by Eric Kester
No one said anything during my walk. They knew this would be Trunk’s show. When I got to my shower I didn’t even wait for the water to warm up. I plunged right into it like it was a curtain I could hide in.
“Dude, you can stop sucking in your stomach now,” Trunk said loudly. “We’re all friends here.”
How’d he know I was sucking in? Now I couldn’t unfurl my stomach for my entire shower, a problem considering I was getting short on air.
“Actually, Wyatt, now that you’re finally here, you can help us settle a little debate we’ve been having the last few weeks.”
I was resolutely facing the wall, and in my periphery I noticed Trunk take a few steps to the center of the room. I glanced back and saw him, hands on hips, pissing into the drain, which was the center of the rapidly deepening stew of water, mud, soap suds, and now urine. Trunk looked over his shoulder at me as he pissed.
“We’ve been wondering,” he went on, “when you’re naked, right, and you look down, can you even see your dick over your gut?”
I can’t. I’ll admit that to you because you seem pretty alright. I mean, you’ve now had to picture me naked in your head (sorry about that, btw) and you haven’t chucked my book across the room. But Trunk’s about as sensitive as a walrus, so I decided no answer was the best answer. I kept facing the wall. To my right Brett casually scrubbed out a stubborn patch of dirt on his left elbow.
My shower’s water was warm now, and the cut from the seagull pelting was starting to sting. The heat of the room’s steam suddenly hit me all at once. Beads of sweat joined shower water and poured down my forehead. It was so, so hot in there. I felt dizzy.
But Trunk was just starting to roll. “Holy shit, guys,” I heard him shout from the center drain. “Wyatt, face me for a sec. I think I just realized something.”
I slowly pivoted to the center of the room. My stomach had never felt so fucking huge, like it was inches from touching the floor.
Trunk had finished pissing, and now he was making a rectangular frame with his thumbs and index fingers. He held it up to his face and squinted one eye as he looked through the frame at me.
“With the two brothers standing side by side, it looks like one of those Weight Watchers ‘Before and After’ pictures!”
This got a big laugh from the group, and finally a response from Brett. He smirked, shook his head, then went back to scrubbing mud off his arms.
Trunk sloshed over to me and stuck his bright red face inches from mine. I noticed his right hand was clenched into a fist. He looked down at my stomach.
“Jesus, I gotta say, Wyatt, you really put the ‘offensive’ in ‘offensive lineman.’ I mean, look at that thing. Probably scares away girls big-time. No wonder you want to fuck Derek Leopold so bad—he’s your only shot at ever getting laid.”
Then Trunk did something that was infinity times worse than a punch to the gut. He loaded a curled index finger into his thumb, forming an OK sign, slowly placed it an inch from my belly button, and uncorked a single flick into my stomach.
THWOP.
I was pretty disappointed by my stomach’s endurance, jiggle-wise. The whole room watched my flab ripple like the waves of the Grayport shore. This was humiliation on a scale I’d never thought possible.
My expression must’ve reflected my mortification because suddenly Trunk seemed to ease up. “Shit, Wyatt, I’m just fuckin’ with you, man.”
He stepped beside me and slapped a beefy arm around my shoulders. “You gotta loosen up, bro. Kinda like you were out there on the field today.”
My neck rested in between the crook of Trunk’s bicep and his forearm. I felt his muscles start to tighten like a vise.
“You were just so smooth with your footwork when you dodged me! Really showed off that famous varsity skill of yours.” Trunk was smiling big and wide, but his arm coiled itself tighter around my neck. He pulled my head down a few inches into a semi headlock. I tried to subtly wriggle free, but his grip clenched even harder. I could hardly suck in any air.
“Yup, you made the Trunkster look like a real asshole out there. In front of the coaches…”
More pressure.
“… in front of the scout…”
More pressure. Now I couldn’t breathe. I felt faint. I was going to faint.
“… and in front of my FATHER.” Trunk’s arm crunched down with ferocity. My windpipe was being crushed. I frantically wriggled my torso in attempt to break free but the death grip around my neck was permanent.
My next move was instinct. I barely even remember doing it at all. I lifted my right foot, and with 250 pounds of force, I slammed my heel down into the bony flat of Trunk’s foot.
Trunk yelped and released me in one instant, then slammed a fist into my stomach the next.
“FIIIIIGHT!”
I wouldn’t have called this a fight, but the declaration sprang from someone’s mouth and made it so.
I was doubled over from the punch and gasping for air, but still managed to sense Trunk charging at me. I took a quick sideways step, so Trunk only managed to get one arm wrapped around me. His momentum carried both of us toward the wall. Brett dodged out of our path and my spine slammed hard into a protruding shower handle. Trunk’s forehead hit the wall, opening a small gash that leaked blood down his face.
Trunk threw a hard punch into my stomach, and for a second I felt like I was going to puke up internal organs. He went for a third, but this time I managed to grab his meaty forearm with both hands. We were stuck in a kind of tug-of-war, and as I desperately clung to Trunk’s arm I shot a quick look to Brett, like “help me, dude, please.” Come on Brett please help me I’m scared. Please Brett you have to do something. Come on man please you’re my After picture.
Brett watched intently. But that was all he did. He watched.
Trunk wrenched his arm free from my grip, and with both hands he grabbed on to the skin on the side of my ribs. His fingernails tore through my skin as he flung me to the floor at the center drain.
My knees and elbows smashed down at the same time. The soup of dirty water was a few inches deep now and it spattered in a small arch as I landed.
Suddenly it felt like there wasn’t any air in the room for me to breathe. The physical exertion of the fight coupled with the room’s wet heat had triggered a familiar suffocating feeling in my lungs, like I was trying to breathe through a straw. The asthma attack was here, a bigger threat than even Trunk. My lungs felt like they were shrinking into nothing. I opened my mouth to scream for help, to beg someone to get my inhaler from my locker, but the only thing that escaped my mouth was a desperate heaving as I gasped for air.
Trunk sauntered up to me. His face was drenched in blood. I frantically tried to get up. I even made it onto my hands and knees. Then Trunk unleashed a wicked kick into my stomach. A mist of bloody vapor sprayed from my mouth like spume from a whale’s blowhole.
I crumpled back to the floor. The dirty lukewarm soup was continuing to rise so I used what little strength I had left to tilt my head sideways and upward so I wouldn’t swallow too much of it. I wheezed and heaved and heaved and wheezed, and as I lay coughing and choking on blood and water I watched my brother, who just stood there watching me back. In a room full of twenty-five dudes I felt the deepest, blackest loneliness of my entire life.
Trunk stood over me and I coughed and gagged and thought, Why, Brett, WHY? I’d do anything for you. ANYTHING. A single word from you could’ve stopped this but you did NOTHING. What have I done to you other than exist?
And as I lay there with one ear pressed into the disgusting soup, as I choked for air and wondered if Brett hated me, Trunk took a step toward my head and leaned down.
The sneer had left his face. An eerie calm seemed to take hold of him. He tilted his head slightly and considered me with an expression of almost innocent curiosity, like a little kid inspecting a wriggling ant. Then he slowly put his giant hand on the side of my head. I tried to resist but he pushed down as the so
up came up.
“Listen to you wheeze,” I heard him say as he pressed my face into the water. He spoke evenly and softly, but still loud enough for the room to hear. “You really are a fucking embarrassment to this team. Maybe you shouldn’t have spent so much time stuffing your face at ‘I Fudged Anna.’”
Then darkness.
* * *
I snapped back to consciousness when a blast of compressed air shot down my throat. The bitter taste was instantly recognizable—it’s kind of like a freezing cold spray of black licorice. The air whooshed down into my chest, instantly unlocking it. My lungs filled with rich, beautiful, life-giving oxygen.
I opened an eye and saw a set of bloody knuckles wrapped around my plastic inhaler. The hand belonged to Brett, who was naked and crouching over me. He held the inhaler to my mouth in one hand and cradled the back of my head with the other.
Brett knew to shake my inhaler’s tiny canister between puffs, which surprised me. He must’ve seen me do it before. He must’ve noticed, remembered. After he shook the inhaler, he gently placed the mouthpiece back on my lips. Blood trickled from a gash in his knuckle and dripped onto my cheek like a splotch of red watercolor falling onto his Before picture.
With another blast of spray from the inhaler and another few gulps of oxygen to power my brain, the rest of the shower room began to assemble around me. To our left the guys were crowded around a heap on the floor, staring in shock. Trunk lay faceup in the soup, writhing in agony. The gash in his forehead was still leaking everywhere, and now it was joined by syrupy red blood bubbling up from a grotesque broken nose that looked like a crumpled piece of origami. With one hand, Trunk, our all-league starting right tackle, our invincible protector of Brett’s blind side, clutched his right shoulder, which was jutting out of its socket.
“Come on,” Brett said to me. “Let’s get you home. You’ve got two days to learn the playbook.”
CHAPTER
TEN
The rectangular brick of fudge on my lap weighed exactly two pounds, as always, but today it felt heavier than that. I traced my finger lightly along the hard edges of its wax paper wrapping, then did the same to the twine crisscrossed tightly around the package. I was always fascinated by how the rock-hard fudge could also contain such delicacy, dissolving the instant it touched your tongue in a gush of sweetness as simple and pure as its ingredients: salted sweet cream butter, Tahitian vanilla bean extract, and 63 percent cacao dark chocolate, all precisely measured and mixed to create this heavenly compound with a melting point of 98.6 degrees. Each bite would leave a lingering sweetness as perfect as it was fleeting, and next thing you knew, your hand would know a solution to a problem your brain hadn’t yet recognized, reaching for the next piece—and the next and the next—in an uncontrolled urgency that would alarm you anew no matter how many times you’d recklessly housed a whole brick of Fudge by Anna. The guilt and shame would come later, but the next piece was coming now.
The key is to not even get started, so as my mom stepped on the accelerator and shot us out of the driveway, I transferred the fudge from my lap to the car mat. With my feet I nudged it under my seat so it was out of sight. I noticed Mom glance over, but she knew better than to ask if something was wrong. The internal struggle over whether to eat the fudge would be a war I’d endure on my own.
“Thanks for the chocolate,” I mumbled, officially completing the fudge transaction that was a certainty of every visit from Mom. “And thanks for coming out here to help. But you didn’t have to borrow Aunt Jackie’s car and everything just for this appointment. It’s not a big deal.”
Mom turned toward me and smiled. She looked so small, even a little frail, behind the wheel of Aunt Jackie’s SUV. But she also looked healthy, less exhausted. It was like every day away from Grayport had reversed a day of aging.
“Well, it’s a big deal to me,” she explained. “You’ll understand one day when you’re a mom.” She glanced at me again and fought back a little smile. I found myself grinning wide in spite of—or maybe because of—the lame mom joke.
“So how’s school? How’s Nate been doing?” she asked cheerfully. “He invented a time machine yet?”
“I wish,” I muttered, thinking back to my cheap shot at practice.
We drove a little farther in silence. I was tense the whole time, knowing that the line of Mom questions had been opened and a deluge was sure to pour down any second.
“I heard the boat got docked.” Mom mentioned this casually, though she was clearly pretending that the thought had just randomly popped into her head. “You getting enough to eat?”
“What does it look like?” I glanced down at the bulges of fat ballooning out around the straps of my seat belt. But the truth was that meals were getting light. We probably qualified for food stamps, but I knew Dad would NEVER go to the food bank to fill out the required paperwork. Imagine if someone saw the great former QB Henry Parker, Grayport legend of the past, father of the present, shuffling in line at the food bank, hands pathetically stuffed in pockets, his shoulders stooped.
“And how is everything at the apartment?”
“You mean at home?” I snapped back, surprising both Mom and myself.
She took a long breath in through her nose and adjusted her grip on the steering wheel. “Yes. At home.”
“It’s good,” I lied. “We’re good.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Mom only nodded in response. We reached a red light and idled there in silence. Mom flicked on the blinker, and we listened to it click on and off, on and off.
“What?” I said finally.
“Nothing.”
I shook my head in frustration. “This is stupid.”
“What’s stupid?”
“Even when I tell you things are good at home, you get upset. It’s like you want me to tell you that things suck here.”
“You know that’s not true.” The light turned green and we lurched forward again. “It’s just … I’m worried. You come out of the apartment with a big welt under your eye and you say it’s from football, but I’m not an idiot, Wyatt. I know fists don’t fit through face masks. And then there’s Dad’s boat getting docked, and then there’s red tide and how the last time it came…”
… it ruined everything. She didn’t say the words aloud but we both knew. The last red tide was when Dad’s occasional whiskey and Coke turned into his nightly whiskey and generic cola, and then eventually his morning whiskey and coffee. It was when Brett got lice and my parents rinsed his hair with paint thinner because it was cheaper than the medicinal shampoo at the pharmacy. It was when Dad started blaming Mom for his own mistakes, and when Mom stopped forgiving Dad for making them. It was when Fudge by Anna closed for good because nobody in Grayport could afford the luxury of a little sweetness.
Mom was clutching the steering wheel almost as tightly as she was clenching her jaw. Finally she said, “You know that if things get bad at the hou—at home, you can always stay with me at Aunt Jackie’s.”
I laughed bitterly at the idea. “And sleep where? On the pullout couch with you? Or how about the bathtub? Maybe curled up at the foot of Aunt Jackie’s bed like a dog?”
“What’s gotten into you?” Mom snapped. I was looking out my window, forehead to glass, but I could feel her glaring at me. “Is it this appointment?”
I felt a sudden urge to lower my window, grab the brick of fudge, and chuck it into the street. This goddam fudge. So much like my mom, so strong and so sweet, the cause and solution all at once.
But I could never do that to Mom. For all the pain Mom’s fudge had brought me over the years, it also symbolized a connection to her that I couldn’t afford to lose. See, in third grade Dad stopped inviting me to come along with him and Brett to practice football, so to help me feel better Mom let me make fudge with her at the shop. While Brett was spiraling footballs, I was swirling gooey chocolate with an oversized spatula in big stainless steel bowls. Mom ta
ught me everything she knew about her craft, and soon she started referring to her fudge as “our fudge.” I almost forgot about Brett and Dad and football entirely when I was with Mom in the shop’s back kitchen. Making our fudge together was that fulfilling.
Problem was, it was filling, too, on a very literal level, and as I taste-tested batch after batch of fudge, the pounds started piling on. I had always been kind of pudgy, and frankly it hadn’t ever really bothered me. But then Halloween of third grade happened. The day after trick-or-treating, I noticed that my candy bag was significantly lighter than it had been the night before. Clearly someone had stolen some of my hard-earned treats, and that someone had to be my traitorous roommate of a brother, Brett. So I approached him all calm and mature, and gently inquired into the whereabouts of my candy. Then, before he could answer, I kicked him square in the shin. It was one of the only times I ever hit Brett, but my candy bag was sacred and he had desecrated it.
When he was done howling in pain, Brett told me that he was innocent and that he had seen Dad sneak into our room, take my bag, and dump half of it in the trash. I was confused and asked if Dad had done the same to Brett’s bag, and Brett got awkward and mumbled no. I looked at Brett, so lean and athletic, and I looked down at my stomach that used to be my tummy but was now suddenly my gut, and all at once I knew Brett was telling the truth. And I knew another truth that’s stuck with me ever since: that I was fat and it was not okay.
Mom and I were closer back then, so I went to her and asked if she thought I was fat. She said of course not, she’d always love me and my body the way that it was. Then I asked her if Dad thought I was fat. The hesitation before she said no was long enough even for an eight-year-old to understand.