Free Someone I Wanted to Be by Aurelia Wills Page B

shoulders.
    Dan Manke shoved his phone in my face. He was playing a video titled Four-Hundred-Pound Woman Pole Dances. “Fat-Ass, check it out — you might have a career after all!”
    The woman looked over her shoulder at the crowd. She was smiling, but her face looked dead. I knocked Dan’s hand away. “Get that shit away from me.”
    “Oooooh. Fat-Ass is feisty today!”
    I stood and picked up my books. I walked across the library to the table where Carl Lancaster was sitting. I didn’t even decide to do it. It was like taking a breath. You just breathe. He looked up, and we looked at each other for what felt like a long time, though it was probably just a few seconds. We just looked at each other. It was weird.
    He waited for me to say something. “Can I sit here, Carl.” It came out like a statement, kind of challenging, as if I was afraid he’d say no.
    He shrugged and waved his hand at the empty chairs across from him. He got back to work.
    “Carl.”
    He raised his face. There was something about the way he looked at me that was unnerving. He looked at me and saw me — he saw all of me, a person, with an inside and an outside, alive all the way through. Almost no one else did. Most people looked and saw their idea of me: fat girl, Chubs, problematic overweight daughter.
    “Carl, why aren’t you in AP chemistry? All your other classes are AP.”
    Carl’s cheeks flushed. He bit the inside of his cheek and squinted over his shoulder at the window. I’d never seen Carl lose his cool before, not even when paper footballs were pinging off the back of his head.
    He sat back in his chair and chewed on the end of his finger. “Uh . . . it’s not my best subject.”
    “You’ve got to be joking. You’ve got an A, for sure.”
    “Yeah, but I’m not certain I could get an A in AP, and my parents would shit bricks if I got anything less, and I don’t want to deal with the fallout. My mother’s always calling the counselor trying to get them to move me up, but I refuse.”
    “Wow. What’s your GPA? What do you want to study in college?”
    “I’m not going to college. My parents don’t know that yet.”
    “Shhh!” said the librarian.
    Carl Lancaster sat back in his chair in that cotton shirt and ran his hand through his hair. He looked at me so seriously and steadily, and his shirt was open at his neck. For a flash, he looked almost like a male model. Carl Lancaster.
    “You’ve got such good grades,” I whispered.
    “Screw college,” he mouthed. “Leah, you’ve got to figure things out for yourself.”
    “Carl?”
    “Yeah?” He leaned across the table, and I leaned toward him so no one would hear, even though everyone else was fifteen feet away. Our noses were about four inches apart, and I could feel his tangerine breath. It smelled like someplace far from Hilton.
    “Can we study together? I need to get a good grade in this class.”
    He sat back and regarded me again in that serious, smoky male-model way. He tapped his pen against the table. “What’s giving you trouble?”

I went with Kristy after school.
    I got to ride shotgun in the afternoons because Corinne could never go with us. She had to babysit her little brothers every weekday until seven, when her parents got home. Kristy chewed with her mouth open and filled the car with the smell of grape gum. In the parking lot, she nearly backed up into some freshman girls. She lowered her window. “Sor-rrrreeeee. I really didn’t mean to do that. Ha-ha-ha.”
    Kristy and I were like sisters now, half the same girl. I could see her so clearly, like I was looking at her through a magnifying glass: the tiny red bumps on her thin arms, how her knuckles whitened when she gripped the gear shift, the jewel-like gleam of her squinty eyes. She glanced at me and stopped chomping her gum. “What the hell are you staring at?”
    Kristy stuffed more gum into her mouth, let the little white wrappers drift out the window, and threw a half-smoked