Chapter 3 - Perspective

What interested Jesse most of all about his new friends was finding out how they were all so damned fat. He observed them all carefully; what snacks they ate, how much incidental exercise they got walking around the college. No matter what, his brain couldn’t seem to make the statistics fit. He could see that Ben had a small soda addiction, perhaps partly explaining why he was so much more obese than the others. Jesse wanted to ask him what it felt like to be that fat, to feel his body jiggling as he walked and his fat rolls sweating in the strangley warm fall season. But Jesse knew he couldn’t ask those things. For the most part, he could see their embarrassment about their weight: the way they dressed to try and conceal it and readjusted their clothes whenever they started to stretch unflatteringly across their blubbery bodies.

For Jesse, it was all new, this freedom to eat and drink whatever he wanted without repercussions. It was fun, nibbling on potato chips with his larger buddies and enjoying creamy lattes in the middle of the day. It felt naughty after all those years of being told that his body had to behave like a machine. What went into it was every bit as important as the performance his body could give on the field. Leaving all of that behind was, perhaps, even a little erotic for him.

“Which gym do you work out at?” asked Harrison, one of the guys at the dorm, just as Jesse went into the kitchen area one evening.

“I don’t go to a gym,” Jesse shrugged. Harrison was one of the boys who was always asking him to sign up for sports with him; hungry for his strong body to win them success. Athletic, but without the natural skill and ability for sports that Jesse had, Harrison was still on a quest for body perfection; asking Jesse about his diet and weight training regime on a regular basis; always wanting to know about the workouts Jesse had done when he’d signed up for his football team after college.

“What’s your exercise regime then?” Harrison pressed, eager to see what weights and dumbbells Jesse must have in his bedroom instead.

Jesse shrugged again. “I don’t have a regime,” he replied.”My knee is fucked and I can’t play professionally anymore, so what’s the point?”

“But, aren’t you worried you’ll just get fat?” Harrison asked, watching with curiousity as Jesse began eating a pack of potato chips from his cupboard in the kitchen.

Jesse rolled his eyes. Was that really everyone’s worst fear in the world? “There are worse things than being fat, you know?” he grumbled, seeing that guys like Harrison were probably the reason why Ben and his friends had taken so long to trust him.

Guys like Harrison just lacked that little bit of maturity. Being those three or four years older than him, Jesse felt like he finally had a better perspective on life; slipping a bottle of soda under his arm and heading back to his bedroom to study.