Jerry was a fat boy. He thought of himself as nothing more than that.
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He didn’t remember always being fat, but he couldn’t pinpoint the moment it happened either. He wagered it had happened gradually, sneaking up on him like some insidious hourglass, grain by grain, pound by pound.
His father was constantly telling him he needed to lose weight.
“Go outside, Jerry,” his dad would say. “You need the exercise.”
His mother, on the other hand, constantly told him to put some meat on his bones. She always had some sandwich or snack ready to thrust into his hands as he ran out to hang with friends.
By the time Jerry reached high school, he was obese. His classmates never let him forget that fact, as though it were worse than some biblical plague.
“Tits” was the nickname Jerry’s classmates gave him freshman year of high school. It stuck to him like glue. Anytime he’d go walking through the halls, he would hear somebody say, “Here comes Tits! Wide load!”
Then the chorus of snickering erupted from all sides.
Jerry didn’t feel happy once the name-calling started. He stopped talking as much, too.
During gym, Jerry couldn’t help but notice the natural athleticism the other boys possessed. He wished that he could be as strong and agile.
More than once, over how intently he watched them, the other boys accused him of being ‘a big old queer.’ But it wasn’t that sort of desire he felt. He was honestly just in awe of them. How they leapt through the air catching basketballs! They passed and chased one another down without labored breaths! They bodies didn’t ripple with every movement like gelatin encased in saran wrap.
Jerry received more than one ‘F’ in gym as the ridicule became too much.
He wasn’t a violent boy, nor a brave one, so he coped by doing what he knew how to do best: eat.
Jerry enjoyed all kinds of foods, especially if they were creamy. The creamy foods always tasted magnificently; every familiar flavor had a memory attached.
When he took a spoonful of mashed potatoes, he was seven-years-old and eating lunch with his great-grandmother during light December snowfall. When Jerry ate fully loaded chilidogs, he was at the first carnival he ever went to, in awe of the bright lights of the carousel and Ferris wheel. A good slice of chocolate cake made him think of his older sister, Lea, who had made it for him on many occasions growing up. He hadn’t had cake like those ones in a long time, though. Part of the smooth chocolate was always bitter and sad as he ate, thinking about how Lea had run away from home two years before. Nobody had heard from her since.
Because of his love for nostalgia, Jerry thought of himself as a bit of a romantic. In his mind, he was simply too sophisticated for commoners like his father or his schoolmates. They were blind while he had merely awakened to a greater sense of self.
The idea comforted him and gave some temporary reprieve from his hurt feelings, but the pain always returned.
He would tug at his soft and pliable chest and stare at flabby pectorals that earned him his nickname.
Why he couldn’t just work out like the others or eat less? He simply didn’t know. Many mornings and most evenings Jerry would stand in the mirror and stare into his own soulful brown eyes, waiting for an answer that Mirror Jerry never had.
Jerry was living in a haze. He desperately needed to understand how to break out of it.
There had been a few nights where he thought about ending it all. He went over many different options. He voted against wrist slitting and gunshot suicide. Those methods were too messy. He didn’t want anyone to have to clean up after him. Not to mention that he had no gun.
Poisoning would be easiest, he figured eventually, since all he had to do was drink and wait. It even crossed his mind to mix the poison into a shake to make it more palatable.
One day after school, Jerry stopped into the boy’s bathroom. As he washed his hands, four larger boys came into the room. They snickered, pointed at Jerry, and chuckled more.
The biggest one loomed over Jerry and sneered. “Take off your shirt.”
“What?” Jerry scanned their faces. He recognized them from around the school, but he didn’t know them.
“You heard me. Take off your shirt,” the boy said.
“Yeah,” another added. “Show us your famous tits.”
Immediately, Jerry cradled his sagging pecs. He really regretted not being bigger and braver.
The boys snickered. The leader punched Jerry in the stomach.
Pain rippled through his torso with the shake of his belly. The boys laughed as Jerry let out a whine of true fear. He held his hands up as hot tears dripped down his reddened face.
The boys laughed harder. Each took turns punching and kicking and spitting on Jerry’s exposed body.
Jerry lay propped against the stall. Blood coated his nose and lips while the leader grinned and shared an idea with his comrades.
One of the other boys whipped out his cell phone. The other two threaten dragged Jerry’s shirt off, ripping it in places where it snagged.
“Please,” Jerry cried. “Leave me alone!”
After removing his shirt, the leader hooted and hollered. The other two boys proceed to milk Jerry like a cow and while the fourth filmed it.
Jerry’s tears didn’t stop. But he was far away, wrapped in the protective memory of his great-grandmother’s arms, eating mashed potatoes.
By the time the boys were done with him, literally kicking him out of the bathroom and into the hallway, the buses were long gone. He grabbed his jacket from his locker and started the walk home.
When he toppled through the door, two hours since he had left school, he had no more tears left to cry.
His mother was all aflutter, babying and coddling him as led him to the kitchen. She wiped the blood and snot from his face then placed a plate of reheated dinner in front of him. To ease the pain.
Jerry’s father, in all his wisdom, said, “Those boys wouldn’t have singled you out if you ever went outside to play once in a while.”
“Nonsense!” His mother said, “It has nothing to do with that, Jerry-sweetie.”
“The boy’s obese, Maude!”
His mother glared at his father. She turned back to Jerry, saying, “Don’t listen to your father. You have big bones, that’s all. It runs in the family.”
“Yeah, Ma, big bones,” Jerry said with a laugh as he chewed on a piece of chicken-fried steak smothered in gravy. “Big bones. And a fat ass. And a rack that some girls would kill to have.”
His father sent him to his room for swearing, but Jerry didn’t care. Nothing mattered. Nothing would change.
Jerry trudged down the hallway his room. He paused by the family photos hung on the wall of the living room. He leaned in to look at the pictures of him and his sister Lea. They had both been healthy looking kids once, not models to be sure, but who was?
Jerry stared at the last picture of Lea, the one taken only a few months before she ran away. He compared the one from the year before and noticed how much slimmer she looked in the last picture, at her high school graduation. She was still a big girl, but he wondered if she had been harassed and if their mother had enabled her, too.
He wished he hadn’t been so much younger than her, so that maybe they could have talked and helped each other. Maybe he would know where she was now, if they had.
His mind made up, Jerry returned to the kitchen briefly. He announced, “I’m going on a diet. Tomorrow. I’ll show you big bones.”
The next day at school, Jerry learned that the boys had posted the video online. It had gone viral. When the principal called him down to the office, one of the boys was waiting for him outside the class. He slammed Jerry against some lockers, and told him he would have a lot worse coming if he said anything to the adults.
Even though he wanted to say something, when the principal and the school counselor asked him about the video he tried to keep quiet.
“Jerry,” the counselor said. “If you need to talk to anyone about this, now’s the time.”
Finally he said, “No, ma’am. It was just a joke.”
The principal said, “A joke?”
“Yes, sir. I was acting. For the camera.”
The counselor asked Jerry to come see him later that week, but Jerry had no intention of going. He didn’t want the boys who had attacked him to think that he would rat them out.
The rest of the day wasn’t much better, but Jerry tried and kept to his diet. He chose spaghetti for lunch but skipped the meatballs and buttered bread. He grabbed a milk instead of a soda and had a yogurt fruit cup for dessert. It wasn’t as filling as he wanted, but it was all tasty at least.
At the end of the day, he avoided the bathroom and made it home in one piece. As Jerry approached the front door of his house, he could smell his mother’s cooking.
“She’s baking mac and cheese and ribs? Tonight?” He said to himself, “What a bitch.”
Jerry turned away from the house. He walked down his street, moving thick legs with one bounding step at a time.