Good Luck, Fatty

the vagaries of the female cycle. Sometimes I worry about diseases, but not too much.
    Behind me, Malcolm unbelts his jeans (I can tell by the way his buckle jangles against his button-fly) and then starts pawing at the elastic waistband of my shorts. I make to turn around, figuring he’ll want to get on top. Missionary is the preferred position of boys around here. But Malcolm grabs my hips, keeps my back to his front, pulls me to my knees.
    Only one other boy has screwed me doggie-style: Justin White, Industry High’s star quarterback. It’ll be two now, I guess (though it’s probably no coincidence, since Malcolm is Justin’s go-to receiver).
    Malcolm tugs one side of my shorts down in a careless, offensive way that makes me feel more like a prostitute than a needy tubbo with a flat-lined sense of self-worth. But that’s not the worst of it. When he goes for the other side, my shorts and underwear stick between two rolls of flab and refuse to come down.
    He hangs his chin over my shoulder and says into my ear, “Hey, Billy, a little help here?”
    Billy? As low as I am, you wouldn’t think I could sink any lower.
    I yank my shorts back up. “My name is Roberta Josephine Cotton!” I spout as I spin around. A look of pure bewilderment shoots across Malcolm’s concave, eyebrow-dominated face. “Excuse me!”
    Malcolm fumbles with his pants, and I shove past him for the tree house exit. He grabs for my arm but misses. “What…?” he mutters as my toes hit the first rung of the ladder.
    Three feet from the ground, I fling myself off the tree and dive for the Schwinn, which I mount sloppily and race to pedal away. My heart bangs in my ears, and tears spurt from my eyes like a pinhole leak from a garden hose.
    I don’t look back.
     

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    My parents have shown their faces in North Carolina exactly once in the nine years since they left, and that was six years ago. And only because they were nominated for a humanitarian award that was up for grabs in Washington, D.C. Apparently Industry was a convenient stop-off on the way to or from the ceremony. They spent forty-five minutes with me at a McDonald’s, every second of which they wasted yammering about orphans and droughts and a freaky flesh-eating bacterium. It broke my heart.
    “Where are we going?” I ask Orv and Denise in a whiny tone I hope wears on their nerves as much as it does mine. If they’d just answered me the first four times I’d asked, we could be cruising along in blissful silence right now.
    Orv steadies his eyes on the road and curls his spindly fingers around the steering wheel, which bucks and shimmies whenever the Royale surpasses sixty miles per hour.
    Denise twists sideways in the passenger seat, smiles all the way up to her eyes. “Don’t you like surprises, Roberta?”
    Not only has Denise dolled me up in a poufy polka-dotted skirt as if I’m a prized sow she plans to show at the county fair, but suddenly she’s calling me Roberta? “It’s Bobbi-Jo,” I say flatly. “And, no. Not particularly.”
    “We’re almost there,” Orv says. “Just keep your britches on straight.”
    I want to be mad, since I sense something unnerving on the horizon. But all I can do is laugh, which raises Denise’s hopes. “That’s the spirit,” she says, chuckling right along with me. “Relax and be yourself.”
    I give a confused half-shrug.
    The highway is deserted. Orv tucks the Royale into the slow lane behind a clattering dump truck and locks the cruise control on fifty-five. It occurs to me that, once upon a time, way back when Gramp rolled this car off the dealer’s lot brand new, it was a pretty spiffy machine.
    A few minutes pass with nobody saying a word, time I spend watching rocks jump out of the bed of the dump truck and ping off the Royale’s sun-bleached hood (and wondering what Orv and Denise have cooked up).
    An eighth of a mile before the next exit (to a place called Hollyhock) Orv hits the brakes and glides the Royale toward the off-ramp. For no reason, my muscles tense. “I don’t feel well,” I say. I crank the window down, and a cool breeze washes over me. But it’s not enough to quell the jags of nausea gulping through my gut. I plead, “Can you pull over?”
    Orv shakes his head. “Here?”
    We are now on a two-lane country road with long stretches of muddy tire tracks crisscrossing the pavement. A gob of vomit spits from the back of my throat into my mouth. “Anywhere.”
    Denise scans the