chapter 13

“...Evelyn” Tom added for her with a whisper.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Well let's see – your credit card that you handed to me when you first started stopping in the restaurant has the name Evelyn on it...that short glimpse of your driver's license that you pulled out of your wallet and slapped down on the counter of the beer and wine store a few months ago, the odd piece of mail I've found lying around the apartment addressed to an 'Evelyn Reed'. Just to name a few” he replied snarkily.

“Then why didn't you-” Tracy began.

“I thought it was your nickname or a middle name or something” he shrugged. “You know my friend Mark Walters who works the shift after me?” he inquired.

Tracy nodded her head

“He's Jasper Marcus Walters the fourth. But who the fuck wants to go by Jasper these days? His family gave him that name to continue a line of names, but they've always referred to him as Mark, and it's the only name he uses with anyone. I knew the guy real fucking well - or at least I thought. Then one day the owners put me in charge of payroll, I was looking through employee information in the system and had to ask why “Jasper Walters” existed but not Mark.” Tom explained.

Tracy laughed softly and nodded her head.

“So when I saw a bunch of stuff with Evelyn written all over it, I just sort of figured you had a different legal name than the one you went by. I never for a fucking moment imagined that it was some sort of alter-ego shit, and that my girlfriend was completely insane!” he said with a gradually rising volume to his voice.

“...sorry” he mumbled after a moment of silence. “It's just that this is a lot to hear right now. I wish you had told me sooner. Hell, I wish I'd have asked you directly about the name thing and not just blissfully assumed all was well.”

“I didn't even fully realize what was going on until tonight.” Tracy replied.

“What do you mean?” Tom asked curiously.

“So, the other me...Evelyn...well she isn't really Evelyn, but I'll get to that. For over a year now she's known about me. I was dormant. I was stuffed down inside of her. Then she let her guard down. She slipped. After years of high school and college, always staying primp and proper, never really losing control, never giving in to temptation, she slipped. She went to a company happy hour for her new job. She got herself super drunk on free cocktails and decided afterwards to take a cab home. As she rode in the cab I could feel myself coming back to the surface. It was one of the only times I could remember sharing consciousness briefly. It was like being born into the world again. I shared her memories, everything we had done for the past...I dunno, 9 years? But I wasn't her.” Tracy said, attempting to convey the almost metaphysical feelings and experiences she held inside her.

“In a stupor, she stopped her cab a couple of blocks away from the apartment. Her stomach was rumbling. She stumbled out of the cab and through the doors of Leonardo's.” Tracy said, looking up again to lock eyes with Tom.

“The first time I saw you...” he said knowingly.

“Yep. Lots of drunk girls and guys have stopped into Leonardo's for a late night pizza binge, I'm surprised you even remember.” she replied with a chuckle.

“I barely do. Only because you kept coming back almost night after night from that point on, and I found this girl with the supermodel physique chowing down on pizza late at night to be an extremely fascinating oddity.” he said with a laugh himself.

“She ate the first bite willingly. I'm fairly sure that's what brought me back out, right then and there. The experience was almost unimaginable. The best I can describe it is like a chemistry rig. I felt like a sentient liquid sitting down in some dark, black beaker somewhere, observing what was going on around me but nevertheless contained. Then that pizza entered her lips. She chose to break her conditioning once in a moment of weakness and it was like someone lit a flame under the liquid that was me. From a liquid I boiled to a gas and was sent launching through an elaborate series of tubes until I found myself bursting through an outlet valve directly into the forefront of her brain – MY brain. I was conscious, I was lucid, I was in control. I knew where I was, I knew who I was, and I knew what I wanted to do – which was eat my feelings. Years and years of pent up feelings unaddressed.” Tracy described, doing her best to convey the jumble of images and feelings to Tom.

“I left after those slices. Hit up Burger King and a Chinese restaurant on the way home. It was weird, I knew everything about myself like I'd been living this life the whole time, but I also felt foreign in my own body and surroundings. I staggered inside with my food in hand, sat down on the couch, and ate myself into a coma.” she added, patting her now enormous engorged belly.

“But you obviously couldn't stay in control...” Tom ventured.

“Nope. As soon as I drifted, it was like I cooled off, condensed back into that liquid, and ran back down the tubes to my prison inside the beaker.” she replied, finishing the image.

“I didn't remain conscious during that time, I drifted deep within, I blinked, and the process snapped back in, accelerated. I shot like a bullet back to the forefront, completely disoriented. I was no longer on the couch, I was in bed. It was no longer early morning but evening again. Originally I thought I must have been sick, and I had dreamed the entire thing. No food boxes in the living room, nothing but health food garbage in the 'fridge.”

“-awful!” Tom interrupted to joke.

“Exactly.” Tracy answered with a smile. “Then I checked my phone. It was Saturday night. My happy hour had been Friday night. I sat and tried my hardest to remember for a very long time, but I had no idea how I'd lost track of a full day. I can only imagine that the other me went through a similar experience when she awoke on the couch surrounded by containers of food. All I knew was that I was awake, I felt fine – but I was hungry. Just in a perpetual state of hunger.” she added. “For the first few weeks, that's sort of how it went. I could barely eat anything back then. Every night I'd wake up hungry and try my best to stuff more food inside of myself. I had maybe another binge or so before the skinny-bitch became aware of me...”

"But why Tracy?" Tom asked.

"What do you mean?" his girlfriend replied.

"Why the name? Why not Evelyn, if you shared her memories and took over just reborn. If you weren't sure how you were different, why adopt a different name?" he inquired.

"To be honest, the guilt and shame I felt for what I did to her was so overwhelming that when I came to the conclusion that I wanted to become immense, almost as a tribute to her as well as an unleashing of who I really was deep down, I'd do it under that pseudonym." Tracy responded.

Tom smirked, then cleared his throat. “Alright, so let's say I believe all of this...how did you get the skinny, bitchy half of you to ever abandon health food and turn into a hog?”

“Well, that was actually pretty easy.” Tracy answered with a smile. “Once she became aware, she tried to contact a therapist to fix her. Psychiatrist actually. The psychiatrist she visited recognized that she was indeed suffering from what they call 'DID' or dissociative identity disorder. What the doctor didn't disclose to her at the time, was that her colleague had suggested that it was entirely possible due to how separated our personalities were, that they weren't even dealing with the “base” version of Evelyn” Tracy replied.

“Dr. Janikowski is the woman's name. I just met her tonight to be honest. Essentially, she had told Evelyn that we had an extremely rare permutation of an already extremely rare disorder, but since I wasn't doing anything dangerous or harmful, that she should do what she can to placate me for the time being. Her colleague's idea for treatment was rooted in the only other similar case they had ever dealt with. That particular case dealt with a late resurgence of older behavioral patterns that existed prior to an intense trauma in the individual, and in that case, the emerging identity was the one which was the true “base” personality before being split or altered by the trauma.” she elaborated.

“So, when your mom pushed you to change your entire persona...” Tom began

“The attached trauma of fat camp, verbal and psychological abuse, and eating disorders came to a head when I struggled to cope with what I'd done to my best friend, which caused a division in myself that suppressed my base personality in favor of one which could deal and cope with events as they had unfolded.” Tracy finished.

“...at least, that's more or less how Dr. Janikowski described it.” she added.

“But you still didn't answer completely how you got your alter-ego to turn into a fatso.” Tom protested.

“Ah, well when it came to that I'd say that you actually had some doing.” Tracy chuckled.

“What do you mean?” he replied.

“Well, I'd gotten her to plump up a bit just through my late night binges. Every day she had to contest with immense hunger and she'd have needed to be a full time fitness instructor who never got to experience eating a meal in order to keep me at bay with what I was shoving down my gullet. I'd stretched our stomach a huge amount...well, I don't need to tell you, you know what I mean.” she said playfully.

"The only trouble was, Evelyn was still miserable. I wasn't 100% sure why at the time, but I despised her in a way. I saw her sobbing, begging for me to slow down or stop. I figured the train might roll down the tracks much faster if I could get the caboose to shut its brakes off.

“The night that I took a leap and had you pegged as the dirty chubby chasing feeder that you are...” she said raising an eyebrow devilishly. “I did it as a gamble, knowing full well that if she woke up next to you the following morning, assuming she didn't nuke the entire thing by overreacting right away, she'd succumb to the primal urge to fuck you, and then she would be ours.” Tracy said, lightly rubbing Tom's abs through his shirt.

“What the fuck, Tracy? I'm like...50% sure that might somehow constitute rape or something” he said, annoyed.

“Hey, I'm 50% sure that I consented, so fuck that skinny-bitch!” she responded shifting her hips towards him to squish him a little.

“So she gave in after meeting me?” Tom added, returning to the subject.

“She was like putty in your hands. I think that's where her resistance began to break down, and parts of me – parts of her base personality began to slip back through.” Tracy replied.

“Dr. Janikowski told me this evening that she was quite certain the base personality was re-asserting itself when Evelyn lost her polished facade and reverted to being an unabashed fatty like me. Unfortunately, Evelyn broke off contact with her when we really started piling on the pounds – she was pretty happy just growing and getting fucked by you, and so was I if I do say so...” she added.

Tom rolled his eyes playfully at the last statement and continued his line of questioning. “So what exactly happened tonight then?”

“Well, for the first time, Evelyn slipped out of control while upright and conscious. Every other time she had been heavily intoxicated or relinquishing control via going to sleep. When she was exasperated and entering Leonardo's yesterday, I started to stir with that feeling of welling up from the beaker – enough to see what was happening around me. I saw her sit at the table, then she seemed to go blank. I wanted to push through and take over, but I didn't really know how – of if I even could. After a while, she reverted, and I was sucked back down into the darkness.” she explained.

“Well that explains the weird episode in Leonardo's...” Tom said pushing his lips quizzically to one side of his face. “But what about her doctor's office?”

“Ah...well, as far as Dr. Janikowski could tell at first, she was trying to get Evelyn to dig into what it was that triggered her episode, and Evelyn went blank while whispering the word 'tubby'. I came rocketing to the forefront and found myself in the extremely unfamiliar surroundings of a psychiatrist's office.” Tracy answered.

“Incredible...” Tom replied, his gaze almost piercing through Tracy's eyes.

“So when I tried to leave right away, the doc persuaded me to stay. She said she knew where Evelyn came from. From my perspective, I'd always been but became born a second time when Evelyn made the choice to break her conditioning and binge. I needed an answer on where she came from. The doctor submitted that her origin likely stemmed from a deep childhood trauma – a trauma about which up until that point, she had been completely unable to evoke any sort of response or progress with Evelyn.” Tracy expounded.

“We did a hypnosis therapy session where she almost lost me back to the void, but ultimately she helped me to dredge up the pain and sorrow associated with what I did to Tracy. Dr. Janikowski didn't have a concrete reason for why it worked with me and not with Evelyn aside from the fact that I must be the base personality, and she was a manifestation of the split in personality brought on by my conditioning, regret, and associated trauma.” she continued.

“Wait, so if you were in control during the session, how are you back here and doing this? Won't Evelyn realize vaguely what's happened when she wakes up and isn't even in Dr. Janikowski's office anymore?” Tom asked with concern in his voice.

“See, that's the best part: Dr. Janikowski suggested letting her come back out in order to conceal that fact.” Tracy answered with a smirk.

“...but why would a psychiatrist want to do that? Wouldn't she have to lie to the other personality?” Tom asked.

“While cures for DID are not generally something which is thought of as possible, at least not necessarily in the long term for most patients, the doc felt that since the barrier between us was eroding slowly, it might be beneficial to expose Evelyn to the realization of what's happened, and see if it were possible at all to merge our personalities back together.” Tracy said excitedly.

“But how do you plan to do that?” Tom asked, his eyebrows raising as he began to come to a conclusion on his own answer without Tracy even responding.

Tracy grinned a wide smile, pushing her flabby cheeks to the side and widening her face deliciously.

“...your mom?” Tom suggested.

“Bingo.” Tracy said, patting her belly.