This is the result of the IndieInk writing challenge, that organizes weekly challenges by pairing up each participant with another writer's prompt.
For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Tara Roberts challenged me with "'He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.' - Harpo Marx" and I challenged Grace O'Malley with "A memory connected to Thanksgiving."
To learn more about the IndieInk Challenge, or to sign up for it, click here. Or, the website address is http://forum.indieink.org/.
From my prompt, this was inspired.
The Fat Kid
By Mera Summers
Everyday in the lunch line, my stomach turns queasy and my palms sweat and my heart aches in anxiousness as I wait to face The Battle of the Cafeteria. My teacher, Mrs. Ranchero, pretends like she never sees it and I don’t know what else to do but pretend I’m invisible. That’s the hard part.
See, I’m The Fat Kid in school.
Nobody wants to be The Fat Kid’s friend. He can’t play hand ball or soccer like the skinny ones. At recess one time, I asked Kevin Grant if he wanted to start a game of hand ball with me and he laughed in my face.
“No. You can’t play handball with hands that fat. If I played with you, your butt would be mistaken for the ball and I’d have to touch you.” He looked me in the eye when he said it. And what I wanted to do was spit in his face.
But I didn’t. I just ran under the bleachers so no one would see the big kid crying.
My mom doesn’t really have much money. Every time I get clothes, we have to shop at used stores like Good Will. I don’t mind much but the kids at school call me poor and tell me my shoes are ugly. I ask mom if we can go buy new ones at the mall but she can’t afford it. I don’t get mad at her for it. My dad left us when I was six. I just wish I could have cool clothes so maybe the other kids wouldn’t make fun of me so much. I know mom loves me. And she tells me so every night when I go to sleep. She tells me I’m important but secretly I don’t believer her. How could someone important be so gross to everyone else?
On my tenth birthday, my mom invited the whole class to my party at Pizza Explosion. I didn’t wanna have a party, but mom told me it would be a good way to make friends. Two guys came. One was from Mr. Hunter’s class whose mom made him come and Tony Green from mine. We had pizza and played in the arcade. I opened my presents and Tony got me a basketball. It surprised me that he even thought I could play it! After the party, he invited me to shoot some hoops at the park down the street. Mom walked us down there. I wasn’t any good at it but Tony was a pro. He gave me a few tips his dad had shown him and I got better every shot.
The next morning, getting ready for school wasn’t so bad. I felt like I had a friend, someone to sit with at lunch and play with at recess. I went up to Tony at his desk before the bell rang. “Hey dude.” I said to him, like I had heard other kids say to each other. He didn’t respond right away like I expected him to. He just looked around and saw all the kids whispering and his face turned red.
Tony panicked and then in one effort, he pushed his hand into my stomach and I fell to the ground.
“Don’t ever talk to me again you fat cow.” Everyone pointed and laughed while I rolled on the ground, trying to stand back up.
Suddenly the laughing stopped. Mrs. Ranchero walked in.
“Sam, why are you on the ground?” She asked me in a harsh tone. I had to act fast, I couldn’t tell on Tony or I would be the Fat Tattle Tell.
It stung. My eyes were feeling wet and I felt a fist in my throat. I got on my knees and pulled my self up using the desk beside me.
“Sorry, Mrs. Ranchero, I tripped.” I walked to my desk with my head down, and saw my ugly old shoes again while the snickers and whispers continued.
“You don’t have to be sorry, hun. Are you okay? Did you get hurt?” She asked from the front of the classroom. I sat down and without looking up, I told her in one word, “No.” I wasn’t okay, but luckily, I didn’t get hurt.
The rest of the day, I hid as best I could. “He looked like something that had gotten loose from Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade.” I heard them say as I walked past. I’ve only ever watched the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade one time with mom. We usually drive to my grandma’s house on Thanksgiving morning. But one year we got to watch it. All I remembered was that there were a lot of pretty people hosting the show, containing the floats in order, and that the floats were fat, jiggly blimps that hovered in the air.
I was sure they were talking about the second.
I floated home that day after school, like a ghost, like something obvious trying to go unnoticed. When I walked through the front door into an empty house, I just threw my stuff down and ran to the bathroom. I took off my shirt and looked at myself.
I saw rolls and stretch marks and sagging skin. The kids at school were right, I was worthless. I shoulda just beat ‘em up. I was bigger than them and I coulda just shoved ‘em down! Suddenly I heard mom’s keys clinking at the door. I pulled my shirt back on fast, swallowed my feelings and went out to see her.
She dropped her bag and let her hair down in one move. She always looked so beautiful when she got home from work, like all the effort she gave had no affect on her.
“Hey mom.” I walked into the room and pretended like nothing had happened.
“Hi Sam, honey. How was your day?” She moved through the house.
I wanted to tell her all the horrible things that happened, but I didn’t know how.
“It was fine.” I tried as best I could to shrug the pain off.
I could feel her watching me. She organized herself in the kitchen but I knew her focus stayed on me. Suddenly, she just stopped and stood at the doorway looking into me.
“Sam, what happened?”
…. I had to tell her, right?
So I did.
* * *
She turned angry for a moment and then big tears rolled down the sides of her face. That made me the saddest, the eyes of my strong mother overflowing with tears just for me. I cried too.
She grabbed me and she held me close to her chest. I could hear her heart beating in tune to some deep, persistent drum beat. And we cried there together in the kitchen.
For that moment, I remembered I was loved.
In our embrace, she spoke. “Do you know what we’re going to do right now?”
I looked up at her, waiting for her answer.
“We’re going to make cookies.”
She got up and went to the cupboard, wiping her eyes. I felt disappointment creeping in on me. I expected mom to march down to the school and demand justice, to go to Tony and give him a piece of her mind, at least call the cops and send him to jail; anything but cookies.
But I got up just so I could move around too.
“I’m going to tell you something very important.” She said it as if she had waited a very long time to tell me this very important thing.
I put a bowl on the counter.
“Sam, I need you to listen! Are you listening to me?” Her tears slowly slid back in. I stopped moving and I nodded. I never knew what to do when grown-ups started talking this way.
“There is no greater love than to lay down your life for another.” She paused. “Do you know what that means?”
“…No.”
“It means forgiveness, Sam.” She cracked an egg into the bowl. Then she stayed quiet for what felt like an eternity.
“It means that even though forgiveness is against every natural instinct, you do it anyway out of love, to stop the cycle.”
She went to the fridge and pulled out a stick of butter. What she said to me made about as much sense as math did to me – none.
“Forgiving someone is never the easy thing to do. Getting revenge would be so easy, wouldn’t it?” She waited. “But what good is it to repay evil for evil?” She looked at me, this time really expecting an answer from me. But I could just listen to her, watching her swollen eyes stare back at me… I didn’t have the right answer.
“I had to forgive your dad at some point. What good would it have brought me, or you, if I lived only to re-pay him? Was it right what he did? Was it right for any of those kids at school to make fun of you?” She stopped and measured flour into the bowl.
“No, it wasn’t. But when you hold on to a grudge for how someone else treated you, you’re the one who pays for it, not the person who wronged you.”
She took a deep breath and let it out. I watched her pour sugar into the bowl. Then she continued. “Did that make sense to you?” She didn’t wait for the answer as she grabbed a bag of chocolate chips. “It’s like you’re carrying the other person on your back… Does it hurt the other person if you do that? No. You just carry this heavy burden wherever you go and it weighs your life down.”
I watched the weight of the chocolate chips fall from the package into the mix of dough. “Extra chocolate chips this time.” She winked at me.
She mixed the ingredients together with force, releasing the rest of her emotions. “The sweetest revenge is forgiveness.”
I stuck my finger in the bowl and pinched out a chocolate chip. She stopped stirring to let my fingers by.
“That’ my solution, that’s the only way it will ever get better, that’s how we will fight back and that’s how we’ll win. Just wait, and watch, and you’ll see that in the end, it’s the secret to life.”
She nodded after her own statement and before I could reply, she hurried to add to it. “But, no one can force you to make that choice. Forced love is not love at all… So when you’re ready, you do it.”
She rubbed her hand on my back. “I love you so much, Sweetie.”
She sniffled and grabbed a tissue to blow her nose. Then she stopped mixing up the cookies and grabbed a colorfully wrapped box from behind her bag on the counter.
“And this is for you.” She handed it over.
“What is it!?” I shook it.
“It’s your late birthday present. Open it!” I ripped the paper off and opened the box... A new, shiny black pair of Nike shoes!
“I want you to wear those because you like them, son. Not because the kids at school made fun of your old ones.”
I already had the shoes on my feet.
* * *
I thought about what mom told me all the way to school the next day. It rang in my ears and I didn’t know if what I decided to do with it was the right thing. Tony really didn’t deserve to be forgiven, plus I didn’t really understand how it would change much, anyway. I looked down at my new shoes, watching the shiny parts reflect the light as I walked.
When I got to school, the usual jokes sounded from every angle of the hallways, the classroom and the playground. I just kept my head down and watched my shoes. They carried me all the way to lunch; something I didn’t think possible on a day like this.
In the lunch line, I felt the usual queasiness, the usual palm sweat in The Battle of the Cafeteria - the time of day when it was the easiest and most amusing to make fun of The Fat Kid.
Then I saw Tony sitting down with his friends. And in that moment, I had the choice…
Against everything in me, I walked up to him.
With every step, the kids around me watched, and when it was certain I was walking up to Tony, the room turned silent. Even the teachers look around in confusion at the sudden hush of voices. I felt the eyes of every kid on my back.
I pulled off my backpack and unzipped the pocket. I slowly pulled out a bag of chocolate chip cookies. And then I said it, loud enough for the whole room.
“I forgive you for pushing me.” I sat the cookies by Tony’s hand and waited.
Tony looked at me wish a puzzled look. ‘What did I have to lose,’ I thought. I stood in front of him, feeling the freedom from my decision already. Nobody said a word.
Slowly, Tony took the bag of cookies off the table and opened the bag.
He pulled a cookie out… and stretched out his arm, offering it to me.
“I’m sorry I pushed you.”
And I took the cookie.
That day at recess, I played basket ball in my new shoes.
I wasn’t any good.
Tony was a pro.
But this time, The Fat Kid had a friend.
