Big Red

She’s a fat girl. Everyone except her mother tells her she isn’t. But in the dark, when she takes off everything and unfolds the parts of her that get squished and tucked by clothes, the big white bits of skin and whatever’s underneath, Chloe knows exactly who and what she is.

She is not big-boned. She is not meaty. She is not the kind of curvy woman-to-be that the artists used to like to paint in green robes. She isn’t that z word that she always forgets and can never pronounce right. She is fat.

She’s supposed to mind being fat, but she doesn’t, not really. She likes the way her belly spoons up to her when she brings her legs in, she takes comfort in holding the big bits of her in her fists, squishing the parts of her that can be squished.   Her thighs are big and they hold her hands tight between them.

*

Grandma lives with them. She’s been there, for as long as Chloe can remember, snoring in her small room off the hallway or crocheting afghans in the living room. There are afghans all over the house in various shades of pale, mismatched hues: bright greens and baby yellows, oranges and browns, one red, white and blue one that was made to look like a flag.

“They have huge holes in them, Chloe,” is what her mother says on those sometimes when she comes to flick off the light and say goodnight, her small hips leaning against the doorframe. “How can you sleep under them? Let me buy you a real bedspread.”

But Chloe doesn’t want a real bedspread. She knows the holes are there on purpose. They’re not even holes, not really. They are flowers and petals and sometimes blank spaces with no obvious pattern. When she’s in bed, she sticks her toes through the holes, clings to them with the curve of her foot like netting. She is anchored, and then she can drift and sleep.

*

Chloe’s mother’s boyfriend, Rob, also lives with them, sometimes. He comes and goes, but not in the bad way that Chloe knows boyfriends sometimes come and go. There is no fighting or throwing of things. Sometimes he’s there and sometimes he isn’t.

Rob is the head butcher at Jim’s Market, and when he lives with them, he comes home smelling like meat and metal. He is small for a butcher, Chloe thinks. Skinny. But then her mother is skinny also and maybe that makes them a good pair.

When he lives with them, Rob doesn’t notice Chloe. This is his way of pretending she’s not fat, the way his eyes slide right over her as though she’s not there, as though she’s so skinny she disappears right from view, can’t be seen at all.

*

Grandma is crocheting a red afghan for Chloe. It’s not any of her usual patterns; it’s all one color, all red, the finished rows hanging off of Grandma’s crochet hook like a long red tongue.

Chloe’s mother doesn’t like it. Chloe knows because her mother doesn’t say anything for a long time, just watches the tongue grow out of the corner of her eye. She’s sitting on the floor, packing baskets full of chocolates and soaps for her gift business, a work-at-home thing she started last summer when she thought she was going to lose her job at the diner.

Chloe’s mother has skinny legs, like just bones inside her pants, and she sits spread-eagle so the basket is tucked between them. She adds another chocolate bar, settles it just so in the bright yellow paper curls. Then she speaks.

“Mama, did you have to make red? Jeez, it looks like a pirate flag or something.”

Chloe wants her mother to hush. The red is mostly an accident–Grandma gets her yarn for free from the senior club at the fire department and someone brought in a whole bag of it–but now that Chloe has seen it being made, she wants it. Maybe more than she’s ever wanted anything.

“The girl wants red, the girl gets red,” her Grandma says clearly, and then not as clearly. “Least she’ll use it. Not like my own daughter, who throws my hard work all away when she thinks I’m not looking.”

Chloe loves her grandma so much that it’s a pain in her throat, like when she sees those puppies in a box that are free for adoption. Or when she watches a skinny woman in a bikini walk across the TV set.

“Mama, I donate them to the hospital. We can’t use six-hundred afghans. Jeez.”

“Well, if we didn’t have six-hundred boxes of junk…” Grandma lets her voice trail off, the plastic sound of her crochet hook against her finger finishing the rest of the sentence.

Chloe’s mother sighs and tucks in a long skinny candle before she gives Chloe the go to bed sign, which is basically a sweep of her hand through the air. There is no touching of Chloe.

“Hey, hey,” her grandma says as Chloe stands.   “Where’s the love?”

Sometimes her grandma sounds like the high schoolers at Chloe’s school and this both scares her and makes her smile. Chloe leans in and kisses her grandma’s stubbly cheek. Her grandma kisses her back without ever stopping her crocheting.

Click-slide. The tongue at the end of her hook grows and grows.

*

Chloe isn’t a fan of school, even though she knows she could be if she tried. It could be “interesting.” It could be “a good experience.” It could be a “great learning opportunity.”

Those are her mother’s words, and Chloe knows that it’s all true, but she also knows that her mother doesn’t remember what school was like, not really. Chloe’s mother once sat Chloe down and told her about her own childhood, how hard it was, how Chloe’s mother was fat too but she went on a strict diet and joined the soccer team and then she wasn’t fat anymore.

It might be a true story. Lots of her mother’s stories seem true. But it also might just be a made-up story to make Chloe feel better, like the one about dog-heaven, which is actually a hole in the backyard, and the one about dad-heaven, which is actually two counties over in a trailer park.

Her favorite part of school is the walk to and from, which is mostly streets but partly the kind of park that is for cities, small as a postage stamp, but there are trees and birds and, occasionally, a fat sassy squirrel that shakes its tail at her. There is no one else there, and this is the part she likes the best, walking through the trail without having to worry about being seen or heard or tsked at.

So Chloe goes to school and puts her head down and she hates it as much as she possibly can without failing out or getting in trouble. School is like home. In both places, Chloe is fat and invisible and perfect.

*

The day Grandma finishes the quilt is the same day Chloe’s mother has twenty baskets due for a big party. The house smells of blades and beef. Between the baskets and the return of Rob, Chloe’s mother is distracted.

This means Chloe and her Grandma are alone in the living room, Chloe sitting on the floor near Grandma’s feet when she puts the last row of stitches on.

The blanket isn’t a real blanket. It’s too small. Because there is only so much yarn and because there is so very much of Chloe.

Grandma has crocheted a button that looks like a flower and sewed it onto one corner. Now, she wraps it around Chloe’s neck and Chloe lifts her chin and Grandma slides the button through one of the little holes with her boney fingers.

“You can wrap it around you like that,” Grandma says. “For when you hang out with your friends.”

They both know she doesn’t hang out with anyone. Chloe doesn’t know what to say because there is everything she wants to say and thank you isn’t enough. Not for this. So she doesn’t say anything at all.

The blanket settles perfectly against her back, is tight but not too tight around her throat. Wearing it, Chloe thinks she might be really invisible. She thinks she might be able to fly, and so she runs and runs around the living room, jumping over her mother’s half-made baskets until her mother comes in, pulling her hair back, and tells her to quit it, that if she wants to start exercising finally, she should go outside.

*

She isn’t a stupid girl. She knows wearing a bright red blanket to school is social suicide. But she can’t bring her fingers to take it off. And she hopes against hope, somewhere inside her belly, she hopes that maybe it really will make her invisible, unseen. That her cape will allow her passage in the dark forest of classrooms and schoolmates.

She makes it all the way to second period PE, which is really just a mad release and scramble onto the blacktopped playground, before she is seen.

“Chloe needs a baby blanket! Baby Chloe.” The chant is endless, picked up and tossed around, discarded long enough for a breath, and then rekindled.

A boy is standing close to her, leaning in, his voice carrying the cry that seems to echo and bounce off her ears.

“Baby Chloe,” he says again. “Big fat baby Chloe.”

Chloe’s hand reacts without her, flying up and somehow connecting just perfect, just like she might have wanted it to if she had time to think. There is a crunch that she can hear either above or below the chanting, and then Danny is sliding to the ground. Crumpling like he’s not any bones, just his own skin and meat.

Chloe’s never hit anything or anyone before and the pain in her fingers is stunning and powerful. Like the first time she woke with her hand between her legs and rolled hard against the closed fist of her fingers. This pain blooms like that pleasure did, full of strength and joy and, belated, a tiny petal of guilt.

The boy stays on the ground, but he’s not dead. Of course he isn’t. It was just a punch. But there’s blood all over his hand that covers his face, a light clear red. Unexpected.

*

After school–she’s been kept late to talk to the principal, something she’s never done in all her life either–she leaves the building alone. There is a week of after-school detention in her future, something that until now has only been for the baddest of the bad. And now, too, there is Chloe, destined to be among them.

At the edge of the school building, between the parking lot and the playground, there is a man. He leans against the wall in a way that makes Chloe think of a cartoon character. His back is curved inward so that only his butt stays on the bricks. There is a white cigarette in his hand, between two fingers. It’s not lit and he twirls it and twirls it while he looks across the parking lot.

Chloe knows she’s invisible to men like this. To all men above the age of twelve. Her fat keeps her that way. So, safe, she pulls the red of her grandmother’s cloak around her shoulders, tucks her fingers through the bigger holes to hold it closed, and walks right by him.

“Hey, you.”

There are three more steps. She barely hears.

“Yo, Red.”

Something stirs, sluggish, in Chloe’s brain. He’s talking to her. Which means he’s seen her.   She looks down at herself, her big belly and butt inside the red cloak, her legs thick as tree trunks. She is surprised to realize she’s the same size. She hasn’t shrunk any, so how can he see her?

She turns and sees he’s watching her. Just her. He has blue eyes that are so light they’re kind of silverish. He smiles and she can see the same shine in his teeth. Braces. And zits. His forehead is pocked with them beneath his bangs. He isn’t as old as she first thought. But too old to be here, hanging around school buildings.

“Just waiting for my sister,” he says as though she’s asked him something, which she hasn’t. Her hand fiddles with the flower button at her neck. “Kaitlyn. You know her? You’re about her age.”

Chloe does know her, and she is exactly her age. Kaitlyn is a tall, skinny girl with straight brown hair who sits behind her in class and chews on her pencil erasers. All through reading time, the girl’s teeth make a squeaky, rubbery sound that drives the teacher nuts — Chloe can see it in her eyes every time she looks across the room — but that Chloe finds oddly comforting. It’s a reminder that everyone has something they do when they’re alone; just some people do it in public without knowing it. This makes Chloe feel like she’s gotten lucky, somehow, that she’s figured out some kind of secret.

The man is still looking at her, but now Chloe knows that he’s just a boy, really. Which might explain why he can see her. He’s young.

The door swings open and Kaitlyn steps out. Tall, skinny Kaitlyn. But his eyes stay on Chloe. That cloud blue.

Kaitlyn doesn’t acknowledge her brother. She doesn’t even stop on her way to wherever it is that tall, skinny girls go.

“I should go,” he says.

She says something back. She’s pretty sure she does. But she finds the words she meant to say later, still resting on her tongue, like hot cheese that sticks and you can’t swallow it or spit it out.

*

“Seriously, Chloe. I’ve told you a million times. Don’t eat the chocolate that’s for my baskets. I’ll buy you whatever you want. Not that you need more chocolate. What about carrots?”

Chloe has barely gotten inside the door. The blood and the man with the braces are still in her brain, there is a dull ache at the corners of her knuckles from hitting the boy, and the living room smells like candle wax and cardboard.

Grandma’s not in her chair, which means she’s gone off to take a nap. Chloe’s mother is digging through box after box, still talking.

“That chocolate’s for my business, Chloe,” she says. “I can’t keep buying it.”

Chloe stands in the living room looking at the back of her mother, how the shirt hangs funny off her and how her jeans look so small, like for a doll. Chloe doesn’t eat too much. Despite what her mother says, that isn’t the thing that makes her fat. She eats like a normal person. She doesn’t even like chocolate.

Chloe’s mother comes up for air, turns to look at her. There is dark red lipstick left on one side of her mouth. It opens and closes as she talks.

“Chloe, you need to go on a diet. And stop wearing the fucking red piece of shit. It’s a blanket, not a goddamn shirt. It needs to be washed.”

*

There is a life that Chloe has discovered in detention, something as dark and hidden and lifesaving as moss against trees. Others who are like her, although not like her at all. She doesn’t make friends — that would be too easy, too something — but she watches, and she comes to understand there are invisible creatures all around her, just like herself.

The boy, the man, the one she won’t think of as Kaitlyn’s brother because somehow that ruins everything, waits for her each day at the corner of the building. He walks her, not to her home, but to his, which is halfway between.

They take the long way home every day, and they go through the park and he stops, looks back at her on the paved path. He puts one hand at the corner of her mouth. She could bite him, if she wanted. In here, his eyes are darker, the silver of his teeth more muted.

“You’re gorgeous, you know that?” he says. “I could just eat you up.”

Chloe doesn’t know what this means, but she feels the shivery thing that works its way down her stomach, along her legs. It is the way she felt once after her mother almost hit a dog while they were driving, the thump-thump of her pulse and breath high in her throat when she first saw it, the shaky relief that followed, when they’d passed and the creature stood at the side of the road, barking.

Chloe has no words. She doesn’t talk much anyway — there isn’t room for her words at home, and she can’t find them fast enough in the scurry and crowd of school banter — and this has stripped her of them entirely. She stands there, picking the lint off her red cape. After her mother washed it the second time, it started to hang funny and now there are bits of pale pink fuzz that ball up on the yarn.

He leans in, all flash of his silvery teeth, and for a second, Chloe thinks he means to kiss her, which sends off all kinds of silent alarm bells in her brain. But instead he puts his lips against her ear. They move shivery soft, like velvet flower petals. “Eat you up,” he says again. His hand — she hasn’t been watching his hand — pushes into the side of her, right above the waistband of her jeans, where all the flesh spills over in little mounds, and it squeezes her. Hard.

*

It’s the cape, Chloe knows, that’s giving her this power. First the discovery of detention, and then this boy who sees her, who thinks she’s beautiful, who could eat her up.

Rob is gone again, Chloe thinks. At least, she hasn’t smelled him lately. She sits at her Grandma’s feet while the crochet hook swoops and swirls. The new blanket is orange and yellow and bright green and huge.

“Come and hold this for me, Chloe, please,” her mother says. Her fingers have worked ribbon into a multi-looped bow on top of one of her gift baskets.

Chloe scoots across the floor, then sticks her finger into the center of the bow, holding it down so her mother can criss-cross the ribbon and tie it off.

“Could you stand up and walk like a normal–”

There is a long pause. Chloe thinks it’s because her mother’s fingers have touched hers — she never knew her mother’s fingers were so hard-edged, so knuckled. “Chloe, are you losing weight?”

Chloe doesn’t know. She doesn’t feel any different — okay, maybe she does — things are looser. Even the cloak around her neck doesn’t feel as tight. When she lies in bed lately, is there space between her thighs? Bigger than her hands? She thinks there might be.

“Oh, thank god. Oh my god. See? I told you. You’re doing just what I did. Oh, good.”

In her excitement, her mother stops paying attention to the ribbons and she ties Chloe’s finger up in the bow. For a second, Chloe is stuck, and then her new skinnier finger slides right out.

It’s all the walking, Chloe thinks. All the long walks with the boy who sees her.

*

The house is not empty, it’s never empty. But it doesn’t matter because Chloe is invisible. She is on her way to becoming seen — her mother saw her yesterday for the first time, and then took her cloak away while she was sleeping and washed it again. Now it is in big pieces on Chloe’s hands.

She sets one piece on her Grandma’s chair. It’s saying something, that piece, but Chloe doesn’t know what. She hopes it’s all the right things.

In the half dark of the morning, she takes one of her mother’s gift baskets, a medium-sized one with a tall handle. The rest of the scraps from her blanket are still warm from the dryer and she stuffs them into the bottom of the basket, pushes them into a kind of nest. Lined up in boxes, there is soap and chocolate and coffee in bags and candy flowers on sticks. Chloe doesn’t know what to take, so she takes one of everything, even the chocolates. Even the half bottles of wine that are only for the special expensive baskets.

The basket is heavy, but not impossibly so. Chloe rests it sideways against her hip like her mother does with a laundry basket. She tucks the flower button from her cape on the very top.

*

He answers the door, teeth first.

Will he recognize her as she is now, without her layers of cloak and skin? She stands in the half-light, the basket on her hip growing heavier as she waits.

“Oh, beautiful girl,” he says.

He opens the door wider, takes the basket from her hips with one big hand, and invites her in.