Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have (5 page)

He unleashes a bag of twenty soccer balls into the middle of the crowd, and the guys leap on them and start doing all kinds of bounces and trick shots. I only have one trick shot. Pretending I’m sick. Last year I forged a note from Mom to get out of the gymnastics rotation. But I spent a week having panic attacks, thinking I was going to get caught, so I never did it again.

“Let’s do a couple laps to get the blood flowing,” Coach says. He pats his stomach. “I’d better join you. I’ve been eating pizza like they just invented cheese.”

Coach starts to run, and the guys follow him in a big circle, kicking the balls in front of them. My body is not really built to run. When it runs, it bounces, and when it bounces, things tend to get displaced. Like my shorts. I have to pull up my shorts every twelve seconds, or they’ll end up in the grass.

But the guys are running, and I have to at least make an effort. Even though it’s gym, you still get a grade, and I’d hate to blow my 4.0 because I’m fat. That seems totally unfair.

There is a bit of good news. Warner isn’t here bouncing around next to me. I saw him downstairs in the locker room a few minutes ago coming out of Coach’s office. I don’t know what he could possibly be talking to Coach about, but whatever it was, he’s not up here. That much is a relief.

I do my best to keep pace with the other guys. I pull up my shorts with one hand and wipe my sweat with the other. All the time I’m praying:
Just keep April out of this class, God. That’s all I ask for today. You can have Ugo beat the crap out of me, or Mom catch me with a mouthful of mini whatever, as long as you keep April away for an hour
.

“Check it out,” one of the guys says, and he points back towards the school.

The girls run onto the field.

It takes about fifteen seconds before I see April come out.

God went on vacation my first week of school. There’s no other explanation.

Here’s the bright side. April looks good in gym clothes. Really good. She’s got on black Adidas shorts with white stripes down the side. When she turns, I can see the outline of her bra through her T-shirt. It takes my breath away, and I didn’t have much breath to start with.

April glances in my direction, and without thinking, I speed up. It makes no sense for a guy who can barely run to run even faster, but my body does it automatically. It’s like it doesn’t give a crap what it can and can’t do. When it sees April, it tosses out the rules and starts hauling ass.

Suddenly I’m running super fast, lifting my legs higher than I ever have before. For some reason I think of a horse, one of those royal stallions in England decked out with all kinds of bells and ribbons. The kind that the guys with big fuzzy hats ride, you know? I’m prancing like I’m one of those horses, zigzagging back and forth, doing moves I don’t even know how to do.

I’m not the only one. Even Coach sucks in his stomach when the girls’ coach comes out. The guys on the field start to get really aggressive once the girls are watching. First they take shots on goal, then a game spontaneously breaks out. I don’t know what team I’m on, but I start to play. I fall in with some guys I’ve never met who are driving towards the goal. A couple guys are shouting, “Pass!” and someone else is screaming, “Over here!” at the top of his lungs.

Somehow I end up in the center of this group, and the goal is suddenly twenty feet in front of me with a super tall kid blocking it. Out of nowhere the ball appears in front of me, right at my feet, and people are screaming at me, “Shoot!
Shoot!”

It all happens really fast. It’s like my brain has switched into some kind of athlete mode I didn’t know I had. I can see what I want my body to do—push off from my left leg and kick the hell out of the ball with my right—and I can see where the ball is supposed to go, even imagine one of those
Bend It Like Beckham
thingies where it flies into the air, then arcs left and goes past the goalie.

I imagine the reaction as the guys crowd around me and congratulate me for scoring. The girls on the sideline say, “Who is that guy?” And April says, “I know who he is. That’s Andrew Zansky. His mom’s an incredible caterer.”

It’s all a great fantasy, but when the moment comes to kick the ball, my body isn’t in the right place. By the time I remember that I’ve never done this before, and maybe I’m pushing my luck, it’s too late. I’ve committed to some kind of thing that’s way, way beyond me.

As soon as I kick, my legs go out from under me. The ball stays where it is, and I go airborne. First I crash into a group of guys. They go down like bowling pins, four or five of them at one time.

But I’ve got so much momentum that it doesn’t stop me. Newton’s First Law. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Especially a fat object.

My entire body flies into the goal. The tall goalie kid screams as I slam into him at, like, a hundred miles per hour.

Even he’s not big enough to stop me. That’s when I hit the net. For a second I think I’m going to rip through and go tumbling right out into the parking lot….

But the net holds. At least briefly.

It snags me, and then the entire thing comes crashing down on top of me. I see flashes of white nylon and grass and goalpost, and then everything stops. I end up splattered on the grass, tangled so deeply in the net that I can’t move my arms or legs.

I look back at a field full of amazed students. It’s like a scene from a war movie, bodies splayed everywhere, girls screaming. Coach Bryson is running and blowing his whistle, trying to calm people down. The girls’ coach runs inside the athletic shack and appears with a first-aid kit to treat the wounded.

I look around for April. She’s standing on the sideline with this horrified expression on her face. She’s staring at something, but it’s not me. It’s in the center of the field.

I follow her gaze until I see what she’s looking at. There’s something in the grass. A blue-and-white pair of shorts. My shorts.

I feel wind blowing on my legs. I shift around until I can see what’s going on.

I’m in my underwear. Not even cool underwear. Fruit of the Loom. White. Size XXXL.

It takes the coaches nearly twenty-five minutes to get me out of the net. They spend the first ten trying to untangle me, and the last fifteen cutting me out with a utility knife they get from the Vocational-Ed teacher.

Most of that time I look up at the sky pretending I’m somewhere else. I’m definitely not tangled in a net in my underwear with forty-nine sophomores watching me. I’m not practically naked in front of the girl I want to impress most in the world.

Coach sends everyone to play a game on the adjacent field, but I can hear them whispering about me and laughing. Just
once I look over and see April looking back at me. Our eyes meet, and she turns away like she doesn’t know me. I can’t really blame her.

I hear the whole story later from Coach. It turns out that when I went to kick, my shorts fell off, and I tripped and took six guys down with me. Four of them got treated in the nurse’s office and released, one needed three stitches at the hospital because my elbow hit his chin, and the last one was able to limp off the field under his own power. I’m the only one who wasn’t hurt. Coach said it’s because my fat protected me like an airbag in a car crash.

“Congratulations,” he said, “you’ve earned a five-star safety rating.”

roar.

It takes about five seconds for everyone in school to hear about the soccer game. There’s no way to keep secrets in high school, especially secrets involving underpants and personal mortification.

At first people call me Tighty Whitey, Fat Ass, or the Destroyer. But none of those really catch on. Then, a few days later in History class, Justin calls me Jurassic Pork.

That catches on pretty fast.

Now instead of just being some unknown fat kid, I’m JP, Jurassic Pork, the fat dinosaur who steps on people and crushes them.

It’s pretty bad for me, but it’s worse for Warner. He didn’t do anything, but he’s guilty by association. Associated fatness or something like that. When people see us together, they make roaring noises. They scream and pretend they’re terrified. They say stuff like, “So simple, even a caveman can do it,” and they mime throwing spears at us.

Eytan tells me to ignore it, and it will pass. “Immature kids being immature.” That’s what he says. But it’s tough to ignore people taping Brontosaurus pictures to your locker.

That thing Dad said about first impressions? He was right. It’s completely possible to change people’s first impression of you.

You can make it worse.

the four words she says.

A couple days later I’m on the way to English class when I run into April in the hall. We’ve been avoiding each other since the soccer game. At least I’ve been avoiding her. But there’s hardly anyone else in the hall now, so we either have to say something or pretend not to know each other.

I slow down a little, and April does, too. I feel that strange sensation in my chest again. It’s crazy, but I’m suddenly hopeful. I think maybe the underwear incident wasn’t such a big deal. Maybe April is so amazing, she can look right past that kind of thing. She’s too smart to care about what people think. I wonder why I’ve been avoiding her if I could have been talking to her all along.

“How’s it going?” I say, and throw her a big smile.

“You told me you were a jock,” April says.

My smile goes away. April sounds angry. More than angry. Disappointed.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“At the wedding. You told me you played sports.”

“I guess,” I say.

“You don’t guess. It’s what you said.”

“Okay, fine. I said it. Why are you so pissed?”

“You lied to me,” April says.

Those four words—the way she says them—I swear to God I gain a hundred pounds in a minute. It’s not even fat weight. It’s heavier than fat. It’s something dense and awful, like my blood turns to lead.

“I don’t care if you’re a jock or not,” April says. “That’s not what I’m about.”

“What are you about?”

She looks at me coldly. “I guess you’ll never find out, because I can’t trust you.”

I suddenly get it. April’s not angry that I almost destroyed an entire soccer team, or even that I wear briefs instead of boxers.

She’s angry that I lied to her. Which means she was hoping I was the real thing. Which means Eytan might have been right. I really did have a shot. Did. Past tense.

I remember the time last year when Mom and Dad were fighting. It was the day Mom found out about Dad’s affair. I think she’d suspected it for a long time, but whenever she asked Dad, he said there was nothing going on. “Nothing to worry about.” That’s what he always said.

I guess when someone you love lies to you, you want to believe them. At least until you can’t believe them anymore. When Dad’s sexy paralegal, Miriam, showed up at the house
one afternoon to tell Mom what was going on, everything went to hell. Mom started baking mini pecan pies, and she didn’t stop until Dad packed his bags and moved out.

April’s looking at me like she wants to bake some mini pies, too. She might even grind me up and use me for the filling. Her arms are crossed while she waits for me to say something.

It’s really confusing. Some girls are impressed if you lie to try and get their attention. I’ve seen guys bragging about all kinds of crap, and girls know what’s up, but they still fall for it.

It’s different with April. It’s like I broke her bottom line or something. I broke it, and there’s no way to unbreak it.

But I have to try.

I have to tell her about the real me, why I lied that day, all the things I wanted to say to her at the wedding. I want to tell her about the night when I couldn’t sleep, and I had those crazy ideas about us at three in the morning.

I want to tell her all of that and more, but when I open my mouth to speak, nothing comes out. That’s what it’s like to be me. Everything goes into my mouth, but when I need something to come out, I’m out of luck.

I guess April gets tired of waiting, because she spins around before I can say anything and walks away. I stand there, so heavy I can’t move, listening to the squeak of her sneakers on the hall floor. I’ve known April for less than a week, and I’ve seen more of her back than I have of her front.

That’s not how I planned it. Not at all.

the scent of popular.

Things happen really fast after that.

On Monday I’m standing in the hall outside the boys’ locker room. The bell has already rung, but I’m afraid to go in. Since the soccer game, I’m not exactly Mr. Popularity in gym class.

Coach passes by on his way into the locker room. “Oh, good,” he says when he sees me. “I need to talk to you.”

We go into the locker room together, and the guys look at me like I’m dead meat. If Coach wasn’t there, I probably would be.

“Let’s go into my office,” Coach says, and he closes the door behind us.

I’ve never been in Coach’s office before. There are inspirational posters all over the walls. One shows a big chunk of coal like you’d use in your grill. The poster says,
A diamond is a lump of coal that stuck with it
.

“I have good news,” Coach says. “I’m taking you out of this class.”

For a second I think I won’t have to take gym anymore.

“I could have a study period or something,” I say.

“No, no,” Coach says. “Phys Ed is mandatory. I’m putting you in Modified Gym.”

“Mod Gym?” I say. Mod Gym is the class for retarded kids and the handicapped. Everyone calls it Slow Gym. “I can’t go into Mod.”

“It’s for your own safety. And anyway, I think it will be more your speed.”

My speed. Slow.

What do you do in Slow Gym? It’s more like what you don’t do. You don’t go outside and play sports with the normal kids. You sit in a circle and roll a kickball back and forth in the gym. No kidding. One hour of rolling a ball. Coach pops in every twenty minutes to make sure nobody fell out of their wheelchair.

If that wasn’t bad enough, guess who’s in Slow Gym?