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What a Big Wiggly Butt Can Do
     
    I grew up in a well-to-do little city. There
was a lot of money there. My mother and I didn’t have it. Going to
high school with rich kids, who had a lack of need and desperation,
I felt safe, but scared. I was afraid of being noticed. I didn’t
have their designer clothes. I could have gotten them at the
secondhand store, but I didn’t want to be the girl that wore the
clothes they gave to charity. I did okay going unnoticed. I was
small and kind of homely looking. I had pimples, but looking back
on it, they weren’t as bad as I’d imagined. I guess I was always
afraid they would get worse. And having a pizza face opened a kid
up to nicknames and condemning stares. But, as I said, I did okay
staying invisible.
    Then came the summer before my senior year. I
could actually feel it coming on. It was like everything I ate went
straight to my butt. At the beginning of the summer I barely
noticed it was there. By the end of the summer I could feel it
wiggling with every step. I dreaded going back to school. I looked
like a petite girl who’d stuck a couple of footballs back there,
except those footballs were made of a thin layer of plastic and
stuffed with whipped cream. It didn’t help that I was small
everywhere else. My chest hadn’t grown at all.
    But I had to go back, and it was torture. I
drew a lot of comments.
    “ Shake it, Mama.”
    “ That white girl stole a black girl’s
booty.”
    “ Look out. It’s the butt that spanks
back.”
    I cried every night until I noticed
something. I noticed it when I started looking behind me more.
Quite often, I would catch a boy looking at it. And if he didn’t
notice me noticing him, then he would continue to stare at it, and
the look on his face wasn’t disgust. That made things a bit
better.
    None of those boys would ask me out or
otherwise risk being seen with me. But I suspected they daydreamed
about what I would be like. That was enough to end the tears at
night, that coupled with the idea of turning eighteen around the
time the school year ended and getting out of that place.
    About ten miles down the road from that
terrible little city was Tooktown, a bigger city, with a much
larger variety of people. It was also the home to a state college,
where I received an academic scholarship to start in the fall.
    “Things will change for you there, Martha,”
my mother said. “They won’t care where you came from there.”
    That sounded awesome. I couldn’t wait to
leave town. I didn’t wait. A week after graduation, I landed a job
at a dollar store in Tooktown. I had a little money from graduation
presents, enough to get me through to my first paycheck. I answered
the ad of two girls needing a roommate. The three of us shared a
three-bedroom apartment. Neither of them seemed to care about what
clothes I wore or the size of my caboose. Things were looking up
for me. Things were about to get better.
    #
    The Happy Dollar was not a hard place to
work. Everything in the store was a dollar. So basically I had to
know how to run a register and stock shelves. Within a day of
starting, I had it down. The rest was basically just perusing the
shelves and memorizing where everything was. I worked the day
shift, mostly, which would change in the fall. There was usually a
manager or an assistant manager and two clerks. I was about a week
into the job when he came in.
    “Excuse me,” a male voice said. It was kind
of deep and raspy.
    I was at the register. I turned to the voice
to see a shock. The man standing there didn’t belong there. He
didn’t belong anywhere in my life except for maybe on television.
He was probably six-two. His hair was sandy blond and down to his
shoulders. He had pretty, bedroom brown eyes. His face was covered
with a little stubble. He wore a tank top and a pair of biker
shorts. His body was tan but not overly tan. And that body was like
nothing I’d ever seen in person. He had muscles coming out of his
muscles. Even