Free All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish

can, or Chinese food containers, or pizza boxes, or
when necessary, the drugstore where Pinny bought candy with the change her
father left on his dresser after having made his own dinner out on pretzels and
beer.
    Some
talked of calling Child Protective Services. One teacher did, and a sallow
woman with dark circles below her eyes came to the house unannounced to find
Pinny doing laundry and sweeping floors, the father paying bills at the kitchen
table, and determined that the pair had formed a good, viable team in the
mother’s absence.
    Pinny
didn’t mind housework. She didn’t mind cooking a fried egg sandwich now and
then. She didn’t mind her mother being gone, because her mother was often harsh
and critical— No , no, stupid, a minotaur and a centaur are two
different things!— and could really sink a cold finger into Pinny’s heart.
She didn’t mind the way her father’s breath smelled when he’d been at the bar,
or the jagged sobs he let out some evenings when the twilight was particularly
tender and soft.
    In fact,
just about the only thing she minded was how people treated the fat girl.
    The fat
girl had transferred from another high school in the middle of the year and
often arrived after the last bell. Some said it was because she stayed too long
at the breakfast table, and the bus was long gone by the time she waddled out
to find it. The truth was that she had a little brother to dress and feed, and
a barn to muck out, with her big rubber boots still on to prove it. She smelled
funny, like earth and sweat and something sweet—like hand soap she would later
say, a cheap scent of honey and lemon.
    One thing
was sure—the fat girl knew how to make an entrance. She took her time crossing
the classroom to her seat by the window, looking at the faces turned her way as
if they were all her loving fans.
    The fat
girl’s name was Eunice, and hearing it called out by the homeroom teacher made
the other students roar. A person couldn’t help the name she was given—like
Penny, for Penelope and her mother’s passion for all things ancient Greek—any
more than she could help smelling weird or being fat. Pinny was soon a quick
defender of the fat girl— Oh, yeah? Well, you’re ugly, how about that? —sometimes
with a raised fist though she had never actually hit anyone.
    “You don’t
need to stick up for me,” the fat girl told Pinny one day. “Not that I don’t
appreciate it, but I got some ideas of my own on how to fix these losers.”
    Not long
after that a boy opening his locker was met with a rotten egg smeared on
photographs of racing cars taped lovingly to the inside of the door. This boy
had been a principal teaser of the fat girl only days before, taunting her in
the lunchroom as she ate her two bologna sandwiches, one cheese sandwich, and
several cookies, calling her Blimpo and Miss Piggy . A pretty girl
who’d told the fat girl she smelled like a used Kotex found exactly that in her
locker the following morning.
    After
school, the fat girl took a bus that drove sixteen winding miles through the
farmland of upstate New York to deposit her at an intersection of two country
roads. She walked along the one that bore east until its cracked pavement
turned to gravel and then to dirt, to arrive at her house, a two-story wooden
structure that must have been very beautiful about seventy-five years ago. The
porch wrapped around three sides, the peak had a lightning rod with a ball of
purple glass on top, and the windows were framed with shutters. The paint had
long since worn away, and the bare wood stood against the revolving seasons
like a tired, old face. She lived there with both of her parents and the baby
brother, just a year and a half old. The father had a herd of dairy cows whose
milk brought in some income, otherwise he worked for Tompkins County repairing roads. The mother sometimes waited tables at a bar six miles away and was
rumored to have a boyfriend over in Slaterville Springs, an