Life in the Fat Lane (18 page)

Frankly, I was relieved to have found her at all. The school was huge, and I had gotten lost trying to find my homeroom. In one corridor a boy had puffed his cheeks full of air and waddled behind me. I had pretended I didn’t see him.

Once I had finally found my homeroom, I’d slid into one of the few remaining empty seats—actually, a combination
chair and desk—and my stomach pushed into the desk part. I sat slightly sideways so that I could breathe.

Everyone seemed to know everyone. They greeted each other with shrieks, laughter, hugs, kisses. Of course, I didn’t know anyone. I could feel people looking at me.

“This is, as you know, your homeroom, and I am, as you can see, Mrs. Benson,” the teacher said, her tone no-nonsense. She sat on the edge of her desk. “We have some paperwork to get out of the way. When I call your name, please respond.”

She perched her glasses on her nose and referred to a long green form. “For some reason I’ve only got last names and first initials,” she said, shaking her head. “Must be some genius in data processing. Okay, people, obviously I know most of you, but please call out your full first name so I can write it into my records. Okay, here we go. M. Abbott?”

“Here,” a girl in the back called. “It’s Melanie.”

Mrs. Benson mumbled, “M. Abbott, Melanie,” and wrote it in. “D. Ackerly?”

“Yeah, here,” a boy in the seat behind me said. I had noticed him—very cute, blond hair, intense blue eyes. In the past, when I was still my real self, a guy who looked like that would have flirted with me, would have given me that special look that I now knew was reserved for pretty, thin girls. Now he looked right through me as if I didn’t exist at all.

“And we all know it’s Dave,” Mrs. Benson said dryly.

I snuck a peek behind me. He grinned.

“L. Ardeche?”

“Here,” I said. My voice sounded small and quavery. I cleared it self-consciously. “It’s Lara. L-A-R-A.”

“L. Ardeche,” Mrs. Benson mumbled, and before she could write in
Lara
on her form, it was clear that her pen had stopped working. She scribbled for a second. Nothing.

“Okay, hold on,” she told us, and went behind her desk to rummage through her drawer for a new pen.

“L. Ardeche? That’s you?” the cute guy behind me, Dave Ackerly, asked eagerly.

So he
had
noticed me! I turned around, and he smiled at me again. Was it possible that I looked sort of cute in my new outfit? Maybe it really
did
flatter me. I nodded and smiled back.

“L. Ardeche—Lardash—Lard-ass!” he crowed triumphantly, leaning his chair back on two legs. “Great name for you, babe: Lard-ass!” He put his hands together like a megaphone. “
Lard-ass!
” he boomed.

“Mainstream,” someone sang out in a deep voice from the back of the room.

“That’s enough, people,” Mrs. Benson called, still rummaging through her desk.

A bunch of people laughed.

I wanted to die. No, I
prayed
to die.

“Okay, we’re back in business,” Mrs. Benson said, coming around to the front of her desk. She said nothing about what Dave Ackerly had called me. Not that I wanted her to—that would have made it even worse.

After a half hour of first-day extended homeroom, the bell rang for us to go to our first class. Mine was senior AP English, room 211, with a Mr. Downberger. I walked into the hall with everyone else.

“Yo, Lard-ass!” I heard from behind me.

Dave Ackerly. I kept walking.

How could he say something so awful to me? How could I ever, for even one moment, have thought that he might actually have thought I was cute?

Something Molly had said to me years ago came flooding into my head:

You put on a certain outfit, and you go around feeling kind of cute, and then someone says something, and you realize you actually look like a big fat slob and you were the only one stupid enough to think you looked good
.

Exactly.

I turned the corner and headed up the staircase, just another face in the crowd, figuring I had left Dave Ackerly behind me. Only the next thing I knew, he was walking right next to me.

“Hi!” he said, his voice really loud. He put his arm around me. I shook him off.

“Hey, you’re new, right, Lard-ass?”

“Go to hell,” I managed, my heart pounding and my face burning with humiliation.

“What’s the problem? I just wanted to welcome a big beauty like you to our school! Wanna go out on a date sometime, Lard-ass?”

I moved away from him and walked faster.

“Come on, Lard-ass!” he yelled after me. “Didn’t you ever hear ‘the bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’?”

“Shut up, asshole,” someone said to him, but I didn’t turn around to see who had jumped to my defense.

Instead I ran, my whole fat body jiggling down the hall with every step, until I reached a girls’ room. Then I ran inside and locked myself in a stall.

I can’t do this, I thought. I’d rather be dead than do this.

I sat in that stall and cried. I felt defeated, worthless. I felt like less than nothing. Just because I was fat. What was I supposed to do, wear a sign that said, “I am a former pageant winner. It is not my fault that I am fat. I have a very rare metabolic disorder called Axell-Crowne Syndrome that many doctors do not believe actually exists. Thank you.”?

Nothing else awful happened in any of my other morning classes, and thankfully Dave Ackerly wasn’t in any of them. On the other hand, no one was particularly nice to me, either. Just like at Cranmoore, no one introduced themselves or even smiled at me. It was the ultimate irony—I had become both huge and invisible.

At lunch, I got in the food line and chose a fat-free yogurt and an apple. I looked around. Everyone was sitting with their friends. I had no friends. I sat at the end of the only empty table I could find.

“Do you mind if I sit here?”

I looked up. A very thin girl was looking at me. She had a long, pale face, lank brown hair, and a receding chin.

“No, not at all,” I said politely. Out of the monster’s mouth had come the words of Lara Ardeche, pageant queen.

She sat down with her tray of macaroni and cheese.

“I’m Frannie Jenkins—from calc, this morning?”

“Oh, right.” I didn’t remember her. “I’m Lara Ardeche.”

“You’re new,” Frannie said, her mouth full. “It’s terrible to be new at this school. It’s full of snobs. I was new
last year.” She swallowed her food and took a sip of her milk. “So, how do you like it so far?”

“It’s too soon to tell, really,” I said, smiling my pageant smile. I could already tell she was someone I would have been nice to but never really been friends with, back in Nashville. I took a delicate spoonful of my yogurt.

“Hi, Frannie,” said a short, chubby girl with a bulbous nose, thick lips, frizzy red hair, and a mass of freckles, setting her tray down next to the skinny girl.

“Hi,” Frannie said. “This is Kendra Sleezak; this is Lara Ardeche. Kendra was the first person who was nice to me when I moved here—not like the rest of these snobs.”

“They can’t all be snobs,” I said reasonably.

“Ha!” Kendra said. “I’ve lived in Blooming Woods since I was five. If you aren’t thin, gorgeous, and rich, they treat you like a pile of puke.”

A fat guy with a ponytail, his jeans so huge that the crotch hung halfway to his knees, sat down next to me. His tray was piled high with two sandwiches, French fries, potato chips, a huge piece of chocolate cake, and a brownie.

“Perry Jameson, Lara Ardeche,” Frannie said. “She’s new.”

“Hi,” Perry said. He took a huge bite out of his sandwich.

“Lard-ass, I want you to have my baby!” a voice boomed.

No, no, no. Dave Ackerly.

He had spied me. The next thing I knew, he had his arms wrapped around my neck and was making kissing noises at my cheek.

“Get your hands off me,” I said, my voice low.

He obliged and took in the sight of me and Perry sitting next to each other. “I see you and Fairy Perry and the other geekoids found each other. It’s so beautiful!”

He pretended to cry copious tears. Nearby, Dave’s two friends high-fived each other, laughing.

“Go take your meds, Mainstream,” Perry said, biting another monstrous piece out of his sandwich.

“Hey, maybe you’ll get lucky this year, Perry!” David said. “Maybe ol’ Lard-ass here can be the woman to turn you straight!” He turned and high-fived his buds, and the three of them sauntered out of the cafeteria.

Frannie’s and Kendra’s faces burned with embarrassment. Perry didn’t seem disturbed at all. He was too busy shoveling food into his face.

“Just ignore him,” Frannie finally managed. “He’s, like, mentally disturbed.”

“He used to go to this special school,” Kendra explained. “But his dad is this big civil rights lawyer, and he sued to have him mainstreamed.”

“My man, Mainstream Dave,” Perry said between bites of his second sandwich.

“I heard he used to actually hit people,” Frannie said, taking another sip of her milk, “but now he takes all these meds to control his impulses.”

“Too bad the meds don’t control his mouth,” Perry said.

“There’s a lot of snobs here, but everyone isn’t like him,” Frannie added. “I’m really sorry he … you know.”

“It’s okay,” I told her.

“Hang in there—you’ll meet people you like,” Perry said, slurping down his milk shake.

“Yeah, you can hang out with me and Kendra!” Frannie offered.

I tried to smile. But it was hard. The pageant motto was to be nice to everyone, but this was just so horrifying.

I was
surrounded
by losers. They had
gravitated
to me.

Lara Ardeche, former homecoming queen, winner of multiple pageants, the cutest and most popular girl at Forest Hills High, had just been invited to hang out with the geekoids of Blooming Woods High, for one all-too-obvious reason.

They thought I was one of them.

“L
et’s go, girls!” Ms. Perkins, my gung-ho gym teacher, called into the locker room. She blew her whistle. “Let’s hustle!”

From my hiding place in a toilet stall I heard the other girls chattering away as they exited into the gym. Finally the locker room was silent and I snuck out of the stall.

For the first two weeks of gym class I had been able to hide under sweats, since my gym uniform was such a large size that it had to be special-ordered. Today it had arrived, and Ms. Perkins had handed it to me like it was a week-old dead carp as a few of my classmates snickered.

I had retreated to the privacy of the toilet stall to put it on: bilious green one-piece shorts and top with an elastic waist, snaps up the front. Size twenty-four.

And it was tight.

I peeked out of the stall. No one was there. I walked over to the full-length mirror beside the lockers.

Oh, God. The material puckered over my breasts and thighs. Every lump, every ounce showed.

Oh, God.

“Ms. Ardeche?” Ms. Perkins called.

I could pretend I was sick. That would work. I could say I had killer cramps—

“Ms. Ardeche?”

Ms. Perkins marched into the locker room and stood over me. “Were you planning to join us this century?”

“I—I …,” I stammered. “I don’t know if you’ve seen my records, but I have this disease that made me gain—”

“Ms. Ardeche, you don’t have a doctor’s note excusing you from gym class. Correct?”

“Correct.”

“Then let’s hustle!”

I followed her out into the gym. The girls in my class were in two groups, playing three-on-three basketball with each other until one side or the other scored and two new teams stepped onto the court.

“Join that group, Ms. Ardeche.”

I walked over to the group nearest me. Allegra Royalton, the Jennie Smith of Blooming Woods High, took one glance at me in my huge green gym suit and shrieked to her friend Bettina Bowers, “Wow, Bettina, look! It’s the Jolly Green Giant!”

They laughed together. I knelt down and got very busy tying my left sneaker.

“Jeez, Lard-ass is right,” Bettina snickered. “I hope the gym floor holds.”

“Ms. Ardeche, you’re out there, let’s hustle,” Ms.
Perkins called to me, throwing me the basketball. I began to dribble it toward the basket.

“Earthquake!” Allegra Royalton yelled. Some of the girls laughed. I kept dribbling, my head down. I would not cry in front of them. Would not.

“Ms. Royalton, a word,” Ms. Perkins called to her. As I worked with my team, trying to score, out of the corner of my eye I saw Ms. Perkins talking with Allegra. Allegra made a face and rolled her eyes.

Someone stole the ball from me. Then the other team scored. I headed off the court.

“I hope you’re happy, you fat piece of shit,” Allegra spat at me. “Perkins just gave me detention because of you.”

I stopped and turned to her. “Why are you saying such terrible things about me? I never did anything to you.”

“I have to look at you, don’t I?” Allegra said, and then she flounced off.

Finally gym class ended. I scooted into the toilet stall to change in private. Since it was my last class of the day, I could wait until I heard the locker room clear out before I left the stall. Which was exactly what I did.