Good Luck, Fatty

riled up over that sort of thing, though, so it’s probably wise of him to keep his private life…well, private.
    “ Bonjour! ” I say in my best French accent as I stride into The Pit, buoyed by the first decent day of sophomore year. If anyone had snide comments to lob at my head today, I must have surreptitiously dodged them. Plus, I’ve been off the Milky Ways for thirty-six hours and going strong.
    Harvey is behind the counter, wearing a frazzled expression and tapping the retractable end of a ballpoint pen on a legal pad: click-on, click-off; click-on, click-off. He doesn’t seem to notice me approaching.
    I halt in front of him and say, “What’s happening?”
    He clicks the pen twice more before looking up, and when I catch a glimpse of the curled, ink-whiskered edges of the legal pad, I understand why his brain is in knots. There must be ten sheets worth of haphazardly scribbled names and numbers and dollar signs. “Need some help?” I inquire.
    He slaps the pen down on the counter. “This damn race has just…” When his gaze hits mine, he finally registers my presence. He shakes his head. “I think I may have bitten off more than I can chew, so to speak.”
    I spin the legal pad my way. “What’s wrong?”
    The bell over the door signals a customer, causing Harvey to lower his voice. “Since Lex Arlington put up that prize money and turned the Yo-Yo into a charity ride, I’ve been fielding calls from every corner of the state. I can hardly keep track of the entrants and pledges, let alone wrangle with the town over new permits.”
    “Forget about this,” I say, clasping the pad to my chest. “I’ll have a spreadsheet whipped up in no time, color-coded and everything.”
    Harvey’s eyes crinkle. “Maybe tomorrow you can man the fort while I twist some arms at town hall?”
    “You got it.”
    I leave Harvey to deal with the potential customer, a guy in his mid-twenties with a cockeyed baseball cap and saggy pants, while I fire up the old desktop computer in the office. I get halfway down the second page of data before I spot something odd and unexpected: the name Duncan Cotton. My father has entered the Yo-Yo and claims to have collected three hundred and fifty dollars on behalf of the American Lung Association. I force my fingers to tap out his name, in the column for adults, aged thirty-one to forty-four. (Harvey’s divided the race into heats, each vying for a portion of the ten-thousand dollars in prize money; the other ten grand, along with all the pledges, goes to asthma prevention and treatment.)
    The next name on the list is Mario Smith (isn’t there always a Mario Smith?), but I can’t bring myself to type it through the tears that sting and blur my eyes. As I rake a yellow, number-two pencil over my father’s name, a tragic factoid whacks me: I was born on March twenty-first, the same as Duncan, and still he doesn’t find me worthy of love.

 
     
    chapter 6
     
    I’M STARTING to think the “old wives” might be right, because ever since I gave up the Milky Ways, my acne has been receding. The scars, on the other hand, are stubborn reminders of the old, weak me.
    It’s taken Tom’s leg more than six weeks to heal, but finally his doc says he can get back on the BMX. I hike the front steps of his house and ring the doorbell, which I somehow missed the last time I was here, even though it’s shaped like a bullfrog. If I didn’t know better, I’d figure the kitschy thing was one of Wilma’s macramé projects gone wild.
    The door jerks open and Tom smiles. “It’s about time,” he says in a tone that sounds like a joke but also kind of serious. I guess if I’d been caged like a grizzly for so long, I’d be itching to scale some trees too.
    “I got a charley horse,” I say. “Had to pull over.”
    He chuckles at my goofiness, shuts the door and accompanies me down the steps. Once we get situated on our bikes, an eerie flash of déjà vu hits me. “You sure you’re okay?” I ask. “Maybe you should wait another week. Or two.”
    He glides into the road. “Why? You afraid I’m gonna beat you?”
    I chug along behind him, just like before. “Well, excuse me for caring,” I say with a mock huff. “See if I bother doing that again. Oh…and there’s no way you’re beating me.” It feels nice to say something cocky and know that 1) maybe I actually can beat him, since he’s injured and all, and 2) even if I don’t, he won’t rub it in my