Free Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher

personal remarks,” Lemry warns.
    Ellerby nods assent. “I brought a tape,” he says. “I want to play it.”
    Lemry has audio and video equipment available because she has encouraged us to bring in outside stimuli to promote discussion.
    â€œIt’s a song,” Ellerby says. “Everybody’s recording it these days, but this was the first person I ever heard.” He pops in the cassette and passes out a sheet of lyrics, some of which are underlined, along with a colorreproduction of the NASA photo of the earth taken from the moon. The song is “From a Distance” by Julie Gold, and it’s sung by a country singer named Nancy Griffith.
    Nancy’s nasal twang brings a few guffaws from the heavy metal set, but we settle in on the lyrics, which talk about how “from a distance”—like maybe out in space—the world looks good. The air appears crisp and blue, mountains are capped with a pure, clean, snow frosting, and there’s no scum floating where the ocean meets the shore. From that distance you can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, and when that’s true, there’s no reason to fight. You can’t see germs and people dying from diseases; it’s just all one big whole thing that needs to be taken care of by everyone, like a beautiful house and yard. Then, in the last verse, Nancy says that’s where God watches us from: from a distance.
    It’s a good song. A great song.
    â€œThere’s a stroke of real genius,” Brittain says immediately. “Wouldn’t you just expect some theological prodigy driving a blasphemous Pontiac station wagon to bring us his religious view packaged in a country-western song.”
    â€œIf thine enemy offend thee, Reverend Swaggart,” Ellerby says back, “meet him out behind the gym after school.”
    Lemry looks around the room in mock exaggeration. “Did anyone hear me say ‘No personal remarks’?” Her eyebrows arc for the sky as she points one index finger at each. “Those are the rules. Don’t make me enforce them at workout.”
    I see her point is well taken: Mess up my class and I’ll swim you so hard your arms will drift, unattached, to the bottom of the pool.
    Lemry says, “So make your point, Mr. Ellerby.”
    â€œMy point is that God created a prototype for a reasonably sturdy carbon unit, gave us a perfectly usable place to live, some excellent advice, as in ‘words to live by’—most of which are misunderstood by the least of my brethren—and stood back to see what we’d do with it.”
    I’m surprised. I didn’t know Ellerby had any philosophical considerations. I thought he just drove his Christian Cruiser through the world seeing whose nose he could get up. And how far.
    Lemry’s eyes land on me. “Mobe?”
    My hands shoot up in surrender. “I give a wide berth to all religious discussions. My plan is to get baptized late in the afternoon of the evening I die, so I don’t have time to sin. A spot in heaven awaits me.”
    â€œCute,” she says. “And chicken. Jody?”
    Shoot. I should have uttered something biblical.
    Jody flashes a sideways glance at Mark, saying simply, “I guess I think God takes a closer look than that.”
    I could go either way on this. I don’t have a quarrel with Christianity one way or the other. As near as I know, Mom doesn’t have religious beliefs, so I wasn’t brought up with any. I know some Bible stories from going to Sunday School with my friends when I was younger, but mostly they were just good stories. I see where getting religion quick here could work to my advantage with Jody, but I can’t jump ship on my friend Ellerby. Steve has a reputation as a verbal troublemaker, and I would abandon him in a second for Jody alone, but not for Mark Brittain. So though I can once again see how the Russians and the