Good Luck, Fatty

throne) to take my lunch in the band room with my kissing buddy, Tom, who plays a mean clarinet, and two or three rotating band geeks, depending on the day. Realistically, this is my pool of friends at Industry High.
    I slide my backpack off my shoulder and drop it to the gritty floor, trying to balance my lunch tray one-handed. As I rock my way onto a wooden stool, a dented apple skips across the tray and threatens to jump overboard. I catch it just in time. “Hi,” I say to Tom, who seems oddly mesmerized by my lunch selections. I chomp a big hunk out of the apple. “How goes?”
    Tom shrugs.
    Our fellow diners today are Ruby Talent—an amiable flautist with severe corrective lenses, a chipmunk’s overbite, and a name more suited for Broadway than the Industry High marching band—and Bernard Jenkins, a chunky (not quite tubbo) trumpeter with an effeminate voice and a futuristic watch that beeps every half hour to remind him to ingest his various medications. I murmur greetings to both of them and then turn my attention back to Tom, who, when compared to the rest of our motley group, looks—dare I say?—normal. “Are we still on for Saturday?” I ask.
    When I told Tom about the Yo-Yo race, and, particularly, my plans to compete, he vehemently disagreed. He said I didn’t need to lose weight (yeah, right), like that was my sole reason for entering. I’m beginning to suspect, based on his attraction to someone of my enhanced voluptuousness, that Tom may be a closet fatty-lover. “I guess,” he says, begrudgingly agreeing to uphold the practice session we’ve scheduled prior to my first real training with Harvey, “but I promised my dad I’d help him rake in the morning, so it’ll have to be after three.”
    Tom’s father and stepmother own a trailer park a couple of miles north of Industry High, where they lord over their single-wide tenants (in a benevolent way, of course) from their snazzy, top-of-the-line double-wide. “Okay,” I say. “I’ll bike over. It’ll be a good warm-up.”
    Bernard’s watch beeps. He flips open one of the compartments of his pill organizer and gnaws through a disc-shaped yellow medication that reminds me of a Necco wafer. Ruby eyes the pill and asks, “Can I have one?”
    Bernard grimaces. “My mother counts ‘em.”
    “You could say you dropped it,” she suggests.
    I glance at Tom, whose soft lips part as if they’re poised to comment on the potential drug deal. Instead, he says to me, “If you come at four, nobody else’ll be home.”
    Why doesn’t he just come out and say, Can I screw you at four on Saturday? At least that would be more dignified than the weaselly game he’s playing.
    I clamp my knees together. “I’ll see you at three.”
     

----
     
    I coast through the entrance of the Ocean Gates Mobile Home Community (Seriously? Industry is in the boonies, nowhere near a salty body of water), my stick-straight hair matted to my damp back, sweat crusted over my downy eyebrows, a random bug or three splattered across my tent-sized tank top. Tom’s house is on the left, immediately following the turnoff from the main road, which I remember from a previous visit here for an end-of-school shindig.
    I lean the Schwinn against the steps and rap on the door. Then I wait. No one answers, so I knock again. A few seconds later, a motor turns over behind the trailer park’s office, the only permanent structure on this patch of North Carolina woodland, its A-frame design reminding me of a teepee.
    The tail end of a battered pickup reverses into view, then its full body. Inside are Tom’s father and stepmother, windows down, stereo cranking out some old fogie hits. From a trio of sun-browned, grease-stained fingers, a cigarette hangs out the driver’s window.
    Tom’s father catches sight of me, and I wave. “Oh, hey there…Bobbi,” he says with a twang and a grin. He pulls the truck onto the lawn. “Tom’s feedin’ the chickens.” He gestures at the stockade fence with his cigarette, spilling a puff of hot ash onto the grass. “Go ahead back.”
    “Okay,” I say. I lumber down the steps and head for the fence, which is tied shut with a length of frayed rope. Over my shoulder, I shout, “Thanks, Mr. Cantwell!” There is no reply other than the truck’s engine ticking ominously as it creeps away.
    Tom’s backyard is nothing like the one Orv, Denise, and I share, prompting me to consider trailer park ownership a worthy occupation. Gramp used