Word for word, these are the things I overheard Caroline Lushamp and Kendra Wu saying about me in gym, as the other girls stood around and listened. And laughed. I add in one or two other lines, the meanest things I can think of, so that I don’t have to hear it from anyone else. I write it so they don’t have to. This way, there is nothing they can say about me that I haven’t said myself.
Libby Strout is the fattest teen in America.
Libby Strout is a liar.
I step back.
These are the truest words of all, and until I see them I’m okay. But something about seeing them there, like someone else wrote them, makes me catch my breath. Too far, Libbs, I think.
Yes, I’m fat.
Yes, they had to partially destroy my house.
Maybe no boy will love me or want to touch me ever, even in a dark room, even after an apocalypse when all the skinny girls have been wiped off the earth by some horrible plague. Maybe one day I can be thinner than I am now and have a boyfriend who loves me, but I’ll still be a liar. I’ll always be a liar.
Because in about three minutes I’m going to open the door and walk down that hall and tell myself what did I expect, I knew this would happen, it was never going to go differently than this, they don’t matter, high school doesn’t matter, none of this matters, it’s what’s inside that counts. It’s what lies beyond this. All those things they like to tell you. Besides, I stopped feeling a long time ago.
Except this is a lie too.
Sixty seconds later:
I walk out of the bathroom and bump right into a girl almost as big as I am. She’s bawling her eyes out, and my first instinct is to get out of her way. She says, “What were you doing in there? Did you lock the door?” Actually, she shouts it.
“It must have gotten stuck. Are you okay?” I talk softly and calmly, hoping she’ll follow my lead.
She’s crying and hiccupping hard, and it takes her a minute. “Bastards.” This is a little less loud.
I don’t have to ask what, only who. I can imagine by the size of her what’s happened. “Who?” I ask, even though I feel like I don’t know anyone at this school.
“Dave Kaminski and his bastard friends.” She pushes by me to the sink, where she bends over, washing her face, wetting down her hair, which is wound in tight black ringlets. She’s wearing a Nirvana shirt and one of those candy necklaces you eat. I grab a paper towel and hand it to her. “Thanks.” She pats at her face. “Dave Kaminski grabbed me, and when I told him to let go he wouldn’t.”
The Dave Kaminski I knew was a scrawny twelve-year-old with white hair who once stole his dad’s Johnnie Walker and brought it to school.
“Where are they?”
“Bleachers.” She’s still hiccupping, but not as bad. She glances up at the wall and starts reading. “What the …”
My eyes follow hers. “I know, right? Look on the bright side. At least that’s not your name on the wall.”
Kam’s still running laps when these two girls come walking out of the school. One of them hangs back, but the other marches across the football field. She glances up at us for a second, and our eyes meet. And then she heads straight for Kam.
At first, he doesn’t see her, which is a miracle because this girl is enormous. But then I can tell he sees her, and he picks up speed, laughing and sprinting away. Seth is sitting straight up, like a dog watching a squirrel. Under his breath he goes, “What the hell …”
Just as the girl gets close, Kam takes off like he’s on fire, and the girl runs after him. I’m on my feet now because it’s the best damn thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, she is flying.
Seth starts clapping like a fool. “Oh shit.” He’s hollering at Kam and laughing himself blue, kicking and stomping at the bleachers, and the whole time I am rooting for the girl.
“Run!” I yell, and I’m yelling it to her, though no one knows it. “Run! Run! Run!”
Finally, Kam hurdles the fence and races off down the street away from us. Like a fucking gazelle, the girl hurdles the fence right after him, and the only thing that stops her from catching him is a truck that goes barreling past at just that moment. She stands on the street and stares after Kam, and then she walks, not runs, back toward the school. She crosses the football field, and as she walks her eyes are on me again. She doesn’t turn her head, just follows me with her eyes, and I am telling you she is pissed.
SIX YEARS EARLIER
* * *
I walk onto the playground, and Moses Hunt says to me, “Hey, if it isn’t Flabby Stout. What’s up, Flabby?”
I say, “You’re flabby.” Even though he isn’t, but then neither am I.
He does a sideways look at the boys grouped around him, the ones who hang on his every move all the time, even when he’s just making arm farts and repeating the swear words his brothers taught him. His eyes come sliding back to me, and he’s about to say something, and I know whatever it is I don’t want to hear it because no one could say anything nice with a mouth that looks like it swallowed a whole lemon, seeds and all.
He opens that pursed-up lemon mouth and says, “No one will ever love you. Because you’re fat.”
I stare down at my legs and stomach. I hold out my arms. If I’m fat, it’s news to me. Plump, maybe. A little chubby. But this is the way I’ve always been. I take a good, hard look at Moses and the other boys and the girls over by the swings. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t look that much fatter than any of them.
“I don’t think I am.”
“Well then, you’re not only fat, you’re dumb.” The boys fall down with laughter. Moses’s face bunches up like a fist, and he opens his mouth so wide it looks like all the pigeons in Amos could nest there. “Go home, Flabby Stout. The sun can’t shine when you come out … ” He’s singing it to the tune of “Lullaby and Goodnight.” “You’re so big you block the moon. Go home, Flabby, go to your room …”
I think, You’re the one that’s dumb. And I move past him. I’m aiming for the swings, where I see Bailey Bishop along with a hundred other girls. Moses steps in front of me. “Go home, Flabby Stout …”
I step the other way, and he blocks my path again. So now I move toward the jungle gym, where I can sit in peace, but he says, “I can’t let you do that. You might break it.”
“I won’t break it. I’ve been on it before.”
“But you might. Your flab has probably cracked the foundation. The next time you go on it, I bet that whole thing’ll collapse. Maybe the playground too. You’re probably cracking it right now just standing here. You probably killed your mom by sitting on her.” The boys die over and over. One of them rolls along the ground, hooting his face off.
I’m not as tall as Moses is, but I stare directly into his dark, soulless eyes. All I can think is For the first time in my life, I know what it’s like to have someone hate me. I can see the hate in there like it’s lodged in his pupils.
I spend the rest of recess standing against the wall on the edge of the playground wondering what I’ve done to Moses Hunt to make him hate me and knowing that whatever it is, there’s no coming back from it. It’s my stomach that tells me He will never like you no matter what you do, no matter how thin you are, no matter how nice you try to be to him. This is a terrifying feeling. It’s the feeling of something turning. Of coming to a corner and going around it and seeing that the street ahead is dark and deserted or filled with wild dogs, but you can’t go back, only forward, right into the middle of the pack.
I hear a shriek, and my friend Bailey Bishop jumps off the swing in midflight, legs reaching for the earth, hair sailing for the sky, bright gold as the sunrise.
I wave but she doesn’t see me. Doesn’t she notice I’m missing? I wave again, but she’s too busy running. I think, If I were Bailey Bishop, I’d run too. She has legs as long as light poles. If I were Bailey Bishop, I wouldn’t even look for me to see where I’d gone off to. I would just run and run and run.
NOW
* * *
The girl’s name is Iris Engelbrecht. These are the things I’ve learned in the past five minutes: She’s been heavy since birth, thanks to a double whammy of hypothyroidism and something called Cushing’s syndrome. Her parents are divorced, she has two older sisters, and everyone in her family is overweight.
“You need to tell the principal.”