Allen Zadoff: Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have

Mom’s not just any kind of caterer. She has a specialty: mini food.

She does platters of mini cheeseburgers, mini club sandwiches, mini pizza bagels, mini muffins. She’s famous for her Skinny Mini Caesar Salad, which is a whole Caesar salad made on one piece of romaine lettuce so you can pop it into your mouth with your fingers.

Everyone likes small things. Take my sister, for instance. She’s got a waist like a stalk of asparagus, and she’s very popular.

Small food, small people. Extremely hard to resist.

Anyway, there was a platter of mini club sandwiches sitting on the table in front of me, and they were calling my name.

Andy , they said. Eat us .

I looked around to make sure nobody was watching me, and I scooped one up in my fist—

“I saw that,” a girl’s voice said.

It was an Asian girl, and she was looking right at me. She was about my age, wearing boxy black glasses that made her look like a genius. I glanced down at her cleavage—it was kind of hard to miss with the dress she was wearing—and I realized she was a beautiful genius.

Suddenly I got this strange feeling in my chest. I have to be careful with strange feelings because I have asthma. When I have an attack, it usually starts as a tickle in my chest. The next thing you know, there’s a giant fist clenched around my lungs and I’m gasping for breath. That’s why I keep an inhaler on me at all times.

“What did you see?” I said to the girl, and I reached in my pocket to make sure the inhaler was there. Like Mom says, better safe than sorry.

“I saw you snag a sandwich. You’ve got nice moves.”

“Not true,” I said, even though it’s obvious that I did it.

“Why do you have to hide it? Why don’t you just eat one?”

“My mom made them,” I said. “And she’ll kill me if I eat her stuff.”

“Your mom’s the caterer?” She picked up a mini éclair and popped it in her mouth like it was no big deal, like a person can just eat a whole mini éclair in public, with everyone looking.

“This is delicious,” she said. “What’s it like to have a mom who’s a caterer?”

I glanced down at my stomach. It was hanging over my belt like a muffin top. That kind of answered the question, right?

“Hello,” the girl said. “Anybody home?”

“What?” I said, kind of annoyed. Sometimes I get lost in my head so it’s hard to keep up my end of the conversation.

“I’m just being friendly,” she said. “Don’t pop a blood vessel.”

“April,” an Asian man with graying hair called.

That was the first time I heard her name.

“Coming!” she said.

“Now,” the man said. Then he spit out some rapid-fire foreign sentence.

“Is that your dad?” I said. She nodded. “He’s pretty tough, huh?”

“Imagine Kim Jong-il as a dentist,” she said.

I got a flash of the Korean dictator drilling a molar, and it made me laugh. This girl sounded like one of the Model UN geeks, funny and smart at the same time.

I really liked her. That was my first problem.

She smiled at me, and I noticed her teeth were super white, whiter than any human being’s I’ve seen.

“You have nice teeth,” I said, which even I have to admit was a pretty stupid thing to say.

April lowered her voice to a whisper: “I had teeth-whitening.”

“You mean like those strips?”

“No. The real thing. With the laser. Just like the actresses get.”

“Are you an actress?”

“No.”

“Then why did you do that?” I said.

“I used to look… different,” she said.

“Different how?”

Before she could answer, a stream of angry Korean came flying across the room. Her dad.

“Shoot,” April said. “I have to go.”

“Wait,” I said.

She was a little surprised. So was I. I’d never told a girl to wait before.

“Wait for what?” she said.

I had to say something. I couldn’t let her go thinking I was just a fat kid with a caterer mom. I mean, I am a fat kid with a caterer mom, but there’s a lot more to me. I don’t know why, but I wanted her to understand that. I wanted to tell her there was more to me that she should know.

“I’m a jock,” I said, which was a complete lie.

“You are?”

“Seriously,” I said. “I’m an athlete.”

“That’s cool,” she said, but it didn’t sound like she believed me.

“You know the sumo wrestlers in Japan?” I said.

“I’m Korean,” she said. “Everyone assumes all Asian people are Japanese, but we’re not. We’re a lot of different things.”

“I know that,” I said, even though I didn’t know. “But you’ve seen the sumo wrestlers, right?”

“Only on TV,” she said.

“You know how they look big, but they’re really not big? I mean, they are big, but they’re big in a muscular way. Like they’re famous for being big.”

“Okay.”

“I’m like them.”

“You’re a sumo wrestler?”

“No. I’m a jock. A big jock.”

“You’re a big jock?” she said, then she looked across the room. “I really have to go.”

She smiled again. It was like looking into car headlights.

I wanted to say something else. I wanted to say a million things, but I just grunted…

…and April walked away.

That’s what happened yesterday.

So when Eytan asks me, I tell him I have a girlfriend. I even say her name.

But it’s all a lie.

I’d never seen April before yesterday, and I’ll never see her again. That’s what happens when you’re a coward. You don’t speak up. Even when it’s the perfect time. Even if it’s the only chance you’ll ever get.

“You know my theory,” Eytan says. “Hot girls are always named after months, cities, or flowers. You meet a girl named Magnolia or Dallas—guaranteed hotness. And if you name your daughter April, she’s going to have a prom date. It’s like you’ve cut fate completely out of the picture.”

Eytan gives me a double thumbs-up and disappears into the crowd.

Sophomore year is ten minutes old, and it’s already messed up. Ugo is on the warpath, I lied to my best friend, and my stomach is killing me.

To hell with my diet. I grab the protein bar out of my backpack. I tear off the wrapper and take a huge bite. I hold the backpack in front of my face for camouflage. I don’t want people to see me eating. A fat kid chewing with chocolate smeared on his face? That’s a bad first impression.

Just as I’m swallowing, a crowd of football jocks walks by. They’re laughing, relaxed, slapping each other on the back and grunting like they own the place.

Who am I kidding? They do own the place.

In the center of the group is this one guy, O. Douglas. If we had kings in high school, O. Douglas would be king. He’s the quarterback, a senior, and a superstar. That’s three out of three. They say he’s being recruited by a bunch of colleges, which I guess is really unusual for Newton. I don’t follow sports, so I couldn’t tell you which colleges or if they mattered.

When I look at O. Douglas, I feel like I’m from another planet or something. He’s from Earth, and I’m from some planet where everyone is fat. Elephantania. On Elephantania, I’m normal-sized, and all the skinny people like O. are the equivalent of midgets. We don’t call them midgets. That would be insulting. We have some PC name for it like “narrows.” I’m normal, and they’re narrows, and everyone feels sorry for them. That’s how it is on Elephantania. I get all the girls but nobody wants to date the narrows.

As the jocks pass by, O. Douglas looks in my direction for a second, and I get this thrill in my stomach like I saw Brad Pitt or something. Even if you’re a guy and you don’t like other guys, you kind of want to know Brad Pitt, right? Sheer cool factor.