Here i am, p.1
Here I Am, page 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.
Text copyright © 2024 by Shaunta Grimes
First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Albert Whitman & Company
ISBN 978-0-8075-0412-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8075-0413-0 (ebook)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 SMI 28 27 26 25 24 23
Jacket art copyright © 2024 by Albert Whitman & Company
Jacket art by Jess Vosseteig
Design by Erin McMahon
For more information about Albert Whitman & Company,
visit our website at www.albertwhitman.com
For the girl at the pool who inspired this story. Thank you.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
CHAPTER 1
Lou Duncan pulled away from me, and I forced myself to stay on my side of the sofa.
If I moved toward him, even an inch, I’d lose a silent war. A secret war. One where my only mission was to keep myself from begging for his attention. So, instead of chasing Lou, I rebraided my hair.
When I was done, I said, “You’re kind of a jerk, you know?”
“Come on, Celly.”
“It’s not fair to Vivi.” As if he didn’t know that already. As if he hadn’t said the exact same words to me a dozen times. At least. “She thinks you love her.”
Knowing that I wasn’t being fair to Vivi either didn’t stop me from wanting him to say she’s wrong.
What he did say was, “She loves herself enough for the both of us.”
Lou handed me the hair tie he’d pulled from my braid as soon as he was inside my house, when he kissed me. Just like always, he had the elastic wrapped around his wrist.
I won’t lie. Sometimes I braided my hair just so he could do that.
He stood up and walked to the sliding glass door that led to my back patio. Nice, high walls. The better to keep out prying eyes.
Lou was about to start spring training and had a baseball scholarship for the fall, but that didn’t stop him from taking a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket and lighting one. I followed him outside and sat at the picnic table where my family sometimes ate dinner in the summer. Lou didn’t look at me.
I inhaled when he did, breathing in through my nose, and wondered if the smell of tobacco smoke would always make me think of him. “It’s not fair to me, then.”
“Don’t give me a hard time, Celly.” Inhale. Exhale slowly, his face turned just enough so that the plume of smoke bloomed away from my face. “Let’s just keep this fun, OK?”
Fun. I was good at fun. I smiled and made an attempt at shoving a stick into the spokes of my spiraling mood.
“You’re such a jerk.” I reached for him, and he came closer so that I could rest my forehead against his stomach. “All I want is to go to Morp with you.”
Morp was a reverse prom. A seriously outdated and homophobic concept. Girls ask the boys, publicly, with a rose delivered during school lunch. Tomorrow.
“I’m your jerk, you know?” He wrapped my braid around his hand, his thumb rubbing the elastic. “For real.”
My teasing tone had worked, even if my heart wasn’t in it. Problem was, I couldn’t hold it in today. It happens. The stick broke. I sat back again and looked up at him. “As long as no one else knows.”
His smile fell. “Don’t do this.”
If it wasn’t fun, he didn’t have any reason to be with me. I knew that. We had a kind of contract between us, and I never had any delusions about what we were.
It wasn’t like I went into this thing with him with my eyes closed.
I stood up and went back inside to sit on the couch. He finished his cigarette, leaning against the doorjamb. I’d have to light a candle after he was gone.
Whenever Lou texted me something like Noon? I knew he meant at my house.
Both of my parents spent all day at the gym they owned. He had a stay-at-home mom. That’s what she called herself, even though Lou was the youngest of her four children and he was a senior in high school.
His mom wasn’t the only reason, though. He could get away with saying that he was at my house to see my sister, Jenna. She was a freshman, but she was also on the school dance squad, and she offered him plausible deniability.
He could say he was hanging out with her, if someone at school asked. The idea triggered my gag reflex, but it was true. He’d rather people thought he was hitting on my fourteen-year-old sister than me.
If one of his friends saw me knocking on his door, there’d be no good explanation. None they’d accept, anyway.
I shoved all of that out of my mind. It was too ugly to keep around for more than a few seconds.
Lou flicked his cigarette onto our lawn, then came in and sat next to me. He smelled like smoke now, but I didn’t mind. He pulled me closer to him and kissed me. Finally, he leaned back just enough to whisper, “I’m sorry.”
What he didn’t say was I’m sorry, so let’s stop this bullshit. He didn’t promise to break up with Vivi. He didn’t say that he wasn’t really ashamed of wanting to be with me. He didn’t tell me that he wanted to go to Morp with me.
Any of that would have been a lie. All of that would have been a lie.
I told myself it meant something that he didn’t lie to me the way he lied to Vivi.
I made another attempt to drag myself away from my bad mood. Lou and I were both going to school in Las Vegas in the fall. We hadn’t planned it. That’s just the way it’d turned out.
Vivi was headed to Brigham Young.
“To me, you’re beautiful,” he said.
Right. But his friends wouldn’t understand the switch from Vivi Hughes, a pom-pom girl they all wished they could be with, to Marcella Boucher, the fatass they’d called Moocella since the first grade.
CHAPTER 2
Mom sat at the kitchen table with her back ballerina-straight and tracked me as I moved around the kitchen.
“What?” I finally asked when she’d literally turned around in her seat to look at me.
“Are you buying a rose today?”
I gave a box of cereal a shake and looked at her, trying to decide if she was serious. Oh my God, the sincerity in her face was going to kill me. “No, Mom.”
“You’re not going to Spring Fling?”
“No. I’m not going to Morp. No one calls it Spring Fling anymore.”
She stood up, took the Lucky Charms from me, and replaced the box with Special K. “I remember buying my first rose. I was a freshman. Tom Norton was a junior. I wonder whatever happened to him.”
“They don’t let freshmen go anymore,” I said.
She looked up at me. “Oh. Right.”
Oh, right. They didn’t then either.
Replace two meals a day with a bowl of Special K, the back of the box promised, and wear a bikini by summer. “I don’t have anyone to give a rose to.”
My mother stuck the smiling leprechaun back in the pantry, deep behind my father’s protein powder. Right. I only had ten inches on her and had surpassed her ability to put things out of my reach before I hit puberty.
She also seriously overestimated my desire to eat stale marshmallows for breakfast.
Back at the table, Mom had a cup of unsweetened herbal tea and a single slice of sprouted wheat toast with half an avocado smashed over it. Sprinkled with black pepper. No salt. “I’m sure there’s a boy.”
“Of course, there’s a boy.” He smoked a Marlboro Light on our back patio yesterday afternoon. “I’m fat, not dead.”
“Celly.”
“Mom.”
“There’s no need for that.”
I wondered what she would think if she knew the boy was Lou or how often he came to our house to do things with me that she wouldn’t approve of.
In her senior year, Mom had a huge, ratted pouf of platinum-blond hair and icy blue eyes. She weighed maybe a hundred pounds and was a cheerleader with a scholarship and big dreams that were squashed when she learned that she was already pregnant with me by the time they handed her a diploma.
She was not the kind of girl that boys dated only in private. My mother was the Vivi Hughes of her generation, and she wouldn’t understand why Lou had a strict no-one-can-know rule.
Or why I’ve gone along with it all year.
I looked down at the Special K again. The box had a picture of a measuring tape wrapped around its middle.
OK, maybe she would understand.
&nb
Because I was such a good girl.
What she really meant was that I was too fat for some boy to accidentally impregnate in a motel room after prom or in the back seat of his car after the big game.
Or wherever she had given it up to our dad and wound up with me.
“Your hair’s like spun gold, you know that?” She leaned in closer to me and pulled a strand through her fingers. Thick, straight, white-blond hair was the only thing I’d inherited from her. Mine fell to my waist and was the one part of me that I knew, for sure, was pretty.
Everything else—height, definitely weight, green eyes—came from Dad. I was what happened when the prom queen procreated with the linebacker captain of the football team.
I put the cereal away. “I’m late.”
“Wait.” She took a half-bite of her toast, chewed it, and swallowed. “I haven’t seen you at the gym lately.”
My parents had opened a strip-mall gym with a loan from my dad’s father when I was two years old. And because being the fattest kid in school wasn’t torture enough, the gym was called Belly Busters.
They named it after me.
Marcella became Celly, which became Belly when I was a fat baby. Mom called me Celly Belly one day at school, when I was in the second grade.
That was a gift that kept on giving.
“Really, there’s no reason for you not to be there every day,” Mom said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Come by after school and work out with me. It’ll be fun. And get a dollar out of my purse for that rose, OK?”
I found her knockoff Coach bag by the front door and dug out her wallet. She had several dollar bills, but I took a ten and wondered if she thought when I left the house every day I went through a time portal to Twain High School circa 2002, when she was prom queen and a rose still cost a buck.
As I approached the school bus stop a few minutes later, I tried to take its temperature.
I wasn’t above walking the two miles to school if the bus stop had a fever. The only thing worse than being surrounded by assholes is being trapped in a giant metal Twinkie with them.
A group of girls huddled together at the curb, looking at something around the corner out of my line of sight. They all wore the same uniform: skinny jeans, fake-vintage T-shirts, and Uggs. Even though it was seventy-five degrees.
Two guys with patchy facial hair and trucker caps stood behind them.
None of them paid any attention to me.
Four more kids stood half-hidden by a pine tree, sharing a cigarette pinched between forefingers and thumbs, looking over their shoulders like their mothers might come up and smack it out of their hands. Ninth graders.
A couple of them looked at me, but none seemed inclined to leave the herd. When I came around the corner, I finally saw two boys, one of them a strawberry blond with a face full of cystic acne and the other a short, muscular fifth-year senior with a mustache and a tribal tattoo around one bicep, standing in front of a small crowd, taking turns karate kicking at the backpack of a very tall boy I had never seen before.
The new kid made me think of a woodland creature—pointed chin, wide dark eyes, big ears—topped by a mop of curly brown hair. He would have looked like he belonged at the middle school, if it weren’t for his impressive height.
He was easily six or seven inches taller than me. I was six feet tall, so that was saying something.
Nathan Bernstein and Jossue Cruz laughed too hard to get any of their regular wisecracks out. Their half-uttered jokes only made them laugh harder.
“I wonder if he’s gigantic everywhere,” one of the pretty girls said as I passed by.
Classy.
The kid kept turning to get away from one jerk, only to find himself assaulted by the other.
Then the boy lifted his face and looked around. He used the back of his hand to wipe at his nose, and his cheeks were flushed a blotchy red. Anger pulsed from him, but it made him look like he was about to cry.
I knew from hard experience that tears were an aphrodisiac to Nathan and Jossue. I adjusted my bag over my shoulder and whispered under my breath, “Come on, kid. Suck it up.”
“Ah, shit, he’s crying.”
One of the groupies started it, and within seconds, the sheep had picked up on the taunting. It was weird, to be surrounded by it, but not the focus of it. A little like being in the eye of a storm.
The new kid was caught in the crosswind.
Nathan reached up and pinched the boy’s cheeks, making his lips pooch out like he was pouting as well as crying. That should have undone the new kid. So, I actually gasped when he reared back, wrenching his face from Nathan’s fingers, and then stepped forward.
I don’t know what I expected. A fight, maybe. Nathan and Jossue and boys like them win fights before they even start just by being aggressive assholes. People assume they’re going to fight dirty. But there was something about the way the new kid held himself that made me think this was going to be different.
I was still trying to figure it out when Nathan fired his knee up like a piston and caught the boy square in the balls. A low blow that was too low, even for Nathan. Where had that come from?
I don’t even have balls, but the wind went out of me anyway as I watched the kid bend forward and let loose a gagging, choking retch.
“Oh, no,” I whispered.
Oh, yes. He vomited all over the sidewalk. And Nathan’s black low tops.
Jossue busted a gut laughing at the poor kid, who stood up as well as he could and wiped his mouth on the edge of his T-shirt, exposing a wiry torso.
Nathan’s face was bright red behind his zits. “You puked on me!”
“Why don’t I knee you in the nuts and see what comes out of you.” The sound of my own voice shocked me. Panic reared up when they all turned to stare at me. Where in the hell had that come from?
“What did you say, Belly?” Nathan looked back at his friends for approval. Maybe someday I’d forgive my parents for that particular nickname. I hadn’t gotten there yet.
Oh, God. Walk away. But something about Nathan, with that shit-eating grin on his face, and the sound of the new kid wheezing gave me a little boost of adrenaline. “When are you ever going to grow up?”
Jossue laughed, which triggered the ninth graders to join in, and Nathan shot him a glare before leaning closer to me. “You’re such a fat bitch.”
Clever. “Yeah, and?”
It wasn’t bravado or a tidal wave of self-esteem causing me to speak up. I’d made my decision about Lou. Either he would say yes and my life would change, or the backlash would be so epic that nothing these kids could do would compare.
I’d reached a weird kind of bottom, and at least in this moment, there was nothing anyone could do to hurt me.
Jossue tipped his head toward me. “I think fatass found herself a man.”
It took me a minute to realize that he was talking about the new kid, who was now standing right next to me.
As one, the whole group erupted in laughter.
“Gross,” one of the trucker hat boys said. “That’s like a giraffe trying to hump an elephant.”
One of the girls he was trying to impress groaned. “He puked all over the sidewalk. I think I need to go home.”
“Go to hell,” I said, but before I could leave, because there was not a chance of me getting on that bus today, Nathan grabbed onto the fat at both sides of my waist and twisted hard.
I tried to turn out of his grip, but he only twisted my flesh in the opposite direction and stepped forward, which forced me to step back.
He flapped his lips together, making a motor sound.
I smacked Nathan’s hands, my face burning, but his fingers dug into me deep enough to bruise, and he walked me backward again. Like we were some kind of grotesque Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.
“Let her go,” the new kid said.
“I don’t need your help.” I meant it, but it was obviously not true. I couldn’t get Nathan to let me go.
Nathan stopped twisting my fat but didn’t take his hands off me. When I tried again to get away, he dug his fingers in deeper as he looked up into the new kid’s face.
I was definitely going to have bruises.
“You really have something to say to me?” Nathan asked.
The blood had drained from the new kid’s face, and he looked to me like he might faint. When I drove my elbows down, trying to dislodge my parasite, the tall boy lifted his chin and held his ground. “I said, ‘Let her go.’”
