Or maybe he saw it online, he can’t remember.
“It’s called Fat Girl Rodeo.”
And he’s laughing like it’s the funniest damn thing he’s ever heard. He laughs so hard he almost falls off the bleachers. “And what you do is you go up to some fat girl and you throw yourself around her like you’re riding a bull …” He leans forward, covering his face, and then he kicks the bleachers three times like it’s going to help him get his breath. When he finally looks up again, his eyes have gone squinty and wet. “And you hold on as tight as you can, really squeeze the shit out of her …” He doubles over and rocks back and forth. I look at Kam and Kam looks at me like, What a dumb motherfucker.
Seth sits up, shaking all over. “And whoever …” (These last words are the hardest to get out.) “… holds on longest …” (He’s barely breathing.) “… wins.”
I say, “Wins what?”
“The game.”
“Yeah, but what do they win?”
“The game, man. They win the game.”
“But is there a prize?”
“What do you mean a prize?”
Seth is pretty stupid, if you want to know the truth. I sigh like I’m carrying the world’s burdens, like I’m freakin’ Atlas.
“If you go to the state fair and you play the shooting gallery, they give you, like, a stuffed panda or some such shit.”
“When I was eight.” Seth rolls his eyes at Kam.
I rake my hands through the lion fro, making it bigger and badder. I talk very, very slowly, the way my dad does to foreigners. “So when you went to the shooting gallery at age eight, they gave you something when you won.”
Kam takes a swig of the flask he always carries, but he doesn’t offer us any. He snorts. “Like he ever won.”
Seth is looking at me, but he reaches out and slaps Kam on the side of his head. I’ll say this for him, he’s got good aim.
Seth squints at me. “What’s your point?”
“What do you get if you win the rodeo?”
“You win.” He holds up his hands like what more is there.
It could go on this way for hours, but Kam says, “Losing battle, Mass. Let it go.”
I look at Kam now. “Have you heard of Fat Girl Rodeo?”
He stands, takes another swig from the flask, and for a second I think he’s about to offer it to me. Then he caps it and shoves it back into his pocket. “I have now.”
And suddenly he’s out of the bleachers and on the ground and jogging toward some girl, who looks like she’s wearing an inner tube under her shirt. I don’t recognize her, but of course I don’t recognize anyone. Except for the inner tube, she could be my own mother, for all I know.
Seth’s identifier isn’t the fact that he’s the only black kid in school with a Mohawk. His identifier is his stupid laugh. Because he’s an idiot, he’s always laughing, and I’d know that laugh anywhere. With Kam, it’s the fact that he has this white-blond hair that makes him look like an albino. He’s the only person I know with hair that color.
I have no idea who this girl with the inner tube is, and the whole time I’m watching, I’m thinking Kam’s not really going to do it. He’s just trying to make us think he’s going to do it.
And then he’s doing it. He’s wrapped around the girl like cellophane, and at first you can tell maybe she’s happy because it’s Dave Kaminski, but the longer he holds on, the more upset she gets, till it looks like she’s going to start screaming or crying or both.
I stand up. I want to tell him to stop. Seth’s eyes are fixed on Dave and the girl, and his jaw goes slack before he starts pounding on his knee going, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” And then he’s laughing and says something to me that sounds like “You know she wants it.” And the whole time I’m thinking to myself, Say something, douchebag.
But I don’t. And right before she loses it, Kam lets her go. Then he breaks into a victory lap around the track.
“Fifteen seconds,” Seth says under his breath. “It’s a goddamn world’s record.”
Libby Strout is fat.
I am locked in the bathroom after school, black Sharpie squeaking against the ugly, ugly wall. There is an unused tampon lying on the floor and an empty lip gloss in the sink, even though the trash can is literally right there. A sign on one of the stalls says OUT OF ORDER because someone dropped (shoved) a math book in the toilet. It smells like air freshener and cigarettes in here, among other things. That old saying about girls being sugar and spice and everything nice? Not so true. All you have to do is visit the third-floor bathroom of MVB High School in Amos, Indiana, to figure that out.
Someone is pounding on the door.
I reach up one arm and write in thick letters as large as I can so that everyone will see.
Libby Strout is fat.
Fat and ugly.
She will never get laid.
No one will ever love her.
I catch sight of myself in the mirror, and my face is the color of beets, the ones Mom used to call “nice vegetables,” even though she knew there was nothing nice about them. Mom always did that—made things nicer than they were.
Libby Strout is so fat they had to destroy her house to get her out.
Word for word, these are the things I overheard Caroline Lushamp and Kendra Wu saying about me in gym, as the other girls stood around and listened. And laughed. I add in one or two other lines, the meanest things I can think of, so that I don’t have to hear it from anyone else. I write it so they don’t have to. This way, there is nothing they can say about me that I haven’t said myself.