Good Luck, Fatty

since, like an idiot, I’ve got the volume set to nil).
    “Save it,” Justin says, his bike encroaching on mine. His fingers dip into his shirt pocket and then— ping! —something small and hard (a pebble?) ricochets off my cheek, just east of my helmet’s chinstrap (thank you, Harvey, for insisting I encase my noggin).
    “Ow!” I whine, letting the sting subside on its own, even though I have the urge to rub it. “Knock it off!”
    Ping! Ping-ping!
    A number of colorful, ovoid-shaped dots (Peanut M&M’S?) spin across the pavement around us. (Apparently Justin’s a pretty bad shot, which is ironic given his exalted status as Industry High QB/god.)
    The candy starts coming fast and furious (are all three jerkwads pegging me now?), but then…
    “Cut the shit,” demands a familiar voice from somewhere in the crowd.
    I calm my pedaling, let this savior—whoever he is—catch up with us.
    Malcolm and Justin (and, I assume, Sydney) slow down too. “What’s up your ass?” Malcolm says to Brent Flynn, who has just, with a clenched jaw and an irate spark in his eyes, sidled up to Justin.
    Brent shoves a palm into Justin’s cycling space. “Give ‘em here.”
    He wants the M&M’S?
    “Just do it,” says Brent, impatiently flexing and unflexing his fingers.
    I wish I could stick around for this showdown, but I’ve got a race to win (or, at this point, at least place in). So while Justin serves up some arrogant lip to Brent (with Malcolm and Sydney mesmerized in the wings), I open the throttle and bolt forward.
    And soon I’m a speed pocket of my own, an island unto myself. I fumble for the MP3 player a third (and hopefully final) time, the volume button warm with eagerness as I hold it down.
    Then whammo! : Freddie Mercury’s long-dead voice fills the air with praise for fat bottoms and the girls (like me!) who possess them.
    Tom’s mother’s tune—now my anthem for the Yo-Yo and for life—is the only track on this music player (I paid a guy Orv knows ten bucks in pennies to convert the record into a digital file), and it’s set to run forever, in an eternal loop.
    Which is exactly what it’s doing—at top volume—when a miracle occurs.
    I don’t know how I spotted him, his mangy little profile weaving from one clump of spectators to the next, seemingly intent on keeping pace with the bicycles in general (which, of course, he can’t, especially in his banged-up state) and me in particular. “Buttercup!” I call, forgetting it’s a bad idea to beckon a frail, old cat into oncoming traffic—and lots of it.
    Still in full trot, he whips his head my way and—I swear—smiles, his cute kitty mouth turned up so far at the corners it resembles the ghoulish grin of Batman’s arch-nemesis, The Joker.
    I pucker up, make an obnoxiously loud kissing sound. (Can I get any weirder? I mean, I’ve already got a dead dude’s voice jumping off my chest, touting large feminine asses.) “Here, Buttercup!” I coo, rustling my fingers to draw his eye.
    But he just keeps barreling along. (Maybe he thinks Duncan’s bird-machine is an overgrown pigeon he can take down and torture for a while before putting it out of its misery.) “Buttercup!” I shout, getting irritated. I start easing the Schwinn toward the side of the road, figuring that, at the very least, I’ll keep an eye on the puny sucker.
    Unfortunately, though, fate has other plans, because as soon as I blow by a trio of middle-schoolers (how did these kids get ahead of me?), the Schwinn’s front tire sinks into a crevice in the road, jamming the bike—and me—to an abrupt, topsy-turvy stop.
    The Schwinn does a barrel roll (or that’s what it looks like from my upside-down vantage point on the pavement, my kidney aching from being sucker punched by the curb) and skids out ahead of the kids I’ve just passed, causing them to scatter.
    “My gracious!” an old lady squeals as she rushes at me, her ample bosom swaying in my face.
    I want to sit up, or at least drag my gimpy legs out of the roadway to avoid having them smashed by impending traffic, but I’m so dizzy there must be tiny stars dancing around over my head.
    “Don’t move, dearie,” the lady says when she notices me trying to elbow myself off the ground. “You could be hurt.”
    Hmm, really?
    “I don’t think so,” I mutter. “Have you seen a cat? Sort of an orange-creamsicle color? His name’s Buttercup.”
    She studies my face as if, instead of the normal two eyes, a