All You Can Eat Tessa Yang (bio) On Tuesday afternoon, Mrs. Anjum, the lunch monitor, started screaming my name on the playground. I figured it was because of me and Payam hanging from the monkey bars by our knees again. Instead, after I'd gotten down, old Anjy pointed to the school and scolded me for being late to my appointment. I stared at her blankly until, exasperated, she grabbed my wrist and dragged me to the counselor's office, a little purple room with a thousand puppies smiling down from posters on the walls. "And there's April!" cried Mrs. Kasprazak, the school counselor. She sat at a table in the center of the room. Gathered in a ring around her were three of my classmates—Roger Cokes, who picked his nose; Liam Goodman, who cried when his team lost dodgeball; and Ariana Acardi, the only girl in the fifth grade who wore a bra because she needed one. We made an unlikely team, the four of us. I figured we were in trouble, but for what? Two weeks ago, I had paid Roger a dollar to carve a dirty word into the back of the bus seat. I'd never colluded with cry-baby Liam, though, and the only time Ariana spoke to me was to tell me to get the hell out of her way in the locker room. We had mini-lockers. Mine was the one right beneath hers. She cast an intimidating shadow with those bazoombas sagging out of their Hello Kitty cups. Maybe Ariana had somehow found out about the dirty word and tattled on me and Roger to Mrs. Kasprazak. But then what was Liam doing here? My mind spun with the possibilities. Maybe we were being demoted to the math class for stupid kids. Maybe we were all getting the fifth grade citizenship award—but who would give Ariana an award for anything? Mrs. Anjum stumped out of the room. I slid into the empty chair. Up close, Mrs. Kasprazak'sskin was loose and papery. Her perfume made my eyes water. Something citrus, like grapefruit. All I could think of was the gum my mom had chewed to help her quit smoking. "Welcome, welcome," clucked Mrs. Kasprazak. She passed around a stack of napkins with puppies printed on them, followed by a platter of vanilla cupcakes. Then she said how she was so pleased our parents had allowed us to come, how she knew these get-togethers would prove very therapeutic by letting us share what it was like to come from a broken family. [End Page 34] "You sabotaged me!" I shouted at my mother the moment she stepped through the door that night. "You're a liar, and a snitch, and—" My thoughts leapt to the word on the back of the bus seat, but as I didn't feel like spending the rest of the evening confined to my bedroom, I finished with: "You are not a nice person!" and waited, arms folded, for her response. Mom dumped the grocery bags on the counter. I could predict the contents: carrots, quinoa, organic cereals, kale. After the divorce, she'd embarked on a health kick. She stopped smoking and joined Jenny Craig. The living room transformed into her personal gym with a rack of dumbbells and squishy teal mats covering the floor. In the evening she did exercise videos, sweating and flailing like a shipwreck survivor trying to hail passing aircraft. She even got a job as the fitness lady on the local news. Amp Up! at 8 past the hour, her segment was called. She didn't know what I was talking about and had to be reminded. Then she laughed her special Mom laugh where she doesn't actually open her mouth—her "Cindy snort," my dad used to call it, which annoyed Mom because she didn't like to be compared to a pig. "Oh that thing?" she said. "The school sent me a letter months ago. I completely forgot about it." "It's so weird. Nobody wants to talk. Mrs. K just spends the whole time smiling at us, and we have to miss recess . . . Plus...
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Nov 1, 2019
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