Good Luck, Fatty

cyclists is inching along like a morbidly obese snail. At the half-mile mark (Harvey roped the children of some former students into tagging a tree or telephone pole or traffic sign with a poufy blue ribbon every twenty-six-hundred and forty feet), the better riders among us start to break free.
    Hard as I try, I’m not one of these precious few standouts (but for all I know, neither is anyone from my age group, the racing lanes having dissolved into a clumsy free-for-all).
    I pump harder, faster, ticklish beads of perspiration dribbling down my back and dampening the waistband of my shorts. You’ve got this, Bobbi-Jo, I say to myself, the pep talk invigorating me. Do it for Gramp and the Royale.
    As we hit the mile mark, my energy soars, and I cautiously move away from Tom, who looks redder in the face than I think he should. “Pace yourself!” I swear he calls after me, but with all the gears shifting and tires slapping and lungs huffing and puffing (not to mention the absolute concentration required to avoid splattering myself and/or someone else on the pavement) I can’t be sure.
    And it doesn’t matter, because as soon as I leave Tom in the dust (figuratively speaking, of course), I go on an all-out tear, speeding past little kids, teenagers, old folks, and even some prime-of-lifers (those abnormally fit twenty-one-year-olds who eat as if they’ve got wooden legs and don’t pack on an ounce).
    I think about hitting the power button of the MP3 player and employing my strategy sooner rather than later, but with twenty-plus miles to go, such a move strikes me as premature. Instead, I double down, work my muscles and lungs for all they’re worth.
    Those poufy blue ribbons are great, but Harvey should’ve had the trees marked with numerical signs too (live and learn, I guess), since I lost count of the ribbons and am now unsure if we’re (by we I mean the second-tier riders, of which I count myself a member, the elite amateurs nearly out of view) coming up on two, two and a half, or three miles.
    The crowd has thinned considerably, racers now falling into distinct pockets of speed. I take a second (all the time I can spare) and evaluate my competition, chagrined at what—or, more precisely, whom—I find.
    Malcolm Gates.
    Justin White.
    Sydney Vale.
    And the jerkwads don’t even seem to be racing that hard, as if maybe—just maybe—their goal is not to take the Yo-Yo but to prevent me from making a run at it.
    “What’re you lookin’ at?” Sydney’s snarky voice spits over my shoulder.
    I ignore him, grope around my chest for the MP3 player while maneuvering the Schwinn one-handed. I’m fingering the MP3 player’s power button when I get knocked from behind. “What the…?!” is all I get out before I’m forced to slap my palm back onto the handlebar and pull the Schwinn out of a near-fatal wobble.
    Once I straighten the bike out, I scan the crowd for Tom, who, even though he’s exhausted from coming to my rescue, would probably play the hero one last time.
    But he’s nowhere in sight, and neither is Duncan (lot of help he’d be), until…
    I squint through a peephole in the race field, all the way to the front of the pack, where my father’s bird-machine has—I now realize—zipped into a commanding lead.
    Malcolm and Justin close in on me, cackling unnervingly as if something is funny (or is about to be). I preempt them by saying, “No hard feelings, guys,”—yeah, right—“but I’ve got a boyfriend, so…”
    “Think we give a shit?” Justin says.
    “He’s a pussy,” adds Malcolm about Tom.
    Involuntarily, the words shoot out of my mouth. “He is not!”
    Malcolm starts playing sideways chicken, aiming his bike’s front tire at the Schwinn’s. “Just fuck Syd,” he tells me in a smooth, used car salesman tone, “and we’ll be even.”
    This is getting out of control. “Even?”
    “For your little cock-tease in the tree house,” Justin explains. “You owe him one.”
    So that’s their angle. “I told you, I’m not doing that anymore.”
    “The hell you ain’t,” spouts Justin.
    I glance at the shoulder of the road, which is dotted with spectators (and potential witnesses, should any of these jerkwads try to get physical with me). “Look,” I say, mad at myself over the pleading tone that has crept into my voice, “I’m sorry; I am, but…”
    My fingers wander back to the MP3 player, this time nailing the power button (to anticlimactic effect, though,