chapter 1

Evelyn woke up in a stupor. Everything around her was hazy, her eyes were filled with gunk. She was disoriented and wondering where the hell she was. Slowly she pushed her body up into a seated position. Blinking rapidly and surveying her surroundings she found that she was on the couch in her apartment. Why was she on the couch? Why hadn't she fallen asleep in bed? But she did fall asleep in bed, didn't she? She began to massage her forehead and forcefully squeezed her eyelids shut.

“Think....think...what is the last thing I was doing yesterday...” she whispered out loud.

The answer was not forthcoming. She could remember getting home, she could remember making herself a salad and watching an episode of some TV show. Then she remembered getting tired and heading to bed. Did she even make it to bed? She's quite sure she remembered sitting down on the edge of the bed, but everything after that was a blur. How did she get out here? As her eyes gained focus, she rubbed them once more and squinted slightly as she took a more lucid scan of the room around her.

“Wh-what the fuck happened here??!?” she said in a gravely voice, loosening some phlegm in her throat and realizing the piles of trash surrounding her.

There was a pizza box on the coffee table in front of her which had been left open and askew, all but two of the eight slices still remaining. Next to that was an empty large soda from McDonalds along with a couple of wrappers with labels of McChicken and McDouble crumpled up next to it. The bag which had contained those items was on the floor alongside an overturned large carton with the unmistakable “M” logo on it. Next to her on the couch was another fast food bag, but this one was from Wendy's and had its own fry cup inside of it along with a baconator wrapper crumpled up inside of it. To the other side of her, close to where she had been laying was a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, just a box of 6, but it was empty aside from the evidence of sugar glaze and chocolate frosting clinging to the top and bottom of the inside.

That's when she registered the gurgling that was going on inside her bowels. She felt sick to her stomach. Wrapping her hands around her midsection, she felt the taut bulge of a food baby as she let out a painful belch. The release of pressure alleviated some of the pain for a moment, though she could feel it building again. She found her phone under some grease soaked napkins and grabbed it. The time read 11:19 AM.

The girl was at a complete and utter loss for words. She was trying to breathe slowly, but she felt full on panic welling up inside of her. She didn't know what her next move was but she was overwhelmed with fear. This was the second time this month. Something was not right with her.

Up until this point Evelyn was a fairly standard young college graduate. She had an internship with a local bank where she was putting her finance degree to use assisting with loan application review. She was living off a meager wage required to her by the bank combined with some money her parents were giving her every month until she got on her feet. It was important to her that she could be independent – out on her own. It was that desire which had convinced her mom and dad to co-sign on a lease for a cheap and frankly pretty cramped little one bedroom apartment downtown. She had a demure and somewhat introverted personality – she was mindful to be polite, maintain good posture, and believed in the quote that it was better to remain silent and thought to be a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt. She hoped that soon, after her 6 month probation period as an intern drew to a close, she would be hired on full-time to assist. After all, she was talented at her work, she was a diligent worker, always complimented for her organization and attention to detail.

Her mother had been a local beauty pageant regular for many years, and passed to her two daughters very good genetics. Evelyn was somewhat tall for a woman at 6'0 barefoot. She had light milky skin, silky, long, light brown hair which she pulled back into a pony tail most days, and she had that golden ratio of breasts to waist to hips that drove most men crazy. Something else Evelyn's mom had passed to her daughters was a somewhat old fashioned view of women's bodies, in particular fat. Nobody in her family was overweight but nobody was naturally skinny. Her mother was borderline anorexic and a fitness nut. As Evelyn had grown as a child, she remembered at one point in her early teens putting on a tiny bit of chub – baby fat really. Her mom reacted poorly. Chastising her daughter, calling her names like “tubby” and “porky” and putting her on a diet and exercise program. This was a truly miserable time in her life and it had a profound psychological impact on young Evelyn. At one point in high school she had developed anorexia just to keep herself up to the modeling standards her mom expected of her. All of this resulted in a young woman with the attractiveness and body of a model quietly putting in time at the local bank, and she drew plenty of attention with her swaying hips, fashion sense and gentle smile.

At any rate, the organized and diligent Evelyn was not the kind of girl who would leave a single sock out of place in her tidy apartment. She was not the type of girl who would ever indulge herself with pizza and fast food, much less devour large portions of it and leave the trash lying around in the aftermath. She was the girl who had avoided the freshmen 15. She had avoided all delicious food in the environment of extreme freedom she discovered at college. All in the effort to never live with the shame of developing any excess fat on her perfect slim figure. It was less about vanity and more about embarrassment and insecurity. She didn't hate fat people, she just knew if she ever joined their ranks she would become an outcast from her family, and a major disappointment to her mother.

So what was the explanation for this? The last time she had awoken disoriented and surrounded by a mess, it was a slightly smaller scale – just some Chinese food cartons and what looked like the remnants of a large meal at Burger King. She had initially panicked, but since it came after a night she had gone out to a team happy hour for work, she chalked it up to some sort of accidental drunken bender. She hadn't been that drunk, but the alternative theories scared her so she went with the one that made her feel more comfortable. This was an escalation however, and worse – she hadn't the slightest idea how it happened.

“Okay...I have to be sleepwalking...well, no that doesn't make total sense, because if I even ordered this food, I'd have had to be conscious to interact with people and pick it up or pay for it...” she reasoned.

“Maybe I have an allergy to something which acts like a drug, and I get in a drunken state and can't remember my actions...” she proposed to herself.

“But no... what could I have possibly ingested? I ate my normal bagged salad for dinner last night – I absolutely KNOW that I did.” she countered.

Was someone ELSE drugging her? Had she fallen prey to some sort of stalker who was abusing her somehow? The premise sounded plausible at first, but of course couldn't stand up to any logical scrutiny. Who could have drugged her, and when? The only places she went today were to work and back! She only ate food that she had prepared, and she always locked the chain across the door of her apartment when she got home, so it probably wasn't someone breaking or sneaking in and drugging her in her sleep. Did someone come in and she has amnesia of it? Possibly, but it's pretty unlikely.

She wasn't even sure where to go with this problem. The police? To tell them what? That she didn't know what happened to her but she woke up surrounded by junk food with strong evidence that she had devoured it? She was sure that would result in some eye rolling, perhaps a bit of laughter...certainly nobody would take her seriously. Still, it might not be the worst idea just as a place to start – worst case scenario they'll just think she's crazy.

Evelyn grabbed for her phone, opening it up. It wasn't exactly an emergency, she didn't want to get in trouble for using 911, so she opened her browser to look up the number for the nearest precinct. That's when it struck her. Her browser. It had about 12 tabs open. All of them food related. Google searches for varying types of food in her vicinity. She had been in her phone last night, and she was sure she was the one who had done it. There was no password to her phone, there was a little depression on the pack to read her finger print to unlock it. Nobody could have unlocked this but her. How could she not remember? She searched through her apps for the phone app and logs of who she called. There was one number dialed last night at 1:18 AM. She copied the number and pasted it into google. The name of a 24 hour pizza place around the block from her popped up immediately. She turned her phone aside and glanced at the pizza box which was splayed open. Reaching out, she yanked the lid back towards her. Leonardo's Pizza and Subs was written in green and red cursive across the front. It matched her search results.

While quickly scrolling through her apps, she had noticed something – a couple of logos she didn't remember. Going back to check she noticed the additions of Uber Eats and Doordash. Neither one had been used last night, but they had certainly been installed and she didn't do it. This was really creeping her out.

“How's this POSSIBLE?” she exclaimed out loud. “It had to have been me...but I didn't do these things...but I MUST have...” she argued back and forth with herself.

“FUCK. This is bad...” she muttered.

Coming to her senses on where she was and what she was doing she flicked off her phone and momentarily abandoned her plan to call the police. She was pretty sure she hadn't been somehow drugged or attacked or coerced or targeted by some devious plan to have her eat some fast food, so she probably didn't want to get them involved, seeing as how there didn't appear to be any crime committed. She was thankful it was a Saturday, otherwise she'd be late for work, and she couldn't afford to have a slip so close to her evaluation. Taking a moment to reclaim her composure, Evelyn rose from the couch, feeling an unfamiliar bloated and gross sensation like she was stuffed into a container too small, and coated in a film of grease. She began to tidy up the trash around her.

During this process, she stumbled across the receipts for McDonalds and Wendy's. The McDonalds was around the corner and within walking distance, the Wendy's was their competitor about two doors down. She could see that of course her credit card had been used to pay for it. Then a major clue: she noticed that one side of her pizza box had some writing on it in marker:

“LG EX-EX CH – TRACY” the box read.

Tracy. Who the fuck was Tracy? She signed in to her online billing for her credit card – sure enough it had been charged at a Leonardo's Pizza last night. She was there. But who was Tracy? She didn't know anyone named Tracy aside from some girl that she thought had gone to her middle school years and years ago. She searched her phone – no contacts for Tracy, nothing. Had she given a pseudonym? Had she run into someone named Tracy last night while somehow drugged or in a sleepwalking stupor and they had gotten food and gone back to her place together? It was possible. She had to try and find out. She went around the corner to Leonardo's with the box and asked the man working the counter if he knew “Tracy”. She explained that she woke up with that pizza box in her apartment last night, her card was charged for the pizza, she didn't remember ever going there, buying the pizza, or eating it, and she didn't know who this Tracy person was either. The man smirked at her, amused.

“Look ..uhhh” he began

“Evelyn” she added

“Look, Evelyn, I wasn't here – I don't work night shifts anymore, but when I did...look I'm just sayin' that about 95% of our customers from 1 AM onward were either drunk, stoned, or some other type of high..” he explained “Now I know you say you weren't high, but you don't really remember anything...I'm sure you're a nice girl and all but...well...hey I dunno maybe you just had a bit to drink or something...”

“I know I didn't last night, that's the thing. I went home by myself, had dinner, watched TV and went to bed!” she said, her eyes widening.

“Sure, sure I guess that's what happened. Just sort of odd that you also ended up with a pizza at 1 AM and it doesn't fit in with any of that...anyway, I gotta get back to it” he said, as the phone began ringing and he jumped at the opportunity to answer it and escape his conversation with the strange girl in front of him.

Evelyn was dejected. The trail had gone cold. She thought about asking for their security footage from last night, but she had a strong feeling they wouldn't ever entertain the idea. She left the pizza box in the trash and walked home. In spite of having awoken a couple of hours prior completely stuffed to the gills, she was absolutely STARVING. Like, she was used to living essentially in perpetual hunger, but she never really indulged and the hunger never really poked and prodded at her like it was right now. She wasn't sure how she could even be hungry with what she had eaten the night before, but there was no denying that she was extremely famished. She quickened her pace – she had some portioned out steel-cut oatmeal at home that would hit the spot.

Back at home, and with a small portion of oatmeal which she downed greedily like a person who hadn't eaten in weeks, she began to devise a plan. She went on amazon and, not know much about surveillance cameras, ordered the quickest and simplest thing she could think of – a ring doorbell camera. The plan was simple – since this had happened to her twice in the span of 4 weeks, she was pretty certain it would happen to her again at some point, and hopefully by the time that happened, she would be able to capture some of what had happened on camera. As she changed the shipping to same day delivery for an extra charge, she eyed the empty container of oatmeal, and contemplated how it hadn't even made a dent in the hunger tearing at her insides. She was sitting here with an unfamiliar and difficult exercise in impulse control. It wasn't that she was bad at this, it's that she had been so good for so long, that it had become effortless. Now it wasn't feeling so effortless. She wanted nothing more than to stand up, walk over to her fridge, open it up, and devour every single thing in there.

To distract herself, she took out her mat and did some yoga on the rug in front of the TV. She tried to meditate a bit afterwards, hoping she might gain some insight during her state of relaxation into what had happened last night, but her mind stayed mostly blank. A couple of hours passed, she was getting close to dinner time and the thought of her hunger and what she could eat had never left her mind for a single second. She was wrestling with the idea of going out and eating something unhealthy or making herself a turkey sandwich with healthy ingredients. At one point Evelyn even grabbed her keys, her purse and was walking towards the door when she thought better of it.

“No, no, no, no I can't do that...” she whispered to herself as she stood in front of her door, her arm halfway outstretched towards the knob. “I'm not some little tubby girl, I'm going to eat a healthy meal” she said unconvincingly to herself.

For the first time in her adult life she absolutely didn't want the healthy meal, and she had no idea why. Still, with as much strength as she could muster, she assembled the bland, healthy turkey sandwich and forced bite after unrewarding bite down her throat until it had all disappeared. She felt little difference from before the meal. It was as if she hadn't eaten anything at all. Then she had a notification in her email. Her package had been delivered. She sprang to her feet, eager for anything to distract her, and walked down to the apartment building lobby to pick it up.

She opened the ring doorbell, charged the battery on it, and propped it in the corner above her own entrance way where it had a nice wide angle bird's eye view of her bedroom door and the short hall from her room to the kitchen/living room area. From there, she would have a good view of everything that happened inside her tiny apartment.

“There we go.” she grunted as she stepped down from the chair she was standing on to fasten the camera in the corner. She tested a few times, walking in and out of the room and watching the playback video on her phone. “This will work perfectly!” she said to herself. Afterwards, she sat down on the couch and watched a movie to try and keep her mind off of her stomach shrieking at her to feed it some junk food like last night. At around 10 PM, she decided to go to bed, shut out the lights, and made her way to the bedroom.