Fat Angie Read online

  “What?” KC said.

  “My . . . my sister loves that song.”

  Fat Angie bit the inside of her cheek.

  Pause.

  More awkward pause.

  They were swaddled in the uncomfortable pause.

  KC stepped down from the tub edge. For such a large bathroom, the two girls were incredibly close.

  “Hey,” said KC.

  “Hey,” said Fat Angie.

  “Um . . .” said KC. It was an unusual filler in her vernacular.

  “Yeah?” said Fat Angie.

  “So you wanna . . .” said KC.

  “Yeah,” said Fat Angie, unsure of what the “wanna” actually was.

  Fat Angie’s heart exercised at rapid heart pounding rate. Having KC so close — so deliciously vanilla-and-Coke–smelling close — automatically parted Fat Angie’s closed lips. She could not explain the sensation swelling in her growling stomach. She was hungry but it was more. Much, much more. And when some clarity for Fat Angie’s parted lips seemed to be on the horizon, KC unlocked the bathroom door and twisted the knob open.

  Fat Angie gulped. Her parted lips smashed shut.

  “C’mon,” KC said.

  “Um, yeah, OK,” said Fat Angie.

  KC slipped around her.

  Fat Angie flushed the toilet and caught a glimpse of herself in the ornate mirror. A glimpse that became a stare. She tried to see the Angie beneath the fat. She tried to see her wrists without the scars. She tried to see a girl who could be brave like the woman in KC’s song. But she just saw fat . . . Fat Angie.

  Fat Angie stood behind KC, who was peering through her hands as though she were a director framing a shot.

  “Sweet,” KC said.

  KC stepped back, critically admiring her newest installment, a five-by-seven copy of the cell phone pic of the ultrasound cake. It was plastered in with precision among a wall collage of Johnny Depp’s tattoos, off-kilter postcards, artsy magazine clippings, and a 1950s ad encouraging women to eat tapeworms to stay thin. From the grin on her face, it was clear that her Wall of Thoughts So Twisted had reached masterpiece status.

  “What do you think?” KC said.

  Fat Angie was more uncomfortable with the image than she had been at the baby shower. The photograph was grainier than it had been on the cake, the result of a low pixel count on KC’s camera phone. The picture reminded Fat Angie of the printouts she had collected of the war in Iraq. Of the Shock and Awe bombings. Of terrains she had Google Earthed and circled in red marker as potential hostage havens for her sister.

  “It’s OK,” said Fat Angie, sitting on the end of the bed.

  But it wasn’t OK.

  “It’s actually very disturbing,” said KC, getting online to post the image on her various social networks. “I like that. People should be disturbed sometimes.”

  This was a peculiar notion to Fat Angie.

  A sort of secret code knock thumped on KC’s door.

  “Yeah,” said KC.

  A woman in trendy rimmed glasses, which clashed with the faded vine tattoo twisting along her arm, poked her head in.

  “Sorry, didn’t know you had company,” she said.

  “Esther, Angie. Angie, Esther.” KC hooked her arm across Esther’s shoulder. “This is my hippie mama.”

  “Quit it,” Esther said. “Good to meet you, Angie. The resident smart-ass has said a lot about you.”

  Esther shook hands with Fat Angie, who stared at the arm inked with fall leaves.

  “Did you do that?” Fat Angie asked.

  “The ink? Hell no, darlin’,” said Esther. “My first ex —”

  “Not my dad,” KC interrupted.

  “Don’t get me going on your dad,” Esther said to KC.

  “Esther,” said KC, struggling to remove her boots.

  Esther grabbed the heel of KC’s boot. With a few calculated pulls, the boot released.

  “You know I hate these boots,” said Esther.

  “You hate that Dad bought me these boots. The boots themselves are fine,” said KC.

  “Yeah, yeah. You know, you coulda told me you’d be hanging around. I would’ve left you something in the fridge.”

  KC and Esther stood face-to-face.

  KC said, “And what would that something be?”

  Esther pinched KC’s cheek. “A piece of your pretty face.”

  “Ha-ha,” said KC. “Don’t quit your day job.”

  Esther’s attention fell to KC’s forearm. The forearm that she was scratching beneath her T-shirt. Before Esther could reach for her arm, KC slid her hands in her back pockets.

  “How was the baby shower?” Esther asked KC.

  “Completely on the nine. I would’ve given it a ten but they didn’t have caviar. Oh, they loved the shirt, by the way,” said KC.

  “I bet,” said Esther.

  KC dragged Esther to the Wall of Thoughts So Twisted. “Check this.”

  “Is that a . . . ?” said Esther.

  “A fetus,” said Fat Angie.

  “Wow!” Esther said.

  “Yeah,” said KC. “Can you believe? Ultrasound pic on the cake?”

  “Huh?” Esther said, tilting her head as if a new angle would give some different meaning to the image.

  KC aimed her camera phone at Esther and snapped a picture.

  “That better not end up on your Wall of Twisted,” Esther said.

  “We’ll see.” KC smirked.

  “Angie, you need anything?” Esther asked. “I could bake some taquitos.”

  Fat Angie shook her head, mostly because Mexican food gave her gas.

  “Hey, paparazzo,” Esther said to KC, who was framing up another picture. “I’ll be in the basement with Mike.”

  “What’s Mike doing here?” said KC.

  “He wanted to get some practice in on that pig ear you scratched on.”

  “Don’t knock my skills, Esther. Besides, that ear is old.”

  “I’ll see ya’ll later,” said Esther. “Nice to meet you, Angie. Don’t let her cynicism rub off on you.”

  No sooner did KC’s door shut than Fat Angie said, “Pig’s ear?”

  “It’s a tattoo practice thing,” KC said, sliding backward in a desk chair and landing in front of her computer. “It’s not alive or anything.”

  Regardless of the pig’s status, a horrible pang welled up in Fat Angie. Charlotte’s Web had been a childhood favorite. However, she strongly objected to the death of Charlotte. While able to process the logic of Charlotte’s death for heightened dramatic tension, twist in plot, she felt it was unnecessary.

  “You cool?” said KC, clicking on the computer keyboard. “Esther can be a shock rock.”

  “Remember my mother?” said Fat Angie.

  “Right . . .” said KC.

  Wandering around the room, Fat Angie took note of a massive stack of vinyl records and boxes of unpacked clothes. Peeking beneath a Pink Floyd tee, Fat Angie saw half of a framed photo of KC. She bit the inside of her lip as she moved the shirt only a few centimeters to reveal KC cheek to cheek with a rather attractive pom-pom teen.

  “Who’s this?” said Fat Angie, holding up the frame.

  “Nobody,” said KC. “Just a girl I knew in the Hills.”

  Fat Angie studied the image and the shift in KC’s posture at the computer. It was not a nobody. She was very pretty. A very, very perfect kind of pretty.

  KC’s phone beeped. She read the text and then tossed her phone in a basket of dirty clothes.

  “Everything OK?” Fat Angie asked.

  “Yeah. Just my dad. He’s what I call a Sometimes Dad. He’s only around some of the time and only when it gels for him.”

  “I like the boots he got you,” Fat Angie said.

  KC cracked a grin. “Yeah, he really didn’t get ’em. That’s just what I told Esther. He gave me plastic and dropped me at some megamall in Minneapolis. Said, ‘Get whatever you like, sweetheart.’ I kinda wanted to scream because he’d promised to go with
me. So I bought a pair of six-hundred-dollar boots instead.”

  “Wow . . .”

  “It was stupid petty,” KC said, scratching at her shirtsleeve. “I mean, he loves me. He’s just really hard to talk to.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Yeah?” KC asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Beat.

  KC peeled a postcard off the Wall of Thoughts So Twisted. She handed it to Angie. Dusk. A guy in a dusty white T-shirt stood in the middle of a road. Canyons filled out the space around him. A teardrop trailer accented with Christmas lights and a woman in the doorway. She had a pie in hand. Angie could not assign meaning to all the elements in the image, other than to call it artsy.

  “You ever wish you could meet someone in a photograph?” said KC. “Like, ask that guy there what he was really thinking when the picture went snap?”

  “Sure. I mean, I guess so. But it’s . . . what you’re saying . . . it’s just make-believe.”

  Fat Angie plopped on the bed. Fidgeting with loose threads, she made a hole in the knee of her jeans.

  “I’m supposed to stay in reality. Be grounded,” Fat Angie said.

  “Your shrink or your mother?”

  Fat Angie shrugged. “Both, I guess. See . . .”

  A hum spun inside of Fat Angie. Swirled with the taste of vulnerable and uncertain. Her lips parted for nothing but air.

  “What?” KC asked.

  “My sister . . . she signed up for the air force and was deployed to Iraq two years ago. She’s been missing since February, which is nine months, seven days, and”— she eyed her Casio calculator watch —“eight hours. But she’s not dead.”

  “I knew. About your sister,” KC said. “I friended the Facebook page your father put up when she went missing. Plus . . . I saw you on Dateline.”

  “You saw me on Dateline?”

  “The two-part Valentine’s Day special,” said KC, turning to Fat Angie. “It was the one with you and your mom. Wang glassy-eyed stoned. Your dad via satellite from Seattle.”

  “You saw me on Dateline?”

  “It seemed really hard. That cutaway money shot, the video clip. You and your sister. Playing basketball in the driveway against your dad and Wang. It was kinda Norman Rockwell. Well, a suburban and extremely diverse Rockwell.”

  “I am critically stupid,” said Angie.

  “No,” KC assured Fat Angie.

  “For some reason I just thought you didn’t know. Which is totally stupid ’cause the whole world knows,” said Fat Angie. “You could’ve said.”

  “What?” asked KC. “‘What’s it like to have your sister taken hostage?’ Seems kind of a killjoy intro.”

  Fat Angie nodded, biting the inside of her cheek.

  “I really . . .” KC said. “I liked you before I knew you. Well, at least I thought I would. You seemed real. And uncomfortable. You were the only one in that interview who was uncomfortable. That was comforting. So, when Esther said we were moving to Dryfalls, Ohio — which I was not jumping on the joy for — I don’t know. I hoped we could be friends or something.”

  “You don’t know me,” said Fat Angie, rubbing the scars on her wrist.

  KC rolled her chair across the room.

  “OK. You like Where Did You Come From? Italian cream soda with two shots of vanilla. You support the fight against cancer.” KC held up her yellow bracelet. “You care about your brother even though he’s crazy mean in public. And you try to please your mother but don’t know where to start. And you’d probably do anything to see your sister again.”

  “Anybody could know that stuff,” said Fat Angie.

  “Could they know I like you?” said KC.

  Butterflies flapped their butterfly wings in belly time.

  “Not that I’m not transparent,” said KC. “Clearly, Jake knows.”

  Fat Angie, her stomach hatching cocoon after cocoon of butterflies, was unsure how KC was transparent. And what did Jake have to do with any of it?

  “Jake knows what?” said Fat Angie.

  “That I’m gay,” said KC, as though it were obvious.

  “Like, gay-girl gay?” said Fat Angie.

  “Well, definitely not like funny-ha-ha gay,” said KC. “Though I am a lot on the funny. It’s the cynicism, Esther says.”

  “Does Esther know you’re gay-girl gay?”

  “You’re totally weirding here,” said KC. “I’m sorry. I thought . . . I thought you . . .”

  “That I was gay-girl gay,” said Fat Angie.

  First the unexpected conversation with Jake at The Backstory about KC being different. Now. Now Fat Angie had been perceived as full-on gay-girl gay. But there had been no pamphlets. There had been no rainbow-in-the-sky epiphany. There had been nothing. Had there?

  “Angie?” said KC.

  There had been no dancing Care Bears blasting belly rainbows in Fat Angie’s dreams either. But were Care Bears a symbol of gay-girl gay? She really had not been confident when discussing masturbation with her therapist. She did not know if she preferred Lady Gaga to the long-tongued KISS singer Gene Simmons. But she did prefer either one of them to the image of Barbies when forced to choose. The Barbies were too perfect. Fat Angie did not like too perfect. That much she was certain of.

  In truth, Fat Angie had not contemplated the notion of lip-to-lip contact with anyone as a serious possibility. That was until KC had been so close to her an hour earlier. In the bathroom. At the baby shower. Until then, the idea of anyone kissing her had been outside the realm of statistical reality. But there. With a collage of Johnny Depp’s tattoos . . . with a framed photo of KC with a very, very perfect kind of pretty girl and a grainy printout of an ultrasound image on a baby-shower cake . . . Fat Angie was engulfed in a huge conundrum.

  Pause.

  Pause.

  Look-down-at-your-shoes kind of pause.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” said KC, kick-rolling her chair back to the computer. “Let’s just forget the reveal part of the conversation.”

  That was, as far as Fat Angie was concerned, impossible.

  Could Fat Angie be releasing some gay-girl-gay vibe unknowingly? Clearly, being introverted was not the code key for the lesbian lockbox. Ellen DeGeneres was not introverted and was in all regards very gay.

  “There it is,” said KC.

  Fat Angie stood behind KC.

  “Now 4,059 Facebook junkies know that photos of embryos on baby-shower cakes are the new it,” said KC.

  “That’s a lot of friends,” said Fat Angie.

  “Most of those people don’t know me,” said KC. “It’s like my dad says, ‘It’s not worth wasting your time letting people in.’ But a cynic can still dream.”

  KC stood up. She was very, very close to Fat Angie.

  Fat Angie’s armpits began to sweat. “I think I’m gay-girl gay with you,” she said.

  “We’re crystal, don’t worry about it,” KC said. “You don’t have to say something because I blended the lines for a sec. We can just be friends.”

  Friends? Fat Angie marveled at how “be friends” dug into her chest like some Syfy channel heart-devouring creature. It . . . really hurt. She shifted her weight from one foot to the next and looked down.

  “Cool?” KC said, leaning in to Fat Angie’s eye line.

  “Yeah,” said Fat Angie. “The best kind. Right?”

  KC grinned halfheartedly. “Sure,” she said, and went back to the computer.

  Fat Angie sat on the bed.

  Maybe Fat Angie really preferred neither Lady Gaga nor Gene Simmons. Maybe it was because they were not really options. Could KC Romance be what she really preferred?

  Fat Angie walked down the sidewalk of Oaklawn Ends, her mind swarming with the notion of potentially being gay-girl gay. The thought was both confining and freeing. But as soon as KC had revealed her liking for her, she had retracted it. Fat Angie was confused by this limited-time offer.

  She was challenged to count beyond ten in her head as she neared her h
ouse. Desperate to clear her head, she mumbled the numbers under her breath. She stepped over the cracks in the sidewalk, not because of obsessive-compulsive disorder but because it somehow felt like a game. A game she played, of course, alone.

  “Hey,” said Jake, throwing an orange tennis ball to Ryan.

  She was perplexed by his instigation of chit-chat again.

  “Hey,” Fat Angie said.

  Ryan returned the ball and Jake threw it in Fat Angie’s direction.

  Ryan bounded in full sprint after it and tried to halt the bounce with his paws.

  Jake and Fat Angie met in the middle of the street.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Nothing,” said Fat Angie. “That’s not true.”

  “So . . . ?” he said.

  “This is really strange,” she said, tugging at her jeans.

  His eyes were forced downward with the awkwardness of her tugging.

  “What?” he said, tossing the ball for Ryan in the circle of the cul-de-sac.

  “We don’t talk, Jake,” said Fat Angie.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know. I mean, why would we? You know?”

  “So . . . ?” said Fat Angie.

  Ryan returned with the ball and stood between them for a cue. Jake reached down, tugging the ball back and forth. “You’re a little badass. Rrrawr . . .”

  Jake tore the ball away and hurled it.

  “Are you into me or something?” said Fat Angie.

  “Wow. Wait. How?” asked Jake.

  “Forget it.” She started to walk off, and he grabbed her arm.

  “Listen, Angie.” Jake cleared his throat. “You know. I think it’s cool you think I’m hot.”

  “I don’t . . . ,” Fat Angie said. “I mean, you are, I guess. But no.”

  “Then?”

  “Then why?” said Fat Angie. “Why stick up for me with Gary? Why give KC a hard time? She’s, like, the only one in the whole school who gives me a fair break, Jake. And it’s a pretty big school.”

  “I just — what do you know about her? You met her only a few days ago.”

  “I met you a few days ago,” said Fat Angie, walking away. “And we have lived across the street from each other for years.”

  “It’s not like your sister and I never played ball.”

  “Yeah, you and her. Sometimes with me, but not you and me,” Fat Angie said, crossing her arms over her chest.