Chapter 29: Fat Girl Trying to Survive

29. Fat Girl Trying to Survive

It was after dinner the next night, which I had eaten all by myself in the general proximity of Michele. Erika was at a table across the cafeteria and had left by the other door when I was only about halfway through my ham and potatoes. It seemed that we ate a lot of potatoes at Holshue House. After I finished and dumped my tray on the conveyor and was walking out the door at the end where I had been eating, Rebecca appeared from nowhere and pulled me by the arm out into the hallway.

I let her, and let her lead down to the end of the hall where it turned and immediately dead-ended in a kitchen door that was closed, and quiet. A vague thought danced in my head that she might be dragging me into a confrontation with Erika, a re-match. But it didn’t feel like that, I was pretty sure that Erika had not come back to that end of the cafeteria, and the noise of a fight there would have immediately attracted the attention of too many people.

Rebecca was actually bigger than me, both in height and weight. Maybe she thought she could revenge Erika, but that also seemed unlikely. She out-weighed me by at least forty pounds, but it was fat, flabby under her pasty white skin. Her belly stuck out from under her under-sized ribbed top. Her voluptuous boobs too heavy for the type of bras we were allowed to have and so their weight rested down on her belly.

There was no one back in the corner where she took me, and I realized her nervousness was more about Erika finding us than about confronting me. Behind her, through the unused kitchen door, I could hear that the clatter of dishes from the post-dinner clean-up, was fading, even as that food/garbage smell lingered to soon be replaced with the smell of steam from the massive dishwashing machines.

After looking cautiously back out into the hallway she said, “Since that night she’s been different.”

The automatic response was to ask, “Who?”  But I didn’t because we both knew who she was talking about. So instead I asked, “In what way?”

She drew a breath in that hissed through the saliva in her teeth, and then took a moment to try to find the words. “She’s on edge all the time, and that makes her meaner. She calls me things like ‘fat slob’ and you should hear the shit that she talks about you.”

I smiled a little bit, knowing that I had managed to worry the bitch. Then I brought myself back into the conversation, into being the wise compassionate one in all of this. “If she’s so mean, why do you hang out with her?”

“It’s not like I don’t know I’m a fat slob. I been one since I was like seven, so I’m used to it. But people, kids, beat me up just because they knew they could.”

“So?” Inside us I felt Allison quietly nodding, one of the first responses I had felt from her in a while. She was telling me fat kids being bullied was a norm in her junior high experience. She didn’t seem to have much will for anything these days, but something was pulling her into this converstation.

“So,” Rebecca continued, “Erika is someone. I mean, everyone knows that she was like state champion in kick-boxing and a big soccer star, but she’s also someone around here. I think the staff treats her different. I think they’re scared of her too.”

I thought of the razor that she had and the mysterious boyfriend she was sneaking in somehow.

“With someone like that I feel safe, like I’m protected, because no one ever messes with her. Except you, and now that you did whatever it was you did, she’s really pissed. At you. At the house. At me. At everyone.”

“So now you want to change sides? You thinking I’ll be a better protector?” I was definitely saying it with sarcasm. Trying to accept a defector from the other side seemed like it might not be worth the risk, not for someone as wishy-washy as Rebecca.

She started biting her upper lip and once again looked nervously back towards the hall. “I don’t know what I want. I’m just scared. Erika’s so much not herself, and … and she has power around this place. She’s got some kind of special deal going with Slanick. I should be scared of you too. After all, you’re a killer, and I’m just in here ‘cause I broke in a store to steal food ‘cause I didn’t want my parents to know that I was eating junk when I was supposed to be getting better with my counseling for my bulimia. But I wasn’t getting any better, and being here don’t make it any easier. My parents say they’ll get into some kind of treatment when I get done serving my time here in four months, but I’m not sure I even want to get better.

“So I’m just in here for petty shit, but you … you killed somebody, and you beat the shit out of Erika somehow. She says you used some kind of voodoo witchcraft shit, but of course I don’t buy any of that.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t going to comment any more about that fight to anyone.

“And Michele – they say she killed someone to get in here. I mean, I just want to survive for four months and then be back home. I don’t want no more treatment or nothing.”

There was a pause, so I added, “I understand.” I really didn’t know what else to say. I wasn’t about to offer to become her best friend or anything, and I didn’t really care about this whole thing she ranting on about.

Then she suddenly shifted gears, “And your girlfriend, Phyla. She’s got some kind of influence with Slanik too. I mean, she got her room moved to be next you, just like that. And somehow she landed that job at the Book Room and a pass to not hafta take American History almost as soon as she got here. But I can’t figure it all out, ‘cause of course Erika hates her because she’s a person of color and I think you know how Erika feels about those people.”

I bristled a little about that. Rebecca wasn’t really saying how she felt about Erika and her racism, probably too scared to commit one way or the other. Scared of Erika, scared of Michele, and now she was trying to tell me that Phyla had some secrets too. And Phyla, the one person that I really wanted to be close to, still was avoiding me. All of this stuff was beginning to make me feel like I might be a pawn everyone else’s game. It had me looking nervously out into the hallway.

“I gotta go … homework and all, you know.” I tried to push past her to get out of the little doorway where we were still stashed out of view of the hallway.

“There’s another thing …” she held onto my forearm with a clammy white hand, like she wasn’t going to let me get through.

“Yeah?”

“I heard Erika mutter something about being worried that she’s pregnant.”

I stopped my movement back out towards the hallway. “What?”

“I mean, she’d have to get sperm inside her somehow, and, and … I don’t think that’s possible. I mean … she’s been here for nearly a year. She was already the head honcho among everyone when I got here.”

“I don’t know, Rebecca. But it’s not my problem. It’s not your problem.”

“But does being pregnant make you mean? I mean everything is getting too weird, and I’m outta here in four months, but I gotta stay alive and it’s … weird.”

Now I was earnestly trying to push past her to get out into the hallway so I could get back to my room.

“I’m scared. If Erika won’t be my friend, I’m just a fat girl all alone in this place.”

“Damn it, Rebecca,” I finally said with too much of her warm body pillow touching me as I pushed past her to get back into the hallway, “Do I look like someone who’s going to be able to take on Erika the next time she decides to attack? It was a lucky punch. That’s all.”

She was starting to cry, her breasts shaking with each gentle sob.

Then I had to add, “But I can tell you this. Whoever has been fucking her has also been beating the shit out of her, and that’s what she’s really messed up about. That’s why she wanted to kill me. ‘Cause she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s putting up with abuse just to get what she needs from some guy.”

“The thing is,” she started to add, “I also heard her say something, and I think I know who the father is, and it’s really ugly, and I kind of wish I didn’t know, so I … I don’t wanna say.”

I stopped and looked her right in the eye. I was shaking a little, but determined not to let her see, not after she had built me up as some kind of superwoman. “I think I do too,” I said very slowly, still unsure if I wanted this conversation to go on at all or not, and at the same time wondering if she knew the identity of the man in the basement.

Rebecca was the one to break the staring contest we seemed to have begun. And suddenly pushing past me she was rushing for the stairs, “I gotta go,” was all she had to stay.

Just to be safe I walked quickly to the staircase at the other end of the hallway. Shit was getting too weird, and who knew what trap might be lying at the top of the other stairs. I thought I caught of glimpse of Phyla slipping into her room ahead of me as I came into our hallway. I wanted to follow her into her room, and try to ask questions, no maybe just try to find a way for her to hold me. But I remembered that we were still fighting about something or other. Why was it I was being forced to talk to everyone except the one person in all of Holshue House, that I really wanted to be with.