Fat kid rules the world (5 page)

“
When Curt was in the kitchen didn’t you think he looked a lot different
?”

“
Did Curt say something to you about the clothes you bought him
?”

Dad and Dayle are less than helpful. Dayle no longer looks curious, he looks repulsed, and my father, well …

“Troy, pass the salt,” he says, exasperated. He’s too embarrassed to look at me.

“Yeah, right, Dad. Sorry.” I snort.
Could I be more pathetic
? I take
a tenth pancake. A second helping of eggs. Bright yellow egg yolks swirl with deep red ketchup on my plate. I decide to chalk up Curt MacCrae’s presence in my life to a sick joke.

FAT KID HALLUCINATES ABOUT COOL FRIEND
. Not funny, just sad.

DAD DRIVES ME TO SCHOOL
and, as always, I’m a surreal spectacle. He double-parks so I can get out, and the kids on the street stop to laugh.

What’s so funny
? I think.
Is it so funny every time you see it? Me getting out of the car? Dad waiting? What
?

I try to ignore them and think about what I’ll do this afternoon when I get home. I decide which TV show I’ll watch, then think about next Sunday, when I will think up some new way of committing suicide. Something less public and more inevitable.
FAT KID DIVES OFF THE FIRE ESCAPE
?

I concentrate on willing everybody away from Dad’s car until he’s driven off. Then I concentrate on getting inside the building with the minimum amount of sweat and breathlessness. Trust me, it’s an ordeal.

In fact, it’s such an ordeal that as I walk down the hall toward my locker I think about nothing else. Just one leg, other leg, first leg, second leg, don’t huff, don’t sweat, don’t trip. Breathe.

Then I see Curt—a mirage in the distance. He’s leaning against my locker surrounded by a small group of senior Goth kids. They’re gathered around him in the same manner people gather around a gruesome car accident, gaping unabashedly, black figures
profiled against red lockers, staring in a daze at what they could become.

I stare, too. I stop in the middle of the hallway and stare like he’s an apparition that will fade if I glance away. Jocks and cheerleaders have to go out of their way to get around me. Classroom doors open and shut. The loudspeaker crackles ominously.

I think,
Curt MacCrae is standing at my locker. The real Curt MacCrae, not the least bit dead, is holding court at my locker
. Then I whisper, “There is a crowd gathered around my locker.” The corners of my fat mouth twitch.

I take a careful step forward. The Goth kids are talking, mostly to each other. I hear the words “marijuana” and “band,” but nothing evokes a response from Curt. He just stands there, studying his sneakers, chipping paint from my locker, kicking at a wad of gum on the floor. Every now and then he glances up and nods shyly.

I ache,
ache, I tell you
, to know how he does it. How does one person transcend everything about himself with so little effort? How does he pull us in like a magnet? He’s as skinny as I am fat, but people love him. They want to surround themselves with him.

And of course, there’s not enough to go around.

For a moment, I hate him. Then he sees me. Curt grins a lopsided grin and I move forward, caught in his tractor beam.

The crowd notices me and for the first time I feel the weight of their eyes. I whisper to myself, “Do
not
screw up. Do
not
trip. Do
not
huff.” It’s my big debut. There are girls watching and every single one of them is hot. I glance at them out of the corners of my eyes, start to sweat, and have to force my gaze forward.

Curt is motioning me to hurry up. He hops and paces, and as soon as I’m within arm’s length he pulls me aside even though people are still talking to him. He drags me to the end of the hall and we stand next to the emergency exit door. A rampant grin runs away from my puckered lips as I wait for Curt’s secret information.

“Practice, second period?” he asks.

I wait, confused.
After all that hopping and hurrying that’s all he has to say
?

Curt takes out a couple pills and swallows them dry. Tilts his head back, and runs his fingers through his hair.

“Tylenol,” he says when I don’t ask. “Headache.”

I wait for more. Something about the band. Something important. I wait for a prediction of my future, the meaning of life, the secret handshake of initiated music lovers everywhere. When nothing comes I think,
Tylenol
?

Suddenly it seems clear that this is not really happening. I may be deluded, but that wasn’t Tylenol and I can’t play the drums. It occurs to me that I’m the world’s biggest moron and this is the world’s biggest practical joke. Maybe everyone’s waiting for him to deliver the punch line.

Did you really think I wanted to form a band with you
?!

But Curt doesn’t deliver his line and no one laughs.

In fact, this is probably the first time since fourth grade that I’m the center of attention and no one is laughing. An ironic development. I even see Dayle lingering with the rest of the freshmen and staring in my direction
without laughing
.

I hesitate. This might be my last chance to avoid, yet again, becoming the laughingstock of the entire school. I should walk away before it’s too late, throw myself out the window before Curt has a chance to turn on me. It’s the only choice that shows a hint of self-respect. I pause.

A hundred eyes stare in our direction and Curt shuffles in place, waiting for my response.

I open my mouth….

If you think I walk away, you need serious help.
No, no, no, Cherie
. I say nothing rational, logical, or ethical. I make no grand pronouncements about personal integrity. What do I do? I turn
ever
so slightly
so that my back is toward the hall and answer very carefully, dragging out my response for full effect.

“Second period,” I say, nodding gravely. I make a hand motion worthy of the Godfather, and the deal is struck.

CURT TOLD ME TO WAIT
by the hoops, so I’m waiting by the hoops. Only he’s not showing up. Second period is almost over and there’s no sign of him.

Suffice it to say, I no longer feel like the Godfather. I’m a lonely fat kid waiting beside a graffiti-gouged wall and a barbed-wire fence—the Norman Rockwell painting for the twenty-first century. The way it looks now, humiliation is right around the corner, and I’m starting to get nauseated. I’m just about to go back inside when Curt finally arrives. He’s in a rush and for a moment I think someone is chasing him. I watch, flustered, as he bangs into the fence.

“Come on,” he says, rubbing his nose. “Let’s go. Let’s go. We’ve got to catch the subway. Let’s go, man.” He hops on one foot like a cartoon character whose legs keep moving when they’re about to go really fast. Then he takes off again, weaving through cars, pedestrians, and an entire construction crew. By the time he notices I’m not behind him he’s halfway across Second Avenue. He stops in the middle of the road and nearly gets creamed by the crosstown bus.

Curt stands there, scanning for me, while people honk, swerve, and yell obscenities out their windows. When I finally reach him he grins and says, “That was a close one. Didn’t realize you weren’t behind me.”

I follow him to the subway and we ride downtown to East Broadway.
As soon as we get off again, Curt leads the way, winding through a half dozen side streets with no street signs. He barely manages to walk slow and I barely manage to keep up. It’s a miracle we make it there, and as soon as we arrive I realize it will be a miracle if we make it out again.

My neighborhood isn’t exactly the posh area most people envision when they think of Manhattan, but Curt’s street takes grime to a whole new level. It features metal security grates, stray cats in heat, loitering men, and empty vodka bottles, and there’re at least three bars within sight at all times. There’s not a single tree that isn’t strangled by plastic bags or fried chicken bones. It’s distorted and grotesque and I nod approvingly.
Maybe this is where I fit
….

Curt blends in, skulking along as if he’s guilty of some crime. When we reach his mom’s place—the profanity-covered wall to the left of the Chinese restaurant—he looks over each shoulder, then picks the outside locks in a single swift motion. He has to pick three locks in order to get in, two to get inside the building and one to the first-floor apartment once we’ve stepped inside the foyer. I’ve never witnessed a crime before and this strikes me as a key moment in my adolescence. I stand two feet behind him the whole time trying to act nonchalant. Nonchalant three-hundred-pound Fat Kid—not easy to pull off.

Then Curt’s on his way in, shoving open the peeling green door marked
APT
. #1 and kicking aside a stack of dusty books that fall when the door opens. There’s a red neon
AN IQUES
sign in the window and it bathes the apartment in an eerie glow. Curt flicks on the light and the room is revealed to be overflowing with miscellaneous, ornately tacky objects. It’s so full we can barely fit inside. There’s a busted piano on one side of the room and no less than three velvet couches on the other.

“This is where you live?” I ask, but Curt doesn’t answer.

“You live here?” I say again. There’s something about the place
that doesn’t seem right. It’s claustrophobic and chaotic at the same time. Reminds me of the junk shops in the Village where every inch of space is occupied with objects bearing no relation to each other. Here a golden elephant, there a crystal-framed mirror. The only sign that this place has some connection to Curt is the guitar lying under the piano. Curt nods at it, as if he’s saying hello, or taking inventory, but he doesn’t take it out. Instead, he leads me around three glass cases, two of the overstuffed couches, and several giant carved antelope.

“Home sweet home,” he says at last.

THE PLACE ISN’T BIG ENOUGH
for two people. Not when I’m one of them.

We pass through a tiny bedroom, a crowded living room, a narrow kitchen that smells like mold, and a bathroom that’s smaller than I am. I get the distinct impression that the bathroom is Curt’s main reason for giving me the tour, because he ducks inside and removes a bunch of plastic bottles from the medicine cabinet. He sticks one in his shirt and opens the other.

He flashes it. “See,” he says, “legit.”

I’m almost positive the name on the bottle reads “Hazel,” so I hesitate, studying the pink plastic rosary beads draped around the toilet.

“What’s it for?” I ask cautiously. I’m trying to be devious, which always fails.

Curt shuts the bathroom door and heads down a narrow hallway. I follow and a line of chipped paint flakes off the wall as I pass.

“Seriously,” I say again, yelling behind him. “What’s it for?”

Curt stops short and I almost plow into him. I have to grab the wall to steady myself.

“Listen,” he says, fixing me with a stern look. “Don’t get uptight.” He pulls out one of the bottles he put in his shirt. “It’s prescription. See? Prescription.”

He hands me the bottle and it does, in fact, have his name on it. I try to force a smile, but my chin quivers with the effort.
Right
, I think,
prescription. I knew that. Didn’t I know that
?

Fuck. I’m screwing everything up.

“Sorry,” I say, turning into a huge inflatable dork. “Sorry.”

For the briefest of moments Curt looks pissed and I watch my future spiral into the abyss. Then the emotion washes away as if it were never there.

“Never mind,” he says, casually. “Besides, you have more … err … important, shall we say,
consequential
things to worry about.”

I’m blank. “I do?”

Curt raises both eyebrows.

“Well, you’ve got a gig in five weeks.”

It takes a long time for his words to register, then I stare dumbly. All thoughts of prescription medication disappear from my brain with the exception of an instant desire for Prozac. I can’t help wondering if I heard him correctly because it seems entirely too cruel and arbitrary that Curt could have set something up between last night and this morning. Does the universe—even
my
universe—operate that way?

The answer is yes.
Of course
Curt set up a gig.
Of course
I am caught in my stupid, impossible, humiliating lie. And the clincher is that now, instead of lying in a vague sort of way using words like “band” and “drummer,” I will have to lie in a very specific way, as in “I’ll be playing a gig on Saturday, November thirteenth, at ten
P.M.
“

My brain turns to mush and I develop a stutter.

“Wh-what are you talking about? Th-that’s not true, is it? You’re kidding, right?”

The words come out in a splurt, and Curt laughs in a high-pitched, breezy sort of way.

“Funny,” he muses as his face squinches up. “Relax, T. No uprightness necessary. I have plentiful …
eh-hem
… connections at The Dump, so I went over there after I left your house and, well, see, I pulled us some strings. But no worries … five weeks is
plenty
of time for a, shall we say, ‘smart’ person such as yourself to learn the drums, especially given your …
cough, cough
… background in percussion.”

It’s a masterful move. He’s taken every subtle nuance of my lie at face value. Didn’t I imply that I was smart? That I’d studied the drums? Didn’t I pretend I was going to be in the band, which would naturally mean playing a gig?

I have no one to blame but myself.

The sweat drips down my tree trunk of a neck as I pray to the hot pink rosary beads for mercy on my soul.

I MUST BREAK THE NEWS
to Curt.
I am not a drummer. I am the Fat Kid. Nothing more. I have never been a drummer and will never be a drummer
. I take a deep breath.

I let it out again.

Shouldn’t Curt know this already? Even Curt can’t believe we will form a
real
band and play an
actual
gig in front of
actual
people. He must know he’s making a monumentally huge mistake. After all,
I’m not a little thing that can be overlooked. I
am
the elephant in the room.