fiction by Jason Edwards
The fattest girl in our high school was Lori Eastman, and the second fattest girl was Gloria Beastman. Now what I want to know is, what kind of asshole keeps the name Beastman? How did he think it was going to go for his kid? And could he not see, at some point, that she was getting kind of large? Surely, by the time she hit Junior High, Gloria was not petite. I don’t know. Maybe it’s the same kind of myopia that lets dads forget that their daughters get periods and have sex. Well, girls other than that tub of lard Beastman.
That’s cruel but she brought it on herself. Maybe she was just the victim of a life time of abuse, with the name and the fat and all. But I’m here to tell you she was not a nice person. She was cynical and sarcastic and maybe she was smart but not smart enough to justify treating people like crap.
There was this one time when the teacher was calling roll and goes “Larry?” and even though he was sitting right here, he didn’t say anything. And the teacher was one of those insufferable types who insisted on doing things one certain way. So even though she can see him, she expects him to say “here.” I mean, for crying out loud, she had exactly 30 kids in her class, the chairs were arranged in a perfect five by six square, all she had to do was see there were no empty seats and, voila, roll call is done. No absences.
But not this teacher. How is a teacher like that going to teach English, anyway. Sure, there’s rules and such, grammar and APA style I guess, but anything other than spelling is open to interpretation. And that includes whatever the hell Hemingway meant when he wrote “We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.” I mean, there’s a comma splice right there.
Finally the teacher goes “I can see you, Larry, are you here.” And he goes “My name isn’t Larry. It’s Lawrence.”
I mean, fair enough. You get to an age where you want to define yourself, want to be your own person, why not start with your name? It’s given to you, forced on you I suppose, so why not own it however you can, insist people call you what you want to be called. Like if a guy decided to put on a dress and go by the name of Brunhilda, were supposed to go along with it, right? Let him drain the lizard in the girl’s restroom, even, I mean, there’s laws in Congress about that. If Larry wants to be Lawrence he can be Lawrence.
And before the teacher could say anything (I mean, stickler for rules, maybe she would have been into it, maybe she would have approved, maybe she would have given Larry a gold star for the day) Gloria Beastman goes “Oh please, you little weasel.”
Half the class laughed. I think they laughed because it caught them off guard. No one liked Gloria, not at all, and so the other half managed to not laugh because they had that not-like fresh in their minds. Or it wasn’t that funny. Or they didn’t hear because they were busy scrambling to get next periods homework done.
And then Larry goes “Whatever, Beats-men.” And nobody laughed. Larry was the skinny little shit, you see. I mean, born premature or didn’t get enough protein or hadn’t hit puberty yet, something along those lines. But he was an okay fellow more or less, no Napoleon complex that I was aware of. And Gloria had this reputation. That tiny little Larry would take on Gloria like that– it was easily the bravest thing any of us had ever witnessed.
Gloria turned red. I mean bright red. I mean, you have to understand, that as awful as she was, and as scary as she was, she was not safe from getting picked on by the popular kids and the assholes. So it’s not like she hadn’t been called every name in the book. But the names were all around how fat she was and how she was, you know, a “beast.” I have no idea where Larry got “Beats-men,” and no idea why none of us thought of it before.
She launched herself out of her desk. Across two rows, screaming this loud, high-pitched snarl that, since she was so damned huge, reverberated on a subliminal level too and made everyone’s spine quiver. She landed right on top of Larry and went to town. Holy shit.
I mean, he called her “beats-men” and the she beat him. I mean, it’s poetic or something. It took two jocks to get her off of him, and when they did she just thrashed around and let loose with the most vile, disgusting tirade I’d ever heard in my life. Racist stuff, anti-Semitic, coprophagic, demonic. It was amazing. We all cowered in the corner, Larry crushed beneath us and forgotten, while she tore the room apart. A couple other jocks went and got the football coach, and they all hauled her out of there.
She sued the school for that. Got a settlement. We never saw her again. Lawrence went to the hospital but he was more or less okay. Was a kind of celebrity for a while, but then it died down and the school went back to being just another bunch of assholes.
The third fattest girl in our school was Calliope Winthrop. We dated for a while. She was a sweetheart. Sort of smelled like peaches.