Read Online Good Luck, Fatty by Maggie Bloom - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Maggie Bloom
Tags: english eBooks
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boys entering me.
Tom’s a virgin, I remind myself. And, oh yeah, there’s a teeny-tiny speck of a chance I might be pregnant.
His hands go from holding up the box to caressing my back and hips and then…
Crash!!! Bang!!! Boom!!!
The contents of the box clatter about our feet, a fair amount of the noise absorbed by the speckled carpet. Still, I glance at the stairway, expecting someone to come running. But no one does, the merriment upstairs in full swing.
Tom and I bend over at the same time, conking heads. “Ow,” I whine, an instant headache developing. (Can his head really be that hard?)
He rubs at his temple. “Wow, do you drink titanium-fortified milk or something?”
So he thinks I’m thick-headed too? Fantastic. “As a matter of fact, I do,” I declare, with mock indignation.
From the looks of the items strewn across the floor, the box belongs to Mr. Cantwell, not Wilma (unless she’s a little on the freaky side). I reach for an upside-down magazine and turn it over. It’s a Playboy, circa nineteen eighty-five.
Tom and I exchange embarrassed but excited glances, the Playmate on the cover enticing us to look further with her moony blue eyes and cherry-kissed smile. I pass the magazine to him and say nothing.
We gather up a bunch of other personal memorabilia and guy stuff (matchbooks from various motels and diners; a giant marble and a brittle, peeling baseball glove; a couple of Penthouse s to complement the Playboy; a magnifying glass with half an inch of dust caked to it; and a cache of vinyl records).
“These are awesome,” I say, sifting through the 33s (the big, old albums the size of pizza boxes) and 45s (the smaller records with one track on each side). Until I was eight, Gramp had a Pioneer turntable, which he’d fire up every Sunday evening for some Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley, or The Platters. When the thing died, we couldn’t afford a replacement.
Tom takes the records from me and, one at a time, stacks them in a neat pile. “Holy shit,” he says when he gets to a particular 45 with a jacket image of a voluptuous topless chick riding a bike and wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and tube socks. “I remember this,” he says, turning the record over in his hands as if he’s unspooling a filmstrip of old memories.
“What is it?” I ask (besides a little soft-core porn, since the cover model is mostly naked but pictured back-to).
He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “My mom used to sing this to my dad every year, instead of Happy Birthday. ”
I glance at the record jacket and note that the tunes are by Queen, a band about which I know next to nothing. “ Bicycle Race? ” I say, reading the title of the A-track.
Tom chuckles, shakes his head. “Uh-uh,” he says. “The other one.”
I feel weird reading the title of the B-track aloud, but I do it anyway. “ Fat Bottomed Girls? ”
He grins. “She thought it was about her, I guess,” he says, without a trace of self-consciousness, or pity, or meanness.
“Do you have a record player?” I ask, wondering how a song about an overgrown body part could inspire an actual fat person to adopt it as their anthem.
He raps his knuckles against a blond wood cabinet that’s the base of our archeological dig.
I blink. “Huh?”
He raps again. “Right here.”
“That’s a record player?” I ask. The turntable Gramp had was the size of a suitcase.
“Not the whole thing,” he says, in a tone that suggests I may be brain-dead. “Just the guts.”
“Does it work?”
“Last I knew.”
Without me having to ask, he begins unearthing the cabinet, and I arrange the boxes out of the way, along the wall. Together we drag the cabinet over by the sofa, where there’s access to an electrical outlet. With a what-the-hell? shrug, he plugs it in (since when do we plug in furniture anyway?). Then he flips the lid open, revealing the turntable inside. “Got the record?” he asks, his string-bean fingers extended.
“Oh,
Tom’s a virgin, I remind myself. And, oh yeah, there’s a teeny-tiny speck of a chance I might be pregnant.
His hands go from holding up the box to caressing my back and hips and then…
Crash!!! Bang!!! Boom!!!
The contents of the box clatter about our feet, a fair amount of the noise absorbed by the speckled carpet. Still, I glance at the stairway, expecting someone to come running. But no one does, the merriment upstairs in full swing.
Tom and I bend over at the same time, conking heads. “Ow,” I whine, an instant headache developing. (Can his head really be that hard?)
He rubs at his temple. “Wow, do you drink titanium-fortified milk or something?”
So he thinks I’m thick-headed too? Fantastic. “As a matter of fact, I do,” I declare, with mock indignation.
From the looks of the items strewn across the floor, the box belongs to Mr. Cantwell, not Wilma (unless she’s a little on the freaky side). I reach for an upside-down magazine and turn it over. It’s a Playboy, circa nineteen eighty-five.
Tom and I exchange embarrassed but excited glances, the Playmate on the cover enticing us to look further with her moony blue eyes and cherry-kissed smile. I pass the magazine to him and say nothing.
We gather up a bunch of other personal memorabilia and guy stuff (matchbooks from various motels and diners; a giant marble and a brittle, peeling baseball glove; a couple of Penthouse s to complement the Playboy; a magnifying glass with half an inch of dust caked to it; and a cache of vinyl records).
“These are awesome,” I say, sifting through the 33s (the big, old albums the size of pizza boxes) and 45s (the smaller records with one track on each side). Until I was eight, Gramp had a Pioneer turntable, which he’d fire up every Sunday evening for some Chubby Checker, Elvis Presley, or The Platters. When the thing died, we couldn’t afford a replacement.
Tom takes the records from me and, one at a time, stacks them in a neat pile. “Holy shit,” he says when he gets to a particular 45 with a jacket image of a voluptuous topless chick riding a bike and wearing nothing but bikini bottoms and tube socks. “I remember this,” he says, turning the record over in his hands as if he’s unspooling a filmstrip of old memories.
“What is it?” I ask (besides a little soft-core porn, since the cover model is mostly naked but pictured back-to).
He gets a faraway look in his eyes. “My mom used to sing this to my dad every year, instead of Happy Birthday. ”
I glance at the record jacket and note that the tunes are by Queen, a band about which I know next to nothing. “ Bicycle Race? ” I say, reading the title of the A-track.
Tom chuckles, shakes his head. “Uh-uh,” he says. “The other one.”
I feel weird reading the title of the B-track aloud, but I do it anyway. “ Fat Bottomed Girls? ”
He grins. “She thought it was about her, I guess,” he says, without a trace of self-consciousness, or pity, or meanness.
“Do you have a record player?” I ask, wondering how a song about an overgrown body part could inspire an actual fat person to adopt it as their anthem.
He raps his knuckles against a blond wood cabinet that’s the base of our archeological dig.
I blink. “Huh?”
He raps again. “Right here.”
“That’s a record player?” I ask. The turntable Gramp had was the size of a suitcase.
“Not the whole thing,” he says, in a tone that suggests I may be brain-dead. “Just the guts.”
“Does it work?”
“Last I knew.”
Without me having to ask, he begins unearthing the cabinet, and I arrange the boxes out of the way, along the wall. Together we drag the cabinet over by the sofa, where there’s access to an electrical outlet. With a what-the-hell? shrug, he plugs it in (since when do we plug in furniture anyway?). Then he flips the lid open, revealing the turntable inside. “Got the record?” he asks, his string-bean fingers extended.
“Oh,
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