Cheerleaders

by Dan Berick

She definitely had gotten fat, there was no getting around it. She was fat fat. She was a fat woman, standing in the cocktail lounge of that crummy Hyatt just off the interstate, looking baffled while the 80s music played and our high school classmates drank and hugged and waved to each other. Jenna had really gotten fat.

She wasn't alone in that condition. Not many of us were looking all that great these days, if I'm being honest. Myself included. But Jenna...that was a different thing, somehow. 

She'd moved to town when we were already in high school, and Karen and her whole gang of girls somehow had to make room for her at the top of the tree, because there was no denying how pretty and radiant and perfect she was.

So, the cheer squad had to add another spot, and Jenna and that good-looking Mark guy from the basketball team became a couple, and a new order was imposed on our little universe. Because that's how things have to be.

And buried inside that fat lady, with her dead-looking skin and beautiful eyes and red chapped hands with an ugly new manicure, there was Jenna, still. She'd moved away, a couple of towns over, after school, and broke up with Mark to marry some older guy. They'd gotten divorced or something. She still had one girl at home, and was taking care of a grandkid from another one - that's what people said, at least. I didn’t really know her, even now, other than to maybe say hi like you do when you run into people you’ve grown up with.

Mark was around town still, and he and his wife were there at "Specialties" at the Hyatt with the rest of us. There were probably fifty of us from school who’d shown up for the party, and I could see the two of them across the room. Whenever I saw him around, he looked shorter than I remembered him, but he'd always been a decent enough guy in kind of a dopey way. Still was, really, and balding and plump and moist-handed.  He was something or other on the parish council and was the sales manager at the GMC dealership. His wife was tan and leathery-looking, scrawny and showing too much skin. Frosted hair, lots of cheap-looking jewelry. She was looking at Jenna and holding on to Mark's arm like she was battling a strong wind. None of us really knew her at all.

"It's Disco Dave!" Two big hands shaking me by the shoulders. Just Kenny and some of his buddies, drinking Genuine Draft and making noise and hanging out, same as always. "How've you been, man? Good time, right?"

Kenny wasn't going to change, I had to give him that."Damn, Jenna sure got fat, huh?" He said it with a certain awe at first, like he’d witnessed some kind of bizarre, long-rumored natural phenomenon. "She got fucking fat as fuck!" The jokes all followed, of course, they had to. That was the way things had to be, too, I guess.   

Laughter, music, hands waving.

Ellen slid onto the stool next to me, and sat there watching the room for a minute. Plain, brainy Ellen.  She’d gone away for college and ten years or so later showed up back home again, running the office at her father's construction business, slipping back into town like she'd never left.  

"Aww, there they are, together again!" It was Kenny, now with an arm around each of us. He was singing. "Together forever, and never to part...."

"Bite me, Kenny," Ellen laughed, and Kenny wandered off, still singing. "Don't you know it would be heaven on earth...”

Ellen and I had hung around for a while when she moved back to town. Dated, I guess you’d say. We'd always gotten along when we were kids, and we were both single and plain and it wouldn’t much have surprised anyone if we’d gotten together, if they thought about us at all.

But I guess neither us of really were all that attracted to the other, and nothing much came of it. "You guys are perfect for each other," people said. Meaning we were both alone and homely and ordinary and didn't much cross anyone else's mind. But that's how it is. She knew it, too.

Plenty of ordinary to go around, though. That's the thing, I guess, about the Jennas and Karens and Marks. It's just how the world is. There's the noteworthy people, the special ones, and then there's everyone else. It just has to be that way. There’s only so much room. Only so much special to go around.

But it’s not just their kind of special. There's other kinds of special, like the people they write about in the Sunday paper. "Born With One Arm, This Brave Girl Doesn't Let Her Handicap Define Her." Or the yearbook pictures of the cheer squad visiting kids in the Shriners hospital, Jenna radiant in her Iroquois Regional High School tracksuit with the smiling doctors and the motherly nurses and the gray-faced bald sick kids in their hospital gowns. Or that kid Petey in our class, the one with cerebral palsy, in his leg braces and metal crutches. (Kenny and his buddies always called him CP Petey.) And then there's everybody else, all of the rest of us: me, Ellen, Kenny and his buddies, just about everybody else really. 

(Funny thing about Kenny and his idiot buddies. One time in high school a new kid – he’d transferred in from some rich kid school - thought he'd impress those guys by spending a whole morning following Petey around and knocking his books out of his hands, over and over again. Or maybe he was just fucking nuts, who knows. It made an impression on Kenny, I guess. He knocked out three of the kid's teeth and split both his lips. "You don't FUCK with CP Petey," the assistant principal heard him shouting, as his buddies Greg and Big Fish and Bill T stood guard. "CP Petey is OUR DUDE."

It was nothing less than the truth, though. We'd grown up with Pete and his crutches. Miss Gardocki at Truman Elementary had made us all learn about cerebral palsy (Kenny sure as shit wouldn't have called him "CP Petey" in front of her). We took turns in elementary school being "Petey's Helper". Petey was our dude. No new kid could understand that. Anyway, that kid disappeared, and Kenny got suspended for six months (and his dad let him have it pretty good, too, for good measure). Petey's teaching college somewhere. I heard he's in a wheelchair now.)

Big Fish was still standing near us at the bar, looking absently around the room. "Hey, Petey didn't come tonight, did he?" 

(Jesus, can he read my fucking mind?)

"Damn...CP Petey, right? Fucking college professor. Professor Pete. That dude was smart as fuck." Big Fish shook his head. "He was a good little dude. He shoulda come tonight." He waved a fat hairless hand vaguely at the room. "Shoulda come, you know? Come and see everyone, right?"

We needed them, that's the thing. All of the rest of us. We needed Jenna to be beautiful and Petey to rise nobly above his disability. We needed their exceptionalness, even just in reflection, to define us. To give us shape and color and texture. Because what were we otherwise?  It didn’t much bear thinking about, to be honest.

I turned around in my chair and looked at the room. What were we, anyway? Most of us weren’t much of anything, if you stopped to think about it. And now Jenna was just another fat middle-aged divorcee, and Mark was selling cars and trying to smile at his unhappy-looking, badly-dressed wife, and they weren’t much different than any of the rest of us.

At least Pete had been true to us. And from afar, we admired him still, just like Miss Gardocki had taught us to. He could still make us feel something like noble. Noble and special, somehow. It was fat Jenna and pudgy sweaty-hands Mark who had let us down. By ending up being just the same as the rest of us.

The party swirled around us, as Ellen drank her rum-and-coke, her thick strong forearms on the bar in front of us. Poking absently at the slice of lime at the bottom of the glass with her swizzle stick. Plain, sturdy, sensible Ellen. She never said much about the years she'd been away. There'd been a man, people said, and somehow things had gone wrong. He was married, I’d heard. But I don't think anyone knew, really. Or cared much, I suppose.  And Ellen and me....well, I would've, yeah. And I'm sorry it didn't work out. For one thing, there's too much time alone, too much time just being in my head. But Ellen wasn't going to settle for me. Even when nothing much else ever seemed to have turned up for her. She had more respect for herself than to just double down on ordinary. And I get that, I truly do.

Long time ago, anyway.

"Well, here we all are." 

The music was playing, voices mingled into an indistinct blur of noise, faces moved among the shadows. Jenna's hair flashed under the lights, her incongruous bulk lost among the crowd of bodies. Laughter, voices raised, lights, music.

"Here we all are."

I stood up and walked through the crowd, away from Ellen, right past Jenna and Karen and Mr. and Mrs. Mark and Big Fish and Kenny (shouting "Disco Dave!" at me again) and everyone, out of Specialties and through the worn-out lobby of the old Hilton, past the glassy-eyed high-school kid working at the front desk and the knot of smokers clustered just outside the doorway, out into the half-empty parking lot, letting the noise of the trucks on the highway rushing past behind the screen of trees wash over me, into the blanketing warmth of the humid night. 

Into the night and away.

BIO: Dan Berick is a writer based in Cleveland Ohio, a husband, father, and lawyer, and a graduate of Columbia University and The University of Chicago. His recent work has appeared in Gulf Stream Magazine, The Storms, The Interpreter’s House, One ART, Epistemic Literary, The Pierian, Stone Poetry Quarterly, The Rivanna Review, FULL HOUSE Literary, 34th Parallel Magazine, Citywide Lunch and Cerasus Poetry Magazine, and is forthcoming in Santa Barbara Literary Journal.