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It’s fifth grade, the year my mother takes me back-to-school shopping at K-Mart because I’ve outgrown everything. Mom buys me Husky jeans, a jungle print polo, a chambray shirt that’s too tight to button, which I wear as a jacket. This is before “childhood obesity” enters anyone’s lexicon, when adults are pretending this is a phase I’ll outgrow, and kids are doling out punishment in their own way.

At lunch we sit boy-girl-boy-girl and are discouraged from talking. Across from me is the new kid, Billy Carrollton, with his stupid gopher teeth and his oily black hair that he slicks back and combs into place. Billy is mean as a snake. He mixes his food together on his lunch tray and purposefully bubbles his milk over by blowing into it.

Mrs. Cook, our teacher, hates everyone in the whole fifth grade, except me.

“Mrs. Cook,” I tattle at afternoon recess, “Billy was doing disgusting things with his food.”

She studies me.  Mrs. Cook is older than most teachers. She wears orthopedic shoes. I stare at their laces while she considers my claim.

“Thank you, Dorothy, I’ll take care of it,” she says.

The next day in the cafeteria, Billy kicks my shins and calls me ugly.

“What’s it like to be the fattest girl in America?” he hisses.

I’m burning, but I spit back, “Your hair’s so greasy, you look like Elvis.”

At home that night, my skinny sister’s eyes seem to linger on me a little too long while I’m changing into my nightgown. I finish dressing in the bathroom, the door locked.

The next morning, I shower with the lights out. The mirror is as dark as a solid wall. For breakfast, I eat oatmeal with the little dinosaur eggs in it and feel nothing.

At recess, the popular girls are back in the woods playing house, kicking apart little trails of pine straw to make hallways and rooms, bartering with acorns, cradling and crooning over pine cone children. I’m leaning against a tree near Carly Ruth’s house, hoping she’ll let me be the maid again. Billy jumps down off the top of the monkey bars.

He has green stuff stuck in his gopher teeth, but his hair doesn’t look as gelled as the day before.

“Hey Dorothy, I wanted to say—“

“Don’t talk to me.”

“I just wanted to say sorry. You know I didn’t mean it. My mom says I need to make friends, since I’m new and all.”

“Whatever.”