Good Luck, Fatty

muscles are too well-trained. I leave the empty plate behind on the coffee table and get up to wander.
    And Tom watches me. “There’s some cool stuff back there you can check out, if you want,” he tells me as I approach an orderly tower of mismatched furniture and caved-in cardboard boxes (leftovers from when Wilma ditched her apartment and took up residence here?).
    I tug at the flap of a box that looks like it’s about to disintegrate, and, sure enough, one whole side of the thing comes apart in my hands. “Shoot,” I say, pressing my jellyroll forward to stop an avalanche of stuff that’s headed my way.
    Tom hops up from the sofa, drops his plate on top of the mini-fridge and speeds to my aid. “I got it,” he says, squeezing against me from behind and wrapping his arms around my sides, steadying the box in place.
    I have an unclean thought that involves me and Tom and that secluded old tree house. “Now what?” I whisper.
    His body is hot against mine. “Turn around,” he says.
    I’m pinned in place and will be just as trapped if I’m able to wiggle myself to face him. “I don’t know if…”
    Out of nowhere, his tongue shoots to my ear (a crime of opportunity?) and something tightens in his frontal pants region. I want to scream (in a good way). He says, “Trust me.”
    I do as he says, twist and shimmy between his arms (all the while massaging my squishy flesh into his considerably leaner bod) until we end up eye to chin. Now I can barely breathe, and the junk in the box is digging a hole into the small of my back. “You’re up, Houdini,” I say.
    “What’s your rush?” He cocks his lips fiendishly. The stuff behind me shifts, and he gives it—and me—a good ramming. “That should do it.”
    There is a release of pressure from my backside but not from his front. Impulsively, I tip my face up and mold my lips to his, that anxious tongue of his darting and probing. I settle my hands on his hips and try to inhibit the memories of other boys entering me.
    Tom’s a virgin, I remind myself. And, oh yeah, there’s a teeny-tiny speck of a chance I might be pregnant.
    His hands go from holding up the box to caressing my back and hips and then…
    Crash!!! Bang!!! Boom!!!
    The contents of the box clatter about our feet, a fair amount of the noise absorbed by the speckled carpet. Still, I glance at the stairway, expecting someone to come running. But no one does, the merriment upstairs in full swing.
    Tom and I bend over at the same time, conking heads. “Ow,” I whine, an instant headache developing. (Can his head really be that hard?)
    He rubs at his temple. “Wow, do you drink titanium-fortified milk or something?”
    So he thinks I’m thick-headed too? Fantastic. “As a matter of fact, I do,” I declare, with mock indignation.
    From the looks of the items strewn across the floor, the box belongs to Mr. Cantwell, not Wilma (unless she’s a little on the freaky side). I reach for an upside-down magazine and turn it over. It’s a Playboy, circa nineteen eighty-five.
    Tom and I exchange embarrassed but excited glances, the Playmate on the cover enticing us to look further with her moony blue eyes and cherry-kissed smile. I pass the magazine to him and say nothing.
    We gather up a bunch of other personal memorabilia and guy stuff (matchbooks from various motels and diners; a giant marble and a brittle, peeling baseball glove; a couple of Penthouse s to complement the Playboy; a magnifying glass with half an inch of dust caked to it; and a cache of vinyl records).
    “These are awesome,” I say, sifting through the 33s (the big, old albums the size of pizza boxes) and 45s (the smaller records with one track on each side). Until I was eight, Gramp had a Pioneer turntable, which he’d fire up every Sunday evening for some Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley, or The Platters. When the thing died, we couldn’t afford a replacement.
    Tom takes the records from me and, one at a time, stacks them in a neat pile. “Holy shit,” he says when he gets to a particular 45 with a jacket image of a voluptuous topless chick riding a bike and wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and tube socks. “I remember this,” he says, turning the record over in his hands as if he’s unspooling a filmstrip of old memories.
    “What is it?” I ask (besides a little soft-core porn, since the cover model is mostly naked but pictured back-to).
    He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “My mom used to sing this to my