DAN HARVEY was a fat kid

DAN HARVEY was a fat kid, which is probably why we became friends in the first place. In the rigid corporeal hierarchy of childhood, you’re either the right weight or you’re not: too big and you’re a fat-ass; too skinny and you’re a faggot. We were a perfect pair, like something out of a children’s tale: the Elephant and the Giraffe, as we nicknamed ourselves during a trip to the Toronto Zoo. What might it be like to take up a different kind of space in the world? But Dan and I were stuck with the bodies we had.

We grew up on neighbouring cul-de-sacs in Guelph, Ontario, and our elementary school was nearby. During recess, Dan sat by himself near the school doors, flicking pebbles at nothing. I was stick thin and bookish. Without a father, I had never learned to move like the other boys, didn’t know how to throw a football or swing a bat. So Dan and I found each other. In junior high, as cliques hardened, we drew closer, sitting for hours in his wood-panelled basement, where we talked about bands—Radiohead, Tool, Pink Floyd—in the rockist shorthand of teenage boys.

Dan played the saxophone then, and he looked as if he were fighting the thing, his cheeks red and puffed, his pudgy fingers manipulating the keys. He was, more than anyone I’ve ever known, an embodied person, moving like a tank and altering the gravity of any room he entered. He highlighted his curly brown hair with blond, and often wore two shirts at a time, as if trying to constrain his bulging proportions.

In grade nine, Dan and I attended the Halloween dance. Kids strutted around like pubescent bowerbirds, and we lurked on the fringes, terrified of the costumed girls around us. A few of them approached. One, a short brunette with blue eyes and a wide smile, had noticed Dan. She was dressed as a bee, black and yellow antennae wiggling on her head. I pushed Dan—who was convinced that he’d die a fat virgin—in her direction.

“I hear you like me,” Dan said.

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to go out?”

“Yeah.”

They danced the rest of the night, the girl’s hands reaching up to rest on Dan’s shoulders, his fingers closing around her waist. As we walked home, Dan realized that he had forgotten to ask her name. It was Jess.

By now, Dan’s rolls were starting to solidify. While I remained gawky, he developed into a natural athlete, his size—six feet four and nearly 300 pounds—an asset instead of a humiliation. He played football and basketball but grew to adore rugby, addicted to the sheer physicality of the sport. Acting also drew him in, and though he was usually typecast as the dumb jock or the idiot sheriff, he loved the attention. It was a way of attracting the spotlight on his own terms; you couldn’t call him fat if he called himself fat first. When we formed a band—I took up the guitar, Dan played bass—he sometimes prefaced performances with an apology. “If I mess up, it’s not my fault,” he told the audience. “I was born with fat fingers.”

He was still the closest friend I had, but I resented him, too. He had buddies on the football team and a girlfriend; he lost his virginity two years before I did. When he got his driver’s licence, I started treating him like a chauffeur. I was not allowed to stay out past midnight, and I was terrified of driving, so after parties Dan took me home in his parents’ Sebring before returning to the kegger to get drunk and sleep on the couch. Even as he ferried me around, I made sure he knew which of us was the smart one,We installed flexible LED Strip lighting in our kitchen for under cabinet and within cabinet lighting. who was the better musician, and who could name the studio where “The Bends” was recorded. Dan rarely said a word in reply. He just fidgeted uncomfortably, pushing his mass deeper into the seat, lifting one hand from the steering wheel to adjust his blue Tar Heels cap.

At the beginning of grade eleven, Dan got the red and yellow Superman logo tattooed on his right bicep. He had always been obsessed with the superhero, collecting comic books and Christopher Reeve movies and T-shirts.Most modern headlight designs include Wholesale HID Kit. Superman,There are all kinds of car daytime running lights with good quality. originally from the dying planet Krypton, is an attractive idol, his body a hard pile of muscle, capable of scattering bullets and soaring through solar systems. In “Superman: The Movie,” from 1978, he even turns back time by reversing Earth’s rotation. Superman is so unbeatable that his creators had to invent an antidote to his abilities: kryptonite, a mysterious green element that renders him powerless.
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