I look around, and April’s still in the driveway behind me.
“I’m going to walk home,” April says. She smiles at me. “I live a few blocks from here.”
“I didn’t know that,” I say.
The cheerleader winks and gets in the car with the other guys. O. drives past us slowly. He doesn’t look over, just faces forward like he’s concentrating on the road.
April and I stand at the end of my driveway. I look back towards the house and see the living room curtains move. Jessica, of course. Harriet the Spy.
“Will you walk me a little?” April says.
“Sure,” I say.
We walk through the neighborhood together. April pulls her sweater around her. It’s the time of year when summer is definitely over, but it’s not completely fall yet.
“What are you thinking?” April says.
“I’m happy.”
“Because your mom signed the form.”
“That and other things.”
April’s lips look soft and wet in the moonlight.
“What’s going on between you and O.?” I say.
I didn’t plan to say that. It just popped out.
“Nothing,” April says.
“You said you liked him.”
“Everyone likes him.”
“Like like. You know what I mean,” I say.
“That’s over. I mean, he has a girlfriend.”
“So you don’t like him anymore?”
“Why are you asking so many questions? I feel like I’m being interrogated.”
That’s what Dad used to say when Mom attacked him.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Why are you so interested anyway?” April says.
There’s a long pause.
This is the moment. It’s time to tell April the truth about how I feel. How I’ve never met anyone like her. How I knew she was different from the first moment I saw her.
But all I can think is that I probably have Caesar salad stuck in my teeth. I’m going to declare my love with a giant, disgusting chunk of lettuce in my gap. I run my tongue around the inside of my mouth. I can’t feel anything, but that’s no guarantee. Lettuce is tricky like that.
April says, “I don’t want you to get hurt, Andy.”
“Why would I get hurt?”
We stop in the middle of the sidewalk. She puts her hand on my arm.
“I’m just worried,” she says.
My entire body is tingling. Everything is telling me it’s time. Kiss the girl, the song says. The song is right. I’m sure of it.
But there’s another song. The one in my head. It says, Fat guys don’t get to kiss the girl. This song comes with a YouTube clip. It’s a scene of a big fat kid trying to kiss this little, cute girl. She’s sitting at a desk, and he’s talking to her. Suddenly he’s overcome with passion. He leans in to kiss her, and he loses his balance and ends up knocking both of them over and practically crushing her. The title of the clip is “Elephant in Love.” When I last checked, it had three million hits.
“You look like you want to say something,” April says.
Three million hits of “Elephant in Love” are playing in fast motion in my head.
Screw it.
I take a deep breath, suck in my stomach, lean in, and kiss April.
I’m not sure if I should aim for the lips or the cheek, so I hedge my bets and go in between. I catch the skin next to her nose, but she adjusts at the last second, and our lips meet.
It turns into a long, slow, soft kiss that completely takes my breath away.
My first.
“Well,” she says. “I didn’t expect that.”
“Was it okay?”
“It was nice. How about for you?”
“Nice,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says.
I look up at the sky. There are real stars out here. They twinkle and go on forever, not at all like the ones on my bedroom ceiling.
“Thanks for helping me with Mom,” I say.
“Oh, no problem,” she says.
It’s completely dark now, and there’s a chill in the air. It’s just a little cold, but there’s something serious about it, like when your chest hurts just before you get the flu.
“I should get home,” April says.
“I’ll walk you.”
“It’s just a few blocks from here. I’ll be fine.”
“I guess I should get home, too,” I say.
April smiles. “Do you have my number?”
“No.”
“Why don’t I give it to you?”
I pull out the iPhone, and she taps it in.
“You’re an amazing person, Andy.”
“I know,” I say, even though I don’t.
April laughs.
“And modest, too,” she says.
53. people standing, person sitting.
The whole school is cheering for us.
It’s not really the whole school, because pep rallies are voluntary now. They changed the policy five years ago when some parents complained and said it was undemocratic to force kids to cheer, even for their own school. So now kids have a choice. If you don’t want to go to the pep rally, you can go to the library. That’s what I always did—sat in the library studying with Eytan while the school walls echoed with cheering.
Kind of ironic. The first time I go to a pep rally, I’m in it.
Caroline Whitney-Smith kicks things off. She talks about our rivalry with Brookline, how it goes back for nearly one hundred years. One hundred games, one hundred pep rallies before the games. I don’t want to be influenced by such a sappy speech, but it’s impossible not to be.
Being on a team. Supporting the school. Tradition.
The stuff we used to laugh about in the library. I’m starting to think maybe it really matters.
By the time Caroline Whitney-Smith finishes her speech, I’ve entered the Matrix. I’m cheering along with everyone else.
Coach starts to introduce us, one player at a time. It seems like I’m on the sideline forever when I hear him say, “Now I’d like to introduce someone really special. Our new secret weapon, the point of the arrow, three hundred and seven pounds of pure grit and muscle—Andrew ‘Big Z’ Zansky!”
Cheesy gives me a push, and I run onto the gym floor. I’m absolutely mortified. Coach just said my weight in a microphone in front of eight hundred people. I want to grab the mic back and tell everyone that I’ve lost a lot of weight during practice. I’m probably 290 now, or maybe even 285. Definitely not 307. No way.
But here’s the really crazy thing. The crowd roars. More than roars. They explode. My name, my size—everything about me gets a cheer. I look behind me and the team is applauding, and the cheerleaders are jumping up and down. When I take my place in the lineup, I wedge my helmet against my hip like I’ve seen O. do, and all the guys pat me hard on the back.
I’m big, and everyone knows it. Maybe they even like it.
Coach waits for the cheers to die down before he starts to announce the next player. He doesn’t even get past the “O.” before eight hundred people leap to their feet in unison. It’s a prison-riot scene from a movie. I’m sure the windows will shatter.
O. takes a breath as the cheers swell to gargantuan proportions, then he slowly jogs towards me, relaxed and completely unselfconscious, exactly the way he was in the hall that first day when we met. It’s as if eight hundred people calling his name doesn’t even faze him.
He holds out his fist to me, and we bump knuckles. The crowd totally flips out. I’m caught up in it just like everyone else, a huge idiot smile pasted across my face as I call O.’s name and clap my hands, cheering for my own quarterback. It’s the O-Effect in full force.
I look out across the stands where everyone is standing and cheering, and a glint of metal catches my eye. There’s a guy sitting in a wheelchair off to the side of the bleachers. He’s got a cast going all the way up his leg. At first I think he’s one of the Slow Gym kids who maybe wants to feel like a part of the action, but when I look carefully I realize I’ve never seen him before. While everyone else is cheering, he just stares.