Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have (3 page)

Just as I’m swallowing, a crowd of football jocks walks by. They’re laughing, relaxed, slapping each other on the back and grunting like they own the place.

Who am I kidding? They do own the place.

In the center of the group is this one guy, O. Douglas. If we had kings in high school, O. Douglas would be king. He’s the quarterback, a senior, and a superstar. That’s three out of three. They say he’s being recruited by a bunch of colleges, which I guess is really unusual for Newton. I don’t follow sports, so I couldn’t tell you which colleges or if they mattered.

When I look at O. Douglas, I feel like I’m from another planet or something. He’s from Earth, and I’m from some planet where everyone is fat. Elephantania. On Elephantania, I’m normal-sized, and all the skinny people like O. are the equivalent of midgets. We don’t call them midgets. That would be insulting. We have some PC name for it like “narrows.” I’m normal, and they’re narrows, and everyone feels sorry for them. That’s how it is on Elephantania. I get all the girls but nobody wants to date the narrows.

As the jocks pass by, O. Douglas looks in my direction for a second, and I get this thrill in my stomach like I saw Brad Pitt or something. Even if you’re a guy and you don’t like other guys, you kind of want to know Brad Pitt, right? Sheer cool factor.

O. Douglas lifts his hand in a wave, and I’m just starting to wave back when this girl behind me says, “Hey, O.!” in a really desperate voice.

He wasn’t waving to me. He was waving to the girl behind me.

the physics of fat.

God has it in for me. Let me tell you how I know.

I am not the fattest.

You might think that would be good news for a kid in high school, but it’s not. There is actually something much worse than being the fattest: I am the second fattest.

It’s true. I am the second fattest kid in the history of Newton High School. At least if you’re the fattest, you have something to brag about. You’re the very worst. You’re the bottom of the barrel. You are King of the Freaks.

But second fattest? What is that? That’s just another fat kid, a sad statistic of America’s obesity epidemic. Everyone cares about obesity in general, but nobody gives a crap about the second fattest kid at Newton High. I saw a documentary on the BBC Channel the other night called
The 687-Pound Teenager
. It was about this kid in Britain who is the size of a small mountain range. That’s the kind of world we’re living
in. You have to weigh more than a quarter ton to get any attention. Being second fattest is hardly worth a mention.

Who is the fattest? His last name is Warner. That’s God’s other little joke. He’s Warner and I’m Zansky, and nearly everything in our high school involves alphabetical order. That means the two fatties are always in proximity, orbiting each other like planets in a gravitational tug-of-war. Warner and Zansky. Zansky and Warner.

As I walk into homeroom, I say a silent prayer that Warner has moved away over the summer. But the minute I get through the door, I see him. He’s standing in the back of the room, flipping through a Trig textbook and smiling. Warner is always smiling. It’s like he’s happy to be fat or something. It’s insane. Today he’s smiling and sweating. Not just a little bit. He’s sweating like a rodeo bull.

I stop dead in my tracks. I see why he’s sweating.

They changed the desks.

They’re not the folding-desk-and-chair combo we had last year. Those were the kind where you can choose to flip up the desk or keep it down, sort of like a tray table on an airplane. These new desks are not like that. They’re the ones where the chair has a half desk locked into place on the side. With this kind of chair, you either fit or you don’t.

Warner doesn’t. At least he’s not sure if he does. That’s why he’s milling around the back of the room. He’s acting like he’s at a party, relaxed and casual (not that he’d ever be relaxed and
casual at a party), but I can tell it’s an act. I hate that I know what he’s thinking. I hate that I’m thinking the exact same thing.

Will I fit?

This is the Physics of Fat. Where do I fit? Each new situation is a science experiment. Chairs, desks, doorways, amusement park rides, airline and movie theater seats, pants, elevators—they all raise the same question. What mass will fit into what volume of space, and what amount of force will it take to get it there?

Today’s experiment: Homeroom.

An empty desk awaits the mountain of Warner, and two seats away, another waits for me. Between the two desks sits Nancy Yee, a Chinese girl built like a plastic drink straw, and Chen Yu, another Chinese girl who outweighs her by eight ounces or so. The poor girls are doomed to spend high school sitting between Warner and me. Even on a normal day, the back row of our homeroom looks like this:

It can’t be good for Nancy or Chen’s reputation, but I have to say it doesn’t seem to bother Nancy Yee. She doesn’t care that three Yees could fit into a desk that holds half a Zansky and one-third of a Warner. She just sits there drawing in a sketchbook, staring down at the pages through glasses thick enough to focus a spy satellite. She’s wearing plaid shorts over purple tights and some kind of vintage green sweater with sparkly purple flowers all over it. My sister watches, like,
twenty-seven modeling shows a week. This is a combo that would definitely make her head explode.

“Hi, Andy,” Nancy says like she’s happy to see me. She flips her hair back, and I see a double streak of acne, both sides of her face breaking out where her greasy hair rubs against it. “Did you have a nice break?” she says.

“It was okay,” I say.

“What do you think of the new desks?”

I think Nancy just won the Stupid Question of the Year Award. But I don’t say anything. I have to remember that Nancy is oblivious. A girl who has the body mass of a Twinkie can’t imagine not fitting into a chair.

“Take your seats, please,” Ms. Weston says. She’s really dolled up for the first day of class, almost like she’s going to a party rather than school. Some guys call her Desperate Doris because she’s always trying to look younger. Even worse is that fact that she’s the Spanish teacher. There’s something sad about a woman without romance teaching a Romance language. It makes me want to cry and eat a paella.

Ms. Weston calls roll. People are starting to look at the fat kids standing in the back of the room.

Goddam Warner. I wish he would sit down or quit school or change his last name. Something. Anything. But no, he only sweats and pretends to read the stupid Trig and shuffles from one elephant hoof to the other.

“Aren’t you going to sit down?” Nancy says. I want to kill her, too.

Ms. Weston calls, “Tackenberg, Thomas, Tiburon …”

It’s now or never.

I suck in my gut, say a quick prayer to the god of physics, and aim my bulk towards the narrow opening between the desk and the chair …

Plop
.

I’m in.

It takes a little adjusting, a few grunts of effort, and an embarrassing shifting of blubber around my belt—but I fit.

Ms. Weston’s at the end of the alphabet, and she calls Warner’s name. He answers from a standing position. She looks at him strangely, then looks at the empty desk. She’s about to say something, when she decides to move on. I’m kind of relieved for him.

“Zansky,” she says.

“Here,” I say proudly and from a sitting position.

I fit, and Warner doesn’t.

For now.

a revised history of fat and fifteen.

Good news. I’m in AP American History this year. They started a new pilot program where they moved some of the top sophomores into AP a year ahead of time. Me, Eytan, Nancy Yee, and a couple other kids are actually mixed in with juniors and seniors.

Even better news. The AP American History classroom has tables rather than desks. And there’s a new teacher, Ms. Hartwell. She’s younger than all the other teachers. Someone said she just got out of graduate school. That means she’s not giving us the same tired old lesson plans. She has fresh ideas.

“History is subjective,” she announces in the second minute of class. “Who can tell me what that means?”

I want to raise my hand. I want Ms. Hartwell’s first impression of me to be special. I’m not just some fat sophomore who got accelerated for good grades. I’m an intellectual. I’m going to get a PhD someday, too, but I’m not
sure what subject it will be in. I look around, and none of the other sophomores are raising their hands. Everyone’s afraid, especially with these older kids around. There’s a super high potential for embarrassment.

A senior with wire-rim glasses pops his hand up. I think his name is Eric. “‘Subjective’ means it’s an important subject,” he says.

“Not quite,” Ms. Hartwell says with a smile on the corner of her lips.

That makes the class laugh, and Eric looks pissed off.

“Anyone else?” she says.

I’m thinking as fast as I can, looking for some way to get into the game, but I’m coming up blank.

“That means it’s not objective. It’s someone’s opinion,” a girl says.

The voice sounds familiar. I shift around to see who said it, but there’s a big guy in front of her blocking my view.

“How can history be someone’s opinion?” Eric says. “I mean, it happened, didn’t it?”

“No,” the girl in the back says. “It didn’t happen.”

The class laughs uncomfortably. Whoever she is, she’s got serious attitude. Ms. Hartwell raises an eyebrow. I look over at Eytan, and I can see he’s excited. He’s rubbing his hands together like he’s ready for some action. He lives for this stuff.

“That’s stupid,” another guy says. His name is Justin. I recognize him because he was vice president of Model UN last year, and that’s my only club. Eytan’s, too. Eytan nominated
me for chairman of the Botswana Election Committee, but Justin was a dick and blocked me. He said a freshman didn’t have enough experience to be chairman. Then he gave the position to some cute girl.

Now he tries to block the girl in the back. He says, “Things happen, and people write about it, and those things become history, right? That’s what history is.”

Most teachers would jump in and explain it now, but Ms. Hartwell doesn’t say anything. She just folds her arms like we’re discussing something really important, and she’s got all the time in the world. She shifts her attention back to the girl I can’t see.

“Would you care to elaborate, Ms….?”

“April,” the girl says. “April Park.”

My heart drops about forty-seven feet and bounces up into my chest. I’m not sure I believe in God, but moments like this get you thinking, you know?

I get a sharp elbow in the ribs. Eytan is staring at me. “April?” he mouths silently.

Crap. I shouldn’t have opened my mouth earlier.

Ms. Hartwell says, “What do you think, Ms. Park? Is that a correct definition of history?”

April bites at her lip for a second, thinking hard. She’s wearing a pink Izod that reveals a little V of honey-almond skin below her neck. I happen to like honey and almonds. Especially when they’re together. She has on those same
genius glasses, only now that we’re in AP History, they don’t seem so out of place.

“I don’t think that’s an accurate definition,” April says. “It reminds me of when we learned about World War Two in my old school.”

“What about World War Two?” Justin says with a sneer.

“How did it end?” April says.

“Duh,” Justin says. “We won.”

“We kicked ass!” Eric says, and the class laughs.

“But the Japanese don’t think so,” April says. “They think they were on their way to a compromise surrender, and we committed a crime by dropping the bombs.”

“Why would we do that?” this Goth girl says.

“The Japanese say we’re too arrogant to compromise,” April says.

“Ah, yes. History repeats itself,” Eytan whispers to me.

Justin rolls his eyes like April’s an idiot. “That’s not the real story,” he says. “That’s Japanese revisionism.”

“First of all, I’m not Japanese,” April says. “I’m giving an alternate view.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have entered the spin zone,” Eric says.

I can see April’s pissed.

“It’s like my parents,” I say all of a sudden.

The attention shifts in my direction. I feel sweat break out under my arms. I glance at April. She looks surprised.

Ms. Hartwell says, “Yes. Mr….?”

“Zansky.”

“Tell us, Mr. Zansky.”

Eytan looks at me like I’m nuts. The seniors lick their lips.

“I went to Hyannis Port with my family a few summers ago,” I say. “We were walking through town, and my sister got lost. She was, like, seven, and she wandered away from us in the crowd.”

Eric makes a loud yawning sound. I want to crawl into a hole and die, but I can’t give up so easily with April listening.

“Right away my folks started blaming each other,” I say. “Mom said it’s Dad’s fault Jessica got lost because he wasn’t paying attention. Dad said it’s Mom’s fault because she was supposed to hold her hand. But probably it was nobody’s fault. I mean, Jess is a kid and she got distracted, right? But they were so freaked out they just yelled at each other and bolted in different directions. So I stopped and I tried to think like Jess. Where would she go? What does she like? And I looked behind us and I saw these shirts hanging in a doorway that have all kinds of animals on them, like cutesy Asian stuff.”