girl. They cheered in parts of Iraq. A victory for their side. They were winning. Only the report about Fat Angie’s sister had been false. Her body was not found.

BODY OF SOLDIER WAS NOT FOUND

A guy plowed past Fat Angie.

She held up her wrists, one feebly covered by her dad’s Casio calculator watch and the other adorned by a ratty yellow sweatband. Six vertical scars clawed their way out.

Fat Angie was moving uncomfortably through the crowded breezeway when —

“Hey, hey, hey! It’s . . .”— Gary Klein deepened his voice —“Fat Angie!”

Gary had been a bully since preschool. He read at a seventh-grade level.

Gary was a junior.

Fat Angie tried to step around Gary. Gary sidestepped and cut her off.

Fat Angie stepped the other direction. Gary slid that direction too.

“I bet this is the closest you’ll get to a dance, Fat Angie,” said Gary.

“Can’t you pick on a freshman transfer?” she said.

He reached out and pinched her stomach.

She squealed.

Gary reached and pinched her again. This time the pain was deep.

“Quit it,” she said.

“Fat Angie the crazy mad cow,” said Gary. “Moooo. Come on.
Moo,
freak.”

Fat Angie began to crumble in place when —

A charge-shove rammed into Gary’s chest. It came out of nowhere. Gary slammed against the wall. The breezeway chatter hushed.

Fat Angie stood stunned to see Gary pressed against the red brick. She was even more stunned when she looked to her right. There he was. All-star-every-sport Jake Fetch.

Kids lingered. The
fight-fight-fight
anticipation ignited in their eyes.

“I’m seriously gonna kick your ass, Jake,” said Gary, peeling himself off the wall.

“How seriously? A little or a lot?” said Jake. “That way I can prepare my ass.”

Although Fat Angie did not like confrontation, she did like Jake Fetch at that moment until he looked her way and said, “You cool?”

The world had turned upside down. The sky would rain frogs by the end of the day, or at least sometime in the next week, because Jake Fetch had stood up for her.

She ran.

During lunch, Fat Angie wrote a letter to her sister.

I am deficient in the art of numbers,
Fat Angie wrote.

She had begun the letter during her time at Yellow Ridge, the spa-like treatment facility Fat Angie’s mother had stuck her in after the pep rally freak-out. After a nine-day stay, she had been stamped as “cure in progress.”

Even though Fat Angie’s pre–pep rally freak-out therapist had said to Angie’s mother, “Angie’s reaction isn’t surprising. Your daughter simply feels lost without her sister. And she thinks you don’t care.”

Fat Angie’s couldn’t-be-bothered mother, quite bothered by the entire event, felt that her daughter’s therapist, a woman she had often referred to as the Hippie with a Harvard Degree, was inept in deciphering the fundamental problem with Angie: that Fat Angie was simply attention seeking.

Consequently, her mother had placed Fat Angie in the care of a new therapist who treated adults. The therapist cost $125 an hour and the office was painted in salmon.

Fat Angie did not like that color.

I’m broke up in parts — fragments — it’s not an illness,
she wrote.
They say it’s “complicated.”
She paused, considering the notion of
complicated
at great length . . . approximately 4.5 seconds. Returning to her spiral notebook, she scribbled,
But all things by their very nature are complicated. They are —

“Hey,” said Jake Fetch, launching a head nod while standing at the edge of the table.

The move seemed forced, as if he had spent a significant amount of time practicing it in the mirror but had not gotten it quite right. His white polo was unnecessarily baggy. This puzzled Fat Angie. Jake had a body worth promoting.

“So, you OK?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” she asked, drawing five lines and crossing through them with a sixth.

“Seemed kinda freaked,” he said. “Gary Klein’s a tool and a half. You know?”

Fat Angie struggled, as any smart outcast would, with the “why” of Jake speaking to her. In kindergarten, Fat Angie had eaten Elmer’s glue, nearly choked to death, and been rescued by then-first-grader Jake Fetch, new to her school and already well on his way to the throne of coolness. But except for her near-death experience, the only thing the two had in common was that they lived across the street from each other. Their proximity aside, they were different. Not Romeo-Juliet different. But different in that Jake was a good boy from a good home with both parents and a dog that most likely liked his name: Ryan.

Fat Angie had witnessed the good boy and his good dog playing Frisbee or fetch many times from her evenly square window with a
Pretty in Pink
curtain that only 80s cult star Molly Ringwald could appreciate. Jake and Ryan were an inseparable duo. Just the way Fat Angie and her sister had been. Minus the game of fetch.

Jake dropped his head to the right and rubbed the bottom of his chin. The smallest of scars was etched in the edge of his genetically perfect chin. A chin complete with the right amount of curve and line. “So you don’t say a lot much,” he stated matter-of-factly.

“That’s redundant,” she said. “That I don’t say a lot much.”