All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Page B

flies would buzz against
the screens, the air would be as still as glass. Her mother would be in Connecticut, drinking her iced tea in a different back yard, Carl would be climbing
mountains out west, and Pinny would be there, in boring old Dunston, thinking
about both of them.
    The fat
girl was sitting on the front porch of Pinny’s house eating a candy bar and
sipping soda pop through a bright pink straw. Pinny slipped the chain that was
still in her hand into her pocket.
    “Where
have you been?” the fat girl asked, chewing.
    “Nowhere.”
    “I skipped
the rest of the day.”
    “I know.
It won’t matter now. The year’s over.”
    The fat
girl ran her fingers through her hair. “It feels weird,” she said. “Like my
head’s too light.”
    “Was it
hard to cut it by yourself?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I’d have
helped you.”
    “You’d
have told me not to.”
    Pinny
pushed a candy wrapper off the step and sat next to the fat girl.
    “Carl
Pratt’s going to California for the summer,” said Pinny.
    “Really?
How do you know?”
    “Someone
at school said so.”
    “Well, I
say good riddance, Fuck Face.”
    Pinny
wanted to explain about her and Carl Pratt, to clear the air and let her know
what to expect when he came back and school started again in the fall, but
didn’t see how. The truth was that she’d gone behind the fat girl’s back.
    “Let’s
take a walk,” said Pinny.
    “Okay.”
    They
watched their shadows move along the slate sidewalk, Pinny’s so long and thin
and the fat girl’s a bobbing circle. Where the road began its steep climb to
campus, a waterfall spilled over thin shelves of rock. A footpath ran along one
side of the falls, and Pinny led them up slowly to give the fat girl time to
catch her breath.
    They
reached a level spot on the path and stopped to watch the water rush and spray.
They leaned against the metal rail in silence. The fat girl’s face was in
shadow.
    “He wanted
me to go all the way, you know, and I wouldn’t. He said, ‘What do you have to
lose, you’re just a fat girl.’”
    Pinny’s
cheeks got hot, a lot hotter than the afternoon’s eighty-five degrees would
cause.
    “He’s a
jerk,” said Pinny.
    The fat
girl took a candy bar out of her backpack, unwrapped it, and bit off the end.
    “I mean,
it’s not like I love being like this. I’ve tried to lose weight about a million
times,” she said.
    “What
about those programs where you drop twenty pounds in two months?” asked Pinny.
    “They cost
money. And then you have to pay for food.”
    “My mother
once lost thirty pounds all on her own. Try eating a lot of protein, or
slashing your carbohydrates for a while.”
    The fat
girl stopped eating and stared at the water. Then she turned to Pinny with an
eager gleam in her eye.
    “Tell me
something,” she said.
    “What?”
    “Why do
you act dumb, when you’re not?”
    “I don’t.”
    “Come on.
Remember that one day at lunch, when someone said, ‘Irregardless of that,’ you
said to me, ‘It’s regardless!’ And in History that time, when Mr. Cain
called on you and asked who the fifth president of the United States was, you said you didn’t know but I saw you had James Monroe in your notebook
with a big circle around his name.”
    Pinny
watched the water run. She didn’t know what to say. Playing dumb was something
she’d learned to do long ago, maybe as a defense against her mother’s constant
disappointment in her.
    “I don’t
like people bugging me. If they think I’m dumb, they leave me alone,” Pinny
said.
    “Don’t you
hate getting bad grades when you can get good ones?”
    “I don’t
care about grades.”
    “How about
being treated like an idiot?”
    Pinny
shrugged.
    “Melissa
Franks called you a moron when you answered wrong in Spanish, and you got all
red in the face. You dug your nails in your palm. I saw the marks,” the fat
girl said.
    She had a
point, Pinny thought. A good one, too. She did hate being treated like