The Fat Girl by Marilyn Sachs Read Free Book Online

until now. Up until the fat girl.
    I hadn’t been dreaming about her. She wasn’t even in the dream. But when I woke up, I was thinking about her as I’d been thinking about her all through the evening. The fat girl—Ellen—said she wanted to kill herself. She didn’t mean it. Her mother said she didn’t mean it, and Norma said she didn’t mean it. But she said it. Maybe she wasn’t afraid to say it, but I was afraid. I’ve always been afraid of dying. I don’t want to die. I don’t even want to think about dying. And I don’t want to think about anybody else—even the fat girl—dying.
    I opened the refrigerator and inspected the interior. Food—I suddenly needed to eat. You couldn’t eat if you were dead, could you? I passed over the four cold artichokes, the leftover pork roast, and reached for the cold mashed potatoes.
    “What’s the matter, Jeff? Can’t you sleep?”
    My mother stood in the doorway, watching me eat my cold mashed potatoes.
    “I just woke up, Mom, and I guess I was hungry.”
    My mother nodded and moved up to the table. She didn’t have the rumpled look of somebody who had just been awakened.
    “I didn’t wake you, did I, Mom?”
    She shook her head and sat down. “No. I was up. I couldn’t sleep.”
    “Want some?” I indicated the bowl of potatoes.
    “God, no! I can’t think of anything worse than cold mashed potatoes in the middle of the night.” She laughed suddenly, and I swallowed another spoonful and grinned back at her.
    “Different strokes for different folks,” I said.
    “But I am a little hungry.” She opened the refrigerator and looked inside. She pulled out a cold artichoke, put it on a plate and joined me at the kitchen table. We both munched away for a while in a comfortable, friendly way.
    “Mom,” I said, “can I ask you something?”
    Her teeth made sharp, little parallel lines in the artichoke petal. “Sure, Jeff, what is it?”
    “Did you ever work with people who said they were going to commit suicide?”
    “Not recently. But when I was younger, I worked on a psychiatric ward, and some of the patients threatened to kill themselves.”
    “And did they?”
    “Some of them did,” said my mother, picking up the heart of the artichoke and biting off a small piece.
    “But . . . do most of them . . . I mean, if people say they will . . .”
    My mother swallowed the last bit of artichoke, daintily licked her fingers with her small, pink tongue and looked at me. “Why are you so interested, Jeff?”
    “I’d just like to know, Mom.”
    “Is it for a school report?”
    “No.”
    “Well . . .” She was looking worried now. “That’s not what’s keeping you up, is it, Jeff?”
    “I guess it is, Mom. I know somebody who says she’s going to kill herself.”
    She was still looking at me. I thought to myself, Why don’t I tell her about Ellen? I was bursting with it, and I wanted to tell my mother. I wanted to share it with her like we were sharing the quiet kitchen in the middle of the night, sharing a good, close feeling that we never usually had during the day. Maybe after I told her about Ellen, I could even tell her how scared I was that night. Maybe she’d laugh when I told her, and then I’d laugh, and then she’d say, “It’s not so terrible to be afraid.”
    “Jeff?”
    “What is it, Mom?”
    She was still looking at me, a troubled look on her face.
    “It’s not Wanda you’re talking about, is it? It’s not Wanda who says she’s going to kill herself?”
    “No, Mom, it has nothing to do with Wanda.”
    “You’re sure, Jeff? You’re not trying to hide anything from me?”
    “Mom, I swear it has nothing to do with Wanda. It’s this fat girl in my class. Why do you keep worrying it’s Wanda?”
    “Because suddenly she seems to be going through some kind of stage or other. And there’s something else. She hasn’t said anything to you, has she?”
    “About what?”
    “About what’s bothering her. She . . . she’s