Life in the Fat Lane

by Cherie Bennett

  I wanted to die. No, I prayed to die.

  “Okay, we’re back in business,” Mrs. Benson said, coming around to the front of her desk. She said nothing about what Dave Ackerly had called me. Not that I wanted her to—that would have made it even worse.

  After a half hour of first-day extended homeroom, the bell rang for us to go to our first class. Mine was senior AP English, room 211, with a Mr. Downberger. I walked into the hall with everyone else.

  “Yo, Lard-ass!” I heard from behind me.

  Dave Ackerly. I kept walking.

  How could he say something so awful to me? How could I ever, for even one moment, have thought that he might actually have thought I was cute?

  Something Molly had said to me years ago came flooding into my head:

  You put on a certain outfit, and you go around feeling kind of cute, and then someone says something, and you realize you actually look like a big fat slob and you were the only one stupid enough to think you looked good.

  Exactly.

  I turned the corner and headed up the staircase, just another face in the crowd, figuring I had left Dave Ackerly behind me. Only the next thing I knew, he was walking right next to me.

  “Hi!” he said, his voice really loud. He put his arm around me. I shook him off.

  “Hey, you’re new, right, Lard-ass?”

  “Go to hell,” I managed, my heart pounding and my face burning with humiliation.

  “What’s the problem? I just wanted to welcome a big beauty like you to our school! Wanna go out on a date sometime, Lard-ass?”

  I moved away from him and walked faster.

  “Come on, Lard-ass!” he yelled after me. “Didn’t you ever hear ‘the bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’?”

  “Shut up, asshole,” someone said to him, but I didn’t turn around to see who had jumped to my defense.

  Instead I ran, my whole fat body jiggling down the hall with every step, until I reached a girls’ room. Then I ran inside and locked myself in a stall.

  I can’t do this, I thought. I’d rather be dead than do this.

  I sat in that stall and cried. I felt defeated, worthless. I felt like less than nothing. Just because I was fat. What was I supposed to do, wear a sign that said, “I am a former pageant winner. It is not my fault that I am fat. I have a very rare metabolic disorder called Axell-Crowne Syndrome that many doctors do not believe actually exists. Thank you.”?

  Nothing else awful happened in any of my other morning classes, and thankfully Dave Ackerly wasn’t in any of them. On the other hand, no one was particularly nice to me, either. Just like at Cranmoore, no one introduced themselves or even smiled at me. It was the ultimate irony—I had become both huge and invisible.

  At lunch, I got in the food line and chose a fat-free yogurt and an apple. I looked around. Everyone was sitting with their friends. I had no friends. I sat at the end of the only empty table I could find.

  “Do you mind if I sit here?”

  I looked up. A very thin girl was looking at me. She had a long, pale face, lank brown hair, and a receding chin.

  “No, not at all,” I said politely. Out of the monster’s mouth had come the words of Lara Ardeche, pageant queen.

  She sat down with her tray of macaroni and cheese.

  “I’m Frannie Jenkins—from calc, this morning?”

  “Oh, right.” I didn’t remember her. “I’m Lara Ardeche.”

  “You’re new,” Frannie said, her mouth full. “It’s terrible to be new at this school. It’s full of snobs. I was new last year.” She swallowed her food and took a sip of her milk. “So, how do you like it so far?”

  “It’s too soon to tell, really,” I said, smiling my pageant smile. I could already tell she was someone I would have been nice to but never really been friends with, back in Nashville. I took a delicate spoonful of my yogurt.

  “Hi, Frannie,” said a short, chubby girl with a bulbous nose, thick lips, frizzy red hair, and a mass of freckles, setting her tray down next to the skinny girl.

  “Hi,” Frannie said. “This is Kendra Sleezak; this is Lara Ardeche. Kendra was the first person who was nice to me when I moved here—not like the rest of these snobs.”

  “They can’t all be snobs,” I said reasonably.

  “Ha!” Kendra said. “I’ve lived in Blooming Woods since I was five. If you aren’t thin, gorgeous, and rich, they treat you like a pile of puke.”

  A fat guy with a ponytail, his jeans so huge that the crotch hung halfway to his knees, sat down next to me. His tray was piled high with two sandwiches, French fries, potato chips, a huge piece of chocolate cake, and a brownie.

  “Perry Jameson, Lara Ardeche,” Frannie said. “She’s new.”

  “Hi,” Perry said. He took a huge bite out of his sandwich.

  “Lard-ass, I want you to have my baby!” a voice boomed.

  No, no, no. Dave Ackerly.

  He had spied me. The next thing I knew, he had his arms wrapped around my neck and was making kissing noises at my cheek.

  “Get your hands off me,” I said, my voice low.

  He obliged and took in the sight of me and Perry sitting next to each other. “I see you and Fairy Perry and the other geekoids found each other. It’s so beautiful!”

  He pretended to cry copious tears. Nearby, Dave’s two friends high-fived each other, laughing.

  “Go take your meds, Mainstream,” Perry said, biting another monstrous piece out of his sandwich.

  “Hey, maybe you’ll get lucky this year, Perry!” David said. “Maybe ol’ Lard-ass here can be the woman to turn you straight!” He turned and high-fived his buds, and the three of them sauntered out of the cafeteria.

  Frannie’s and Kendra’s faces burned with embarrassment. Perry didn’t seem disturbed at all. He was too busy shoveling food into his face.

  “Just ignore him,” Frannie finally managed. “He’s, like, mentally disturbed.”

  “He used to go to this special school,” Kendra explained. “But his dad is this big civil rights lawyer, and he sued to have him mainstreamed.”

  “My man, Mainstream Dave,” Perry said between bites of his second sandwich.

  “I heard he used to actually hit people,” Frannie said, taking another sip of her milk, “but now he takes all these meds to control his impulses.”

  “Too bad the meds don’t control his mouth,” Perry said.

  “There’s a lot of snobs here, but everyone isn’t like him,” Frannie added. “I’m really sorry he … you know.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  “Hang in there—you’ll meet people you like,” Perry said, slurping down his milk shake.

  “Yeah, you can hang out with me and Kendra!” Frannie offered.

  I tried to smile. But it was hard. The pageant motto was to be nice to everyone, but this was just so horrifying.

  I was surrounded by losers. They had gravitated to me.

  Lara Ardeche, former homecoming queen, winner of multiple pageants, the cutest and most popular girl at Forest Hills High, had just been invited to hang out with the geekoids of Blooming Woods High, for one all-too-obvious reason.

  They thought I was one of them.

  “Let’s go, girls!” Ms. Perkins, my gung-ho gym teacher, called into the locker room. She blew her whistle. “Let’s hustle!”

  From my hiding place in a toilet stall I heard the other girls chattering away as they exited into the gym. Finally the locker room was silent and I snuck out of the stall.

  For the first two weeks of gym class I had been able to hide under sweats, since my gym uniform was such a large size that it had to be special-ordered. Today it had arrived, and Ms. Perkins had handed it to me like it was a week-old dead carp as a few of my classmates snickered.

  I had retreated to the privacy of the toilet stall to put it on: bilious green one-piece shorts and top with an elastic waist, snaps up the front. Size twenty-four.

  And it was tight.

  I peeked
out of the stall. No one was there. I walked over to the full-length mirror beside the lockers.

  Oh, God. The material puckered over my breasts and thighs. Every lump, every ounce showed.

  Oh, God.

  “Ms. Ardeche?” Ms. Perkins called.

  I could pretend I was sick. That would work. I could say I had killer cramps—

  “Ms. Ardeche?”

  Ms. Perkins marched into the locker room and stood over me. “Were you planning to join us this century?”

  “I—I …,” I stammered. “I don’t know if you’ve seen my records, but I have this disease that made me gain—”

  “Ms. Ardeche, you don’t have a doctor’s note excusing you from gym class. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “Then let’s hustle!”

  I followed her out into the gym. The girls in my class were in two groups, playing three-on-three basketball with each other until one side or the other scored and two new teams stepped onto the court.

  “Join that group, Ms. Ardeche.”

  I walked over to the group nearest me. Allegra Royalton, the Jennie Smith of Blooming Woods High, took one glance at me in my huge green gym suit and shrieked to her friend Bettina Bowers, “Wow, Bettina, look! It’s the Jolly Green Giant!”

  They laughed together. I knelt down and got very busy tying my left sneaker.

  “Jeez, Lard-ass is right,” Bettina snickered. “I hope the gym floor holds.”

  “Ms. Ardeche, you’re out there, let’s hustle,” Ms. Perkins called to me, throwing me the basketball. I began to dribble it toward the basket.

  “Earthquake!” Allegra Royalton yelled. Some of the girls laughed. I kept dribbling, my head down. I would not cry in front of them. Would not.

  “Ms. Royalton, a word,” Ms. Perkins called to her. As I worked with my team, trying to score, out of the corner of my eye I saw Ms. Perkins talking with Allegra. Allegra made a face and rolled her eyes.

  Someone stole the ball from me. Then the other team scored. I headed off the court.

  “I hope you’re happy, you fat piece of shit,” Allegra spat at me. “Perkins just gave me detention because of you.”

  I stopped and turned to her. “Why are you saying such terrible things about me? I never did anything to you.”

  “I have to look at you, don’t I?” Allegra said, and then she flounced off.

  Finally gym class ended. I scooted into the toilet stall to change in private. Since it was my last class of the day, I could wait until I heard the locker room clear out before I left the stall. Which was exactly what I did.

  Frannie Jenkins was waiting for me when I came out.

  “Allegra Royalton is a bitch,” she told me, pushing some hair behind her ear. “She makes fun of everyone. I hate her so much. I hate all her friends and her whole clique.”

  I headed for the sink to wash my face.

  “She only cares about the perfect people,” Frannie went on. “I hate snobs like her. They run this school, it’s so unfair. That’s why us nobodies have to stick together.”

  Leave me alone and go whine to someone else, I wanted to yell at her. I’m not a nobody. I’m nothing like you and your geekoid friends. Nothing!

  Frannie and I walked toward the main doors of the school. I had nothing to say to her. All I could think was: At least this hellhole called high school is over for another week.

  “Hey, what’s up?” Perry Jameson asked, falling in next to me. He had on his usual superbaggy jeans and a gigantic long-sleeved T-shirt that read I’M NOT STRESSED OUT, YOU’RE JUST INCREDIBLY ANNOYING. The inner thighs of his jeans swished against each other with every step he took.

  “Hi, Perry,” Frannie said eagerly. She’d confided in me that she had a crush on him. She thought he had such a handsome face—it was such a shame that he was gay.

  “Hey,” Perry replied.

  “I have to run and meet Kendra,” Frannie said. “I’ll see you guys. Call me, Lara!” She hurried off.

  “Are you two buds?” Perry asked me, surprised.

  “No,” I admitted. “She kind of whines.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  We turned the corner and headed for the doors. Perry pulled a candy bar out of his back pocket and tore it open.

  “Want a bite?”

  “No, thanks,” I said, trying not to show my distaste.

  “So, I’ve been thinking, you really ought to do the piano solo at the winter concert,” Perry said, his mouth full of chocolate.

  The only extracurricular activity I’d signed up for was a quartet of classical pianists who played with the school orchestra. The teacher, Mr. Webster, had asked me to play a piano solo in a school concert that winter, and I had promptly declined. It was bad enough that I would be playing in public with the quartet—I did not plan to play a solo ever again. No one would be listening; they’d be too busy gawking.

  Perry was in the orchestra, too. He played saxophone and he played it well. Unlike Frannie and Kendra, Perry was smart and funny and I actually kind of liked him, although I was grossed out that he never seemed to stop eating. Of course, back in Nashville, I would have been nice to him, but I never would have hung with him. But I wasn’t in Nashville anymore.

  “I already told you, I’m not playing a solo,” I said as we turned the corner.

  “Why? You more into blues than classical, I hope?”

  “Why do you hope?”

  “I live for blues,” Perry said. “T-Bone Walker? Gatemouth Brown? Johnny Winter?”

  I shook my head.

  “They’re only everything,” Perry said. He took another bite of his candy bar. “I’ll make you a tape.”

  I smiled politely, basically wishing he would just go away so that I wouldn’t have to watch him eat.

  “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, I’m free at last,” Perry sang out as we reached the front door of the school. He popped the last of his candy bar into his mouth and tossed the wrapper into a trash bin.

  Kids streamed around us, out into the fall sunshine. Some guy bumped into Perry from behind in his rush to get out the door. “Watch it, Tubs!” he yelled over his shoulder.

  “So, have a nice weekend,” I said, turning away.

  “Wait,” Perry said quickly. “Uh … there’s this club downtown I go to on Sunday afternoons. A lot of great musicians hang out … I mean, you’re a musician, you might like it.”

  Was Perry Jameson asking me out? How could that be? He was gay. Not that I was even remotely attracted to him, anyway. I mean, he was just so … so fat.

  “Gee, I’m really busy this weekend,” I lied. “Maybe some other time.”

  “Whoa, it’s Fat America!” Dave Ackerly boomed, striding over to us. “It’s Fairy Perry the Fatboy and Lardass!” He put his arms around our shoulders.

  Dave always referred to Perry as Fairy Perry, or Fatboy, or, if he was feeling particularly imaginative, Fairy Perry the Fatboy. This was clearly one of his imaginative days.

  “Go take your Ritalin, Mainstream,” Perry mumbled, but I could tell he truly was embarrassed.

  “You two geekoids could make some bi-i-ig babies, huh?” Dave said gleefully, thrusting his hips forward obscenely. “You ought to give her a tumble. Fatboy! You can’t stay a faggot forever!”

  Perry’s hands clenched into fists, and he turned red with rage. “Get out of my face.”

  “Oh no, Fatboy and Lard-ass are going to sit on me!” Dave yelled in falsetto horror. “Save me! Save me!” He ran away, laughing, toward the parking lot.

  “What an asshole,” Perry said, unable to look me in the eye. He slunk off toward the school buses.

  Just as I was about to go to my car, I heard a girl’s voice from somewhere behind me.

  “Is that really your sister with the fat guy?” she asked.

  I turned around. There, near the doors, stood my brother with two girls and a guy. They all looked like freshmen and they were all cute.

  Scott didn’t see m
e looking at him. Quickly I turned my back so that they wouldn’t know I could hear them.

  “Yeah, so?” I heard Scott ask belligerently.

  “So … she’s kinda … big,” the girl said.

  “So?” Scott asked again.

  “Tell her to go on a diet, man,” the boy said.

  “She’s got a disease that made her gain weight, okay?” Scott said. “She used to win beauty pageants, okay?”

  “I am so sure,” one of the girls said.

  “Here, check this out,” I heard Scott say.

  A beat of silence.

  “Wow,” one of the girls breathed. “When was this picture taken?”

  “Last year,” Scott said.

  “Last year?” the other girl echoed incredulously.

  “She was homecoming queen and everything. I’m tellin’ ya, she’s got a disease, so don’t rag on her.”

  “Wow,” the girl said again, her voice awestruck with horror. “I would just kill myself if that happened to me. I am totally serious.”

  I walked away and headed for my car. Scott showed up a few minutes later. I was so mad at him I couldn’t speak. We drove toward home in silence for a few minutes. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “You carry my homecoming photo with you to school?”

  Silence, as he figured out that I had overheard his conversation. Then he shrugged and stared out the window.

  “I thought you thought all that pageant stuff was so stupid,” I reminded him.

  He shrugged again.

  “I thought everyone who’s into looks is so superficial, such a hypocrite,” I said coldly.

  “People say stuff about you,” he muttered.

  “No shit,” I spat at him.

  “I’m just trying to defend you—”

  “You are not,” I snapped, the acid of his betrayal gurgling in my stomach. “You’re embarrassed that I’m your sister. Admit it!”

  “What, you want them to think you’re like that Perry guy—some kind of pig or something? It’s not your fault that you’re fat.”

  “Did I give you permission to talk about me or to carry my picture around? Did I?”

  “Look, I just didn’t want them to think that you were … you know, like him.”

  “A fat pig,” I filled in as I pulled into the driveway. “So now they can feel sorry for me instead. If they even believe you. So sorry I embarrass you in front of your cool new friends.”