Emmett’s heart thudded as he stood before the vending machine, scanning the rows of chips and chocolate held captive behind their black metal rings. Come on, come on, just pick something, he thought. The break room was empty, but it wouldn’t stay that way long. He had only moments, seconds maybe, before someone came in and caught him at it, before the warm flush of comfort he’d been craving all morning was dampened by the cold deluge of shame that came with being caught.

Hearing footsteps down the hall, he panicked and punched in the code for a bag of baked chips, the least satisfying of all possible choices.

Fuck.

As the ring swirled, pushing his selection to the edge of the shelf, Emmett could no longer avoid his reflection in the glass. In the mirror at home he almost passed for unremarkable, but set against the backdrop of the outside world, there was no getting around it—around him. His five-foot-eleven frame; his hair, neon pink fading to ash brown, framing the exaggerated circularity of his face; the bulging chest beneath his scarlet parachute of a tee.

Emmett Truesdale had never been bigger, but in some ways he hadn’t changed at all. Even at the age of five or six, growing up on the northern fringes of his Southern California community, he’d daydreamed of taking a knife and shearing the fat off his body. He’d fantasized about being impaled with tubes and having the excess sucked out of him, being pricked with needles and drained like a blister. His sides had been a particular heartache, the way the flesh, bypassing his relatively flat stomach, collected like meaty saddlebags beside and behind him. His chest too—his “boobs” as his brother called them, before his hand darted out to squeeze and twist.

Imaginative Emmett had sat for hours on the toilet, Mickey Mouse undies looped around his ankles, awash in the fantasy of a procedure, medicine, or enchantment that would allow him to absorb the fat back into his digestive tract and purge it into the bowl with a plop. Never once had he blown out his birthday candles or glimpsed a star arcing across the night sky without wringing the words through his mind: I wish I was thin.