Good Luck, Fatty

but…
    I want to be a cyclist. A competitor. The female Lance Armstrong.
    When I reach the first crossroad on my route, Marigold Way, I stop at the sign and plant my feet in a patch of loose gravel, wait for the intersection to clear. Before it does, though, a shitty old beater car—a Dodge Dart, according to the once-proud insignia on its rear end—rolls up beside me, a cloud of pot smoke trailing out its open window.
    I try not to look, but I can’t help it.
    The guy in the passenger seat, a smartass freshman named Sydney Vale with goldfish-orange hair and giant, splotchy freckles, makes eye contact with me and bursts out laughing.
    I snort softly to myself, peer deeper into the Dart, where I note Evan Richter slouching behind the wheel, his sunken squirrel eyes glassy and dazed. He screwed me three weeks ago, behind a dugout at the Little League field. Took all of five seconds.
    The traffic on Marigold dies out, and the Dart glides away. As it goes, I spot Craig and Corey Benson, their twin black ‘fros unmistakable through the Dart’s rear window. They screwed me in the brush by the river over the summer, one after the other. Corey was better.
    I put my feet to the pedals and pump, do the math on the Dart as I clear the intersection. Three out of four. I’ve been screwed by everyone but twerpy little Sydney Vale (mostly because I have a rule: no one younger than me). Otherwise, I could’ve been nailed by a hundred percent.
    Around the corner from school, a scraggly stray cat I call Buttercup strides out from between two houses—much nicer houses than the hole where Orv, Denise, and I live—and starts trotting along behind my bike. By the way he hounds me, I figure the fleabag must have gotten it into his head he’s a dog.
    “Shoo!” I holler over my shoulder. I flail my arm around to convince him to go, but he refuses to bug off. I wouldn’t mind the puny sucker so much, but he’s one of the main sources of material for the jerkwad bullies. And I’m sort of sick of being referred to as “The Pussy Whisperer.”
    I pull over and drop my bike in the grass. I’m close enough to school now that the torment may begin at any moment, but, for now, no one seems to notice me.
    I slip my backpack off, unzip one of its cavernous pockets and root around. Buttercup mews a few words of encouragement, nudges my hand deeper. Eventually I come up with a mostly melted Milky Way (the end of my stash) and a few errant corn nuts that escaped the last garbage dump.
    “Good kitty,” I coo. I deposit the corn nuts on the sidewalk, and Buttercup gives them a perfunctory sniff. With my teeth, I rip through the candy wrapper and squeeze the gooey chocolate into my mouth.
    I scratch Buttercup behind his ears and on the back of his neck. This is sad, I think. Pathetic even. As sick as it makes me to admit it, I love this doofus cat more than my parents love me.
    You know what’s worse than being abandoned by your parents, though? Not being allowed to be ticked about it. Because when your parents jet off to dig wells in remote third world villages, eradicate malaria, and funnel medicine to AIDS babies, your hurt turns selfish and insignificant pretty quickly.
     

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    Dr. Harvey Lassiter is the closest thing I’ve got to a parent nowadays, because as hard as Orv and Denise try, I’m not sure they’ve got it in ‘em.
    I fly over to Harvey’s shop on my Target-special Schwinn, jam on its brakes and squeal its tires to a dusty stop. At a chunky metal rack out front, I chain it up.
    A little bell over the door jingles merrily as I rumble inside. “Hey, kiddo,” Dr. Lassiter says with an open smile. He doesn’t even have to look up from the jumble of tools and bicycle parts on the carpet in front of him to know it’s me. “Hope you’re ready to roll up your sleeves today.”
    Dr. Lassiter—Harvey, as he insists I call him—is sixty-something years old with a full head of silver-white hair (the only feature that makes him look his age) and a trim, sinewy build. He used to be the principal of Industry High, where I landed in his office because of a schoolyard brawl I decided to win. A month later, he caught Noah Rice screwing me in the janitor’s closet. We both got a week of in-school suspension.
    Harvey retired in June. The same week, he opened The Pit, a bicycle sales and repair shop in Industry’s shuttered downtown. Besides The Pit, three other establishments survive on this strip of baked earth: a