Your hands, possessed by the wine, or so you tell yourself, run up and down her squishy sides, from her astonishingly firm breasts to the monstrous curves of her many flanks and thighs.
“Wrotethissongbout you,” you tell her, even though you are so far gone now you do not even know which song is playing, and whichever it is, you probably wrote it about Some People, their red lips and white limbs and their wiles.
Ah, but Some People, or so you feel now, do not deserve you or your music. In fact, you tell the fat girl, you are thinking of ending it with Some People.
“Really, really?” she whispers, like you have just told her this is one bow-strung puppy she can keep.
“Yup,” you breathe into her warm, doughy neck, marveling at how, with one mere breath, you can make a whole fat girl tremble like a leaf.
? ? ?
Was it you who lowered the lights? Was it you who dragged her up the stairs and down the hall to the overly postered, Christmas-light-lit cave of her bedroom? All you know is the hammering of your own heart in the morning, the laughter of God ringing in your ears, when you wake up naked under her celestial patterned bedspread, your mouth still full of her long, dark hair.
On a sheet of her Edward Gorey stationery, you tell her you’ve made a terrible mistake. You don’t know what you were thinking. Probably you have a drinking problem or maybe it’s something to do with self-esteem—anyway, you hope she understands. Though it’s a fine note, it doesn’t feel like enough. So you leave her an autographed copy of Novembral Musings (tentatively titled), which you hastily sign, “To My Biggest Fan.”
It is only as you drive home, still drunk, through the dishwater-colored dawn that you realize it was a poor choice of words. “Number One Fan,” you should have put. Of course, it’s too late now.
Some People is waiting at your doorstep, tapping her witch-toed boot, drumming her fingers on her narrow white hips, frowning at you through feathers of layered red hair. She takes one look at the cat hair on your clothes, breathes your Banana-Rama-and-flesh scent, and knows where you have been and what you have done.
“Pathetic,” she says. “Disgusting. With her? That child? What is she, like, seventeen?”
Child?
She closes her eyes, shakes her head, sighs the way she does whenever you pull your guitar from its lovingly stickered case. “I can’t believe you,” she says at last. “I really can’t.”
And if your mouth weren’t so full of cotton, if your throat weren’t so parched from all that fat-girl wine, you would say, Neither can I. Neither can I.
A week later, the fat girl still won’t take your calls. You sit alone in your basement apartment, leaving message after message—mainly drunken, but sometimes sober—waiting for her to call you right back, can’t believe that she doesn’t. Mistake. Surely there must’ve been. It’s only when you see her front window abruptly darken as you tipsily turn in to her driveway one night that you understand there has been no mistake.
Three weeks after that, you’re paying your first non-drunk visit to the fat girl. You don’t know why. You only know you need to see her.
It’s the only time you’ve been to see her dry—or during the day, for that matter—and the house seems different, somehow. Smaller. Not swaying. Less lethal lawn ornaments.
Standing on the doormat, you knock a gentle knock. You knock and knock until the bundle of birch twigs tumbles to the ground and still there is no answer. But you do not give up. After all, she never gave up on you. You go around back like she always asked you to. That’s when you hear the sound of inexpertly strummed chords wafting out of her open window, smell nag champa burning, Banana-Rama bread freshly baked. You hunch down in the hydrangea beds and peer into her half-open window.
She’s lying on the bed wearing what appears to be some sort of uniform. Jesus. A high school uniform. Lying on the bed beside her is a tall, thin, lanky man with long hair. He looks older than you are. Mangier. Less gainfully employed. He’s sitting reclined on her Indian cushions, your Indian cushions, his legs crossed at the knee, torturing the strings of an acoustic guitar. The fat girl lies with her eyes closed, her hands clasped on her vast stomach like she’s dead. Her hair is fanned out all around her. She’s doing her nod. Her slow, grave, listening nod.
“Wow,” she says, eyes still closed. “This is so epic, Samuel.”
“Seriously?”
She nods slowly, her eyes still closed. “Oh yeah. Really gritty too. And so . . . what’s the word I’m looking for?”
The man looks down at the fat girl like she’s an oracle. “What? Like, raw or . . . ?”
“Ethereal,” she says at last. “Incandescent.”
“Whoa. Really? You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Rad. I really don’t know what I’d do without your support, Eleanor.”
“Elizabeth. But most people call me Lizzie.”
“Right. You get it.”
The fat girl, your fat girl, is blushing. “Oh my god, anytime, seriously.”