Diary of a Mad Fat Girl (3 page)

Catherine Hilliard glares at him like she’s
about to cram her fist down his throat, rip his heart out, and eat
it with a side of fries.

She says nothing.

His smile falters and he looks at the
floor.

She turns and clicks down the hallway,
maroon pumps bulging.

“
What was that all about?” Coach
Hatter asks, obviously stung by her rudeness.

“
Hell if I know,” I watch her tromp
past my students’ art displays without so much as turning her head.
“Maybe she didn’t get to eat the full pig this morning.”

That makes him snigger that ridiculous,
obnoxious snigger of his and that always cracks me up so we just
stand there laughing like hyenas waiting for the first bell to
ring.

5

At lunch, my friend Chloe is a nervous
wreck.

Chloe Stacks takes her job, her life, and
her self very seriously. Too seriously in my opinion, but that’s
just me. She’s the best school counselor in the state of
Mississippi and has the plaques in her office prove it.

“
What’s wrong, Chloe-sweets, have to
counsel some nut cases this morning?” I ask as she gracefully takes
a seat across from me and places her lavender monogrammed lunch bag
on the table.

“
You don’t know?” she asks, like I’m
stupid.

“
Know what?” I’m not stupid, so I look
her like she’s crazy.

“
You really do not know?” She’s
staring me down with those big, brown, saucer-shaped
eyes.

“
Well, obviously I don’t, Chloe.
What’s up? We gonna have a state test in Art this year and you just
found out?” I snort at my own joke and open a ketchup packet with
my teeth.

She stares at me like I’m an insolent child
misbehaving in church. During prayer.

“
What? Why are you looking at me like
that?”

“
How do you not know what just
happened to your best friend?”

“
Lilly?” My mind starts spinning the
crazy
what-if
scenarios. What
if she got kidnapped in Paris? What if her plane crashed? What if
it got hijacked? What if she tried to screw one of the hijackers?
What if she had a wreck on the way home from the airport? What if
she got car jacked in Memphis? What if she tried to screw the
carjacker? What if the Gentleman’s wife found out about her and
hacked her to death with a pick ax? It’s amazing how many ludicrous
thoughts can dart though your mind in a millisecond.

“
She was fired this morning,” Chloe
whispers.

“
What?” I spray the table with tater
tots and get the insolent child stare again. “What for? Are you
serious?
What
?” Jealousy
sweeps over me as I imagine being free from the stifling chains of
public education. But not Lilly. She loves everything about her job
and quit a gravy train modeling career to do it.

“
I overheard it this morning while I
was in the conference room,” she whispers. “Cheap walls, very
thin.” She eyeballs the other teachers filing into the cafeteria.
“If you don’t know, then probably no one does. I guess they’re not
going to make it public.”

“
Make what public?”

She cups her hands around her mouth and
whispers, “She was fired after Catherine Hilliard accused her of
having an affair with one of her students.”

I choke on my chocolate milk and it takes me
a second to recover.

Not jealous of that. No, buddy.

“
Would you please stop eating for a
second?” Chloe asks, wiping milk and tater tots off of her side of
the table. “Please?”

“
She’s banging one of her kids. No
shit? Which one?”

“
Watch your
language
! Does it matter which one?”

“
Hell yeah it matters.”

“
No, it does
not
matter because she would
not
do that.” A thoughtful pause. “What are we
going to do, Ace?”

“
Hell, nothing. Watch her on the news
tonight, I guess.” I’m not feeling the pity party vibe for the
promiscuous Lilly Lane. Not even a little bit.

“
So you think she’s guilty? You think
she did this?” Chloe is giving me her saucer-eyed stare again,
“Because I do
not
think that
she would do such a thing and I think we need to help
her.”

“
Help her what? Clean out her desk and
find a pedophile lawyer?”

When we were 13-years-old, Lilly and I took
a six pack of root beer to Chloe’s house and acted like we got
drunk on it. She almost stroked out before we finally convinced her
that it was a just a joke. She doesn’t know about the
Gentleman.

“
You think she would do something like
that?” Now she’s boring a hole through me with those eyes.
Perfectly arched eyebrows drawn; perfectly lined lips quivering.
“How could you
say
that? She
is our
best
friend. What
is
wrong
with you
today?”

“
I don’t know, Chloe.” I can see she’s
about to burst into tears so I paddle backwards like I usually do
when having a conversation her. “No. You know what, Chloe? No. I do
not think that Lilly did anything wrong. There is absolutely no way
she would do something like that.”

“
So we’re going to help her then?” Her
brown eyes light up and she smiles like little girl looking at
lollipop balloons.

“
Yes. Absolutely. We are absolutely
going to help her.” I look down at the tater tot shrapnel floating
in a pool of chocolate milk on my plastic lunch tray. “Forget
lunch. Let’s go check out her classroom. See what we can find
out.”

“
Yes, let’s do that!” She jumps up and
runs right into Logan Hatter.

Coach Hatter eats lunch with us every day
but Chloe can’t tell her husband that.

“
Hey ladies, where y’all off to?” He
takes a look at Chloe, then eyeballs me. “What’s wrong? What’s
going on?”

“
We gotta run, Hatt. I’ll fill you in
later, I promise.”

“
So I’m eatin’ by myself? That’s no
fun. Where’s Lilly?”

Awkward silence.

“
Here comes Coach Wills. He’ll keep
you company.” I give him a quick wink and he rolls his eyes. He
can’t stand Coach Wills.

6

The hallway is empty so I imagine for one
disillusioned second that this might go off without a hitch. The
door to Lilly’s classroom is slightly ajar, so we scurry down there
like field mice sneaking past a sleeping cat. I stop short and
Chloe bumps into to me from behind and I spin around and put a
finger over my mouth.

Someone is in Lilly’s classroom.

We freeze.

And wait.

Then, a voice.

It’s Principal Catherine Hilliard.

I can’t tell if she’s talking on a cell
phone or just mumbling to herself, but either way, she’s stupid and
I want to knock her ass over with a tire tool. I can’t make out
what she’s saying; I can only hear papers rattling and stuff
hitting the floor.

Suddenly, she articulates a sentence that
comes through loud and clear.

“
Who? Oh, of course. Right now? Out in
the hallway?”

“
Shit!” I whisper and Chloe takes off
running in a dead sprint to the girls’ bathroom. “What are you
doing? Get back here!” I scream-whisper, but she’s gone.

I smell moth balls and old lady muff powder
and turn around like a girl in a horror movie about to get axed in
the skull. I’m eye level with a giant gold cross hanging on a thin
rope chain. There is a tiny little Jesus on the cross.

“
Just what do you think you’re doing,
Miss Jones? And where did Mrs. Stacks run off to?” she hiss-snorts
and I wonder for a second how she can breath out that fat ass pig
nose and speak at the same time.

“
I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” Probably not the best response I’ve ever come up
with.

She stares at me like I’m a dog turd in the
lima beans on the Sunday dinner table. I look back down at
Jesus.

“
You should’ve taken Miss Lane to
Florida like you always do.”

That caught me off guard.

“
Okay, seriously, Mrs. Hilliard, now I
really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“
You will. Now why don’t you be a nice
girl and get in there and clean out Miss Lane’s personal
effects?”

“
Why? Is she getting a new
classroom?”

She snarls and points like I’m going to trot
right in there and do exactly what she says.

“
What’s that you have in your hand
there, Mrs. Hilliard?”

“
School property.”

“
Picture frames and post cards are
school property?” I wonder when the pictures were taken and where
the post cards are from. I wonder why I can’t just keep my mouth
shut and live a normal life. I think about grabbing that stuff out
of her hand and slinging it down the hallway just for
fun.

“
Don’t stand there and act like you
don’t know what’s going on, Graciela Jones. I haven’t decided yet
what
your
role is in all of
this,” she whisper snorts.

This bitch is driving me crazy. Crazier,
that is. I think about grabbing her by the hair and bashing her
head against cinder block wall. Repeatedly.

“
All of what, Mrs. Hilliard?” I’m not
sure I want The-Whole-Truth-So-Help-Me-God when it comes to what’s
going on with Lilly, but I press on anyway. “What exactly is ‘all
of this’ and who do you think you are, some kind of educational
casting director?” I decide to skate backwards with a tactical
conversational maneuver. “I come down here to check on Lilly
because she wasn’t at lunch and find you going through her personal
stuff, so why don’t you tell me what you mean when you say, ‘all of
this’ and please, for the love of God, tell me how I might have a
part in it.”

“
Don’t play stupid with me, Miss
Jones, even though we both know how good you are at that,” she
smirks and I fight off the urge to gouge her eyes out with the dry
erase marker in my back pocket. She continues, “So tell me, why
were you standing at the door eavesdropping? And where is your prim
little side kick?”

“
Well, she ran to the bathroom, so
common sense would dictate that she had to pee and I was standing
outside the door here because you don’t look or sound
any
thing like Lilly Lane because,
you know, she used to be an underwear model and all,” I make a show
of looking at her from head to toe, “so it gave me pause when I
heard you in there tearing down the place.”

“
You are on thin ice, Miss Jones, and
you better tread lightly.”

“
I think you mean skate. And is that a
threat? Do I need to call the Mississippi Association of Educators
and report that?” I can feel my face burning.

“
Like that would make any difference,”
she snorts. “By the way, your presence is no longer required in my
office this afternoon because, as it turns out, something far more
important has come up.”

“
Oh really? Like what?” I can’t wait
to hear this.

“
I’ll be at the district office,” she
says and smiles at me with those gigantic yellow horse teeth,
“filing the papers to have Miss Lane’s teaching license revoked.”
And with that little victory under her 64-inch belt, she puts her
super-cankles in action and stomps off down the hallway. She stops
at the girls’ bathroom and calls, “Yoo hoo, Mrs. Stacks, you can
come out now. Coast is clear.”

I stare at the back of Catherine Hilliard’s
man-suite that is masculine in every way except for the fabric,
which looks a floral tapestry cerca 1989, and wonder what the hell
is going on.

Could Lilly really be sleeping with one of
her students? Why is Catherine Hilliard such a hateful bitch? Could
I kill her and make it look like an accident? What the hell does
she think I’ve done? What did Chloe accomplish by running to the
bathroom and leaving me here by myself looking like an idiot? What
if Lilly really is doing it with one of her students? Wonder which
one it is? What was Catherine Hilliard looking for in her
classroom? Why didn’t Lilly talk to Chloe before she left? Would
she really do it with one of her kids and risk throwing her entire
career away? Could Lilly possibly be that stupid?

I have always been jealous of Lilly’s
passion for teaching, but the question pressing in my mind now is
how that passion fits into her getting fired. And if she ditched
our trip to Florida so she could screw around with some teen-aged
boy, then this could be the end of our twenty year friendship.

It takes Chloe a full two minutes to creep
out of the bathroom. I stare at the mini-sombreros stuck to Lilly’s
door and try to wrap my mind around what’s going on, but none of
this crap makes any sense. Nothing lines up.

“
Ace, how did she know we were out
here?” Chloe asks. “That’s creepy.”

I nod my head toward the security camera
mounted at the end of the hallway.

“
Someone was
watching
us! Those monitors are in her office!
Someone
was
watching
us!”

“
Chloe, someone was watching out for
her and saw us.” I push open the door and motion her in. “Let’s get
Lilly’s stuff packed up before that sow pig comes back and throws
it all in the trash.”