All the Roads That Lead From Home (10 page)

“The one
who’s got her down in the dumps, of course.”

Pinny said
Carl Pratt’s name.

“Pratt.
Father’s Don Pratt? Sold him a Buick last year. Good car. Wouldn’t go for the
extended warranty. Only a couple hundred bucks more. Just couldn’t talk him
into it.”

The fat
girl wiped her nose on a paper napkin.

“Well,
it’s his loss,” she said. Pinny wasn’t sure if the fat girl meant Carl Pratt or
his father, but the statement worked, either way.

***

Pinny asked Carl Pratt to
be nice to the fat girl as a favor to her.

“What, are
you kidding?” he asked. They were in the gym where basketball practice had just
ended and Carl Pratt was gathering up basketballs.

“She
really likes you.”

“Gross.”

“You’re
mean.”

“Not to
you, I’m not.” And then he kissed Pinny right on the lips. She thought it was
the most disgusting thing she’d ever done and that she’d probably never kiss
anyone again as long as she lived. But, since Carl Pratt seemed to like it so
much, Pinny soon learned she could get what she wanted letting him have his
way. The next day Carl Pratt said “Hi” to the fat girl, and even managed a weak
smile in her direction. For that Pinny paid him with two kisses. 

Day by day
Carl Pratt paid attention to the fat girl, causing a huge stir. Though he had a
reputation as a ladies’ man, his interest in the fat girl still couldn’t be
fathomed. Someone said Josh Silverman, one of the wealthier students who’d
spent money on gags before, was up to his old tricks. What a good joke it would
be to build up the fat girl, only to let her down, everyone said.

Pinny kept
the truth quiet by letting Carl Pratt kiss her for up to an hour, often with
his hands inside her shirt. She liked it a little better than she used to, but
still not too much.

“Do you
kiss her, too?” Pinny asked. The fat girl didn’t say what she did with Carl
Pratt after school at his house while his father sold insurance and his mother
slept off her night shift at the hospital. She just drifted around with a quiet
light in her eyes, and a rosy glow on her round, smooth cheeks.

“Not like
this,” said Carl Pratt.

Pinny
hadn’t really thought that Carl Pratt kissed the fat girl. She had expected him
to say no, she realized. She had gotten the idea that all they did was talk,
because Carl Pratt had once said, “Man, she talks a lot.”

Pinny was
deeply jealous of the fat girl, because all of a sudden she, too, had fallen
for Carl Pratt.

She
refused to let either the fat girl or Carl Pratt know. When the fat girl talked
about him, her voice all soft and dewy, Pinny listened with a blank face and an
occasional nod. After school, on the days when the fat girl had to go straight
home and had waved goodbye to him from the pushed down window of the school
bus, he’d find Pinny, take her behind the building and she wouldn’t lean into
his kisses no matter how much she wanted to. When he finally pulled away, she
made her hands let go and not clutch his hard shoulders.

One
afternoon, with the end of the year only eight days away, Carl Pratt wanted to
go home with Pinny after school. The fat girl had left early for a dental
appointment, but Pinny still didn’t think it was a good idea. The fat girl
might call and she’d feel weird about answering the phone. If she didn’t
answer, the fat girl’s voice on the machine would be hard to hear. But since
there was no good way to explain this to Carl Pratt, she agreed.

A little
while later, as Pinny led Carl up her back stairs, she suddenly stopped. “What?”
he said.

She turned
around and looked down at him from two steps above.

“You said
you dad’s at work, right?” he said.

She
nodded.

“So don’t
worry, okay?” He stroked her arm and she shivered. She was afraid he wouldn’t
like her room, that he would think it too girly. The princess costume her
mother had bought her for Halloween when she was four years old was tacked to
the wall above her bed. The thought of her mother seeing her that way—as a
princess—if only that once sometimes made her sad. Pinny had gone from not
caring that her mother was gone to caring more than made sense, and somehow
that sadness she felt—that deep longing—was all to do with Carl Pratt.

Carl Pratt
didn’t say anything about the costume, or the flowery scarf she had across her
lamp, or the rocking chair, or the stuffed yellow mouse in the corner. He put
down his backpack and took her in his arms.

A few
moments later they were lying on her bed and he was wrestling with her shirt.

“Stop it.”

“Come on.”
He stopped. Then he said, “Let’s screw.”

“It’s
dangerous.”

“No, it’s
not.”

Pinny lay
in a state that swung between fear and joy like the heavy brass pendulum of the
clock downstairs. To stop that swing she held Carl Pratt’s hand and squeezed
hard.

“I don’t
want to get pregnant,” she said

He let go
of her hand. “You won’t.”

“Why not?”

“Well,
because thin girls like you don’t get pregnant very fast. It takes a long
time.”

The sound
of Pinny’s father’s car in the driveway ended the conversation. They were
sitting side by side with a science book between them when her father came into
her room to say hello.

Pinny
introduced Carl Pratt to her father, and upon hearing the name he gave Pinny a
good hard look, and went downstairs to watch television.

“You
better go,” Pinny told Carl Pratt.

Over
dinner Pinny’s father sipped his beer and watched Pinny eat the fried chicken
he’d bought. His bright blue tie had a grease stain Pinny couldn’t help staring
at.

“Honey,
about this boy. I’m not the best one to give advice in matters of the heart,
obviously, but you should be careful about who you spend time with. No good
making people jealous,” he said.

Pinny saw
her father thinking about her mother, who had sent him a letter saying she
might have been wrong, too harsh, too quick to judge, but that she still
doubted his strength to resist the siren call of the young and restless, mixing
mythology with a stupid soap opera in a way that made Pinny wonder who was
dumber than whom.

“We’re
just friends. He helps me with my homework,” Pinny said.

“Good.”

That weekend
the fat girl called and said she knew damn well Carl Pratt didn’t really like
her and only invited her over when he wanted to cop a feel.

“But
that’s OK, it’s payback time,” she said, with a sniff.

“What do
you mean?”

“You’ll
see.” The fat girl hung up.

Monday and
Tuesday dragged by. Carl Pratt was busy with basketball, and the fat girl was
sullen.

On
Wednesday, the last day of school, the fat girl appeared with her hair short
and spiky. The nine inches she’d cut off herself were stuffed in a plastic bag,
which she handed to Carl Pratt in front of a crowd of people and said, “This is
the only thing you ever liked about me, so here, keep it.”

Someone
grabbed the bag, and when the fat girl reached for it, the bag was thrown from
hand to hand, always above her head. “Here, Fat Girl,” and “Hey, Fat Girl, over
here,” people called.

The fat
girl brought her fists to her face and screamed. A teacher emerged from an open
door, everyone scattered, and Pinny didn’t see the fat girl again all day.

After the
last bell rang Carl Pratt found Pinny waiting by the fat girl’s locker. “She’s
not here,” he said. “I think she skipped out.”

“Because
those kids were so mean to her.”

Carl
shrugged.

“I should
have stopped them,” said Pinny.

“You?
How?”

“I don’t
know.”

Pinny stared
down at Carl Pratt’s sockless feet, stuck inside his big, torn sneakers. She
was to blame, for wanting Carl Pratt to be nice to the fat girl in the first
place. She hadn’t seen how stupid it was to ask someone to fake what he didn’t
feel. But even if he’d felt nothing, and hadn’t liked her at all, not one bit,
he should have felt bad for the way she’d been teased. Pinny wanted him to, if
only a little.

“Carl—”

“Look. I
have something fucked up to tell you. I’m going to California for the summer,”
he said.

Pinny
lifted her eyes and stared firmly into his.

“I got a
cousin there, a park ranger. My folks think he’ll make me straighten up and get
all serious about school,” he said.

Carl’s
grades sucked, everyone knew that. He was in Pinny’s math class, and she
couldn’t believe some of the things he didn’t get. Carl Pratt looked at his
watch.

“Crap. My
mother wants to take me to get a haircut. I have to go,” he said.

He pressed
a small gold chain into her hand and said to wear it around her neck every day
until he returned. There was a metal heart hanging on the chain with his name
engraved. Pinny looked at the chain, her throat heavy and tight. Then Carl
Pratt trotted off, his back pack bouncing on his bony shoulder.

Pinny left
the building and walked slowly home. The air smelled of the season to come.
Hollyhocks would climb below her dining room window, flies would buzz against
the screens, the air would be as still as glass. Her mother would be in Connecticut, drinking her iced tea in a different back yard, Carl would be climbing
mountains out west, and Pinny would be there, in boring old Dunston, thinking
about both of them.

The fat
girl was sitting on the front porch of Pinny’s house eating a candy bar and
sipping soda pop through a bright pink straw. Pinny slipped the chain that was
still in her hand into her pocket.

“Where
have you been?” the fat girl asked, chewing.

“Nowhere.”

“I skipped
the rest of the day.”

“I know.
It won’t matter now. The year’s over.”

The fat
girl ran her fingers through her hair. “It feels weird,” she said. “Like my
head’s too light.”

“Was it
hard to cut it by yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d have
helped you.”

“You’d
have told me not to.”

Pinny
pushed a candy wrapper off the step and sat next to the fat girl.

“Carl
Pratt’s going to California for the summer,” said Pinny.

“Really?
How do you know?”

“Someone
at school said so.”

“Well, I
say good riddance, Fuck Face.”

Pinny
wanted to explain about her and Carl Pratt, to clear the air and let her know
what to expect when he came back and school started again in the fall, but
didn’t see how. The truth was that she’d gone behind the fat girl’s back.

“Let’s
take a walk,” said Pinny.

“Okay.”

They
watched their shadows move along the slate sidewalk, Pinny’s so long and thin
and the fat girl’s a bobbing circle. Where the road began its steep climb to
campus, a waterfall spilled over thin shelves of rock. A footpath ran along one
side of the falls, and Pinny led them up slowly to give the fat girl time to
catch her breath.

They
reached a level spot on the path and stopped to watch the water rush and spray.
They leaned against the metal rail in silence. The fat girl’s face was in
shadow.

“He wanted
me to go all the way, you know, and I wouldn’t. He said, ‘What do you have to
lose, you’re just a fat girl.’”

Pinny’s
cheeks got hot, a lot hotter than the afternoon’s eighty-five degrees would
cause.

“He’s a
jerk,” said Pinny.

The fat
girl took a candy bar out of her backpack, unwrapped it, and bit off the end.

“I mean,
it’s not like I love being like this. I’ve tried to lose weight about a million
times,” she said.

“What
about those programs where you drop twenty pounds in two months?” asked Pinny.

“They cost
money. And then you have to pay for food.”

“My mother
once lost thirty pounds all on her own. Try eating a lot of protein, or
slashing your carbohydrates for a while.”

The fat
girl stopped eating and stared at the water. Then she turned to Pinny with an
eager gleam in her eye.

“Tell me
something,” she said.

“What?”

“Why do
you act dumb, when you’re not?”

“I don’t.”

“Come on.
Remember that one day at lunch, when someone said, ‘Irregardless of that,’ you
said to me, ‘It’s
regardless!’
And in History that time, when Mr. Cain
called on you and asked who the fifth president of the United States was, you said you didn’t know but I saw you had James Monroe in your notebook
with a big circle around his name.”

Pinny
watched the water run. She didn’t know what to say. Playing dumb was something
she’d learned to do long ago, maybe as a defense against her mother’s constant
disappointment in her.