Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have Read online

  For my mother

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Fat Runs in the Family.

  Chapter 2 - Wake Up, Get Up, Suck It Up.

  Chapter 3 - Reality Bites.

  Chapter 4 - On a New Level.

  Chapter 5 - What Happened Yesterday.

  Chapter 6 - The Pitiful Life of a Narrow.

  Chapter 7 - The Physics of Fat.

  Chapter 8 - A Revised History of Fat and Fifteen.

  Chapter 9 - Eytan Meets the New Girl.

  Chapter 10 - Long-Distance Dad.

  Chapter 11 - This Theory I Have in the Middle of the Night.

  Chapter 12 - A Bad Bounce.

  Chapter 13 - Roar.

  Chapter 14 - The Four Words She Says.

  Chapter 15 - The Scent of Popular.

  Chapter 16 - Mini Memories.

  Chapter 17 - I Turn Right.

  Chapter 18 - The Secret World Behind the School.

  Chapter 19 - Go.

  Chapter 20 - How Not to Limp in Front of Your Mom.

  Chapter 21 - How to Lie to Your Best Friend.

  Chapter 22 - Back in the Big Leagues.

  Chapter 23 - The Elephant in the Living Room.

  Chapter 24 - The Center of It All.

  Chapter 25 - Hurry Plus.

  Chapter 26 - Mini Miracle Required.

  Chapter 27 - Wide Awake and Dreaming.

  Chapter 28 - Out There.

  Chapter 29 - Clutch.

  Chapter 30 - Child Support.

  Chapter 31 - Maybe I’ve Changed.

  Chapter 32 - Mom Picks, I Unpick.

  Chapter 33 - Get Tipsy.

  Chapter 34 - The Nice/Mean/Nice Theory.

  Chapter 35 - Thighs Dancing in Fluorescent Light.

  Chapter 36 - April Sucks My Straw.

  Chapter 37 - Circus Material.

  Chapter 38 - Invisible.

  Chapter 39 - Hit or Run.

  Chapter 40 - All That Testosterone Stuff.

  Chapter 41 - A Lot Can Happen in a Millisecond.

  Chapter 42 - Thinner.

  Chapter 43 - Game Face.

  Chapter 44 - We’re on the Same Team.

  Chapter 45 - Mom on a Rampage.

  Chapter 46 - Things Change.

  Chapter 47 - Twisted.

  Chapter 48 - Just Plain Zansky.

  Chapter 49 - A Feeble Attempt to Recapture the Dream.

  Chapter 50 - Private Practice.

  Chapter 51 - The Sound of Salad.

  Chapter 52 - The Sidewalk, the Moon, and April.

  Chapter 53 - People Standing, Person Sitting.

  Chapter 54 - Percentages.

  Chapter 55 - Man Meets Mountain.

  Chapter 56 - Enojado.

  Chapter 57 - April (and Other Things I Don’t Want).

  Chapter 58 - Everywhere He Goes.

  Chapter 59 - Cards and Letters.

  Chapter 60 - There’s This Ringing in My Head.

  Chapter 61 - The Hole in the Middle.

  Chapter 62 - Dad and His Echo.

  Chapter 63 - Roar (of the Crowd).

  Chapter 64 - Why?

  Chapter 65 - Because.

  Chapter 66 - Take the Field.

  Chapter 67 - Something Big, Coming Towards Me Fast.

  Chapter 68 - I Can Try.

  Chapter 69 - The Glow of Nothing Special.

  Chapter 70 - The Long Short Ride Home.

  Chapter 71 - Expansion.

  Chapter 72 - Football Players Only.

  Chapter 73 - Buses Come and They Go.

  Chapter 74 - I See Yee.

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Except from My Life the Theater, and Other Tragedies

  Copyright

  fat runs in the family.

  My name is Andrew Zansky.

  I’m fifteen years old, and I weigh 307 pounds.

  Actually, I weighed myself yesterday on Mom’s digital scale, and I’m down to 306.4.

  306.4 is big at my age. Okay, it’s big at any age. It’s not big enough that they make a Discovery Channel documentary about you, but it’s big enough that you stand out wherever you go. There’s no flying under the radar at 306.4. There’s a lot of surface area to reflect radar signals.

  Dad says I carry it well. That means I don’t look more than 275. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

  Mom says being fat is not my fault. She says I have a glandular problem. She says it runs in the family.

  Grandma Isabel was fat. So was Papa Joe. Papa Paul is chunky, but I’m not sure how chunky, because he lives in Florida and we hardly ever see him in person. He learned to use e-mail last year and now he sends us photos. He looks pretty big in the photos. He’s always wearing a loose shirt, and his skin is very pale. For me, those are important clues. Most people take off their shirts in Florida, and their skin turns brown like car leather. But when you’re fat, you don’t take off your shirt for any reason. Not for the doctor, not at the beach, not anywhere. That’s why I think Papa Paul is bigger than he looks.

  Speaking of shirts, I sometimes wear two—my regular shirt and a T-shirt underneath—just in case I’m hit by a car on the way to school. If the paramedics have to cut off my shirt to save my life, there will be another shirt underneath. It’s bad enough to get hit by a car. But to be hit by a car and have your blubber hanging off the side of an ambulance stretcher on WBZ-TV? No, thank you.

  My mom isn’t fat exactly, but she’s always fighting her weight. When I say always, I mean all the time. 24/7. It doesn’t help that she’s a caterer. It’s hard to be thin when you’re a caterer. She has to taste things, right? Mom’s problem is that she doesn’t taste a little bit, she tastes the whole thing. Then she complains that her pants are tight and her life is ruined. Then she complains that my pants are tight and my life will be ruined if I don’t go on a diet. It’s what they call a never-ending cycle.

  There’s a lot of fat in our family, but there’s some thin, too. Dad is thin and athletic, and my sister Jessica is super skinny. She’s also a super bitch, so there’s clearly no correlation between being skinny and being nice, at least in her case.

  That’s my family. Some of us are fat, some are thin.

  It may be true that we have a glandular problem, but if so, it’s extremely selective.

  wake up, get up, suck it up.

  I hate my pants. Especially right now. The first day of school.

  They’re sitting on the dresser taunting me, waiting for me to try them on.

  I don’t like that they’re size 48. I also don’t like that they’re Levi’s, and the company puts the size on the waist where everyone can see it. Are they crazy? Nobody brags about wearing size 48. If Levi’s were cool, they’d have a cutoff point at size 32. Even if you bought jeans bigger than that, the waist would still say 32. They could come up with a good marketing slogan for it. “Tease-Proof Pants.” Something like that. Then people like me could wear them without having to erase the label for an hour.

  Okay, I admit it. I erased the number, but really gently so it looks like it wore out on its own because of my belt, not because some fat kid erased it. Really, what choice did I have? If I walk through school with size 48 on my waist, it’s social suicide. I might as well wear one of those yellow-and-black OVERSIZE LOAD stickers they put on trucks.

  The pants are sitting next to a preppy button-down, brown-checkered socks, and a pair of blue underwear. Mom laid them out last night before I went to bed. She still picks out my clothes for me. Embarrassing, right? She wants to control everything that goes on my body and everything that goes into it, too. I
t’s because she wants me to be thin. If I can’t be thin, she wants me to look thin. And if I can’t look thin, she thinks I should act thin.

  When Mom looks at me, she sees a fat kid. Which makes her about the same as the rest of the world. They don’t see Andrew. They see big.

  These are the kinds of things I think about when I’m getting dressed. Crazy, right?

  These pants have to fit. They have to, or I can’t go to school. No school means no degree, no degree means no college, and no college means I’m pumping gas at a Mobil station in Roxbury. According to Dad, that’s the fate of all kids who don’t have a 4.0 when they graduate. So I pick up the Levi’s, suck in my gut, and pull them up. I’m not even at my waist and I already know I’m in trouble. My pants hate me. They don’t want to be seen with me. They want to find a nice size 32 kid and hang out with him.

  I grasp at the waist, suck in my stomach, and pull forward and in. The two sides move slowly across the Grand Canyon of my gut, until finally, miraculously, the metal button slips through the slot.

  They’re on. Barely.

  Just once I want to button a pair of jeans and still be able to breathe. It doesn’t seem fair that I should have to choose between pants and oxygen.

  I glance at the clock.

  7:02. In an hour I’ll be sitting in homeroom. The thought makes me want to get back into bed and stay there until graduation.

  I notice a piece of paper on my night table. It’s got my writing on it. I pick it up and take a look.

  Remember April, it says.

  April. The girl I met yesterday. Not just any girl. The Girl of My Dreams: Asian Edition.

  I dreamed about her last night, and I woke up with a tent in my sheets and wrote myself a note. I guess it made sense in the middle of the night, but this morning it just seems cruel.

  Why remember a girl you’re never going to see again?

  Why think about her at all?

  reality bites.

  Kids are rushing around this morning, chattering away because it’s the first day and they’re excited. What’s it like to be a kid who’s excited about school? I try to imagine it. I guess you don’t sit up the night before school thinking about girls you’ll never meet again or praying that your pants will fit. You think about how much fun it will be to see all your friends and have girls giggle when you talk to them rather than totally ignore you or walk away.

  I open my locker. Number 372 on the third floor. I’m a little concerned because I weigh 306.4. What if my locker number is some kind of omen of things to come?

  I start thinking about April again, and it makes me kind of sad and happy at the same time. Suddenly a shadow passes by, and I get body-slammed from the back.

  “Watch where you’re go—” I start to say, and then I see who I’m about to say it to.

  Ugo.

  Let me tell you about Ugo. Imagine the ugliest creature in the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen. That image in your head? It’s attractive compared to Ugo. Seriously.

  Ugo says, “You’re looking good, Zansky. Did you lose an ounce?”

  Actually, it’s ten ounces. But I don’t tell him that.

  “I don’t want any trouble this year,” I say. Ugo and I have been at war since the first week of ninth grade. I don’t even know why. I just know that Dad doesn’t like it when I have issues at school. It makes him question his legacy.

  “We’re not going to have any trouble,” Ugo says, “as long as you stay in your locker and don’t come out.”

  “Very funny,” I say.

  But he’s not joking. And to prove it, he starts pushing me into my locker. Now it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out that a 306-pound kid is not going to fit into a school locker. But Ugo’s never been bothered by little things like facts.

  He puts a giant paw on my back and shoves. I probably wouldn’t mind getting in the locker if I could close the door behind me and never come out. I’d stay for the whole semester if someone would slide a thin-crust pizza through the slats three times a day. Preferably Papa Gino’s with extra pepperoni.

  “Cut it out,” I say, my voice echoing inside the locker. I sound like such a pussy. Even to myself. Ugo thinks so, too, because he just pushes harder.

  “Hey, Andy,” someone says in the hallway.

  Ugo lets go. I turn around and see my best friend, Eytan, standing there. I’ve never been so relieved to seen a skinny person. It’s not like Eytan can do anything to stop Ugo. He’s outweighed five to one. But there’s less likely to be bloodshed with a witness around. Eytan’s my personal version of Amnesty International.

  “This may sound slightly cliché,” Eytan says to Ugo, “but why don’t you fight someone your own size?”

  “He is my size, Pretzel Rod,” Ugo says.

  “Then try someone your own IQ. I think there’s a mold culture in the Bio lab.”

  Ugo crunches his fist like he might punch Eytan in the face, but instead he gives me a super hard shove, so my head whacks into the front of the locker. Great. I’ll probably have the number 372 imprinted on my forehead for the rest of the day—48 on my waist and 372 on my head. There goes my Sophomores Who Lost Their Virginity Award.

  “Son of a bitch,” I say, like I’ve had enough.

  I turn around and face Ugo. Actually, I face his sweatshirt. He’s a lot taller than me, and he always wears a sweatshirt, even when it’s a hundred degrees. From the smell of it, this sweatshirt hasn’t been washed since middle school.

  “You want to do something about it?” Ugo says to me.

  He reaches out slowly, too slowly, and puts an open hand on the front of my chest and pushes. And just like that, he pins me against the locker.

  I’d love to shove him back. Grab him by his sweatshirt and whip him into the wall, bash his head a couple times until he starts crying. I get a flash of those sea-lion fights on Animal Planet, two giant bulls roaring and smacking against each other.

  But I don’t do anything. I don’t fight back at all.

  That makes him smile. He even laughs a little.

  “You’re such a wuss,” he says.

  What can I say? It’s true.

  So I stare at the ground. I keep staring until he walks away. Then I brush myself off and pretend it didn’t happen. Just like always.

  “First day follies,” Eytan says. “Don’t let him get to you.”

  I rub my sides where the locker almost tore them off.

  “No big deal,” I say.

  But it’s not true. When I look into the future, I see an entire year of misery—hiding from Ugo, never going to the bathroom alone, taking corners wide in case he’s waiting. It’s a very big deal.

  I was hoping Ugo forgot about me over the summer, or maybe there would be a new, pudgy freshman for him to torment.

  That’s pretty sad, right? When you’re such a coward you wish someone else would get it instead of you?

  on a new level.

  Eytan and I are walking downstairs when I suddenly remember I’ve got a protein bar in my backpack. I’m not supposed to eat it until right before lunch. Jessica taught me that if you eat a protein bar and drink an entire Diet Coke right from the can, you feel really full because your stomach thinks it ate a whole meal. She didn’t tell me you swell up like the Hindenburg and leak gas out of your butt for thirty minutes. But I guess it takes sacrifice to lose weight. If I have to choose between skinny jeans and air pollution, I’m willing to compromise.

  I reach into my backpack, feel the wrapper crinkle seductively in my hand.

  “Are you smuggling illegal contraband into school facilities?” Eytan says.

  “It’s just a protein bar,” I say.

  “It may look like a protein bar, but how do I know it’s not an illegal recording device?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Okay, check it out. I saw this Web site where a guy turns regular items into little cameras, and then he walks around and looks up girls’ skirts.”

 
; “You’re twisted,” I say, but I’m kind of laughing. That’s why I like Eytan. He can always make you laugh when things are rough and you don’t want to.

  “Seriously,” he says. “You take a protein bar, core out the center, put in one of those spy cams, and bam! You’re in business.”

  “What good is a camera in a protein bar?”

  He looks at me like I must be dense. “You drop it on the floor when girls walk by,” he says, “and it looks up their skirts. Or you kind of hold it in your hand when you’re talking to them. You’re talking, but your protein bar is looking at their cleavage.”

  “You’re totally obsessed.”

  “Call it what you want, but this is our year, my friend. You get your 4.0, Estonia wins Model UN, and I become a man. A Hoochie Coochie Man, in the immortal words of Muddy Waters.”

  Eytan loves blues music. He also loves sex, even though he’s never had any. Getting laid is Eytan’s life mission, followed by winning Model UN. We came in sixty-third last year, but we were Botswana, and what can you expect when you’re Botswana? This year we were assigned Estonia, and for some reason, Eytan thinks we can go all the way. He thinks he can go all the way, too. Last year he got to second base with Sveta, a German exchange student, but no further. Those last two bases are driving him crazy.

  Eytan says, “We’re sophomores now, right? That means the freshman girls are going to be looking up to us for support and encouragement.” He winks at me. “Play your cards right, and you might become a man, too.”

  “I’m already a man.”

  Eytan studies my face. “Son of a bitch. Did you get some this summer?”

  “No.”

  “Seriously. You got poon, didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t get poon. But I met somebody.”

  “Met her where?”

  “At a wedding. One of Mom’s events, you know?”

  Eytan looks at me with amazement. Like he suddenly respects me or something. Not that he didn’t before. But on a new level.

  “You have a girlfriend!” he says.

  “Not exactly.”

  “I want photographic evidence—cell phone pictures, image capture—”