Good Luck, Fatty

to refer to our dusty little plot of land as “Postage Stamp, USA.” Tom’s place, on the other hand, boasts a rolling green expanse the size of a football field, complete with a giant trampoline, an above-ground pool, and a tidy little chicken house.
    I slip inside the fence and meander. The chicken coop reminds me of an elaborate dollhouse an obscenely rich parent might lavish upon his or her spoiled offspring. “Knock, knock,” I say as I tug its wood-framed, wire-mesh door ajar.
    Tom jumps, clattering the rake he’s holding against a giant metal birdfeeder. “Geez,” he says, “way to sneak up on a person.”
    I giggle. “Sorry.” I step just over the threshold (there’s not enough room in the coop for someone of my ampleness) and strain to hear over the hiccupping squawks of ten or twelve hens pecking around. “What’d you forget about me?”
    He tucks the rake into a corner and ushers me outside. “Nah.  I got a late start this morning,” he says with a ghost of an eye roll. “It’s Wilma’s birthday.”
    “Oh.” From what I know of Tom’s stepmother, Wilma, she’s sort of like the Julia Roberts character in Pretty Woman : a hooker with a heart of gold. (Not literally, of course. Wilma works part-time as a bartender at The Plough Horse and, in her off time, sunbathes and churns out macramé knickknacks.)
    Tom hikes up the back steps, pauses at the screen door and says, “Want a drink?”
    I shrug. “Sure.” I trudge along behind him, into the double-wide’s bright, wallpapered kitchen. He scuffs a stool away from a faux wooden island and motions for me to sit, then pours two ice-filled tumblers of lemonade. We gulp in eager bursts, awkward and silent, not sure what to make of each other after so many years of being “just friends.”
    “We should get to work,” I say once the glasses are emptied and sweaty, water rings pooling in their wakes. If we don’t start the training session pronto, there’s a distinct possibility I’ll end up letting Tom Cantwell screw me.
    He gives me a sweet, doe-eyed smile, clangs the glasses together on his way to the sink. When he passes the refrigerator, his gaze hangs for a moment on the five-by-seven Glamour Shot of his late mother that’s slapped to the freezer with a bunch of random magnets. I can’t help noticing that the woman has (or had ) the same number of chins I do. Tom catches me looking, nods toward the living room and says, “Let’s go.”
     

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    Tom’s father lets him drive that dilapidated work truck around the trailer park, since, technically, Ocean Gates is private property. “I clocked a few routes,” he tells me as we spin our bikes out of the gravel driveway. He waves an arm toward the sun, which glows orange in the mellow autumn sky. “If we do Pebble, White Sands, and Boardwalk, it’s a mile almost exactly. We could do it three or four times and build up our endurance.”
    “You got any routes mapped for speed?” I ask, figuring I’ve already worked the endurance angle on the ride over and will be tasked with repeating the performance upon my return home.
    Tom nods, pops a wheelie and bounces back to earth. “Sea Spray,” he says. “It’s a straight shot. Not a lot of houses back there, either.”
    I cruise up beside him, encourage my stringy hair to flutter in the breeze like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model’s. “What’re you waitin’ for?” I ask, trying to sound flirty and carefree, like a normal fifteen-year-old. Like a girl who prays to Jesus for a shot at her first real boyfriend. Like a girl who hasn’t spread her chapped thighs for every backward ape to grunt her way.
    Tom goes into race mode, whizzes out in front of me like a bottle rocket toward the heavens. I pump harder, faster, give him the best run I can. But it’s no use: A girlie tubbo without so much as a fiber of muscle in her being has no chance against a gangly nerd-boy on a testosterone-stoked mission.
    I fall back, try to settle my ragged breaths, clear the perspiration from my brow with the back of my hand. Tom senses my surrender, peers over his shoulder and shouts, “Come on, Cotton!”
    Ahead of Tom, a cream-colored compact car with a navy-blue passenger door reverses out of a driveway. I grip the handlebars of the Schwinn and squeeze its brakes into action. But Tom is the one in danger. Before I can blurt a warning, he smacks into the car’s rear quarter-panel, skids over its trunk, and lands on the pavement