Chapter 5
“FAT”
Like a magnet for my retina, my eyes were drawn to those three letters and instantly I couldn’t see anything else. I didn’t need to follow the box back left to find the male owner of the row because I already knew the chubby culprit. But I did anyway. I confirmed. It was me. Who else could it have been? Shimika’s legend and options for categorizing young boys had a flaw and some girl had manually corrected it herself. She could’ve abstained. She could’ve dropped my grade down a notch like a professor might do for turning in a late assignment. But not this strict bit – despite my love for rhyme, I can’t bring myself to use this ugly term to describe her, because deep down, I knew it wasn’t her fault. She simply wrote what they were all thinking. Don’t shoot the messenger. After all, fat wasn’t a foreign word to me but generally, people extended the common courtesy of saying chubby, overweight, big-boned-(ed) or just glossed over the subject altogether. Lil’ mama was quite direct.
I feared moving upwards, tracing the column until I found this feminine rebel who snickered at rules and conventions. Only the truth mattered to her. What if it was one of the girls I’d hesitantly but secretly hoped would prove to be a match?
“Wait, it was Krystal?” I murmured to myself. I exhaled a sigh of relief. I was nice. I never would’ve ranked someone with the bottom score if put in the same position, but Krystal was a coin toss for the bottom two rankings. A sense of guilt overcame me for thinking of her in this negative light and I wondered if these feelings were retaliation? Nope. They legit. Krystal was a bit of a facial conundrum for my personal attractiveness scale. There was no particular feature above-averagely off-putting, but like a sports team full of superstars that don’t gel together, her face could never put together an extended playoff run. The one thing I could point to was her hair was rarely done or combed in a premeditated fashion, and it was short, but she attempted styles like bangs and ponytails as if it was long, or even just, longer.
Struggling ponytails and disharmonious features aside, my feelings were still hurt. Yet, the sting was lightened slightly by this realization. Krystal was also an early candidate for class clown, and though I thought her word was mean, I imagined she did it to express her humor more than she meant to humiliate me. Maybe fate put that word there as a sign I was moving too fast. Was I rushing love? Chasing waterfalls? Should I stick to the rivers and lakes that I was used to? Was there no answer key as to who deserved a holla and who didn’t? I returned the page without viewing the rest. Shimika gave me the faintest of “sorrys,” almost inaudible, to signal to me she’d likely followed my eyes and gathered what I was seeing and therefore feeling.
At lunch, I heard Marcus and Tyrone bragging about their own numerical conquests, but I was fairly quiet as I chewed on my rectangular, school cheese pizza. I spent the rest of the day, the bus ride, and the evening at home under a cloud of mental funk.
They say trouble don’t last always and fortunately, I didn’t have long to doubt the claim’s legitimacy. Later that week, back in French class, there was a lull when Ms. Meister had to leave the classroom. It always seemed like such a huge deal any time a teacher abruptly left the classroom unattended, likely indicating they needed to handle a pressing matter, though now, I’m guessing they just needed to go to the bathroom. A conversation started between two girls sitting near me.
Random Girl 1: “Did y’all finish filling out Mika’s sheet?”
Random Girl 2: “Yeah, girl, who were your finest boys?”
Random Girl 1: “I really think Maxwell and Jason are real cuties.”
Random Girl 2: “Which Jason? Light-skinned?”
Random Girl 1 confirmed she guessed correctly. I guess it could’ve been dark-skinned Jason. There was also a brown-skinned Jason, but even I assumed, it wasn’t him. Jason Polk seemed a bit nerdy and shy. He was the type of guy girls described as “sweet” more often than as “real cuties.” He was only at Bellevue for seventh grade before he transferred to another school.
Random Girl 2: “Mmmm hmmm, what about you, Kelly? Who you think?”
At least that’s how I imagined the conversation went because up until this point I was only vaguely listening in, as had become my routine when references to Shimika’s dreaded chart arose. But once I heard Kelly’s name, my ears perked, even if my head stayed down pretending to study.
After she mumbled a word, or two, that may’ve been halves of different names as evidence of lack of commitment to answering the question or embarrassment to say them aloud, I eventually heard her say,
“You know who I think is really cute? Him.”
A deafening silence overtook our space, yet in the form of a translucent bubble seeming to only encapsulate our small area of five to six desks. It allowed for the idea of other conversations simultaneously being conducted in the outskirts of the classroom, but only that – just the idea – as nothing else could be heard as if my other, outer classmates existed in an alternate, adjacent universe. I can only describe this bubble in retrospect because, in real time, there were but a few seconds before I felt an energy suffocating me. So, I slowly emerged from my book to both draw air and investigate the pause in conversation. It was then I studied the eyes of the random girls to find one set staring at me while the other pair could be found looking just ahead of me. Following the latter set’s line of sight led me to the back of Kelly’s head, then slightly to my right of it, where I saw her arm bent above her shoulder holding a pencil with the limp purple hairs of a novelty Troll eraser-cover pointing directly back at me. She never turned around to acknowledge me or even confirm I saw her, but as if she had eyes in the back of her head, she lowered her hand with a deliberately subtle pace suggesting she’d received confirmation I knew the compliment was intended for me.
Uncontrollably my cheeks spread wide, wide enough to burst the bubble, but not narrow enough to contain my giddy grin as my mandible experienced a slight aching sensation from the intense stretching it had to endure. Catching myself, I attempted to regain command and dilute the obviousness of how much I was pleased with Kelly’s cuteness compliment. With my jaws finally relaxing, one of the random girls was only able to blurt out a “you cheesin’ ain’t it?” before Ms. Meister returned to the classroom. Her return saved me from an onslaught of jokes or checkin’ that would’ve, at the very least, added both a “you blushing, mane?” and a “you tickled pink, ain’t it, mane?” despite the inapplicability to my perfectly-medium brown skin. Honestly, remnants from that smile would remain etched in my skin until several days later when an equally powerful force stripped the lingering residue of gleeful joy from my face for what felt like the rest of 7th grade, but perhaps more accurately, the remaining business days of 1992.