No pressure, of course.
The cheerleaders cheered. Coach Laden paced. And Stacy Ann Sloan stood at the key, her eyes searing Fat Angie. Her lips mouthed, “Don’t fuck it up, wacko.”
Fat Angie’s armpits sweated.
Her head sweated.
Even the backs of her knees were slimy.
She wiped her clammy hands on her damp shorts.
“You can sink it, Angie!” Jake’s voice pierced the silence.
“Go, Angie!” said KC, in a rhythm of competition with the hunky Jake Fetch.
But could she? That was the question that hovered like an alien spacecraft prepared to abduct her. A bright light suddenly went off in her brain.
She was not her sister. She was Fat Angie.
Her head swung from one side of the gymnasium to the other. Then down the key of annoyed players, waiting for her to botch the shot. Most of them, anyway.
Fat Angie backed away from the free-throw line.
This was, by all rules and regulations associated with the game of basketball, an unusual act. Not an act ever dramatized in sports films. The referees were stumped as Angie jogged off court and toward the concrete stands to KC. KC pushed through the Hornets’ Nest crowd and squatted where Fat Angie held on to the red railing.
“I’m scared,” said Fat Angie.
“This is it,” KC said. “You know, where the sky clears — where something big is right around the corner.”
“And you can see a pocketful of stars,” Fat Angie said.
“Yeah,” KC said. “It all lines up. You feel it, right?”
“Yeah,” said Fat Angie. “I think. I mostly wanna throw up.”
“Yeah,” said KC.
Fat Angie smiled. KC smiled. Ignoring the obnoxious fans and even Coach Laden, KC wrapped her hand around Fat Angie’s. Then KC’s cell phone rang, jolting them back into reality. Coach Laden fished Fat Angie away. The girls’ hands pulled apart.
“Angie, it’s just two points,” said Coach Laden, reassuring Fat Angie. “Just concentrate.”
Fat Angie smiled. “Yeah.”
Then something unexpected occurred to Fat Angie. As though the thought had come to her in a spiritual revelation. “I am special,” she said, looking at KC, who jammed a thumbs-up while talking on her cell.
Fat Angie looked to Coach Laden.
Coach Laden followed the trajectory of the moment. “Exceptionally special.”
Angie jogged back to the free-throw line.
The referee warned Angie about leaving the court. Angie picked up the ball and dribbled it exactly five times. Squinted at the basketball hoop. And with absolutely no hesitation, bent her knees, flicked her wrist, and . . .
Whoosh!
Nothing but net.
The Hornets’ Nest crowd went ballistic. She had done it. She had made it. She had tied the game!
Angie’s eyes shot to the stands. Jake whipped his fist in the air, and KC —
KC was gone.
The referee handed the ball to Angie.
“You can do it, Angie,” Coach Laden shouted from courtside.
Angie’s eyes focused only on that rim as she again dribbled five times. Her arms went up and she closed her eyes as it released. In the split moment of release, Angie saw her sister. The two of them shooting hoops on the backboard over the garage. Wang jumping in. The three of them. Together. Not all perfect but —
Swoosh! The Hornets’ Nest crowd sprang to their feet!
It was the Disney-esque ending Angie had prayed for. She had won the game. A big game. She had done it!
Only she was not lifted in the air by her teammates as Ralph Macchio had been in 1984’s Academy Award–nominated film The Karate Kid. They ran right past her to Coach Laden. One girl said in passing, “Way to go, Fat Angie.”
As if Fat Angie were in fact her real name.
Nevertheless, the inner beaming of one said game-winning girl could not be squashed. She looked up at that rim and whispered, “Whoosh . . .”
Her sister had to have heard — felt the moment when Angie had won the game.
Angie looked into the stands. No KC. Just Jake throwing a nod, then shooting his arms in the air with an explosive V for victory.
Stacy Ann clipped Angie’s shoulder.
“You’re afraid of everything,” said Angie. “And I know it. And that’s why you don’t like me.”
Stacy Ann shook her head. This gesture, plus her smirk, unbalanced Angie’s confidence. “I don’t like you because you think everyone owes you something because your sister went missing. My dad’s been over there twice. He lost three fingers. Do you see CNN at my house? Your whole family soaks up every ounce of light around here, so excuse me for not bowing down to you, your victim-ness.”
Stacy Ann disappeared behind the locker-room door.
Angie had not considered that Stacy Ann Sloan’s dislike for her could be something other than a one-dimensional mean-girl kind of hate. Stacy Ann had genuine feelings about what was clearly accurate. No one had paid attention to her father in the same way that they had Angie’s sister. If they had, Angie had not noticed. Perhaps because she had been preoccupied with her own sadness.
Angie did not know how to translate this epiphany in the letter to her sister. Perhaps she would embellish ever so slightly, so she would not appear to be as insensitive as she suddenly felt.
During the course of traveling from A to B — A being the away-game town and B being her high school — Angie wrote endlessly. While the team gabbed and laughed, while all of them were marinating in the juices of victory, Angie was elsewhere. She was in Iraq, imagining that by some miracle her sister had in fact wandered out of the desert and found a squadron. They were rushing her to a hospital — clearly she would be dehydrated — and the much-awaited press conference was imminent. Angie’s fingers gripped the uni-ball 0.7 roller-ball pen with incredible deliberateness through the whole journey — approximately forty-five minutes, give or take a minute.
She transcribed at length the details of the game. Her fierce struggle to overcome adversity and to become the young woman she was. Similar to what Coach Laden had described to her when she had fought Stacy Ann Sloan in gym class. It felt as though the fight had happened eons ago, but her sister would understand the eons feeling.
Angie paused.
She did not like feeling insensitive about Stacy Ann and had yet to include it in her letter. She twisted around in her seat and peered around the side. Stacy Ann crunched up alone. Eyes closed. Head bobbing from the bumpiness of the ride. Perhaps this would be the time to approach Stacy Ann. To acknowledge her feelings of exclusion. Just as Angie’s butt lifted for takeoff, the bus hit a pothole. Stacy Ann’s head slammed against the window. Angie braced herself in a midlean hover over Stacy Ann.
“What?” Stacy Ann said.
“Timing is everything,” her sister had always said. “B-ball, people. It’s all timing.”
Timing involved math, and Angie remained deficient at the art of numbers.
In short, that moment hovering above Stacy Ann was very bad timing.
“Um. Uh-uh,” Angie said, pushing up and away.
She flopped back in her seat.
Angie uncapped her pen and continued her letter. Rather than embellishing, she reconstructed the actual details of her thoughts. Minus the questions of her burnout therapist and her couldn’t-be-bothered mother. There. Right then. No detail was too small. Nothing could be left out, because her sister would want to know everything. Good and bad. The way she had always wanted to know everything. Her sister did in fact see Angie fully. When she was simply Angie, as she recently had become to KC.
The bus pulled up to William Anders High. The team charged off with the energy of a hundred victorious warriors. Many of them jammed into the compact energy-efficient cars their parents forced them to drive and kicked up gravel as they sped out of the parking lot.
Angie enclosed the letter to her sister in a six-by-nine envelope. Peeling off a
preprinted label with her sister’s last known mailing address, she centered it with care. It was absolutely perfect.
“Angie, you all right?” called Coach Laden from the front of the bus.
“Yeah.”
“Going to lock you up in here,” said Coach Laden.
Angie dragged her tired legs down the aisle.
“Good game,” said Coach Laden. “See you Monday.”
Angie stepped off the bus. No Wang. Just Jake. Jake without Ryan.
She swung her duffel over her shoulder. “ Hey,” she said to Jake.
Angie speed-dialed Wang’s cell. Voice mail. “Hey, where are you?” she asked.
“That was some shot,” Jake said.
“Wasn’t too bad, huh?”
“No, you definitely rocked the board.” Jake jammed his hands in his hoodie.
“Thanks. I mean, really . . . thanks,” Angie said.
Jake nodded.
“So, Wang was supposed to give me a ride,” Angie said. “Though I shouldn’t be surprised he bailed.”
“Yeah, he got hung up,” Jake said. “Kicked me a text to give you a lift.”
“He’s probably engaged in the criminal element, as my mom says.”
Jake blew on his hands. “C’mon. I’m freezing.”
The ride from the high school toward Oaklawn Ends was a short one, but long enough for Angie to pop off half a dozen texts to KC with no reply.
When they turned into the cul-de-sac of Oaklawn Ends, Angie’s couldn’t-be-bothered mother stood at the curb of their driveway. She seemed unusually bothered. Angie’s pulse elevated. Her palms sweated. Something was . . . off.
“Jake?” said Angie.
He could not look at her.
Angie popped the pimp silver door handle and stepped out. Jake pulled in to his driveway. Ryan blazed through the open back gate.
Ryan was a good dog.
Jake was a good boy.
“What’s . . . going on?” said Angie to her mother. She saw Wang in his second-story bedroom window.
He had been crying. He was crying. Wang showed no signs of crying on average and that was a fact that troubled Angie.
“Your dad —”
“Something’s wrong with Dad?”
“He’s on the way,” finished her mother.
“Wh — wh — why?”
Then it happened. The silence.
It took only a moment for Angie to realize. In a film, the camera would have circled around her.
Again and again and again.
Fat Angie dropped her duffel bag and tore the poorly stitched zipper apart.
Her mother, ill equipped for such an outburst, knelt. “What are you doing? Come inside.”
Fat Angie ripped into her bag and tossed clothes onto the driveway. She raced to their mailbox with her sister’s letter, threw it inside, and lifted the red flag. Her sore hands shook as she gripped the mailbox.
The box was cold.
“Angie,” said her mother.
“One, two, three, four, five, six . . .”
“Stop it,” said her mother.
Angie looked up to Wang’s second-story bedroom window again.
Wang was crying. He was crying a lot.
“Ten, eleven, twelve . . .” The numbers were difficult to form. Her concentration shattered.
Her mother grabbed Angie’s shoulders and the sweaty teen twisted, screamed. Her grip on reality had wavered. Angie clawed the envelope out of the mailbox and shouted at her mother, “One, two, three, four, five!”
Angie backed away, seeing Jake and his good dog Ryan sitting on the curb.
Jake was crying.
Ryan sat on his haunches.
Neighbors emerged from their doors. The sounds of news reports seeped from their flat-screen, surround-sound televisions.
“Angie, stop,” her mother said.
It was all so loud. Too loud. Angie squinted at the overcast sky. A helicopter flew overhead. Angie screamed again. And again.
Jake stood.
Ryan stood.
“It’s not like we didn’t know she wasn’t coming back,” her mother said, trying to hold her daughter. “Angie, it’s OK. You can be OK.”
Her mother’s voice had quivered only for a moment. It wasn’t enough for Angie.
The blades of the helicopter ricocheted in Angie’s ears.
Wang was crying. A lot.
Ryan barked at the helicopter as it passed.
Jake moved toward Angie.
“You can be OK,” pleaded her mother.
Screaming her numbers, Angie sprinted at top speed down the street. Neighbors looked on, barely pretending not to.
“Angie!” shouted her mother.
Angie’s counting echoed as she cut out the entrance to Oaklawn Ends. The trucks with satellites . . . the bloggers . . . the photographers . . . they would all return. It would be of interest to the whole world. They would want the skinny — the scoop. The everything.
She ran faster.
Harder.
Her breath was shallow. Her chest hurt.
They would ask their stupid questions. The country would mourn. The president would call, again. What could he know? What could anyone really know? They were watching. Just watching.
Eighteen minutes and twenty-two seconds later, Angie raced up KC’s lawn. She pounded on the door.
“Three hundred and four, three hundred and five . . .”
She pounded on the door harder.
“Three hundred and twelve, three hundred and thirteen . . .”
She stepped over Esther’s recently cut-back bush and around the side of the house to KC’s bedroom window.
“Three hundred and eighteen, three hundred and nineteen . . .” Angie’s knuckles rhythmically drummed the window.
She heard the muted sounds of an undetermined genre of music as she picked up a rock and slammed it through the window. Still counting, fumbling to twist the lock, she cut her arm in several not-so-critical areas. Angie opened the window and flopped in, a piece of glass jamming in her thigh. She did not notice the glass, as her attention was still focused on counting and moving toward the source of the ever-swelling music behind KC’s bathroom door.
“Three hundred and —” Angie swung the bathroom door open.
Angie stood still.
The numbers stopped.
Angie’s eyes went from a bloody handprint on the floor to KC’s beautiful brown eyes, which had seemed to go black. KC kicked the boom box off the tub ledge. The CD skipped before it crashed onto the floor. Electric sparks ignited.
KC’s forearms — her beautiful shoulders.
Blood.
Dripping.
Blood.
So many . . . cuts.
“Get out!” KC said.
Angie could not shake off the — the everything. Her shoulders tensed. Her throat tensed.
“Um . . . she . . . um —”
“I don’t want you here, Fat Angie!”
Angie shivered. The words Fat Angie had never, ever leaped from the sweet luscious lips of KC Romance. The grief-stricken Angie could not rationalize the behavior. No set of equations came to mind. She was not prepared for such cruelty.
Angie did not scream.
She did not cry.
She did not even count.
Simply, her fists unclenched. The letter to her sister only whispered as it hit the bathroom floor.
“KC,” called Esther. “Your dad’s — KC!”
Esther pushed past Angie.
“No baby, no,” said Esther.
“Get out, Esther,” KC said. “Get out!”
“Not gonna happen, kid.” Esther dampened a washcloth. “Angie, honey —”
Sobbing, KC kicked the wastebasket. “I have to cut it out!”
“Shh,” Esther said, her voice soothing and safe. “What do you have to get out, baby?”
“He hates me! Dad hates me, Esther,” KC said. “He told me he wasn’t coming around if I was gonna pl
ay gay. Play?”
Esther tapped the washcloth against KC’s cuts. “He’s just a son of a bitch sometimes. I’m sorry, baby.”
It was not safe here, Angie thought. Not at KC’s.
Angie stepped back from the doorway, her shaky steps disconnected from herself. Glass crackled beneath her sneakers. The sound shredded her ears.
“Angie?” called Esther from the bathroom.
Angie walked at a vigorous pace out of KC’s room.
“Hey, Angie,” said Mike. “Angie?”
She swung open the front door and burst off the porch. Running. Chafing the inside of her thighs. She felt nothing.
The details as to Angie’s whereabouts from A to B were hazy. In this instance, A being KC’s home and B being the Five ’N’ Go.
The bell dinged above the door as she entered the four-aisle establishment that was under new ownership and being renovated. As if on autopilot, she marched to the Swiss Rolls. She gathered them in her bloody arms and then turned to Sno Balls, M&M’s, and whatever assortment of sugary substances caught her eye. Fat Angie approached the counter. A few items dropped from the heaping mountain of junk food.
A skater dude behind the counter gaped at the stockpile of junk food. Clearly he was in the midst of a Mary Jane high, as could be assessed by his glassy eyes.
“Hey,” he said. “You know your leg’s bleeding.”
She looked down. In fact, it was.
“OK, so, you wanna add a Super Slam Soda Slush for eighty-five cents?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “Just this.”
“It’s really good. I had one and you can suicide it with —”
“No!” she said. “Just this.”
He sniffed, scratching the top of his greasy head.
“OK, whatever,” he said as her eyes filled with hate — with anger — with hunger.
“Nineteen eighty-four,” he said.
The number lingered in her head.
She dug into her moist tube sock and flicked a smelly wet twenty at him. She hauled the bag off the counter.
“You want your change?” he asked.
She pushed the door open. The bell dinged.
“Have a nice day,” said the skater dude behind the counter.
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