Good Luck, Fatty

based on nothing more than a wink and a nod), during which time we scarfed down a couple of cheeseburgers and took in a movie at the five-dollar theater on the outskirts of town ( Rango, if you must know).
    Tom is growing the cutest shadow of a moustache, which looks sublime against his honey-colored skin (he’s one-sixteenth Peruvian Indian). To me, though, he resembles a hot, young Mexican gunslinger. “Can I walk you home?” he asks, stepping aside so the rest of the bicycle-riding students can clear out.
    “Sure,” I say. As my boyfriend (he hasn’t told me otherwise, so I’ve disregarded what Wilma said and decided that Tom and I are, in fact, meant to be), he doesn’t really have to ask, although I appreciate his courtesy.
    He pulls the BMX out of the bike rack. “You know what I was thinking about today?” he says as we slip off Industry High grounds.
    “No. What?” I say, figuring he may be referring to something birthday-related, since today is the day. I chew at the inside of my cheek as I await the reveal.
    “Remember in fourth grade, in Mr. Yeager’s class?” he says. “When we went to Owakini Springs?”
    For some reason this makes me smile, then laugh. “Not really,” I say. “Wawakini?”
    He slows his enunciation. “ Ow -a-kini. It’s Native American,” he says. “We took a fieldtrip a few weeks before the end of school. My mom chaperoned.”
    When he mentions his mother, I get a familiar little stabbing pain in my chest that sometimes comes on when I think about Gramp, which seems to happen less and less frequently since Marie and Duncan wedged themselves back into my life.
    I squint. “Not ringing a bell. Sorry.” I say, “What about it, though?”
    He stops his bike a second. “You really don’t remember?”
    I want to remember, mostly because he seems so pained about my not being able to. “Was that…” I say, pausing to buy my brain cells a few extra moments of concentration, “…the place with the water?” I hope I’m not misinterpreting the word springs, or I may end up looking like a fool here.
    He starts rolling his bike along again. “Yup,” he says. “It’s a lake. A manmade one. Remember, they had picnic tables and a volleyball net and those built-in grills? We had a cookout.”
    I have the vaguest sense of having experienced something like what he describes. “Sounds sort of familiar,” I admit. “But I’m not totally clear.” I frown. “Sounds fun, though,” I add, hoping this is the recognition he’s angling for.
    He stops the BMX again, this time abruptly. “ Fun?! ”
    Now I’m confused. I shrug and say, “Well, not the whole thing, of course. But some of it was okay, wasn’t it?” I find that vague lies with lots of gray area work best.
    “Until you almost died,” he tells me bluntly, “and I saved you.”
    I can’t make eye contact with him, because I’m not sure if he’s joking. “Huh?”
    “You weren’t a very good swimmer,” he says. “Are you any better now?”
    “I don’t know,” I say, realizing that the only time my body has contacted water (other than in the shower, of course) was at Tom’s pool party last year. And all I did then was dangle my legs in.
    We continue walking. “I think you thought that, uh, ‘cause…” he says, stumbling over what he wants to say. “Malcolm Gates told you fat people float, like whales. He said you should go out deeper, even though the teachers told us to stay inside the ropes. He called you something too. A crybaby? A fraidy cat? Something like that.”
    A sick feeling bubbles in my stomach. “Then what?”
    He stares into the distance. “I’ve sort of blocked it out too,” he says. “But not all the way. If I try, I can still remember. Sometimes I dream about it.”
    “Fourth grade wasn’t that long ago,” I say, implying that our recalls our deficient. “It couldn’t’ve been that bad, right?”
    His eyes well, and I get an ominous feeling that whatever happened to Tom and me nearly six years ago was that bad and worse. “When I got to you, you weren’t moving or breathing,” he says. “It wasn’t like on TV. It was bad. I didn’t think I was going to be able to…” His voice does a hiccupping thing that takes the place of a sob. “The teachers didn’t even know what was happening until I got you back inside the ropes, and then one of them started screaming. I was screaming in my head, but on the outside, all I could do was shake.” Softly he