Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Crutcher Read Free Book Online Page B

I’ve gotta stop over at the junior high and tell him thanks. Anyway, he knew Dale was after me and he offered Sarah Byrnes and me a ride home, but the bet was off if I rode in a car or if an adult helped get me to the bus.
    I said, “Hey, what’s more important, your bank account or my life?”
    Sarah Byrnes looked at me like I’d turned yupster before her very eyes. “Man, you’re lucky to have me around,” she said. “If you start using adults to save you, Dale will just wait till the one day there isn’t one around. And waiting pisses him off. Then you not only get your butt kicked, but you worry every day till it happens. This way, the more times you outsmart him, the smarter you get—you know, like a forest animal. Pretty soon you’ll be so good nobody will ever get you. You have to always think about survival, Eric. Trust me.”
    One of the reasons I hung out with Sarah Byrnes, besides that I was as fat as she was ugly, was her brains. I’ve always been considered pretty smart (a genius, if you ask me) but I consistently play Watson to SarahByrnes’s Sherlock Holmes, and from where I stood at the time—petrified by fear—her thinking seemed sound. Looking back, however, I think she said it more to win the money than to turn me into some kind of environmentally wise escape artist. I have to say in her defense, though, that just before I lost consciousness I heard her screaming at Dale that she wrote the newspaper with me.
    No help. Dale’s last words were, “Mautz only said it was him.”
    To back up a bit, I was with Mr. Webb, refusing a ride home like a moron while Sarah Byrnes was down in the janitor’s room getting an empty cardboard generator box and Mr. Otto’s dolly truck. She told Mr. Otto she had to move this huge science project from the science room to the storage room so no one would mess with it until after the science fair. Sarah Byrnes was a stickler for detail when it came to telling a good lie. She even got Mr. Otto to write DANGER—FLAMMABLE on the side of the box in adult handwriting so it would look all official.
    I was to get into the box so Sarah Byrnes could wheel me eight or ten blocks to the edge of the arboretum, where I would jump out and run through the trees like a bowling ball dodging pins. Dale Thornton wouldbe lurking in the halls and out in the parking lot waiting for me to show, and I’d be scooting the back way toward my house and great riches for Sarah Byrnes, which she promised to share with me, though not fifty-fifty because I furnished only the body while she provided the brains.
    So much for the difference between how smart Sarah Byrnes was and how dumb Dale Thornton was. He got one look at Sarah Byrnes wheeling a hundred-seventy-five-plus pounds of FLAMMABLE Eric Calhoune down the sidewalk, followed her out of yelling range from school, and made his move like the true thumb crusher I believed he would grow up to be.
    I was bouncing along inside the absolute darkness of this box, feeling like a bat in an earthquake down in Carlsbad Caverns or someplace and thinking how Sarah Byrnes and I ought to go to Southeast Asia and see if Chuck Norris had missed any MIAs that we could spring, when I heard, “Uh-oh.”
    â€œWhat?” I whispered.
    â€œShhhh.”
    I shhhhed.
    â€œDon’t breathe,” she said, as if I were.
    Now give me a little fear and a small enclosure back then and I’d heat it up like a steam room, pronto. Giveme a lot of fear and a small enclosure and I’d combust spontaneously.
    I closed my eyes (which didn’t help because it was already darker than a tomb) held my breath, and listened.
    â€œHey, Scarface.”
    Sarah Byrnes didn’t answer and we kept rolling along.
    â€œScarface!” Closer. Still we rolled. Then I felt us stop. “What’s in the box?”
    â€œNone of your stupid business,” Sarah Byrnes said.