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  For my dear family, Ella, Asa, Samaria, and Caylao, and for anyone doing their best to be all of who they are.

  Before Summer

  Who Am I?

  The life in my head seems

  so different from the life outside,

  where I am so big

  that everyone stares,

  but no one sees the real me.

  My name is Ari Rosensweig.

  This year, I am the newest seventh grader

  at Mill Valley Middle School.

  I have sandy-brown hair

  and green eyes like my father’s.

  I’m average height, but

  I am a fat kid, and I hate it when

  people call me names.

  Even though I’m overweight,

  I can still do everything

  everyone else can—

  ride my bike, play video games—

  but people just see me as different,

  only notice who I am

  on the outside.

  My mother is an artist

  who sculpts giants in clay

  and paints the world

  on canvas, on murals,

  and even on clothes;

  my father sells what she paints.

  I’m an only child.

  Sometimes I get lonely,

  wish for a brother or sister,

  but I get so much time to myself

  to do what I like to do,

  and no one interferes.

  I make role-playing games.

  I’m going to be a cryptozoologist.

  I want to find the creatures out there,

  like Bigfoot, that might seem so different

  but that belong to this world too.

  My mother says we are going

  to spend the summer at the beach;

  Out in nature, she says.

  I like the beach, but I don’t like

  taking off my shirt.

  I always have to hike up my pants,

  and I worry that there isn’t enough food,

  because I’m always hungry.

  More than anything, I think,

  I want to lose weight,

  and I don’t know how.

  Why Are You So Fat?

  people always ask (not always out loud)

  I’m not fat.

  I sit up straighter,

  feel the rolls on my body unbuckle.

  I just have big bones. That’s what my mom says.

  I have big bones and bigger spaces in between them.

  Why are you so fat?

  Well, they say my grandfather, from eastern Europe

  had a mysterious disease that made him big;

  he carried it with him,

  and he gave it to my mother

  and my mom had it and now I have it.

  Why are you so fat?

  Because my grandmother made me eat every bite,

  told me to never leave anything on my plate.

  Why are you so fat?

  It’s a gland problem.

  I’ve got bad glands.

  Someone told me about glands,

  so I think I have bad ones.

  Why are you so fat?

  The doctor says I can’t help it.

  He says I may not look normal,

  but I’m healthy enough to carry the stars,

  and this fat keeps me safe.

  Why are you so fat?

  Because I love school lunches: meat pies and yogurt cups

  and a giant cookie, and then after school

  I take the five dollars my parents give me

  and buy slices of pizza from Mario’s and play the old Pac-Man machine until dark,

  stack quarters along the edge

  until I pass the second apple.

  Why are you so fat?

  My parents are never really home anyway.

  They’re busy,

  and I fill myself up with food and watching TV,

  comic books, and going to the park, and hot dogs with ketchup and onions.

  Why are you so fat?

  Sometimes I get home to an empty apartment

  and the echo of the cars going by on the street outside.

  Why are you so fat?

  Because if someone asks enough times,

  then the question becomes the answer.

  Moving

  When your mother is an artist,

  you move a lot.

  We stretched ourselves

  across the whole country

  from New York to San Francisco,

  far from our family

  and everything we knew.

  For the artist,

  making a new life

  is as simple

  as scraping off a palette,

  setting up a new studio.

  For me

  the studio means

  quiet corners

  with slabs of clay,

  sketch pads

  and universes,

  hands and face chalked

  with pastels, potato chip grease,

  and Pepsi.

  Spider-Man comics,

  The Hobbit, and Bridge to Terabithia.

  For me it means waiting.

  It means space,

  suspended in time

  between the mother

  who is the Artist,

  the father who is too busy,

  and a son

  whose story is about being

  the new kid in seventh grade,

  awkward, big, different

  from everyone else.

  Since Leaving New York

  we haven’t celebrated

  the high holidays like we used to,

  with the rest of the family.

  It’s like things that used to matter

  suddenly don’t anymore.

  I didn’t know I cared.

  I thought of it as something we just did,

  who we are, but now that it’s gone,

  I think about those long tables

  back in New York,

  overflowing with food

  and candles at Shabbat,

  and the grown-ups

  talking long into the night,

  the cousins playing ring-a-levio

  outside, or capture the flag.

  When we left,

  they stopped talking to us,

  or we stopped talking to them,

  like we were all suddenly

  not in the same story anymore.

  When I tell this to my father

  on the way to the rabbi’s office,

  his eyes get wet,

  so I don’t say anything else.

  Rabbi’s Office

  Right away I am nervous

  because we are already

  a year late in the process

  of my bar mitzvah because my parents

  just didn’t make the time.

  My father waits outside,

  and I go in.
/>   The first thing I notice

  is a little glass globe.

  Inside is a blue river

  and green trees in the center,

  a whole world, so peaceful,

  a storybook inside glass.

  If I could, I would sleep

  next to the trunk of the tree

  closest to the rock,

  where words are etched

  in delicate precision:

  “I will pour water on the thirsty land,

  and streams on the dry ground.”

  The rabbi tells me that his grandson

  brought the globe back from Israel.

  He lets me hold it.

  He gives me saltwater taffy.

  He’s calm,

  and everything he says

  sounds like a story

  I might be a part of.

  I make promises to practice,

  and he writes down some dates

  for when to come back,

  all the way through the summer.

  It’s a good meeting. A start at least.

  It won’t be the worst thing

  to come here.

  Grown-Up Talk

  In my room, I watch

  The Greatest American Hero.

  It’s an old show

  I watch with my dad about these aliens who

  give a suit to some guy

  and it makes him a superhero.

  I think about what I would do

  if I had the suit.

  How I would fight for good.

  How I would streak across the sky.

  How I might look in that skintight suit.

  I would have to get in shape and exercise,

  or maybe the suit would change me

  just by my putting it on.

  I hear my parents

  talking in a low hum

  in the dining room,

  a gentle

  stream of words

  flowing through the house.

  It’s comfort,

  the uncomplicated vibration

  of grown-up talk,

  the sound, not the words.

  But then, in the middle of the second commercial,

  I hear a crashing sound,

  the dining room table, the pewter cup,

  the dinner dishes falling.

  The bass of my father’s yell vibrates

  through the wall.

  I hear the shriek

  of my mother’s angriest voice.

  I hear

  crashing,

  bumps,

  door slams.

  I hide in my room and wait.

  The Greatest American Hero

  slides under a car

  to stop it from crashing

  into a school bus.

  My parents yell,

  but it’s when I hear crying

  that I try to be brave.

  I open my door,

  sneak down the very short hallway

  until the sound burns like fire.

  My father sits on top of my mother,

  holds her head down,

  screaming, Fatso, you’re killing me!

  She screams back

  every word

  I have been told

  not to say.

  Other words too,

  about traveling,

  about lying again,

  another woman’s name,

  about businesses. About money.

  Words in spit and terrible angles.

  His body hangs over her,

  his weight over hers, trying to maneuver

  their awkward, swollen adult bodies.

  I want to rush in and knock him over.

  I want her to stop screaming.

  I’ve heard yelling before,

  always shouting at each other

  as if this pitch and fury

  is just a part of who they are,

  but I’ve never seen them like this before.

  When my father finally notices me, his eyes are broken,

  pleading, guilty, hopeless.

  She’s driving me crazy, he says.

  He stops, stand ups, grabs his cigarettes,

  walks out of the apartment.

  My mother gets off the floor too,

  stops crying,

  tries to pull herself together,

  takes a drink of whatever is on the table,

  stares at the door, left slightly open.

  Grown-up talk, Ari, she says,

  and sits down in her chair.

  Just grown-up talk.

  School over the Bridge

  I should be going

  to school in San Francisco,

  where we live,

  but my parents

  send me over the Golden Gate,

  to Mill Valley Middle School.

  They say they want to send me to the best school.

  It’s won all the awards, my mother tells me.

  I ask her if she’ll get me a phone now

  since I will be going so far every day,

  but she tells me, No!

  Under no circumstances, she says.

  Those things stifle creativity!

  You can always reach me on the school phone.

  At first, my father drove me every day,

  and we laughed and talked about school

  or the family in New York

  or the best ways to talk to girls,

  but after doing it for a while,

  I could tell he didn’t like

  driving over the bridge every day.

  One day he got really quiet,

  played the music a little louder,

  and we didn’t talk at all.

  This drive is too long, he said.

  There’s got to be another way.

  I Will Fight You

  Words are the source of misunderstandings.

  —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  When you are fat,

  you get picked on.

  It’s just how it is,

  especially if you’re the new kid.

  I don’t know what to say

  most of the time.

  I just want them to like me.

  I want to fit in.

  At the Ping-Pong table

  before school,

  Frank tells me

  that he is afraid of Mark,

  that he made him mad somehow.

  Frank’s one of the people

  I see before school,

  because his parents drop him early

  for the breakfast program,

  and sometimes I get there early too.

  We eat doughnuts between games,

  and I eat way too many.

  Powdered sugar

  wafts onto the table,

  white flecks

  on a green field.

  I want Frank to be my friend

  but usually he is mean to me,

  picks me last at PE,

  makes fat jokes,

  even pushes me.

  Sometimes, on bad

  days, he chases

  me on the bike path after school.

  One time he called me “Jewboy.”

  When I told my parents,

  they said to stay away,

  but there is

  nowhere else

  to go.

  For now, we are

  battling on the table,

  and for once I am winning.

  You’re pretty good, he says.

  I used to have a table at home, I reply.

  I didn’t. I try not to lie,

  but I’m scared to tell him

  that I learned to play

  with my parents, in New York,

  on vacation in the Catskills

  and at Camp Shalom.

  I don’t want him

  to ask me questions

  about being Jewish.

  Mark is weak, I say between serves.

  Mark is not weak. Not at all.


  The mini-doughnut wrapper blows across

  the table. Powdered sugar

  covers the green field, the paddles, our hands.

  You are way tougher, I insist.

  Frank is strong, but not the toughest,

  maybe in the bottom of the top ten,

  behind the obvious choices,

  mixed in with the dark-horse contenders,

  strong kids, good athletes,

  kids who do karate and kung fu.

  I tell Frank that he can kick

  Mark’s ass, that he shouldn’t worry.

  The bell rings.

  Frank smiles and grabs his bag.

  Later, he says.

  I feel the pride of helping,

  and soon, in my mind,

  I am standing on the far field,

  across from the basketball courts,

  right alongside him and the other cool kids.

  I see Frank later in PE.

  He stands next to Mark.

  They are looking at me and laughing.

  Mark is the tallest in the class.

  In the mile run,

  he glides past us

  like some action hero.

  Crushes baseballs,

  spirals footballs.

  After lunch, in the bathroom,

  Brian Yee whispers to me,

  I hear Mark and Frank are going to kick your butt.

  Why did I open my big mouth?

  I meant well.

  I just didn’t think past that moment,

  that I was the outsider,

  but I can’t go through people

  to get inside.

  I don’t fit into those spaces,

  no matter how much I lie to myself.

  I am too big,

  even in theory,

  to hide,

  too slow

  to run.

  I shouldn’t have said anything.

  We’re gonna get you, Fatboy, they say.

  How long do I have?

  First Friend

  On one of my first days

  in this new school,

  the counselor ducks me into class,

  unannounced, sits me near the back,

  close to a wiry, brown-haired kid

  with bright eyes and a square jaw.

  I’m John, he says.

  Ari, I reply.

  His desk is filled with notebook pages

  of robots and mechs from Transformers,

  Robotech, Voltron, and Battle of the Planets