Biggie (6 page)

Chapter 9

This Ends Now

I hate my alarm clock. Its beating and pulsing sounds give me a headache as soon as my eyes open. Lifting my arm and pounding the snooze button takes all the energy I can muster at 4:45 a.m. I need the seven minutes between the beeps to wake up. On top of the alarm clock, Mom taps on my door. “Sweetie, Jim's waiting,” she says.

This isn't a dream. I'm an athlete now. I climb out of bed and lurch into the bathroom. I fill a Dixie cup full of sink water and take a drink. I repeat this six times. I'm thirsty all the time lately, especially in the morning.

My eyes get only a sliver of space between my eyelids to find Mom and Laser sitting in the living room. He's putting his tennis shoes on and Mom's holding a glass of orange juice, no pulp. She thinks pulp is bad for you. Even after the water, I empty the glass.

“Biggie.” Laser hands me a shoe box. “I got you some shoes to work out in. Your mom said your old shoes were worn out.”

I open the box and see a pair of Nike shoes: black with one gold swoosh through the middle. They feel so firm and tight, even with the laces untied.

“What do you say?” Mom chirps.

“Thanks, Jim,” I say with my eyes now wide open and staring at the shoes. They are kind of cool, but my size fifteen feet can barely squeeze into the size fourteen-and-a-half shoes.

“You want workout shoes to be tight to help keep your feet pointed forward,” Laser says. “I thought we would walk a mile. Are you up for it?”

I release a wake-up deep breath and nod optimistically, but I have zero idea how far I can walk.

The walk starts with complete silence. I try to make out how fast I'm walking, so I can then figure out how long the walk will last. My best guess is that a block is approximately one hundred meters. A mile is roughly 1,600 meters. I walk the first block in 127 seconds. I have no idea what Laser's thinking, but I'm counting. I'm doing math. That's a little over two minutes. If I can keep this pace, this walk will last 2,032 seconds or thirty-five minutes. Thirty-five minutes is way too long for him to keep quiet.

Thirty-five minutes is also a pipe dream. The second block seems shorter, yet it takes me 143 seconds to walk it and even that pace is hard for me to keep up with. Soon walking a block is going to take me almost three minutes. Soon I'm going to need to take a break. I'm starting to fear this walk might take all morning.

“Biggie.” Laser breaks the silence. “Why did you go out for baseball? And don't tell me it was to throw a perfect game.”

Well, Laser lasts all of 277 seconds before asking what the hell I'm up to.

“Two weeks ago in gym I threw a perfect game in Wiffle ball,” I say. “I told Maddux about it and he said he could teach me to throw a pitch that would be unhittable, allowing me to throw a perfect game. There isn't more to the story than that.”

“The knuckleball?”

I nod and struggle to lift my pudding legs, as Laser calls them. I need to take a break, but I'm terrified to say something to him. “The pitch is not really a knuckleball,” I say instead. “It's multiple pitches thrown into one. We call it a Wiffle ball.”

“Do you have other pitches?”

“A fastball that not really fast,” I say.

“You're a big boy with a good pedigree,” he says. “I can teach you to throw some heat.”

As we cross the three-block mark, I can feel my face turning red and my feet swelling inside the already-too-small shoes. My shoulders must weigh a million pounds.

“You're going to love being on a team,” Laser claims. “You'll help them on your good days. They'll help you on your bad days. There's nothing like being on a team.”

I move my head up and down to let him know I'm listening. My eyes fill with sweat and my tongue turns to sandpaper. I'm so thirsty. If I don't get something to drink, I'm going to pass out.

“I know that you haven't had good luck with coaches, but you can't let that bother you,” Laser says. “I realize that Coach Phillips seems like a jerk after cutting you yesterday, but he's a good coach.”

I start to breathe slower, louder. The grass in front of Mr. and Mrs. Bowen's house looks so comfortable. I should just fake fainting and take a rest while Laser tries to figure out what to do. No. I can't do that. Cars are driving by, and in a town of a thousand people, word would get out that I passed out. Instead I try to slow the pace down without Laser knowing. How fast am I going now? I've lost count.

I struggle to keep count in my head. Between the choppy breaths, sweat-filled eyes, and Laser's questions, my mind can no longer do math. Is this the fourth block or fifth? How far have I walked? My eyes are more closed than open now and the sweat pools distort my vision and I can't really tell whose house is whose. I don't know where I am.

“I wish I could say the same for your T-ball coach.” Laser keeps talking. “Now, he was a straight-up asshole. I never told you this, but I feel really bad for not saying anything.”

“
Can we stop
?
” I place my hands on my knees. Laser unhooks a water bottle from his belt and hands it to me. How did I not see that earlier? I drink the cold water like I've been stranded on a desert island for fifty years.

“Drink slowly, Biggie,” he says. “Getting into playing shape isn't going to be easy, but if you're committed, you'll get there.”

My breathing returns to normal after the six ounces of water and the five-minute break. “I'm okay now,” I say with little confidence. Laser's not even sweating. He snaps the bottle back to his belt without as much as a sip.

“You know, I was so disappointed when you quit T-ball that I didn't even understand what you were telling me,” he says. “Now that I have Maddux and he's going to play organized baseball, I realize what a jerk your T-ball coach was. To make two overweight six-year-olds race for everyone's amusement—that's horrible. I'm really sorry for not saying anything to him.”

I don't accept Laser's apology. Maybe I would've ten years ago when it happened, but he called me a quitter when I, with tears all over my face, said I hated baseball. We had just met and maybe he made a rookie mistake, but I hated him a lot more than my coach that day.

He's sorry now. Well, I don't give a shit.

I need to start counting again. “How far are we?”

“We've walked four blocks. Twelve to go,” he says.

I want to die.

After eating Mom's tasteless low-fat yogurt and strawberries for breakfast, I hightail it out of my house with my mind on a sausage-and-bacon-combo breakfast sandwich from Molly's and a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew to chase down the greasy treat. After walking a mile, I need some protein, caffeine, and carbs to get through the day.

I pull up to the drive-through, order my usual, and wait for
my real breakfast
,
not that bird food Mom gave me. Shelly, my favorite drive-through lady, hands me the bag. I open the sack and let the smells and steam wash over my face. I'm in heaven.

I look up and Laser's black Explorer sits right in front of me. “Pull over,” he mouths through the windshield.

He followed me. Is he going to play private detective now to make sure I eat only morsels from my mother?

“You forgot your phone,” I can hear him say as he walks from his truck to mine.

Although he's holding up the phone, I still give in to the urge to check my pockets for it. The only bump I feel comes from a pen in my left front pocket. The early morning walk took forever and I had to rush to get ready for school.

“Are you even a little bit serious about baseball or was this morning some joke to you?” He tosses my phone onto my lap.

“I was hungry,” I muster.

“You just ate five minutes ago,” he says.

“That's not enough food. I can't make it through the day. ”

“That's bullshit,” he says. “That's all I had. That's all Maddux had. You don't need to stuff your face all the time.”

In the twelve years I've known Laser, I've never been scared of him or worried he'd hit me. Until now. His face has a red glow. I can tell he wants to pound the crap out of me.

He slides the palm of his hand down his face, traveling over his eyes, the brim of his nose, and his lips.

“You have high blood pressure,” he says, “It's way too high for a seventeen-year-old. Don't you care at all about your health? Do you want to have a heart attack in your twenties? What's wrong with you?”

I don't answer any of the questions. I just squeeze shut the Molly's bag, holding in the steam.

“You're three hundred pounds, Biggie,” he continues. “Three hundred pounds. Listen to that—three hundred pounds. Is there any part of you that is tired of looking—?” Unable to think of a nice word, he stops and shakes his head.

“I'm sorry” is all I can say.

“You better apologize to yourself,” he says. “Or to your mom. How can I tell her about this? I mean, you're going to kill her before you kill yourself. She worries so much about you. Do you have any idea how many times she has cried herself to sleep? She goes to the grocery store to buy you healthy food. She gets up early every morning to make you a nice breakfast. And you repay her by sneaking food behind her back.”

My eyes look straight ahead, over the steering wheel, on the cars and trucks racing down Main Street. If someone gave me a million dollars, I still wouldn't turn to look at Laser.

“Give me the bag, Biggie,” he orders.

I grip it tighter. “No. If I don't eat this, I'll pass out at school.”

He squeezes my wrist to loosen my hold, but I keep my fingers locked on the paper bag.

“You will not pass out at school. That's ridiculous. This bag of grease will just make you fat, not healthy.”

“You know if people didn't call me fat or Biggie all the time, maybe I would care more about my weight.”

“You don't want to be called Biggie?”

“Would you?”

He leans in, rips the bag out of my hands, and says, “This ends now. You are going to play baseball next summer, and you are going to weigh two hundred pounds doing it. You want people to stop calling you Biggie? Well, do you?”

With my eyes focused on the floor at the Mountain Dew that Laser has yet to secure, I offer a small smile.

“God damn it, Biggie, talk!”

“I don't want to be called Biggie anymore.”

“You want something in life, you have to earn it. You don't want me, Maddux, your teammates to call you Biggie, then you have to earn it.”

He reaches forward, grabs the Mountain Dew, and gets out of the truck.

I drop my head against the steering wheel and grip it tight. As I shake the steering wheel like I might yank it out and grind my teeth, a thought boils inside me and I lean back and scream at top of my lungs.

“
God damn it, Mom. Why did you rip up that note
?
”

I dig my fingernails into my forehead and scratch down my face, almost cutting open skin. When I reach my neck, I whisper, “My life's over.”

Chapter 10

#Friends

I don't sleep much anymore. Most nights, I stay up until two, talking online and then lying in bed until three or three thirty. And since I agreed to get up at five to work out, my nightly shut-eye has dropped to an hour and a half. Thank goodness for the caffeine in Mountain Dew or I would fall asleep in class or behind the wheel.

Tonight all I can think about is Annabelle. Ever since eighth grade, I have known she would be my first date, my first kiss. Now I'm a junior and I've done nothing about it.

Earlier I peeked again at her Gmail account. I know that makes me a creepy stalker, but I have good reasons. One, I'm planning the perfect date, which will be a night she'll never forget. Yes, I'm snooping, but the way I look at it is that when we're eighty years old and reminiscing on how we met, I doubt she'll care how I put together the night we fell in love. Second, I'm addicted to her poetry. She sends all of her poems to her cousin, Margaret, who lives on an air force base in Germany. The first poem of hers I read is called
It Felt Like Being Drunk
. The poem itself sucks. It rhymes but the rhymes are not good. The first two lines go like this or something:

Tuesday was a blast. Wednesday sucked ass.

Thursday flat out stunk. Friday, I will get drunk.

I always wonder if she drank when she was a seventh grader or if it is a metaphor for doing something else, something seventh graders do. I don't know how to explain it, but the idea that she might've gotten drunk when she was thirteen made me like her then, and now, five years later, I still like her. I just can't find the perfect time to ask her out.

If I'm going to be Annabelle's boyfriend, I'm going to have to lose weight. I know that. I'm not stupid. She's beautiful—dark hair with red streaks, little nose, green eyes. She's about five-foot-six with massive breasts trapped inside those amazingly tight V-neck shirts, my favorite. She has her ears and nose pierced. The nose piercing, a little silver stud centered on her left nostril, makes me melt every time I see her. She probably weighs around 160 pounds—not anorexic, but not fat either. Since I fell for her five years ago, she's had five boyfriends. Three of them easily weigh more than two hundred pounds, so she doesn't like skinny guys.

I figure if I can get down to 250 pounds, she would go out with me. And if television diet shows have taught me anything, it's that fat people lose weight at a faster rate than skinny people. With Laser training me, I should lose fifty pounds in a few weeks.

Once I reach 250, I need to quit being a pussy and step up and ask her. I have all the research I need; I just need to pull the trigger and ask her out. But how do I do it? How can I ask out someone who I've never had a single conversation with? She comes into the convenience store most nights, so I could just ask her then. But what do I say?
Hey Annabelle, want to go out with me sometime?
No, I need a more open-ended question. It's a girl's reflex to say
no
when asked out by surprise. Maybe I'll ask her what she's doing on Friday night. That's pretty open. She can't say no to that.

But what if she tells me she's going out on a date, which would be worse than her saying no. I guess I could ask her if she's still dating Mike, but then I might come across as her dad, wondering what she's up to. This is so difficult.

My problem is that I'm trying to accomplish this the hard way—in the real world. Nothing good ever happens in the real world—at least not to me.

As I think about her, I feel the urge to see that smile, those eyes, those V-neck shirts. I roll out of bed and flip open my laptop.

I pull up Twitter and log out of my account. As I go to log in with her information, I stop. For years, I've scrolled through her private, protected photos with her password, but now, after the perfect game, I wonder if I could just be her Twitter follower and see the photos that way. I've never sent her a follow request. In fact, I'm not friends with anyone at school on any site. I keep my online and school worlds apart.

Not that I haven't thought about sending her a request. I mean, we do go to school together. I doubt she wouldn't accept it. But then a small part of me worries that she would find it weird that I asked. Maybe she would take a closer look at me and figure out that I've been logging on to her account for years. Whenever I've considered sending a follow request, I've decided it's better to remain invisible.

But tonight, I send the request. It happens so fast. Half of me wants to take it back, but the other half is curious. What will happen next?

The message comes across the bottom of my screen:
@Annabelle has approved your request.
And then I get another message:
@Annabelle is now following you
. I immediately click on her photos and start scrolling. The pictures are ten times hotter now that I can look at them because she wants me to see them. There's no way I'm sleeping tonight. I'm too excited.