Someone I Wanted to Be (10 page)

Across a landscape of heads and tables, I saw Carl sitting alone. He was bent over his textbook. I studied his hair, his neck, and his shoulders.

Dan Manke shoved his phone in my face. He was playing a video titled Four-Hundred-Pound Woman Pole Dances. “Fat-Ass, check it out — you might have a career after all!”

The woman looked over her shoulder at the crowd. She was smiling, but her face looked dead. I knocked Dan’s hand away. “Get that shit away from me.”

“Oooooh. Fat-Ass is feisty today!”

I stood and picked up my books. I walked across the library to the table where Carl Lancaster was sitting. I didn’t even decide to do it. It was like taking a breath. You just breathe. He looked up, and we looked at each other for what felt like a long time, though it was probably just a few seconds. We just looked at each other. It was weird.

He waited for me to say something. “Can I sit here, Carl.” It came out like a statement, kind of challenging, as if I was afraid he’d say no.

He shrugged and waved his hand at the empty chairs across from him. He got back to work.

“Carl.”

He raised his face. There was something about the way he looked at me that was unnerving. He looked at me and saw me — he saw all of me, a person, with an inside and an outside, alive all the way through. Almost no one else did. Most people looked and saw their idea of me: fat girl, Chubs, problematic overweight daughter.

“Carl, why aren’t you in AP chemistry? All your other classes are AP.”

Carl’s cheeks flushed. He bit the inside of his cheek and squinted over his shoulder at the window. I’d never seen Carl lose his cool before, not even when paper footballs were pinging off the back of his head.

He sat back in his chair and chewed on the end of his finger. “Uh . . . it’s not my best subject.”

“You’ve got to be joking. You’ve got an A, for sure.”

“Yeah, but I’m not certain I could get an A in AP, and my parents would shit bricks if I got anything less, and I don’t want to deal with the fallout. My mother’s always calling the counselor trying to get them to move me up, but I refuse.”

“Wow. What’s your GPA? What do you want to study in college?”

“I’m not going to college. My parents don’t know that yet.”

“Shhh!” said the librarian.

Carl Lancaster sat back in his chair in that cotton shirt and ran his hand through his hair. He looked at me so seriously and steadily, and his shirt was open at his neck. For a flash, he looked almost like a male model. Carl Lancaster.

“You’ve got such good grades,” I whispered.

“Screw college,” he mouthed. “Leah, you’ve got to figure things out for yourself.”

“Carl?”

“Yeah?” He leaned across the table, and I leaned toward him so no one would hear, even though everyone else was fifteen feet away. Our noses were about four inches apart, and I could feel his tangerine breath. It smelled like someplace far from Hilton.

“Can we study together? I need to get a good grade in this class.”

He sat back and regarded me again in that serious, smoky male-model way. He tapped his pen against the table. “What’s giving you trouble?”

I went with Kristy after school.

I got to ride shotgun in the afternoons because Corinne could never go with us. She had to babysit her little brothers every weekday until seven, when her parents got home. Kristy chewed with her mouth open and filled the car with the smell of grape gum. In the parking lot, she nearly backed up into some freshman girls. She lowered her window. “Sor-rrrreeeee. I really didn’t mean to do that. Ha-ha-ha.”

Kristy and I were like sisters now, half the same girl. I could see her so clearly, like I was looking at her through a magnifying glass: the tiny red bumps on her thin arms, how her knuckles whitened when she gripped the gear shift, the jewel-like gleam of her squinty eyes. She glanced at me and stopped chomping her gum. “What the hell are you staring at?”

Kristy stuffed more gum into her mouth, let the little white wrappers drift out the window, and threw a half-smoked cigarette after them. She chugged a Snapple, threw the bottle into the back, and changed the radio station in the middle of a song.

She kept her phone between her skinny thighs. “God, I’m bored! Want to go to the mall? Or want to go downtown?”

“No. Kristy, no one will be there. Want to go to Animal Kingdom?” We used to take the bus there when we were thirteen; it was dark and smelled like mice. We’d stand in front of the aquariums and watch the angelfish and the schools of bulgy-eyed goldfish. The parakeets squeaked and the aquariums bubbled peacefully.

“Are you kidding? No. Gross. Boring.”

“Let’s just go to Corinne’s.”

“Fine,” she said. She did a U-turn, the tires skidding on the gravel.

We passed Anita walking home alone. Kristy blasted her horn. I ducked. “Kristy, damn it . . .” That morning, I’d passed Anita, who was sitting on the floor in the hallway before first period. She was drawing in her sketchbook. I walked over and said, “How’s it going?” She slowly lifted her face and stared at me like I’d farted, then closed the sketchbook, hopped to her feet, and sauntered away.

I sat up. A black car was coming toward us.

I adjusted the side-view mirror and looked behind us. It wasn’t the Mustang. But one day it would be, because it was not just possible: it was going to happen. Kurt King and his black Mustang would suddenly pull up behind Kristy’s Civic, and he’d flash his lights, and Kristy would laugh maniacally and turn into a parking lot. It was just a matter of time.

“Why are you so quiet? It’s weird,” said Kristy as she turned into Mountain View Estates. She pulled into Corinne’s driveway, turned off the engine, climbed out, and slammed her door. She trotted to the house without waiting for me. She’d started trotting on her toes like a pony — it was a way to stick out her boobs and her skinny little butt at the same time.

As usual, the inside of Corinne’s house was a catastrophe. The counters, table, and chairs were piled with wrappers, dirty plates, half-eaten waffles, black banana peels, school papers, junk mail, bills, catalogs, coupons, and empty milk jugs. Plastic action figures in weird contortions lay scattered around the floor. A jumbo box of maxi pads sat in the middle of the kitchen table. Cases of juice boxes, fruit roll-ups, and Aldi pop were pushed up against the wall. The sink was piled to the faucet with plastic cups and ketchup-smeared plates. Corinne babysat while her mom and stepdad ran a housecleaning business.

Corinne stood watching a cooking show on the kitchen TV while the microwave whirred. She held Jimmy on her hip. His yellow diaper bulged around his fat legs.

“Hey,” Corinne said over her shoulder. The microwave dinged.

She took out the plastic bottle, shook it hard, then squirted formula onto her wrist. Jimmy snatched the bottle and sucked it.

“What’s new?” said Corinne wistfully, as if something amazing might have happened in the hour since school let out. She pulled open the back of Jimmy’s diaper and sniffed.

“Nothing!” said Kristy. “I’m bored as hell. Jesus, that kid stinks. Can I light a cigarette to cut the smell?”

“Let’s go on the patio.” Corinne grabbed a bag of candy and lugged Jimmy through the sliding glass door.

Corinne’s patio was a slab of concrete on the edge of a yard worn to bare dirt. Pieces of broken plastic toys stuck like arrowheads out of the ground. A wimpy aspen tree, held up by wires, grew in the corner of the yard. At Mountain View, you could do anything you wanted behind your cedar fence, but the front yard had to be either thick green grass or a gravel garden. There were three shades of beige paint you could choose from.

Corinne threw a pack of cigarettes and the lighter down next to the Folgers can that we used as an ashtray. “Derrick was being a total dickwad last night. Just screaming at everyone. God, I wish I was playing softball.”

Even Kristy allowed a short, respectful silence at the mention of softball. Corinne’s inability to be on the team was one of the tragedies of our grade. Corinne was talented, a natural, an incredible pitcher without ever attending any of the expensive softball camps Kelsey Parker and her friends had gone to every summer since elementary school.

My dream was so far away and almost impossible, but Corinne’s was right there in front of her, and the only reason she wasn’t living it was because of her stepdad and stupid little brothers. Corinne didn’t look tragic, though; she just looked tired.

Kristy sat down on the concrete, scooted back against the green siding, and lit up. She closed her eyes. “I can’t believe your mom allows you to smoke.”

“Can’t you say anything original?” I asked.

“What?” Her eyes snapped open. She stared at me with her lip hiked up over her teeth. She got out her phone.

“Sorry,” I said, “but you’ve said that exact sentence about a hundred times before.”

I took a drag and gagged. I decided right then that I was going to quit smoking. Not that minute, but soon. Cigarettes made me stink, and my teeth were turning yellow. I couldn’t breathe, and my lungs hurt when I ran. I couldn’t afford it. Plus, it was ironic for a doctor to smoke, though lots of them did. I saw them in their blue scrubs shivering outside the hospital. But a doctor who’s fat and smokes is a little too much. Anita had told me that cigarettes were a conspiracy of rich white men to make a fortune while slowly killing off the underclass. I’d started smoking with Kristy when I was thirteen.

Kristy tried to hawk up some spit. “Go to hell, Chubs. Whatever.” She shook her head like I was an idiot and stared cross-eyed at her phone’s screen.

“Quit fighting, you two.” Corinne held Jimmy between her knees and forlornly blew smoke away from his big head. “You wouldn’t believe the woman they had on
Top Chef.
I just caught the end of it. She was awesome.”

Carl Lancaster floated up into my mind and looked at me. “Corinne, what do you think of Carl Lancaster?”

“Total geek,” said Kristy.

“Pretty awkward,” said Corinne. “But he’s an OK guy.”

Jimmy sat in his wadded-up yellow diaper and flapped a plastic bag against the concrete. His pink stomach hung over the top of his diaper. He had black threads of toe jam between his little toes. A breeze blew through, and goose bumps popped up on his squashy legs. He curled his toes and smiled. He had eight teeth.

Corinne picked a blue M&M out of the bag with the tips of her nails. She had shadows under her eyes and sad smudges around her mouth. “Last night, I made chicken Kiev, and Mom said it was better than the Olive Garden’s. But the boys wouldn’t eat it, so Derrick said I couldn’t make it again.”

I said, “That sucks. Pass me the candy.”

Corinne tossed me the bag. I dumped out a handful, then remembered I was transforming myself for Damien Rogers; I poured the candy back in. I wasn’t sure who I liked more, Kurt King or Damien Rogers. At this point, it was kind of a toss-up. I’d never really talked to Damien Rogers, but Kurt King was a little intense.

“I’m going to get a drink of water.” I’d recently read that drinking a gallon of water a day was one of the top ten diet tricks.

Kristy gritted her teeth as if she was about to vomit from the smell of Jimmy’s diaper. I got up and scooted through the glass door into the kitchen.

I filled a giant plastic cup with water and walked into the living room. A mound of clean underwear and towels had been dumped onto the carpet. On the other side of the laundry, Corinne’s three other brothers huddled around the computer.

“What are you guys playing?”

Ryan rubbed his ear against his shoulder, but none of them answered. They were skinny boys with wild khaki-colored eyes and blotchy freckles on their cheeks and square noses. They leaned closer to the computer screen.

My phone vibrated. It was a text from Kurt King.
Meet me tonight 7-11 @ 10:45
. The room tilted and I was standing in a different place, though I hadn’t moved.

I closed the phone, drank the entire cup of water, and walked over to the boys. They were looking at a picture of a woman whose naked breasts lay in her lap like watermelons. It was a really sad picture. Her smile was tight and forced, like she thought the guy taking the picture was the ickiest man she’d ever met. Ryan giggled and rolled his forehead against the desktop.

Alex clutched his throat. “I’m going to throw up.”

“Gross, you guys. Turn it off !”

Alex didn’t even turn his head. “Shut up, Leah. You’re not the boss of us.”

I grabbed a handful of toffee nuts and headed back to the patio. “Your brothers are looking at porn.”

“Damn them!” Corinne stubbed out her cigarette and got to her feet. “Here, take him.” She jammed Jimmy into my arms and charged into the house. Jimmy wrapped his legs around my waist and grabbed a handful of hair with his sticky hand.

He stared at me with his tiny, clear eyes. There were creases in the fat around his wrists. Drool poured off his lip. I rubbed my cheek against his warm velvety head. He smelled like pee and candy. The screaming moved to the kitchen.

Kristy was on her feet. “I’m stressing. Let’s get out of here. I can’t stand this place.”

The three boys surrounded Corinne. They jammed their fists into their eyes and screamed, “Don’t tell!” The six-year-old, Kelvin, threw himself on the floor, hit his head against a chair leg, and shrieked. Corinne squeezed her eyes shut and stretched her face with her hands. She looked like an alien.