Dave Karp

Disclaimer Ya, you know that I don't own the ducks. I own the kids in school, the psychologist and Karp's mom and dad. Karp's POV

After the game, Coach Bombay treated us to pizza. We went out to the local Pizza Hut in downtown Minneapolis. I ate 9 slices, I couldn't' help it, I was starving. Everyone was teasing me about eating so much.
"The Karpster eating his own weight in pizza" Averman teased. Everyone laughed. That stung. I looked over at Coach Bombay, he was covering his mouth to keep from laughing, but I knew he was. I stopped eating and just sipped my cup of pop.

A week after the championship game, school started back up. That morning as I stepped out of the shower, I decided to step on the scale and see if I'd lost any weight. I'd vowed that I'd lose 10 pounds over winter break from all the hockey practices I was putting in. I was shocked when the bright red numbers flashed across the scale. I'd gained 20 pounds. I felt sick......

"Hey look its Dave-the-food-thief, fat as ever" shouted a girl at me from across the classroom. I felt even sicker than I had when I looked at the scale this morning when I'd weighed myself. I just slide into my desk and concentrated on the reading assignment that Mrs. Brown had written on the board. All day long kids made fun of me for gaining more weight over Christmas Break. I felt horrible. I thought I'd lost weight from playing that entire hockey game and doing all that partying after winning the state championship. When I got home from school, I grabbed six cookies and some leftover chicken salad and began to eat.

"DAVID JORDAN KARP! I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU ONLY FRUIT AFTER SCHOOL!" my mother yelled at me when she came home from work. "That's it, young man, you're going to a psychologist" my dad growled at me. My parents weren't happy with my weight, they never had been. My older sister had been positively petite. At 18 years old, she'd been 5'9 and weight 110 pounds. My parents saw her as the perfect child. I had known this was coming, I just hadn't known when. When my parents made a decision, they stuck with it and there was no changing their mind. About a day later, they packed me off to some fancy child psychiatrist in the rinky-dink town of St. Peter. About the second we got there, we checked into this humongous hotel that looked like a Hilton Head resort but didn't have enough fancy-schmancy stuff to make it a Hilton.

"Now, David, why is it that you eat so much??" the psychiatrist, Dr. Green, asked me the next morning. Ugh, this guy was too touchy-feeling. I hated people like that. "Because! People treat me like shit and eating is the only way to make me feel better! Are you happy?" I snapped. I didn't want to be there, my parents were paying some dude $150 an hour to analyze my eating habits. "You seem to be very angry, Dave" Dr. Green said carefully. NO DUH, I WAS ANGRY! I hated my parents for sending me to some dopey doctor. Dr. Green wrote some things on his notepad and started babbling off on how I shouldn't take out my anger by eating. I should learn to talk my feelings out. Whatever.

Dr. Green told my parents that the lifestyle I was living in wasn't healthy, he recommended that we move. My parents wasted no time. We moved from Minneapolis to Boulder, Colorado three days later. I got slapped into some fancy school for fat kids. It was like living in a world full of a bunch of fat loads. I missed playing hockey. My parents made me give it up when we moved to Boulder. I lost touch with all of my friends from hockey. I found out that Averman, Charlie, Banks, Connie, Guy, Jessie and Fulton all made Team USA and went to the Junior Goodwill Games. They won the gold medal. It pissed me off knowing that I could have been on that team. Then they got a scholarship to some preppy school called Eden Academy. I heard that Tammy and Tommy also got a scholarship to some preppy school called the Parker Academy in Chicago. I kept the picture of the Ducks on the day that we won the state championship on my desk wherever I lived. Every time I looked at it, it reminded me of how much fun playing hockey had been.