play. ground.

todd replied scornfully, "advice is for fat kids."

not understanding what he meant, i looked at the ground. when someone says something i don't get and is mean about it, this is what i usually do. I wiggled my shoes from side to side until they were buried in the playground ground. they already had sand in them anyway. todd was saying some more bad things, loudly, but i had stopped listening. i did see more pairs of feet coming to stand behind his feet; todd was not very clever, but when he said bad things--which happened at least twice a recess--he said them Loudly. and for some reason people want to be right next to you when you say things that are mean and say them loud.

but i already knew all of this. todd was mean to me often--often enough that i had stopped telling mrs. pendergrast about it when it happened. mrs. pendergrast was the recess supervisor. i didn't know how the recess supervisor was supposed to supervise, but i was sure that it was something different than what mrs. pendergrast did, which was stand stock-still in a covered area by the wallball court. she always looked to be smelling herself. i decided to tell todd that he wasn't making sense.

"you're not making sense, todd," i told him.

his face gaped and he laughed in a way that was not real. his friends all said "ooo-oh" at the same time. i wondered if they had practiced this. "i guess i'll just have to beat some-"

i already knew the rest of what he was going to say, so i kept talking to him. "because i am not fat. i am a kid, but i have something called a thyroid that the doctor said is hyper a lot. and somehow that means that i will always be skinny."

"shit, jason, thanks for the medical history. why don't you keep telling me about it while i re-arrange your--"

once again i had heard him say this before. i continued. "you, though. you're what they call 'pudgy.' --not fat, exactly, but it means you will be fat someday soon. from what i've heard. and when that happens--your fatness--maybe you will still be a kid. then you can come back and i'll tell you the advice i thought you’d want to know, then."

todd’s face got all scrunchy and red and he took a really deep breath and his chin disappeared. then the bell rang and i ran back to class. i stopped at the door to kick the sand out of my shoes.