Fat Angie Read online

  “She’s still in Phoenix.”

  “Ahhh . . .” Wang held up his cell.

  Her mother was, in fact, not in Phoenix.

  Wang squeezed Angie’s cheeks. She slapped him away. “Apparently, she’s home playing Martha Stewart.”

  “I didn’t get in trouble, so Mom’s not gonna know.”

  “Really?” asked Wang.

  “You better not have,” warned Fat Angie.

  His devilish growing grin signed, sealed, and delivered the answer Angie was most afraid of: her mother knowing she had been acting out.

  “Stacy Ann was making fun of her, OK?” said Fat Angie.

  “Making fun of Mom?”

  “No. Her.”

  Wang’s quiet revealed some inkling of a soul, but he had little room for something as useless as a soul in his current rebellion against all things hopeful. He threw his shoulders back and said, “She was stupid going off all G.I. Jane and now she’s dead. So quit thinking it’s all gonna turn out different like your little flashback family shows.”

  A couple of Wang’s dud dude friends fell in beside him.

  “You don’t have to be like this,” Fat Angie said. “I know you miss her too.”

  “Sell that shit somewhere else, Fatty. People disappear, yo. Roll credits.”

  Wang high-fived the dud dudes as they all started to strut off.

  Fat Angie’s breath felt shallow. She wanted to scream. Run through the annoying crowd and scream out all the noise in her head full blare. Just as her lips parted, the intensity of her voice revving, she decided to bypass screaming and go straight to payback.

  “Wang,” shouted Fat Angie. “Bet your friends don’t know you’re a big ABBA fan!”

  “Shut up, Biggie Sized,” said Wang.

  “Shut up, ABBA Fan,” she said loud enough for dud dude posse to hear.

  A dud dude snickered.

  Wang rushed her, his face in gag-me range. The stench of Camel filterless, Red Bull, and Andes mints slithered down her throat. Her stomach soured.

  “Don’t ever say that again,” he said.

  Her eyes steeled. “ABBA! ABBA! Wang whacks it to ABBA!”

  The reason for the building tension between Fat Angie and Wang was as follows:

  ABBA (n.): a rock group from the early 1980s; largely regarded as sappy and “gay” music.

  Fat Angie grinned, confident she had pinned Wang into a socially sticky corner. One that his criminal status of hacker supreme and karate blue belt could not rescue him from. ABBA was most definitely a roundhouse kick to his manhood.

  “Why couldn’t you just’ve died?” said Wang.

  The high from outing Wang’s love of ABBA dropped.

  Wang hopped into his cherry-red Jeep Cherokee (a gift to soften the blow of divorce and abandonment). He made a special point to flip off Angie as he cut the wheel, poseur rap blaring.

  Angie’s sister would not have resorted to outing Wang’s love for ABBA. She was the one who got him when other people didn’t. She was the fulcrum of their family machine, and in her absence they had not only stopped working, they’d forgotten what working meant. Dad leaving, living in his condo on the West Coast. Fat Angie’s couldn’t-be-bothered mother pretending she had not needed him the way he had very much needed her. Everyone had failed when said sister-fulcrum was deployed from the United States into a war none of them could support. Only to have her disappear and suddenly become more visible than ever — on Iraqi television, tied to a chair, blindfolded and bruised. Everyone could see her — feel her — and experience heartbreak for her.

  “Hey,” said a voice that sounded the way Butter Rum Life Savers tasted.

  Fat Angie turned. KC Romance cracked a Coke and the fizz filled Fat Angie’s ears.

  “You busing it too?” said KC.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “You OK? I mean, as OK as you can be. Best years of our lives, huh? Slap it on a bumper. It’s all a bunch of Santa Claus and Easter Bunny, you know?”

  Should she have died? Fat Angie wondered. Should she have stayed in the girls’ bathroom lighting matches and dropping them in the toilet just as they began to burn her fingertips? All while the school band played the fight song during the pep rally. All while blood drip-dropped into the toilet. All while her sister was —

  “Wanna swig?” KC asked.

  Fat Angie snapped back into time and place.

  “Um, no . . . thanks.” Fat Angie adjusted the straps of her overly packed backpack. “You’re, riding . . . the bus?”

  “Yeah, Esther couldn’t get it together to pick me up,” said KC.

  “Esther . . . ?”

  “She’s my mom. We’ve been on a first-name basis since third grade. It’s really not that weird.”

  “I didn’t think it was weird,” said Fat Angie, who in fact thought it was very weird to refer to your mother by her first name.

  KC held up her hand, which had a purple heart surrounding a large black-inked 5 on it. “That’s mine. What’s yours?”

  Fat Angie studied the life lines grooving along KC’s palm. All intersected by the thick black 5.

  “What’s my what?” said Fat Angie.

  “Your bus.” KC swigged her Coke.

  “Two,” said Fat Angie.

  “Then you get on before me,” KC said.

  “I guess. I mean, sometimes when they come up from the elementary they get out of order. Sort of that sock-missing-from-the-laundry phenomenon.”

  The awkward juxtaposition was felt by both girls but covered with polite half-hearted smiles.

  “I mean, um . . . your bus might be before mine,” Fat Angie said.

  KC grinned. This sent a thick gulp down Angie’s throat. She adjusted the straps of her overly packed backpack again.

  “So, the lunch guy? The two of you really aren’t a thing?” asked KC.

  Fat Angie was confused. “Jake? No.”

  “So, he’s not checking you out from that eco-friendly car over there?”

  Sitting on the hood, Jake seemed to be a part of his jock group, but he was watching Angie. Could he truly be checking her out? It didn’t follow the trajectory of her life so far.

  Fat Angie’s brow furrowed. “He’s probably just into you. You’re really pretty.”

  Pretty? Fat Angie’s inner-outer spaz had reached painful proportions.

  “Thanks. For the pretty,” KC said, her finger running along the lip of the Coke can.

  “Sure. You know, I mean . . .” Fat Angie said. “You know you’re pretty. Everyone knows you’re pretty.”

  “Well, I haven’t met everyone yet. It’s a big world. Besides.”

  Fat Angie waited for the what came after “besides.”

  Pause.

  Excruciatingly awkward pause.

  “I have a deviated septum,” Fat Angie said.

  The non sequitur was a ridiculous factoid. It was simply all she could think of.

  “Yeah? Cool. I broke my nose at a Marilyn Manson concert. See?”

  Fat Angie struggled for a response while examining the seemingly flawless slope of KC’s nose.

  “You see it, right?” said KC.

  But Fat Angie’s eyes had swung down to that luscious impossibly possible purple heart tattoo on KC’s neck. That was no stick-on from the fifty-cent machine at the IGA grocery.

  “Yeah,” said Fat Angie. “Musta hurt.”

  “It did. So critical. I had raccoon eyes. My nose coulda been a landing pad for extraterrestrial aircraft. OK, maybe small spaceships, but seriously, you shoulda seen it. I thought Esther was gonna pass a stone,” said KC.

  In the nervous bending of her fingers, Fat Angie had unconsciously revealed her scars, peeking out beneath the Casio calculator watchband. KC’s attention to them made Fat Angie even more nervous, if that were possible.

  “No worries . . . about the etching. Things get dark sometimes,” KC said.

  The scars burned, itched, and felt embarrassingly alive on Fat Angie’s wrist. There was
no “cool” about her mother’s unbelievable disconnect around the public suicide gone wrong on the basketball court. There was nothing “cool” about the raging hush of the crowd and the band instruments’ notes echoing as they fell out of play. There was nothing “cool” about the fact that Fat Angie often wished she had stayed huddled against the toilet in the girls’ locker room. Because it hadn’t gotten better. Nothing had gotten better.

  KC sipped her Coke, staring off at the Dumpster. Graffiti sprawled along one side:

  Pause.

  Would the pauses ever end? It felt like a forever pause. And forever could be longer than the calculation of forever times pi — the sum was too large. Fat Angie had officially stunted her hopeful mathematical growth by creating an unsolvable problem. Perhaps she was truly deficient at the art of numbers. Perhaps.

  Then . . .

  KC leaned into Fat Angie. “Don’t you hate it when girls spin all boy crazed? Like that Suzie Kitten over there,” said KC, motioning to a short-skirt tease sitting on her boyfriend’s slick ride. “It really changes them, you know? I bet she was someone once. Her own someone. Weird, huh? How you can just get all lost in what someone else wants?”

  KC leaned away but the smell of her sugary Coca-Cola breath lingered, anesthetizing Angie.

  “Looks like you’re first,” KC said.

  “Huh?” Fat Angie said, dazed.

  “Your bus. It’s here.”

  In all the commotion of Coca-Cola breath, KC not asking about the suicide tracks, and the simple fact that she was speaking to Fat Angie at all, Fat Angie had failed to notice the line of buses arrive. In perfect numerical order, as luck would have it. Unlike her sister, Fat Angie relied heavily on the possibility of luck. But it was rarely in her favor.

  Fat Angie wearily approached the bus.

  “Hey,” shouted KC.

  A guy clipped Fat Angie’s shoulder. “Move it, whale,” he said, and got on the bus.

  KC stepped toward Fat Angie and lifted the girl’s sweaty palm. KC, Pilot pen cap pressed between her lips, steadied Fat Angie’s trembling hand.

  “You cool?” KC said.

  “It’s a sugar disorder. They’re working on it.”

  KC resumed her attention to Fat Angie’s palm. With several hard strokes, KC imprinted a series of numbers.

  “Call me,” said KC. “Maybe we can do The Backstory thing. When you’ve thought about it.”

  The bus driver slammed the horn.

  “I gotta . . .” said Fat Angie, motioning toward the bus. “Thank you.”

  “For?” KC asked.

  Fat Angie stumbled on the bus steps. The door swung shut.

  The hefty girl made her way through the name-calling, leg-tripping kids to the back of the bus, her eyes fixed on her palm. A heart encompassed a set of seven numbers. She dropped into the sticky last seat and stared out the window. KC had vanished but the imprint of the girl’s grin, eighteen-eyehole boots, and purple heart tattoo played in montage repeat in the mind of one unusually tingly Fat Angie.

  In that moment of bliss, Fat Angie raised her head to a pair of outcasts she referred to as the Duo of Geekdom. They should have been lower on the social chain than she was. With their high-end braces and robot-stickered binders, they were, in urban slang, tricked-out freak geeks. The brawn of the group, which wasn’t saying much, sported a faded Dolly Parton T-shirt.

  Dolly Parton (n.): a famous country singer best known for her incredibly endowed chest and unimaginably slim waist. Her success as Doralee Rhodes in the 1980 smash film 9 to 5 and as Truvy Jones in Steel Magnolias (1989) heightened her fame in mainstream cinema.

  The ringleader, a redhead with shabby blue highlights, was, in Fat Angie’s mind, the brain.

  “I heard Stacy Ann Sloan whipped your fat ass in gym,” said the brain. “They said you cried like a girl.”

  The boys laughed. The statement was clearly funny only to them.

  Fat Angie had to ride the bus home every day. Her couldn’t-be-bothered mother’s corporate lawyer lifestyle and not-so-on-the-sly affair with Wang’s court-appointed therapist left her little time for after-school pickups.

  So she rode the hot, overcrowded bus with kids who were too young to have a car or too loser to score one. Any kid remotely as odd as Fat Angie consciously sat at the front of the bus in the hope that closer proximity to the driver would fend off the anticipated cackling, name-calling, and otherwise unpleasant actions. Not Fat Angie. She wanted to be a daredevil . . . a rebel . . . a girl against the grain, so she rode in the back. The last seat on the right-hand side. In a car, it would be the passenger’s side. Fat Angie imagined she always had shotgun — in reverse. She enjoyed the backward perspective on all things. What if ice were warm? What if fire were cold? What if her dad had not suffered a mild stroke while vacationing with his new wife and her son in Mexico? He spoke with only the slightest impediment after speech therapy and assured her when they did get to chat that she was, as always, special.

  Fat Angie had told the therapist, “I don’t know why he always says that. That I’m special. Doesn’t that seem unusual?”

  The therapist had made a note: Incapable of forgiving her father.

  The bus came to a stop at Oaklawn Ends, an upper-middle-class suburban cul-de-sac tucked at the edge of Dryfalls. As Fat Angie made her way down the aisle, the Duo of Geekdom shouted, “Fatty Freak!”

  Accustomed to the name-calling, she continued to walk, as if ceremoniously stepping off into a better place. Unfortunately, Fat Angie’s bland cookie-cutter two-story house nestled in the heart of the cul-de-sac wasn’t that place. Wang’s Jeep hogged the two-car driveway. She huffed, eyes pinned to the well-worn basketball hoop over the garage. The net remained unswooshed since her sister had left. Fat Angie dropped her head back, squinting. An airplane flew overhead, eclipsing the sun for a moment.

  Only for a moment.

  Fat Angie did not like the muted roar of planes.

  Fat Angie did not like her neighborhood.

  Fat Angie did not like that she disliked so many things lately.

  She slipped in the back door and closed it ever so carefully in the hope of avoiding her mother.

  “Angie?” called her mother from the kitchen.

  A blanket of uggh wrapped around the girl. In the last month, Fat Angie had seen her mother for 3.6 hours, and that was a generous estimate. Her mother’s way of dealing with Fat Angie was not to deal with her directly. E-mails, text messages, and the occasional voice mail kept them in their out-of-sync connection.

  Fat Angie ambled into the kitchen.

  “Um . . . thought you were in Phoenix for another week,” said Fat Angie.

  “They settled. They always settle,” said her mother, sorting through stacks of mail. “Which is good because we have to go to your aunt’s baby shower Saturday.”

  Her mother dismissively slid the invitation across the counter to Angie. The card was conservative, like most of Angie’s family. Cute in a baby-duck-and-pink-pastel way but refined in font and border.

  Fat Angie’s mother swiftly slit the tops of envelopes, her technique careful and cruel. Discarding the envelopes’ hollow bodies, she moved ruthlessly through the contents. Only a few missives were deemed worthy of further attention.

  “Um . . . do you think I could not go to the baby shower?” asked Fat Angie.

  Her mother continued sorting the mail. “Why?”

  Aside from the uncomfortableness of all gatherings with her mother’s side of the family, there was the unbearable expectation to adapt to her mother’s idea of normal. Which tended to lean toward being like her triplet cousins who consistently wore new clothes designed to flatter their brittle bodies fueled on energy drinks and eating disorders. Fat Angie was neither brittle nor acquiring new clothes until she dropped twenty-nine pounds exactly.

  “I just . . . I thought I’d stay home and do homework and stuff,” Fat Angie said.

  “It’s a couple of hours,” said her mother. “You can bear
to be normal for a couple of hours, can’t you? Besides, your cousins will be there.”

  Triple Threat confirmed. Fat Angie needed to be soothed. Craving leftover Papa Johns, she opened the refrigerator. She asked, “Where’s the food?”

  “There’s a grilled chicken salad from the airport in the back,” said her mother.

  “Where’s the rest of the food?”

  “No one is ever going to love you if you stay fat,” said her mother.

  The cool air of the refrigerator melted against Fat Angie’s fiery flushed cheeks. It had taken less than two minutes for the fat digs to emerge from her mother’s mouth. Fat Angie headed for the stairs, but not fast enough.

  “I’m not done talking,” said her mother. “Another fight.”

  Wang had no doubt been honest about selling her out. This reaffirmed his position as King of the Jerkfaces.

  “I didn’t technically start it,” Fat Angie said.

  “Technically?” asked her mother.

  “There’s this girl in my gym class,” Fat Angie struggled to explain. “She — she was talking about her and —”

  “We agreed you would stay on the medication,” said her mother, in a calculated deflection of any and all talk of Angie’s sister.

  “I am,” said Fat Angie.

  “Then?”

  Fat Angie did not like confrontation.

  She especially did not like confrontation with her corporate lawyer mother.

  “What do you want, Angie? Attention?” asked her mother.

  Fat Angie felt her large self begin to shrink. It was an incredibly uncomfortable feeling. More uncomfortable than her too-tight jeans.

  “You get into fights. You skip therapy. They bill us whether you go or not. You understand?”

  Angie gripped the railing and made a feeble attempt at straightening her posture.

  “You have to start being normal,” said her mother. “Give people the chance to forget about . . . I don’t even know what to say. Do you know what I’m supposed to say to you?”

  Fat Angie’s chin doubled in her defeated stance.

  “Don’t you want to be happy?” asked her mother.

  And there it was. The million-and-three-dollar question. Angie honestly did not know. Not in the absolute way that she thought she should know. There was too much pressure for a quick response. Plus, she thought she might have to pee.