Good Luck, Fatty! (first draft, chapter 7)

Copyright 2012 by Tara Nelsen-Yeackel. All rights reserved.

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS MATURE YOUNG ADULT CONTENT. IF SUCH CONTENT MIGHT OFFEND YOU, PLEASE STOP READING HERE (or just read with your eyes closed)

Here’s another chapter for your reading enjoyment

Good Luck, Fatty!

by

Maggie Bloom

Chapter 7

Tom has invited me over for Christmas Eve dinner and a Secret Santa gift exchange. I’m playing Kris Kringle to the dog, Hush Puppy, a mouthy Pomeranian that makes my phone conversations with Tom as obnoxiously loud as a heavy metal concert.

Denise drops me out front and toots the horn of the Royale as she pulls away. Before I can get within striking distance of the door, though, Tom appears on the porch wearing an attractive charcoal-gray dress shirt, a pair of borderline-trendy jeans, and an unmistakable excited-to-see-me smile. Now that I’m his girlfriend (and I’ve quit the extracurricular screwing cold-turkey), he seems nothing short of enamored. “Hey,” he says, taking my hand and guiding me up the steps.

This whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing has me feeling as if I’ve plunged headfirst into a fairy tale. “Hi,” I say, a sudden case of jitters wiggling around in my stomach.

The first thing that hits me when we get inside is the smoke. Say what you will about Orv and Denise, but cigarettes are one evil they’ve kept soundly at bay. “I’ll take your coat,” Tom says, an arm outstretched for me to drape it over.

I slip my windbreaker off and let him have it. “What about this?” I ask, holding up the chunk of rawhide I’ve brought for Hush Puppy, the shiny snowflake paper I’ve wrapped it in coming undone at the edges. I scan the living room and notice that I don’t recognize a soul.

“We’ve got a gift table,” Tom says, pointing the way to an elaborately festooned octagonal stand in the corner.

As I squeeze sideways toward the drop spot, I rub knees with an elderly lady tethered to an oxygen tank, a worried look pressed into her brow as a cloud of smoke drifts by. “Excuse me,” I say. Most of the time my size isn’t much of an issue, but in tight spaces, I immediately start wishing I was [insert skinny model’s name here].

I arrange Hush Puppy’s present atop the small pile, and Tom runs my jacket to some mysterious coat holding area. When he returns, the compact bundle of fur is hot on the trail of his black-and-gray Vans. “Come on,” he says, gesturing toward the kitchen. “Everyone’s out here.”

I steal a final glance around the living room, realizing that the old folks have been relegated to second-class party status. Then again, some of them look so frail they probably don’t mind. I follow Tom, waving and smiling to his great-aunts and grandparents as we go.

Unlike the living room, the kitchen is crammed with people. Smoking, laughing, drinking people. And music, food, and…kids. That’s what strikes me as strange: so many little ones jumping and running and crashing about. My life with Orv and Denise (and Gramp while he was alive), has left some holes in my experience of family. If I have any extended relations on Duncan’s side, I don’t know about them. Orv is Marie’s nephew, and Gramp was her father. I’m pretty much a loner.

I press myself into a spot between the dishwasher and the refrigerator, just to get out of the fray. “Want something to eat?” Tom says, sensitive to my growing claustrophobia. “We’ve got Swedish meatballs, macaroni and cheese…” He gives the island a one-eyed squint. “…and potato salad, I think.”

“Sure,” I say. “A small plate is fine.” I didn’t get this big by being particular about what I eat, a quality that will serve me well should there ever be a disaster that disrupts the food supply. Sardines? Beets? Pickled eggs? No problem.

While Tom loads a couple of Styrofoam plates with buffet fare, I dodge the eager hands and arms of thirsty partiers, a number of three-liters of soda pop stashed on the counter behind me. During a break in the action, I swivel around and pour a cup of ginger ale for me and an orange soda for Tom.

“My dad says ‘hi,’ ” Tom tells me when he shows back up with our dinner. “Wilma’s, uh…”

Drunk? I feel like saying, because it’s the God’s honest truth. I’ve only seen someone so intoxicated in the movies (and in an anti-drunk driving video the middle school showed us during an eighth-grade assembly, but I’m pretty sure that guy was an actor too). “Can we go somewhere?” I ask. Fat people get overheated quick, especially around so much other body heat.

A few steps from the kitchen is the glorious basement door, which Tom motions toward with his head. Our hands are full–mine with the soda and his with the food–so he drags his forearm over the doorknob to twist it open, then elbows the door ajar. A girl of about ten, with ringlet curls and a crimson velvet dress, gives us the hairy eyeball as we slip downstairs.

Tom sets the plates on a coffee table and takes the drinks from me, so I can sink into the sofa without making a sloshy mess. “How come we’re the only ones down here?” I ask, surprised at the tranquility given the cacophony above.

He chuckles, passes me a plate of food. “My cousin, Annabelle…she broke one of Wilma’s favorite Hummels last year. It was a rare one too. Cost her like two-hundred bucks. She was pissed.”

“So…?”

“Well, now the kids are banned. No more ‘horsing around’ in the basement,” he tells me with a mischievous grin.

I want to horse around with him right now. “That’s too bad,” I say, trying my hand at a little suggestive flirting.

We nibble through the meatballs and mac ‘n cheese, with me trying my darndest to come off as ladylike despite our lack of simple accoutrements like napkins. “This is good,” I say about the pasta, which dissolves on my tongue like a gooey fondue. “Is it homemade?”

He nods. “Yup. My uncle’s wife owns a catering company.” He has a step-aunt? It seems like the men in his family are unlucky in love.

I try to eat slower, just so I don’t finish before him, but it’s no use; my jaw muscles are too well-trained. I leave the empty plate behind on the coffee table and get up to wander.

And Tom watches me. “There’s some cool stuff back there you can check out, if you want,” he tells me as I approach an orderly tower of mismatched furniture and caved-in cardboard boxes (leftovers from when Wilma ditched her condo and took up residence here?).

I tug at the flap of a box that looks like it’s about to disintegrate, and, sure enough, one whole side of the thing comes apart in my hands. “Shoot,” I say, pressing my jellyroll forward to stop an avalanche of stuff that’s headed my way.

Tom hops up from the sofa, drops his plate on top of the mini-fridge and speeds to my aid. “I got it,” he says, squeezing against me from behind and wrapping his arms around my sides, steadying the box in place.

I have an unclean thought that involves me and Tom and that secluded old tree house. “Now what?” I whisper.

His body is hot against mine. “Turn around,” he says.

I am pinned in place and will be just as trapped if I’m able to wiggle myself to face him. “I don’t…know if…”

Out of nowhere, his tongue shoots to my ear (a crime of opportunity?) and something tightens in his frontal pants region. I want to scream (in a good way). He says, “Trust me.”

I do as he says, twist and shimmy between his arms (all the while massaging my squishy flesh into his considerably leaner bod) until we end up eye to chin. Now I can barely breathe, and the junk in the box is digging a hole into the small of my back. “You’re up, Houdini,” I say.

“What’s your rush?” He cocks his lips fiendishly. The stuff behind me shifts, and he gives it (and me) a good ramming. “That should do it.”

There is a release of pressure from my backside but not from his front. Impulsively, I tip my face up and mold my lips to his, that anxious tongue of his darting and probing. I settle my hands on his hips and try to inhibit the memories of other boys probing me that are squiggling through my naughty parts and my mind.

Tom’s a virgin, I remind myself. And, oh yeah, there’s a teeny-tiny speck of a chance I might be pregnant.

His hands go from holding up the box to caressing my back and hips and…

Crash!!! Bang!!! Boom!!!

The contents of the box clatter about our feet, a fair amount of the noise absorbed by the speckled beige carpet. Still, I glance at the stairway, expecting someone to come running. But no one does, the merriment upstairs in full swing.

Tom and I bend over at the same time, conking heads “Ow,” I whine, an instant headache developing. (Can his head really be that hard?)

He rubs at his temple. “Wow, do you drink titanium-fortified milk or something?”

So he thinks I’m thick-headed too? Fantastic. “As a matter of fact, I do,” I declare, with mock indignation.

From the looks of the items strewn across the floor, the box belongs to Mr. Cantwell, not Wilma (unless she’s a little on the freaky side). I reach for an upside-down magazine and turn it over. It’s a Playboy, circa nineteen eighty-five.

Tom and I exchange embarrassed (but excited) glances, the Playmate on the cover enticing us to look further with her moony blue eyes and cherry-kissed smile. I pass him the magazine and say nothing.

We gather up a bunch of other personal memorabilia and “guy stuff” (matchbooks from various motels and diners; a giant marble and a brittle, peeling baseball glove; a couple of Penthouses to complement the Playboy; a magnifying glass with half an inch of dust caked to it; and a cache of vinyl records).

“These are awesome,” I say, sifting through the 33s (the big, old albums the size of pizza boxes) and 45s (the smaller records with one track on each side). Until I was eight, Gramp had a Pioneer turntable, which he’d fire up every Sunday evening for some Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley, or The Platters. When the thing died, we couldn’t afford a replacement.

Tom takes the records from me and, one at a time, stacks them in a neat pile. “Holy shit,” he says when we get to a particular 45 with a jacket image of a voluptuous topless chick riding a bike and wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and tube socks. “I remember this,” he says, turning the record over in his hands as if he’s unspooling a filmstrip of old memories.

“What is it?” I ask (besides a little soft-core porn, since the cover model is mostly naked but is pictured back-to).

He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “My mom used to sing this to my dad every year, instead of Happy Birthday.”

I glance at the record jacket and note that the tunes are by Queen, a band about which I know next to nothing. “Bicycle Race?” I say, reading the title of the A-track.

Tom chuckles, shakes his head. “Uh-uh,” he says. “The other one.”

I feel weird reading the title of the B-track aloud, but I do it anyway. “Fat Bottomed Girls?”

He grins. “She thought it was about her, I guess,” he says, without a trace of self-consciousness, or pity, or meanness.

“Do you have a record player?” I ask, wondering how a song about an overgrown body part could inspire an actual fat person to adopt it as their anthem.

He raps his knuckles against a blond-wood cabinet that’s the base of our archeological dig.

I blink. “Huh?”

He raps again. “Right here.”

“That’s a record player?” I ask. The turntable Gramp had was the size of a suitcase.

“Not the whole thing,” he says, in a tone that suggests I may be brain-dead. “Just the guts.”

“Does it work?”

“Last I knew.”

Without me having to ask, he begins unearthing the cabinet, and I arrange the boxes out of the way, along the ecru wall. Together we drag the cabinet over by the sofa, where there’s access to an electrical outlet. With a what-the-hell shrug, Tom plugs it in (since when do we plug in furniture anyway?). Then he flips the lid open, revealing the turntable inside. “Got the record?” he asks, his string bean fingers extended.

“Oh, hang on.” I slip over and fetch the 45 from the floor and return it to his waiting hand.

“Here goes nothin’,” he says, an air of skepticism underlying his optimistic tone as he slides the vinyl disc into place, powers the turntable on (it’s spinning!!!) and gingerly coasts the needle to the sweet spot at the record’s edge.

All I can do is stare at that glossy black disc revolving and revolving (this thing won’t put me into a trance, will it?) as the music starts to crackle out. “It’s working,” I squeak, suddenly giddy at our success in resurrecting a bygone technology. “I can’t believe it.”

As Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, a band I know next to nothing about but not absolutely nothing (they do sing Bohemian Rhapsody, after all) croons about the virtues of rounded feminine derrieres, Tom gets inspired to sample a bit of this fat girl’s bottom.

And I let him, at least for now. But before things can progress to the next level between me and Tom Cantwell, I’m obligated to bring him up to speed on the whole sordid truth of my sexual promiscuity, including the fact that I may now be carrying Brent Flynn’s (or Justin White’s or Craig Benson’s) baby.