Chapter 1 - Three Animals (1.1)

Lighting a fire

I get that it’s stupid and reckless, okay, I get it, but you’ve gotta understand that everyone does stupid and reckless things even knowing the odds. They’ll say, I shouldn’t be doing this, and then haul ass down the interstate at night, maybe twenty, thirty over the speed limit, knowing that the cops love to hang out there. Well, I mean, I did that, and the ticket hurt as much as my dad chewing me out, but I bet everyone else has something like that. Everyone at a casino knows the house wins in the long run. We make stupid decisions like that because life needs a little bit of transgression, yeah? If something really makes you happy, well, maybe it can be worth any amount of problems it’ll cause. That’s what I thought.

It’s harder to resist this line of reasoning when you’ve been mulling over how bad you want something for… oh, wow, it had to have been like, six years by that point, huh? I think it started for me in middle school. I had been a precocious little girl, and the first time I got the chance to show off was PE, so I was really excited to set my mile time. I hoped to beat a lot of the boys in the class, so I felt like I was flying when I finished my final lap ahead of everyone else. The teacher called out my time, and I grinned at his surprise.

I flopped on the grass next to the track and just sat there, watching my classmates filter by. It was just something idle, no real focus on what I was seeing, until this one girl came along. She transferred out before the end of the year, so I don’t remember her name. I just remember she got bullied because… well, she was fat. That was the only thought going through my head as I saw her stagger through her second lap, red-faced. I couldn’t look away for some reason.

When I was home later that day, I kept thinking about her. Something was so fascinating to me. The way she moved… I would’ve been embarrassed to be seen like that, but I could not help but imagine what running that mile as that girl would feel like. It would have stopped there in simpler times, but unfortunately, I had internet access. I started making clumsy google searches, stringing together random terms from my internal monologues until my parents came home. I had the vague feeling I was doing something bad, so I stopped once I heard a car pull in. The next day, I tried it again, and breathlessly read a blog post from some woman who gained a hundred pounds on purpose. By the end of the week, I was bemoaning the fact that I was definitely horny imagining myself as these fat women.

I kinda just bore that shame into high school without acting on it. I threw myself into sports, and was a track captain at the end. They voted me into homecoming court, for some reason. I think I just made people laugh, and I was pretty. That sounds a little facetious, but I really was! I was even more of a standout when I landed a sports scholarship, too.

I only used it the first year, though. I did some academic competitions – write a good essay, make a poster, cite your community service – to get some aid, and then won some merit-based scholarships. It was enough to leave the track team – it was a huge time sink to go to all those practices, and I wanted to, you know, study at college, not go *** at a tournament.

It opened up a lot of free time for me, and that was kinda bad, because my idle mind started screaming the thought that had been bouncing around in my head since middle school: I need to be a fat pig so bad. Yeah, it was that serious. It was objectively a stupid wish, no upsides, just irrational horny thoughts. It was also my Achilles heel. Whenever I saw a fat enough woman in public, I would just get a little excited, feeling my heart beat – this was still happening in college, mind you, and I know that’s a bit more ridiculous than if some pervert teenager gave these poor women the same visual mugging I was fond of. It was a bit of envy, a bit of admiration. I wished I was there, swaddled in my own body…

Actually, no, I may as well be brutally honest. I didn’t just want to be fat, I wanted to be distractingly fat… okay, listen, I’m still a little squeamish about it, alright? Let me try again: I wanted to be humiliated. I wanted judgment. I wanted gossip about me, and I wanted to ruin myself. I wanted to be gasping and pathetic. Fuck! I should’ve made a different New Year’s Resolution. ‘Honesty.’ I don’t think I like this sort of shame…

W-well, it was a thought that got more intense over time just from being there. It interfered with my life. On the outside, I was this cute track captain who put her all in the competitions and was generally well-liked, but buried deep inside, I was a huge pervert that wanted to pretty much destroy everything I had going. Why? Because dammit it would be hot. Just thinking about it for too long made me a quivering mess. It was something I thought about before bed when I was masturbating under the covers with my phone propped up next to me showing something my parents would have – well, in all honesty, they probably outright lacked the worldview to comprehend what I was watching. My dad is an accountant! It would have been like showing a caveman a strobe-light.

So, yeah, that is what I was dealing with. When I finally quit track at the start of sophomore year, well, I’d read the stories about how that could go. I thought to myself, it could start right here. Track star loses control. My tuition wasn’t riding on my physical fitness anymore, and you can still do coursework with a few extra pounds. In fact, some people expect the first few.

Imagine that popping in my head when I bought groceries, every day, lingering by the bakery before I would grab… I think it was kale? I’d leave there digging my nails into my palms.

While I was dealing with that, I still had a social life too. I had some friends from the track team that I studied with. One of them declared the philosophy major with me, and a few others took electives from the department when they could. They would come and work with me as they gossiped about people I didn’t know anymore. I swear it was kafkaesque the way they lived. I hate using the word but from my view, that’s what it was like. Someone would ask what we thought about ‘Maud,’ and then one of my friends would pass judgment on her for some social faux pas that I would never have conceived of. In case you were curious, Maud’s sin was not knowing who John Lennon is. To be fair, that was a very strange thing to not know, but punishment-worthy?

That same group from track had trysts that came and passed just as arbitrarily. Strange, half-formed golems trotted out, said some personal trivia I would expect from a toddler (‘I love barbeque,’ ‘I have a birthmark,’ ‘I can’t drink milk or else I pass out,’), and were then shuffled off-stage once they ran out of material. My friends cared for me, and they tried to set me up with men they thought I might like, but the men they found were more evolutionary holdovers. I’d humor them for a date, maybe spending a night with one of them if they were hot. Then, block them from my phone the next morning. It might seem rude, but the talking stage with these guys was often when you learned about their anger issues, or hunting obsession. Of course, even if I had found one that didn’t drive me insane, it wouldn’t have worked out beyond a night of fun; true intimacy is harder when you’re unhappy with your body.

All this came to a head in the winter of my sophomore year. I was a little on edge by that point. I was getting hammered with work, had two papers looming in the next week, and wanted a distraction. So, I agreed to meet some guy. I only remember him as Football Joe. There were two other Joes my friends introduced me to – the first one was Engineer Joe and the second was Rock Climber Joe. So, this guy had to be Football Joe. Guess how the lug had gotten himself a scholarship?

He was clearly strong, but a bit… empty between the ears, so he suggested a burger place for the first date. I wasn’t a high schooler, so I was a little thrown by the weird location, but I still accepted. I got there, and he smiled at me, shaking my hand for a greeting like we were businessmen going through customs. Internally, I thought to myself, football player. He’s had a lot of head trauma, cut him some slack.

He was boring, but kinda cute, so I stuck it out. I had gotten a small fry and a chicken sandwich, which I had finished five minutes before I saw someone else at the restaurant. He was trying to interest me in what he was saying, and when he drifted off, I didn’t notice.

“Oh, damn, look at that,” he said, staring at the woman eating a double cheeseburger in a corner. She had three more in front of her, and it explained her weight. Her stomach brushed against the table, not that she noticed. A part of my brain was ready with the estimate: probably about 230-ish pounds. She was focused on her food, shuffling around to get more comfortable as she chewed.

“That’s like, at least two of them. Some real fatsos come here, huh?” Football Joe said, grinning at me.

I still remember that line. ‘Fatsos?’ That’s not even a high schooler insult. That’s what you say in a kid’s cartoon. I had been lasered-in on that woman plowing through her burgers, and had been so intensely thinking about what it would feel like to fill that booth like her, that I felt some twinge of embarrassment by proxy for that woman when Football Joe spoke. That got me a little excited, even if I was indignant: both because he was insulting some random woman who had done nothing to him, and because…

“Oh, come on, that’s not that much,” I scoffed. “Those burgers are not that big.”

“There’s still more than two of them,” Football Joe said back, certain. “It’s more than you think.”

Something snapped in me. This caveman was acting smug! I laughed, murmured “watch this,” and with a big stupid grin on my face, went up to order four burgers for myself. Football Joe stared as I came back with the tray.

“Lynne…?” he said as I sat down. I ignored him and tore open a burger, scarfing the whole thing down as fast as I could. It was maybe thirty seconds of frenzied chewing.

“Mmf see?” I mumbled through the first bite of the second burger. It was already a struggle to eat, and Football Joe’s brain was straining as he watched. I hoped the blush was not visible on my cheeks, as I internally screamed at myself to stop, but I was just too exhausted to control myself. I needed the release.

“Uh, what are you doing? You’re gonna feel like shit from that.”

“No!” I grunted, unwrapping the third burger and trying to hide my dread at it. “It’s… it’s not really that… much…”

I took a bite as Football Joe asked me a few more times to stop. I was in visible pain when I finished it, and Football Joe jabbed a finger at me.

“Lynne, this is fucking weird, stop it. I won’t talk shit about anyone else here, okay? This is just gross, I can see you’re full!”

I looked down at the last wrapped burger on the table, mind still aflame from the rush, and then looked up at the big lug wagging his finger at me. Did I really care what this guy thought of me? Was sleeping with him even going to be a possibility after eating all that?

I reached for the fourth burger, and Football Joe got up, storming out of the fast food place while muttering about me being weird. I sat there quivering for five minutes before I even unwrapped the burger, face red from thinking about how I must have looked to him, and thinking about the eyes of the other patrons I could feel on my back. After I had recovered, I left with the burger, and stumbled home while forcing myself to take a bite every once in a while. In that heady state, all I could think was, oh my God that was incredible. I had partaken of the forbidden fruit.

Once I had the feeling and I knew it felt that good, I think I was doomed. I lasted a month in a weird, intermediate state where I was lying to myself about what I was about to do: yeah, it felt great playing the glutton, but I totally only did that to get out of a date I wasn’t enjoying. Maybe I order a bit more on some days, relax my old diet, just for a brief thrill… but I would tell myself it was a hard day, and I needed to give myself a little reward. It became a bit more frequent, but the naughty, out-past-curfew feeling of walking back to my table with the greasiest thing on the menu didn’t go away. I became very fond of that jolt of pleasure, and the strange looks the waitstaff would give me when this pretty little thing would order the most threatening heap of meat they had. Despite that, I never ate like that at home. It was a performance to me, that’s all, and it had no point without an audience.

In the meantime, I found myself getting more invested in classes again. On the days when I could bask in the afterglow of glutting myself in public, I found a zenlike calm. I wrote some damn good essays. I managed to get through the worst part of my Renaissance thinkers course without any damage, which was usually the GPA killer in our department. I spent a little less time with my old friends, wondering if I needed something new in my life. I decided to try out some new clubs.

On their existing rosters, well, I didn’t find anyone as strange as the haruspices of the track club. Instead, all the people I met reminded me of the bland men that clique attracted. They were all… really mundane. The interesting clubs were already formed knots of people who had no interest in recruiting – I should have tried this wandering the previous year, I realized, and there may be no slots left at any club that I could slide into, if I did want to try out anything new.

The exceptions were other transients. They darted about, searching for flowers to further pollinate their already vibrant lives. The woman behind me in Ren thinkers made dresses as a hobby, and had fifty-thousand followers on Instagram. I learned this when we both showed up to the pottery club’s recruiting meeting and fumbled through the ‘don’t I know you?’ talk. Isn’t that incredible? She was there the whole time, and I never knew. That was something way more interesting than my friends from track. I tried going to more of those meetings. There were amateur actors and unicyclers. One guy brought his pet ferret, and it was way cuter in person than I expected. I got really fond of these little encounters.

The standout, though, was the guy I met in bowling club. I had come that day because I was full from an ‘impromptu performance,’ and thought bowling was relaxed enough that it would not upset my stomach. Because I was last to arrive, I had to take a spot in the overflow lane at the end of the room. Zeke was on that team.

He was lean, a little below average height, and rather good looking, if you could accept the glint in his eyes. You could see the glint best in the first look he gave anything: it was a sort of leer, really intense with his brow knotted up, but it was only a split second. Then his face would relax, and he would start talking breezily. He did it to me when I walked up, eyes boring into my face before he tossed out a hand to introduce himself.

He was a strange, intense man, but he was intense because he was so caught up in everything around him. That included me. He drew stories out of me I forgot were my favorites from high school, and he when I wanted laughs. It felt like trading secrets, even when he was just telling me about seeing some man piss himself outside of a dive bar the past week. He was a little sardonic at times, but… how do I put it? Even when he was a little grating, I was glad for the texture.

I ran into him again on campus, a week or so later, and he recognized me immediately. He even seemed happy to see me. I learned he was a history major, and on a whim, told him I might take a history class next quarter to satisfy a requirement. He asked which, and it was apparently one he already had planned to enroll in. That decided that class for my next quarter. He was cute and interesting – and I actually did kinda need the class – so it was an easy choice.

In between these new social experiences, I started going to cheap food places alone to order a ton and get stares. I was chasing the high. I still did it in front of my friends, too, and all that eating started to get to me. I put on a little weight, but I was still jogging regularly, and that kept it down to levels only noticeable by me when I wanted to fantasize – less than ten pounds, despite the infrequent gorging. The jogging was my argument to myself that I was not going to let myself go for this stupid fascination – an argument that became harder and harder to make against as the desire mounted.

The dam burst when I woke up hungry one night. I was frustrated to wake up at first, squirming in the darkness, but then I shot upright with a blush when I realized why it had happened: I had been stretching out my stomach, it was making me hungry more often. Sat up at two in the morning, just staring down at my body in the darkness, my mind reeled. I thought about how I had gotten to that point: this desire had become so persistent in my mind, so strong, that it was waking me from my sleep. I had been swallowing all of these salacious fantasies until that point, but being awoken at night by hunger made all my thoughts spill out. I had tried to ignore the time a friend muttered that I would not have my figure for long if I kept eating like I had been, but the thought rose back to my mind unbidden. Was I too far gone already? Being awoken by hunger in the night? That’s a fat girl habit, I thought to myself. The body was sure to follow. My friends already understood that, from just seeing my daytime eating. Was I an idiot for thinking it wasn’t inevitable?

Right after this, came the thought – and is it really inevitable? My heart was hammering in my chest just from entertaining this fantasy. It was time to admit to myself that I probably couldn’t hold myself back from the constant deluge of thoughts, so there was no point circling the drain any longer.

I ran to my kitchen, flinging open the pantry. The only sugary thing I had was cereal, but I was so desperate for anything with empty calories to feed my mania that cereal was good enough. I stuffed handfuls of it into my mouth at the kitchen counter – no milk, that would’ve filled my stomach up more instead of the more caloric cereal. I kept rubbing my stomach, lean from years of running and exercise, as it bowed out slightly from what must’ve been about three bowls of cereal. I was stuffed, and it did show, but I was still so small that it could’ve been hid by a thin hoodie. It should be larger, I told myself, even as I threw in the towel, staggering back to bed as a giddy mess.