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

My name is Andrew Zansky.

I’m fifteen years old, and I weigh 307 pounds.

Actually, I weighed myself yesterday on Mom’s digital scale, and I’m down to 306.4.

306.4 is big at my age. Okay, it’s big at any age. It’s not big enough that they make a Discovery Channel documentary about you, but it’s big enough that you stand out wherever you go. There’s no flying under the radar at 306.4. There’s a lot of surface area to reflect radar signals.

Dad says I carry it well. That means I don’t look more than 275. It doesn’t make me feel any better.

Mom says being fat is not my fault. She says I have a glandular problem. She says it runs in the family.

Grandma Isabel was fat. So was Papa Joe. Papa Paul is chunky, but I’m not sure how chunky, because he lives in Florida and we hardly ever see him in person. He learned to use e-mail last year and now he sends us photos. He looks pretty big in the photos. He’s always wearing a loose shirt, and his skin is very pale. For me, those are important clues. Most people take off their shirts in Florida, and their skin turns brown like car leather. But when you’re fat, you don’t take off your shirt for any reason. Not for the doctor, not at the beach, not anywhere. That’s why I think Papa Paul is bigger than he looks.

Speaking of shirts, I sometimes wear two—my regular shirt and a T-shirt underneath—just in case I’m hit by a car on the way to school. If the paramedics have to cut off my shirt to save my life, there will be another shirt underneath. It’s bad enough to get hit by a car. But to be hit by a car and have your blubber hanging off the side of an ambulance stretcher on WBZ-TV? No, thank you.

My mom isn’t fat exactly, but she’s always fighting her weight. When I say always, I mean all the time. 24/7. It doesn’t help that she’s a caterer. It’s hard to be thin when you’re a caterer. She has to taste things, right? Mom’s problem is that she doesn’t taste a little bit, she tastes the whole thing. Then she complains that her pants are tight and her life is ruined. Then she complains that my pants are tight and my life will be ruined if I don’t go on a diet. It’s what they call a never-ending cycle.

There’s a lot of fat in our family, but there’s some thin, too. Dad is thin and athletic, and my sister Jessica is super skinny. She’s also a super bitch, so there’s clearly no correlation between being skinny and being nice, at least in her case.

That’s my family. Some of us are fat, some are thin.

It may be true that we have a glandular problem, but if so, it’s extremely selective.

I hate my pants. Especially right now. The first day of school.

They’re sitting on the dresser taunting me, waiting for me to try them on.

I don’t like that they’re size 48. I also don’t like that they’re Levi’s, and the company puts the size on the waist where everyone can see it. Are they crazy? Nobody brags about wearing size 48. If Levi’s were cool, they’d have a cutoff point at size 32. Even if you bought jeans bigger than that, the waist would still say 32. They could come up with a good marketing slogan for it. “Tease-Proof Pants.” Something like that. Then people like me could wear them without having to erase the label for an hour.

Okay, I admit it. I erased the number, but really gently so it looks like it wore out on its own because of my belt, not because some fat kid erased it. Really, what choice did I have? If I walk through school with size 48 on my waist, it’s social suicide. I might as well wear one of those yellow-and-black OVERSIZE LOAD stickers they put on trucks.

The pants are sitting next to a preppy button-down, brown-checkered socks, and a pair of blue underwear. Mom laid them out last night before I went to bed. She still picks out my clothes for me. Embarrassing, right? She wants to control everything that goes on my body and everything that goes into it, too. It’s because she wants me to be thin. If I can’t be thin, she wants me to look thin. And if I can’t look thin, she thinks I should act thin.

When Mom looks at me, she sees a fat kid. Which makes her about the same as the rest of the world. They don’t see Andrew. They see big.

These are the kinds of things I think about when I’m getting dressed. Crazy, right?

These pants have to fit. They have to, or I can’t go to school. No school means no degree, no degree means no college, and no college means I’m pumping gas at a Mobil station in Roxbury. According to Dad, that’s the fate of all kids who don’t have a 4.0 when they graduate. So I pick up the Levi’s, suck in my gut, and pull them up. I’m not even at my waist and I already know I’m in trouble. My pants hate me. They don’t want to be seen with me. They want to find a nice size 32 kid and hang out with him.

I grasp at the waist, suck in my stomach, and pull forward and in. The two sides move slowly across the Grand Canyon of my gut, until finally, miraculously, the metal button slips through the slot.

They’re on. Barely.

Just once I want to button a pair of jeans and still be able to breathe. It doesn’t seem fair that I should have to choose between pants and oxygen.

I glance at the clock.

7:02. In an hour I’ll be sitting in homeroom. The thought makes me want to get back into bed and stay there until graduation.

I notice a piece of paper on my night table. It’s got my writing on it. I pick it up and take a look.

Remember April , it says.

April. The girl I met yesterday. Not just any girl. The Girl of My Dreams: Asian Edition.

I dreamed about her last night, and I woke up with a tent in my sheets and wrote myself a note. I guess it made sense in the middle of the night, but this morning it just seems cruel.

Why remember a girl you’re never going to see again?

Why think about her at all?

Kids are rushing around this morning, chattering away because it’s the first day and they’re excited. What’s it like to be a kid who’s excited about school? I try to imagine it. I guess you don’t sit up the night before school thinking about girls you’ll never meet again or praying that your pants will fit. You think about how much fun it will be to see all your friends and have girls giggle when you talk to them rather than totally ignore you or walk away.

I open my locker. Number 372 on the third floor. I’m a little concerned because I weigh 306.4. What if my locker number is some kind of omen of things to come?

I start thinking about April again, and it makes me kind of sad and happy at the same time. Suddenly a shadow passes by, and I get body-slammed from the back.

“Watch where you’re go—” I start to say, and then I see who I’m about to say it to.

Ugo.

Let me tell you about Ugo. Imagine the ugliest creature in the scariest horror movie you’ve ever seen. That image in your head? It’s attractive compared to Ugo. Seriously.

Ugo says, “You’re looking good, Zansky. Did you lose an ounce?”

Actually, it’s ten ounces. But I don’t tell him that.

“I don’t want any trouble this year,” I say. Ugo and I have been at war since the first week of ninth grade. I don’t even know why. I just know that Dad doesn’t like it when I have issues at school. It makes him question his legacy.