Fat Angie (21 page)

It was late in the second half when three key Hornets’ Nest players had fouled out. Coach Laden looked to the end of the bench, where a minimum of three feet separated Fat Angie from the rest of the squad.

“Substitution,” Coach Laden told the supertoned female referee with a tattoo of a four-leaf clover peeking from beneath her zebra-striped polo sleeve. “Number forty-two.” Coach Laden looked to Angie, who had zoned out. “Angie, let’s hustle.”

Fat Angie sprang off the bench and tugged her shorts away from her crotch. Coach Laden held on to her arm and said, “Stick to the fundamentals. Do what you know.”

And with a tap on her back, Fat Angie was sent into battle. Stacy Ann, dripping in sweat and red faced, executed her famous glare.

The Hornets’ Nest tossed the ball inbounds. Stacy Ann caught and dribbled it, her eyes scanning for an open teammate.

Fat Angie fought to stave off her guard in an elbow-slugging match under the basket. An aggressive six-foot-two Titan who had failed to wear deodorant was all over her.

“Cut it out,” Fat Angie said.

“Ref!” shouted Coach Laden about the gorilla girl covering Fat Angie.

Stacy Ann dribbled. The shot clock was running out. No one was open. She had to do something. She had to . . . What happened next would be the talk of Dryfalls for years to come.

Fat Angie pushed away from her defender. She pressed to the front of the key, set a screen on Stacy Ann’s guard, and opened up a path for the wretched girl. Stacy Ann drummed for the goal. Fat Angie pivoted and followed the shot that bounced off the rim. With all her might, she leaped, pulled the ball into her, and swung her elbows like an injured snake willing to strike at anything. She shot back up and scored.

Fat Angie scored!

She actually scored in a real game!

The Hornets’ Nest crowd shot into the air. The high-school drum corps ripped out a cadence. But the game was one of speed, and the ball was back in play before Fat Angie could bask in her newfound glory.

Fat Angie fought through her exhaustion as she sprinted up and down the court. She fought the overzealous six-foot Titan guarding her like she was on suicide watch. Nothing would stop Fat Angie. If the ball made it to her hands, she would do everything she could to convert the opportunity into two points — or three points! How could it be humanly possible for a wacko fatso newbie-lesbo to display such ability without performance-enhancing drugs? It was not the magic of the jersey that the Hornets’ Nest fans had begun to chant. It was not the magic of her sister’s
HORNETS’ NEST
T-shirt beneath the jersey. It was simple. Angie felt that her sister was right there, beside her.

The Hornets’ Nest team had foolishly expired their time-outs with less than fifteen seconds on the clock. The Titans taunted their opponents with the ball and a one-point lead. Stacy Ann made her best attempt to jostle the ball out of the hands of the Titans’ point guard but lost her balance. This left a hole wide enough in the key for the fast lanky girl to drive. The Hornets’ Nest team flushed toward the key. Fat Angie pushed away from the girl she was guarding, ran toward the point guard blazing up the key, and stopped. Her feet planted. Her arms went up, and Fat Angie screamed that primitive scream. The Titan point guard shouted back and plowed Fat Angie down.

The supertoned female referee with a tattoo of a four-leaf clover peeking from beneath her zebra-striped polo sleeve blew her whistle. “Foul. Number fifty-four, red. Two.”

Foul? This was a scenario Fat Angie had not considered. Sure, there were fantasies of scoring the winning basket, but those were mere fantasies. With one second left on the clock, she had two chances at tipping the scales. Two chances to be all she could be without enlisting in the armed forces. Fate had thrown her a bone and she was completely, absolutely, without a single doubt unsure if she was dog enough to catch it.

Fat Angie rolled onto her knees and struggled up.

“Fatso,” said one of the Titan girls, who bumped Fat Angie back down.

“Hey!” yelled Coach Laden at the snarky Titan.

But the referees were too busy making small talk. Perhaps setting up a drink or two after the game. Getting knocked down did not do much for Fat Angie’s self-esteem.

A Hornets’ Nest teammate helped Fat Angie up. Stacy Ann sneered. “Don’t screw it up, Fatty.”

“She’s on our team, Stacy Ann,” said a senior teammate. “Suck it up or sit out.”

Stacy Ann stared at Fat Angie as she stepped up to the free-throw line. The referee handed Angie the basketball and moved behind her.

Fat Angie had practiced the free throw to no end. She knew it was the key component to any winning game. Ball handling, layups, three-pointers. These were fundamentals that would take skill, or a substantial amount of time, to harness. The free throw, however, had been her sister’s specialty while playing for William Anders High. It was something Fat Angie had studied year after year of her sister’s games. And right then it was Fat Angie’s specialty, or so she had to quickly convince herself while a gymnasium full of people watched — with KC and Jake looking on from opposite ends of the stands — with the notion that some mythical connection would allow her sister to hear the
whoosh
of nothing but net wherever she was.

No pressure, of course.

The cheerleaders cheered. Coach Laden paced. And Stacy Ann Sloan stood at the key, her eyes searing Fat Angie. Her lips mouthed, “Don’t fuck it up, wacko.”

Fat Angie’s armpits sweated.

Her head sweated.

Even the backs of her knees were slimy.

She wiped her clammy hands on her damp shorts.

“You can sink it, Angie!” Jake’s voice pierced the silence.

“Go, Angie!” said KC, in a rhythm of competition with the hunky Jake Fetch.

But could she? That was the question that hovered like an alien spacecraft prepared to abduct her. A bright light suddenly went off in her brain.

She was not her sister. She was Fat Angie.

Her head swung from one side of the gymnasium to the other. Then down the key of annoyed players, waiting for her to botch the shot. Most of them, anyway.

Fat Angie backed away from the free-throw line.

This was, by all rules and regulations associated with the game of basketball, an unusual act. Not an act ever dramatized in sports films. The referees were stumped as Angie jogged off court and toward the concrete stands to KC. KC pushed through the Hornets’ Nest crowd and squatted where Fat Angie held on to the red railing.

“I’m scared,” said Fat Angie.

“This is it,” KC said. “You know, where the sky clears — where something big is right around the corner.”

“And you can see a pocketful of stars,” Fat Angie said.

“Yeah,” KC said. “It all lines up. You feel it, right?”

“Yeah,” said Fat Angie. “I think. I mostly wanna throw up.”

“Yeah,” said KC.

Fat Angie smiled. KC smiled. Ignoring the obnoxious fans and even Coach Laden, KC wrapped her hand around Fat Angie’s. Then KC’s cell phone rang, jolting them back into reality. Coach Laden fished Fat Angie away. The girls’ hands pulled apart.

“Angie, it’s just two points,” said Coach Laden, reassuring Fat Angie. “Just concentrate.”

Fat Angie smiled. “Yeah.”

Then something unexpected occurred to Fat Angie. As though the thought had come to her in a spiritual revelation. “I am special,” she said, looking at KC, who jammed a thumbs-up while talking on her cell.

Fat Angie looked to Coach Laden.

Coach Laden followed the trajectory of the moment. “Exceptionally special.”

Angie jogged back to the free-throw line.

The referee warned Angie about leaving the court. Angie picked up the ball and dribbled it exactly five times. Squinted at the basketball hoop. And with absolutely no hesitation, bent her knees, flicked her wrist, and . . .

Whoosh!

Nothing but net.

The Hornets’ Nest crowd went ballistic. She had done it. She had made it. She had tied the game!

Angie’s eyes shot to the stands. Jake whipped his fist in the air, and KC —

KC was gone.

The referee handed the ball to Angie.

“You can do it, Angie,” Coach Laden shouted from courtside.

Angie’s eyes focused only on that rim as she again dribbled five times. Her arms went up and she closed her eyes as it released. In the split moment of release, Angie saw her sister. The two of them shooting hoops on the backboard over the garage. Wang jumping in. The three of them. Together. Not all perfect but —

Swoosh!
The Hornets’ Nest crowd sprang to their feet!

It was the Disney-esque ending Angie had prayed for. She had won the game. A big game. She had done it!

Only she was not lifted in the air by her teammates as Ralph Macchio had been in 1984’s Academy Award–nominated film
The Karate Kid.
They ran right past her to Coach Laden. One girl said in passing, “Way to go, Fat Angie.”

As if Fat Angie were in fact her real name.

Nevertheless, the inner beaming of one said game-winning girl could not be squashed. She looked up at that rim and whispered, “Whoosh . . .”

Her sister had to have heard —
felt
the moment when Angie had won the game.

Angie looked into the stands. No KC. Just Jake throwing a nod, then shooting his arms in the air with an explosive
V
for victory.

Stacy Ann clipped Angie’s shoulder.

“You’re afraid of
everything,
” said Angie. “And I
know
it. And that’s why you don’t like me.”

Stacy Ann shook her head. This gesture, plus her smirk, unbalanced Angie’s confidence. “I don’t
like
you because you think everyone owes you something because your sister went missing. My dad’s been over there twice. He lost three fingers. Do you see CNN at my house? Your whole family soaks up every ounce of light around here, so excuse me for not bowing down to you, your victim-ness.”

Stacy Ann disappeared behind the locker-room door.

Angie had not considered that Stacy Ann Sloan’s dislike for her could be something other than a one-dimensional mean-girl kind of hate. Stacy Ann had genuine feelings about what was clearly accurate. No one had paid attention to her father in the same way that they had Angie’s sister. If they had, Angie had not noticed. Perhaps because she had been preoccupied with her own sadness.

Angie did not know how to translate this epiphany in the letter to her sister. Perhaps she would embellish ever so slightly, so she would not appear to be as insensitive as she suddenly felt.

During the course of traveling from A to B — A being the away-game town and B being her high school — Angie wrote endlessly. While the team gabbed and laughed, while all of them were marinating in the juices of victory, Angie was elsewhere. She was in Iraq, imagining that by some miracle her sister had in fact wandered out of the desert and found a squadron. They were rushing her to a hospital — clearly she would be dehydrated — and the much-awaited press conference was imminent. Angie’s fingers gripped the uni-ball 0.7 roller-ball pen with incredible deliberateness through the whole journey — approximately forty-five minutes, give or take a minute.

She transcribed at length the details of the game. Her fierce struggle to overcome adversity and to become the young woman she was. Similar to what Coach Laden had described to her when she had fought Stacy Ann Sloan in gym class. It felt as though the fight had happened eons ago, but her sister would understand the eons feeling.

Angie paused.

She did not like feeling insensitive about Stacy Ann and had yet to include it in her letter. She twisted around in her seat and peered around the side. Stacy Ann crunched up alone. Eyes closed. Head bobbing from the bumpiness of the ride. Perhaps this would be the time to approach Stacy Ann. To acknowledge her feelings of exclusion. Just as Angie’s butt lifted for takeoff, the bus hit a pothole. Stacy Ann’s head slammed against the window. Angie braced herself in a midlean hover over Stacy Ann.

“What?” Stacy Ann said.

“Timing is everything,”
her sister had always said.
“B-ball, people. It’s all timing.”

Timing involved math, and Angie remained deficient at the art of numbers.

In short, that moment hovering above Stacy Ann was very bad timing.

“Um. Uh-uh,” Angie said, pushing up and away.

She flopped back in her seat.

Angie uncapped her pen and continued her letter. Rather than embellishing, she reconstructed the actual details of her thoughts. Minus the questions of her burnout therapist and her couldn’t-be-bothered mother. There. Right then. No detail was too small. Nothing could be left out, because her sister would want to know everything. Good and bad. The way she had always wanted to know everything. Her sister did in fact see Angie fully. When she was simply Angie, as she recently had become to KC.

The bus pulled up to William Anders High. The team charged off with the energy of a hundred victorious warriors. Many of them jammed into the compact energy-efficient cars their parents forced them to drive and kicked up gravel as they sped out of the parking lot.