Fatty Patty: A Romantic Short Story (San Juan Island Stories #1) (2 page)

They talked to each other while Gerard
Depardieu used his dying words to lie to his true love. Julian sat
by her during her shaded study room lunch. On the club days, he met
her at her locker, never minding that such kindness carried its own
danger.

When the other boys walked by with their chests
puffed out and their chins lifted like dominant sea walruses,
Julian didn't look away. He never looked away. Not from her, and
not from the boys who broke from the pack and approached her,
razor-tongues sharpened for a new torture.

"We have to go to club," she said to Julian,
under her breath.

Julian dipped his head and slowly, too slowly,
shouldered his backpack.

Ellis slammed her locker shut and started the
chant that had chased her from second grade throughout the rest of
her life. "Fatty, fatty, ate too many Peppermint Patties. You're
glistening today. Are you half whale or does your family have to
oil you in blubber fat?"

She cowered.

He sneered over her red face at Julian. "Hey
Frenchie. You like fat girls?"

Julian squared up to Ellis. "Yeah. I
do."

White waxy fear churned in her belly. The hall
squeezed in, hot and sweaty. Ellis and his friends laughed with a
rictus, forced sound at her puffy body, white as the inside of the
candy, and at Julian's warmer tone for his crueler
words.

Ellis elbowed his friends and turned back to
them. "You get it up for puffy chicks?"

Julian tilted his head. "You must have read my
diary."

Ellis stepped forward, shoulder first, cheeks
taut. "You keep a diary? Fag."

Which was usually the kind of thing he said
right before he slammed a person.

Pepper tugged Julian. "We have to
go."

Julian moved easily with her to the club room.
Not intimidated. Not even the slightest put out. Indifferent to the
walruses in a way that inspired loud fury.

Ellis and his friends followed to the lip of
the classroom. The teacher was engaged with a freshman, so he
swaggered inside with all of his jock friends. "Frenchie.
Fat-girl-lover. You're a fag, aren't you? You're a total
fag."

Julian's easy smile narrowed. He slowly
stretched and leaned back in his seat, his feet resting on the back
of her chair with a little bump. "Why? Are you
interested?"

Ellis screwed up his wedge-shaped face.
"What?"

"Are you asking me because you want to know?
Or—" he tilted his brow in calculated amusement "—are you hoping my
answer is yes?"

Ellis reddened from his neck up. "What the hell
are you saying?"

"I'm saying you spend all day clinging to
sweaty boys in spandex and you ask if
I'm
gay."

His friends tittered.

Ellis's shoulders rose and his hands formed
meaty fists.

His friends dropped silent.

He stepped forward.

Julian looked up at him like a manatee facing
down a powerboat, nothing but idiocy to protect him from the
rippling blades.

The teacher bustled over. "What is happening
here,
mes amis
?
Ooh la la la
, you're not in this
club."

Ellis's friends shifted, edging towards the
door. Ellis didn't take his eyes off Julian.

Julian turned to the teacher. "He asked me
out."

Ellis's friends laughed.

The jock blistered red.

The teacher raised one brow. "Club hour is not
the time for
affairs de coeur
, Julian."

"He's not my type." Julian looked up at Ellis
again. "Don't be too upset."

Ellis glared at him, then at Pepper, and
slammed out of the room.

The teacher shooed the others out and the air
pressure rose and fell, rose and fell, as in the passing of a
storm.

She twisted the pages of the
Asterix &
Obelisque
comic they were supposed to translate, struggling to
concentrate.

Julian went to sleep.

She poked his elbow. "You shouldn't say you
like fat girls."

He made a sound as though jerking awake.
Muffled, "Why?"

"I bet you don't even know any." Aside from
herself, of course.

He rose up on his elbows, yawning and
stretching. "My mom's fat."

A harpoon of hurt sank in with those words.
"Don't say that."

"She's two hundred and eighty-two pounds. Or
she was last Christmas." He rested his hard cheek in his palm and
studied her with his blue, blue eyes. "She can kick my ass at life.
And at Scrabble."

Pepper bit her Bic. Believe him or not? If he
was being mean, he was nasty subtle. She might be an idiot for her
heart popping to the surface of her chest, bobbing and
light.

As if he read her skepticism, he leaned
forward. "Want to see a picture? Come to my house."

So she met him that very night after her
private tutoring in town. He tossed the drink he'd bought while
waiting with his other friends and the two of them boarded the hot
bus.

He lived in a one-bedroom that smelled like
unwashed dog, though they didn't have any sort of animal. Cigarette
burns littered the brown carpet and his dad snored on the one
couch. Their blocky TV, the kind she'd seen in thrift shops,
alternated between QVC and static.

Julian stepped over food-crusted paper plates
and ant trails to the kitchen. He opened the dull fridge. "Want a
beer?"

She shook her head.

He took her outside, along secret back steps,
across a neighbor's fence, and down the hill to the edge of the
world. Clinging to the underside of an oak tree, he swung over the
broken rocks to the beach.

She picked her nimble way after. Careful,
because whatever happened she did not want to be the fat klutz in
front of him. Just for once, she wanted to be light on her feet,
and when he looked up to smile at her, she actually felt like the
air itself would hold her up if she fell.

They talked about nothing and watched the
sunset lengthening, red and orange and yellow rays crashing across
blue sky. His shoulder brushed hers, thin hoodie to thin hoodie,
and his hand rested so close to her leg that it melted her outer
shell of cold.

Her whole body pulsed like the ticking of a
clock. Counting down, endlessly down. Wishing it faster. Willing it
slower. She hung every second on his long curved eyelashes and
short nose, the moist yeast from his aluminum beer, his sensitive
brows and the circular scar at his neck just below the
jugular.

She knew his eyes were blue, but the French had
another word for knowing, a word deeper than the surface knowledge.
Comprendre
. Up close, his eyes were deep green radiating
brilliant from black irises. Brilliant like a sun-swallowed sea.
Je sais que tes yeux sont bleus, mais je comprends que tes yeux
sont verts comme la mer.
Untouchable. Dangerous. Forever out of
her reach.

Her watch alarm finally beeped. Her parents.
Dinner.

She stood. "I've got to do
homework."

He crushed the can on driftwood. "You don't
have to do anything, you know."

Well, except for graduating, going to college,
talking her parents out of oceanography as her "dream" career, and
figuring out how to become attractive enough to interest a guy like
him.

"You can leave the island. Do whatever you
want. Go wherever you want."

"My parents are starting a new intern today and
they will kill me if I don't show."

He smiled at the can and then out at the sea,
as though she had proven his point rather than arguing against it.
"I'm stuck here. Destined to drink myself into a stupor." He threw
the can.

It arced through the air and dropped into the
waves.

His face twisted. Bitter. "Just like my
papa."

Probably not the time to tell him that
littering was bad and also made her parents' organization super
angry. "Well, yeah, if you keep staying up late and drinking all
the time."

He wrinkled his nose, edged his initials into
the spongy driftwood with a ragged nail. "He'd just drink it
himself."

"Well, you drinking it obviously hasn't stopped
him. It's just makes you a drunk."

He looked at her. Bitter and hard.

She bit the skin at her cuticle, softening it,
gnawing it to nothing.

Her watch beeped again.

He rubbed away the initials, swung his legs
over the branch, and easily caught her laboring up the hill. "You
leave too early. Make it up to me."

She caught her breath at the top, hot and
sticky, melty in the sun. No wonder boys like Ellis thought she was
gooey and icky. But in spite of all that, Julian's complaint
sounded real. Real and like he meant it.

She sucked in a deep breath. "Come to my
house?"

"Now?"

"No!" Oh god, no. His face flashed a darker
feeling and her tongue tripped over itself to be understood. "My
graduation party's next weekend. Will you—would you mind—what do
you think about coming to that, if you have a chance?"

He grinned. Soul-sweet and achingly beautiful.
"Okay."

The week passed in agonizing slowness and
advanced excitement, because Julian kept inviting her over to his
house, and she kept going. Night after night, staying a little bit
later each time, until her parents finally complained that she
wasn't hardly at home and she defended herself by saying that she
was bidding farewell to classmates who were leaving the state, and
they eased off because after all,
she
was leaving the state.
Julian didn't push her about her party, even though his face
changed, unreadable, every time he brought up his impending
visit.

"Your parents are busier than mine," he said,
one night when she had to leave, and "There will be a lot of people
at this party of yours?"

"Just the people at the organization," she
said, which was about five people including the intern, "and
Mia."

And his face set again. Darkly thoughtful.
Almost nervous, she would say, but he never got nervous about
anything. Not even the now silent, watchful Ellis.

At the end of the last day of classes, Mia
saved them almost an entire row of seats at the school awards
ceremony. Julian sat next to her, and Pepper separated him from the
rest of her family. It was a weird introduction, but Julian's
coming to her graduation party later would seem normal. Her parents
wouldn't get that over-interested look and begin asking questions
about career trajectories. They wouldn't grill him like they had
grilled the last boy she had invited over—in second grade. That boy
had wanted to be a firefighter. Now, she was pretty sure he was
thriving in San Francisco and wanted to be a handbag
designer.

Nobody would think she was over-reaching. Not
even Julian. She could dress up and be cool, and it wasn't solely
for him. It was expected. His visit was nothing special.

Her new black dress was not a
little
black dress, but it was a Vera Wang clone. For one brief moment,
the hours she spent spraying her hair into sausage curls and trying
on Wet & Wild shades seemed to be rewarded by a deeper emotion
beneath Julian's lazy smile.

Her heart fluttered. She moved her hand to
cover the feeling just at the moment Julian put his hand over where
hers had been on the arm rest.

Wait—had he meant to take her hand?

Before she could move back, his name floated
across the theater.

He see-sawed to the aisle on Mia's side,
because Pepper's side was too full of thick people.

They all clapped for his award.

Mia leaned over his empty seat. "He's good
looking, isn't he?"

Hot and cold feelings pulsed through Pepper.
Although saying it was like mentioning that tourists came to see
orca whales. It was a fact, and someone as normally-proportioned as
Mia would notice it just as much as an orca like Pepper
would.

"I think he's dating a girl at the smoothie
bar," Mia said.

The day shifted monochromatic, dropping below
the edge of the ocean and flaring the blue sky to yellow with its
last sunlit rays.

"I see him there practically every day. At the
place across from the bus stop? A blonde with a surfer tattoo is
always giving him free stuff."

Cold grayness seeped into her chest.

Oh.

Of course.

The drinks he tossed after her private
tutoring. She had thought he was waiting for her. But that was
wrong. He was actually using her for cover. Cover so he could be
with a thin, beautiful blonde and score niceness points for being
friends with a fat girl.

Pepper tucked her hands between her knees and
hugged her elbows to her sides.

Her instinct—
who was she kidding?
—was
wrong.

Julian returned to his seat and lifted a gold
key. A purple foot inscribed with "Track."