Good Luck, Fatty

air, bashing it into the microphone and causing a screeching echo of feedback.
    Lex just grins smugly.
    In the next few moments, I lose track of Harvey’s speech (and eventually Lex’s too), because, out of nowhere, there’s a familiar (and welcome) hand clutching at mine. “Tom?” I murmur, certain it’s him before I whirl around.
    “Hi,” he says, moving his hand to my shoulder, as if he’s offering me a congratulatory pat on the back. “How’s it goin’?”
    I want to spill my guts, beg him with my heart and soul to extend our friendship, our relationship…and maybe more. But considering all he’s already done for me, that doesn’t seem fair. “Good,” I reply with a nervous smile. “You?”
    We’re both on our bikes, sort of wedged together at a forty-five degree angle (or so I’m guessing), so he couldn’t hug me if he wanted to. (But I think he wants to!) “Eh,” he says with a shrug, “it’s been kind of a…a boring week.”
    He missed me! He can’t live without me! I knew it! “Really?” I say coolly. “That stinks. Harvey’s been on my case since Wednesday about…well, this,” I say, gesturing at the craziness that has become the Yo-Yo.
    Tom rolls his eyes. “I figured.”
    In my peripheral vision, I notice Harvey and Lex hoisting one of those comical cardboard checks onto a giant easel as an official-looking dude in a business suit (the representative of the American Lung Association?) looks on with a smile.
    “You’re racing, right?” I ask, stuck for small talk, even though I know his name’s on the list (I put it there!) and he’s got a race card safety-pinned to his shirt: number forty-two.
    “Oh, yeah,” he says, cracking a grin. “And I’m gonna win.”
    Even though I know he’s joking, I can’t resist saying, “Not if I have anything to say about it.”
    “Well, you don’t.”
    I torture my face into a mock pout and drop my shoulders. “We’ll just see about that, won’t we?”
    Tom chuckles a little to himself, then goes quiet for a while. Finally he asks, “Are we…okay?”
    My heart swells. “Definitely,” I rush to say, not wanting him to doubt my loyalty.
    There is a big ol’ cowbell on the platform, and Lex has just begun clattering it exuberantly. As the crowd goes wild, Tom takes my hand and squeezes.
    And then we’re off.

 
     
    chapter 18
     
    WHEN HARVEY organized the Yo-Yo, he contemplated racing each age division separately, to simplify the compilation of race statistics (a task generously being managed by Brian Watson, CPA, an auditor for the accounting firm of Knight, Phillips and Bertrand) but instead settled on racing them simultaneously, in what are (theoretically) distinct “lanes,” like the ones used for swimming laps in a pool.
    I’m in the second lane over, with the fifteen- through twenty-year-olds, including Tom, Justin, Malcolm, Brent Flynn and his prissy girlfriend, Melissa, (plus her she-man pal, Dana), my janitor's closet fling, Noah Rice, and even Sydney Vale, the only boy in the immediate vicinity (except for Tom) who hasn’t screwed me.
    “This should be fun,” I say to Tom, trying to take the sarcastic edge off my voice as the words flow from my brain to my lips.
    He cuts his gaze left and right, surveying the sea of bicycles and riders that envelops us. “For sure.”
    I sneak a peek at the digital sports watch Orv and Denise picked up for me (without my permission, I might add) at the flea market. It reads: 9:56. This is a good idea, I tell myself. You’ve thought it through. It’s going to work.
    Quietly I open the pouch under the Schwinn’s seat and withdraw the MP3 player and mini speakers, linking them with a stunted cord and clipping them like charms to the Mardi Gras beads dangling off my neck.
    Step one? Check.
    Somewhere ahead of us, our motorcycle-cop escorts rev up (with just about everyone in Industry here at the Yo-Yo—either racing or watching—I doubt we’ll be needing such law enforcement accompaniment, but the town clerk insisted, so…). “Be careful,” Tom tells me, the starting gun imminent. “This could get messy. Pull over if you have to.”
    I appreciate his concern, really I do, but… “I won’t,” I assure him. “Have to, I mean.”
    He snaps a nod. “Good.”
    Ker-blang! goes the signal, and then, all at once, we’re in motion.
    For the first few blocks, I keep steady pace with Tom, which isn’t really saying much, since the whopping mass of twelve-hundred