Too much, too much, too much!
Why were there so many alternatives? So many different outcomes to be considered?
Fat Angie’s watch beeped. She’d wasted too much time deliberating. It was, as the cliché went, now or never. Do or die. A girl against the grain — the metaphor seemed clear.
Fat Angie sprinted Fat Angie–style toward KC. Her backpack slapped against her back. The feeling was quite uncomfortable. In fact, it hurt like all hell. She tripped and fell arms-first onto the concrete with the grace of girls in horror films. The casualty: her right elbow.
It bled.
Fat Angie hated blood.
She once had told her therapist, “It isn’t at all like on TV. When you bleed, it really is something.”
The therapist had made a note: Obsession with notions of self-mutilation.
The injury on Fat Angie’s elbow was minor. She wiped it on her jeans. It stung.
Fat Angie still had KC in her sights as the beauty turned a corner. She ran once again. Backpack back-slapping her. “KC,” called Fat Angie.
Between the elliptical in gym and the run, Fat Angie was spent.
“Go away, Angie,” said KC.
“Wait,” said Fat Angie, catching up.
“You’re gonna miss your bus,” said KC.
“Already did,” Fat Angie said, winded. “See, I set the timer to estimate —”
“Angie,” said KC. “Stop.”
Fat Angie was perplexed. And still trying to catch her breath.
“When we — you and me at The Backstory,” said KC. “The way we talked. I just. I wanted things to be different here.”
“It’s Dryfalls,” said Fat Angie. “Everything’s different. We’d don’t even have an IHOP.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Um . . .” said Fat Angie. “I didn’t think so. It sounded a lot funnier in my head. Like when I told my therapist he reminded me of James Dean in Giant. Well, a cartoon version. A fatter, hair-receding version with an overbite. Actually, he doesn’t look like James Dean at all. Maybe that’s why that wasn’t so funny either.”
KC laughed. Not a big bursting laugh. More of that quick-breath kind.
Fat Angie smiled, and the left side of her mouth inched just a bit higher into an adorable dimple.
“What are you doing, Angie?” KC tugged at her messenger bag strap.
“I don’t know,” said Fat Angie. “I mean, I do. But I don’t.”
“Look, I gotta split,” said KC, heading down the sidewalk.
Fat Angie was in a classic Fat Angie scenario. The urge to purge the thoughts in her head were locked behind serious mood-controlling medications and her fear of rejection. She dropped her head back and stared at a breath of white clouds. Fall leaves falling, raining with a burst of wind. Spinning orange, yellow, and red . . . dancing. She felt the moment was poetic — metaphorical — no, poetic. At least pretty.
“KC,” said Fat Angie.
Romance stopped for Fat Angie. “Yeah.”
Fat Angie hustled over to KC. Convinced her move would be smooth and dramatic, she froze.
“Um . . .” said Fat Angie. “Thank you.”
“For?”
“For?” Fat Angie said, a sense of panic in her voice.
The for was clear. Crystal. But Fat Angie stood there in the pretty, poetic-falling-leaves moment, saturated in her typical awkwardness.
“Um . . . for being the new girl who stood up for me,” said Fat Angie, channeling Coach Laden. “And . . . what . . . what is that? I mean, why . . . did you hide? Your arm?”
Fat Angie eyed KC’s arm.
“It’s nothing, Angie.”
“That doesn’t make . . . that doesn’t make sense. You have too many nothings,” said Fat Angie. “The girl in the picture frame in your room. No one frames a nothing. Unless their grandmother gave it to them. And that was way not a grandmother-type picture.”
“Just leave it,” said KC.
“I care,” said Fat Angie.
“You don’t know me.”
“So?” said Fat Angie. “It’s only a technicality. People get married in Las Vegas all the time and they don’t know each other. Not that I think we should —”
“I’m a cutter, OK?” said KC. “But on the record, the slice and dice is about me. And I don’t even do it anymore. I mean, I had a slipup, obviously, but it was super micro.”
“KC, I don’t really know what that means,” Fat Angie said.
KC stretched her neck and clung to her messenger bag strap. “It means you shouldn’t always judge the package. It’s what’s inside that really sucks sometimes. I dunno. It’s hard to explain. It’s just how I deal . . . did deal a lot in the past. But it’s over.”
KC, speaking in KC speak, had revealed a hint of her ouch, pain — vulnerability. As with many things about KC Romance, this reached right into the chest of Angie. Not Fat Angie but Angie. This perplexed her. Intensely.
The moment was ripe for some brilliant reply. The thought spun around and around Angie’s fatty-acid mind: WWMSD (what would my sister do)?
Follow through. She would follow through.
Angie undid her Casio calculator watch and revealed three deep, erratic scars.
Beat.
KC’s long fingers, nails finished with black polish, slid over the scars. To be seen — to be touched — Angie could not remember such a time since her sister had disappeared. After the scars — and the headlines and the camera footage of Angie’s pep rally meltdown — her couldn’t-be-bothered mother had moved into rare avoidance form. Not that she had ever been a very demonstrative person — not even with Angie’s sister, and she had seemed to want it more than any of them. Well, maybe her dad wanted it too.
The fall leaves fell.
A car drove by.
A dog barked. Then again. Then again.
“All better,” said KC, taking her hands away from Fat Angie’s wrist.
And for a moment, it was.
“Can I see?” Angie asked, holding on to KC’s wrist. “Under your sleeve?”
“It’s not required. Ever. OK?” said KC.
Angie gulped, feeling more like Fat Angie all over. Holding KC’s wrist, she said, “I still think you rock.”
KC’s eyes softened. “I think you rock, too.”
The moment was combustible. Their eyes were in an I-can’t-stop-looking-at-you-or-I’ll-die lock. KC leaned forward, head tilting, lips parting, when —
“Fucking dykes!” blared from Gary Klein’s mouth out the passenger window of an SUV. The driver laid into the horn.
Fat Angie’s hand fell away.
KC adjusted her posture. Crossing her arms, she established an invisible wall as she shook her head at the bitter irony.
“It’s always the same school,” said KC. “Whether you have an IHOP or not.”
Fat Angie was not accustomed to any of what had just almost transpired. She did not like to see KC so down on herself.
“I gotta fly,” said KC. “Esther . . . pseudotraditional dinner in an hour.”
“OK,” Fat Angie said.
KC started to reach for Fat Angie’s face but caught herself. “You really are beautiful.”
And just like that, KC Romance walked away from Fat Angie.
This time, Fat Angie did not follow.
Fat Angie removed her sister’s DVD/VCR combo player from the hall closet. The DVD player was broken but jammed into the VCR was Magic Johnson Presents: Fundamentals of Basketball. This would be her primary training tool because her sister had studied the video many a time before and during basketball season. Her sister held Magic Johnson (former Los Angeles Laker who contracted HIV in the 1990s) in the highest regard, so he would now be Angie’s mentor for at least fifty-two minutes out of every hour until tryouts — factoring in time for school, hands-on practice drills in the driveway, and sleep.
Just as her sister had done her freshman year, Fat Angie would rise to the occasion. Against all odds, s
he would earn a coveted spot on the Hornets’ Nest varsity basketball team. In spite of the technicality that it was, in fact, Fat Angie’s repeat of freshman year. Such technicalities did not register with Fat Angie. Besides, there was too much work to be done.
The days passed and Fat Angie saw very little of KC outside of gym class. Fat Angie’s heart swelled for the leggy girl toting her Last Supper lunch box to the cafeteria, where she always sat alone. The two occasionally exchanged looks through a sea of shoulders and bobbing heads. Angie’s urge to say something to KC was complicated by her not knowing what to say. The paralysis of such a paradox kept the girls together yet apart.
Jake had become an avid onlooker of Fat Angie’s after-school basketball drills. So had a few of her other neighbors in Oaklawn Ends. The neighbors were hoping to catch a glimpse of the wunderkind that had been Fat Angie’s sister. What they saw instead was Fat Angie. Fat Angie in her sister’s HORNETS’ NEST T-shirt.
One afternoon, Jake watched from his living-room window as Fat Angie ran drills in her driveway. A crooked line of metal folding chairs and a baby stroller served in place of orange safety cones on the concrete slope for her to dribble between. Ball-handling drills were key according to her sister and Magic Johnson.
“You can’t shoot if you can’t control the ball,” her sister had said on more than one occasion as they practiced in the driveway. “But remember, the free throw will always save you.”
Often, Angie had been the “practice dummy,” playing the defender for her sister early in the morning and late at night. While Angie was not as fat then, she was nevertheless heavy. And while her weight had slowed her down, she, like her sister, had a keen sense of the game. In those days, Fat Angie played against lightning in motion. And sometimes she even scored. When that happened, Angie’s sister goaded her to dream big. To stay focused. To never quit.
“Hey, Angie,” called Jake, coming out of his house, Ryan clicking behind him.
“Now you’re talking to me?” she said.
“I haven’t not talked to you,” he said, leaning on the back of his father’s antique Mustang.
She straightened her back, a definite soreness just about everywhere in her body. “That makes no sense,” she said.
“Yeah it does,” he said.
“Does not.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“You’re weird,” she said. “You know that, right? How you try to . . . fit . . . everything.”
“You’re still on that?” said Jake. “Even if you know it pisses me off?”
“It’s good to make people uncomfortable sometimes,” Fat Angie said.
Fat Angie began the awkward experience of the jump shot. Jake and Ryan sat on their curb and watched her uncoordinated body attempting to coordinate.
Coordinate (v): to make moving parts, such as parts of the body, work together in sequence or in time with one another, or to work with another person in this way.
Jake chomped into an apple. He chomped again. And again. And again.
He patted Ryan on the head and said, “Let’s go, boy,” and they crossed the street to Fat Angie’s driveway. The basketball ricocheted off the rim and bounce-rolled to Ryan’s paw. The dog barked.
“What are you doing?” said Jake, snapping up the ball and sinking a free throw with nothing but net.
Fat Angie rebounded the ball.
“I’m going out for the varsity team,” she said, peeling her sweaty hair from her forehead.
“You’re joking, right?” he said.
“Do I seem funny?” she said.
“No. It’s just . . .” Jake struggled how to state the obvious. “Varsity’s competitive. I don’t even play varsity, and I’m really good.”
She glared.
“Not that you aren’t,” he said, backpedaling with great speed. “It’s just not as easy as saying you’re gonna go out for the varsity team.”
“Why?” she asked.
Jake snapped the ball from her hands. He dribbled, spun, and went up in the air with a beautiful jumper.
“Just ’cause,” he said.
She rebounded the ball. “I’ll practice all night. Every night. Just the way I have been. See?”
She pointed to the side of the two-car garage. Three floodlights on yellow stands were clumped together.
“Yeah, I’ve seen you out here stumbling around,” he said.
She moved into position for a jump shot and failed miserably once again.
Jake snapped up the rebound. “What’s really going on? KC put you up to this?”
“No!” she said. “We don’t even talk, OK? Give me the ball.”
She held her hands out. Jake whipped the ball up and spun it on his index finger. This was not only an act of skill, but as Fat Angie thought, showing off.
“You really wanna go out for varsity?” he said.
“Yes.” She made for the ball, but the nimble Jake, in full finger spin, jerked it from her.
“Because of your sister?” he asked.
“Because of me.”
Fat Angie would not be dissuaded. And the only way the good-hearted Jake could think to protect her was to help her. Jake whip-spun the ball on his finger before holstering it in the crook of his arm.
“OK,” he said. “But you gotta be serious.”
“I am.”
“Then you better know Coach Laden is a sucker for a solid jump shot and killer defense. I’ve seen her,” said Jake.
“I’ve been to a game.”
“Yeah, but now you wanna play in one,” said Jake. “You’ll have to show her you’ve got teeth.”
Fat Angie stretched her lips, revealing that, in fact, she did have teeth. Jake looked down at Ryan. Ryan barked.
“Um . . . that was kinda funny,” she said.
Jake half-laughed.
“Now, the jump shot is all about flow,” said Jake, who began the visuals. “You dribble. Full stop. See? Bend your knees and fly straight up. Before you come down, release, and . . . full follow-through. See how I flicked my wrist? It puts a strong-ass spin on the ball. And you always have a target. Once you get the form it’s all about what you see. And see only one thing: your target. Everything else is invisible.”
Jake pushed a chest pass that knocked Fat Angie harder in the bosom than she would have anticipated.
Pause.
“What?” Jake said.
“I’m writing a letter to my sister,” said Fat Angie. “I’ve been writing it since my mom locked me up in that rehab place.” Fat Angie aggressively kicked the toe of her sneaker against the concrete driveway. It left a hint of a mark. “Everyone wants me to think she’s dead, Jake. Even you.”
Jake seemed unprepared for such dramatic statements. Even if his life wasn’t perfect, it was no way as screwed up as Fat Angie’s. Jake’s life consisted of:
mom + dad + dog =
Fat Angie’s life equation was
couldn’t-be-bothered mom − dad − sister + misfit adopted brother =
Fat Angie stood there, awkwardly tugging at her sister’s HORNETS’ NEST T-shirt, which was sticking to her. Jake looked at Ryan and said, “Then she’s not.”
Ryan wagged his tail.
“What about everything you said? Um, about how long she’s been gone,” said Fat Angie.
“Hey, I’m just a jock. Arrogance is sort of in the handbook.”
“A freak jock,” she said, chest-passing the ball back to him.
“Takes one to know one.” He slammed the ball back to her.
“Wacko,” she said, passing the ball.
“Crazy.” He passed the ball back.
They continued the firing of back-and-forth ball passing until Fat Angie abruptly said, “I’m gay-girl gay with KC Romance.”
Jake held on to the ball. “Really?” he said, a little too serious for her comfort.
She crossed her arms over her stomach.
“Yeah, I think,” she said. “I think, maybe. Yeah. I don’t know.”
&
nbsp; He dribbled away from the basket. “I knew she was, but I wasn’t sure you were. She’s got a history, you know.”
“I know about the cutting thing,” Fat Angie said.
Jake powered hard to the basket. Up. Flying. Slam dunk! The cutest little boy smile cut the edges of his mouth.
“She is really hot,” he said, throwing the ball back at Fat Angie.
Angie, with what most would deem a dorky expression, smiled and basked in Jake’s description. “Yeah. But it’s different.”
“Not really,” said Jake, hands ready for the ball. “But yeah. It is.”
“I think she could really like me . . . does like me. Uggh. What do I do?” She fired the ball back to him.
He ripped the ball right back at her. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not a gay-girl-gay guru. Just make sure you know what you’re getting into. You know?”
Angie nodded.
“That’s what your sister would say, right?” Jake said.
“Yeah,” she agreed, noticing that Jake knew so specifically what her sister would have said. It was a strange thing for him to mention.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s play.”
Fat Angie practiced and practiced well into the evening for several evenings with Jake. Her couldn’t-be-bothered mother remained unbothered, as she was apparently working late every night. During this time of intense training, Wang watched his sister from his second-floor bedroom deck.
She ignored the increase in Wang’s nasty remarks at school and the way he started to bring his school persona home. When he hinted at tearing her down, she would build herself back up by running basketball drills. Taking to the driveway every afternoon, Fat Angie had attracted an unexpected crowd. The neighbors of Oaklawn Ends began to act in a way that could only be characterized as peculiar. They mowed their lawns even though they had just been mowed. Some organized their garage though they were, by all accounts, already organized. The sound of a basketball beating the driveway had stopped with her sister. The resurgence of the game Jake and Fat Angie played intrigued them, and something about that felt right to her.
And so the neighbors went to bed to one sound: dribbling. And while Fat Angie practiced long past the designated noise-ordinance time, not a single neighbor called the police to file a complaint. They all wanted, in some way, to remember the wunderkind that had made Oaklawn Ends a beginning.
Fat Angie Page 9