Chapter 4
Lizette was the first person on her feet when the presentation was over. “That was the most fucking offensive, fatphobic sci-fi bullshit I’ve heard in a minute.”
“Will you keep your voice down?” Emmett’s gaze snapped to Dr. Saito at the front of the room. To his relief, she seemed not to have heard.
“You’re not actually thinking about—”
“Can we talk about this in the car please?” He hurried out of the room ahead of her.
The elevator full, they took the stairs down to the parking garage in silence and got into the car. “Please tell me you didn’t fall for that shit,” Lizette said, pulling the driver’s door shut.
“What do you mean, fall for it?”
“You know what I mean.”
Emmett belted himself in. “For fifteen hundred bucks a month I don’t have much choice.”
“This isn’t about money. I know you.”
“Then you should understand.”
“What, that you’ve been brainwashed your whole life, made to think you’re not worth shit? Fucking—” She thumped the steering wheel with a soft fist. “Emmettito!”
“Lizette!”
“I just wish you could see how dope you are! You don’t need this boohoo, weight loss, self-loathing shit. You’re better than that.”
“No, you’re better than that. You have a business, a boyfriend who loves you—”
“And so would you if you put yourself out there. I keep telling you to get on GROWLR. There are plenty of guys who like it juicy.”
“You know I hate that word.”
“Whatever! You’re fuckable!”
Emmett shook his head. “I just wish that after being my friend for twenty years…”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, say it.”
“I’m done talking,” he said to the window.
Lizette scowled. “Fine.” She prodded the LCD screen, and music blasted from the speakers like a wall of sound risen between them. She backed out and gunned it toward the exit.
Emmett sulked. Part of him wished he hadn’t lost his nerve, wished he’d just said what he was thinking. He’d been wanting to for a while, found himself getting close whenever the topic of his pathetic desperation to be normal came up.
Yes, “normal,” he thought. Because thin is normal, whether Lizette likes me fucking saying it or not.
She could be disappointed in him all she wanted; he was equally disappointed in her.
Disappointed that despite knowing how hard it was to live like this, she lacked any sympathy for his wanting out.
That despite how long they’d been friends, she didn’t seem to understand him, or what he’d been through, at all.
She knew what his stepdad had done to him, had supported his writing about it in his blog, but she didn’t like his talking about it. This was another weight she seemed adamant he go on carrying forever.
That night, Emmett tossed and turned for hours before sinking into fitful semiconsciousness. His mind chattered repetitively with the argument, Lizette’s words stuck like the lyrics of a scratched CD. I understand you’ve been brainwashed your whole life, made to think you’re not worth shit.
Brainwashed your whole life. Not worth shit.
Not worth shit.
Not worth shit.
The words enveloped him, drawing him down into a lower state of restlessness.
They remained even as the environment darkened and reformed.
“I just wish you could see how dope you are!” Lizette was saying, standing on tiptoes behind the surgeons crowded around the operating table.
“You don’t need this boohoo, weight loss shit. ”
White masks grappled their faces. Eyes glinted under the glare of their headlamps.
Panic clawed up Emmett’s chest. He could feel their hands dully through the anesthetic: pulling, applying pressure, carving him like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Lifting away a trembling yellow slab, the bruised skin of his belly still attached on one side.
It slapped the metal tray with a fwap.
“I keep telling you, there are plenty of guys who like it juicy!”
“Shut up, Lizette!”
Fwap.
Fwap.
Fwap.
They were taking too much. There’d be nothing left of him. No, the fat wasn’t him. It wasn’t him.
“W-what’s that for?” Emmett said when the surgeons hauled out a circular saw, triggering a memory of one that his former stepdad used to keep in the garage. The gadget revved, the razor tips blurring into a circle of screaming silver.
Emmett thrashed on the operating table, the restraints biting into his wrists and ankles. The spinning blade descended. He screamed as it ripped a horizontal line through his forehead.
Finally the pressure broke. Something clacked against the floor. A chill invaded the open cavity of his cranium: cold where it was never meant to be felt. Worse, the surgeons seemed not to like what they were seeing—murmured darkly to themselves, shook their heads.
“What’s wrong?” he gasped. “W-what’re you going to—”
His words exploded again into screams. His body raged against the violation of latex fingers in his skull, scrabbling for purchase on the slippery coils of his brain.
A wet, sucking sound—
Then Emmett collapsed. Zonked. Literally lightheaded.
“Don’t worry, sport. You won’t miss it.”
The surgeon dropped the brain into the metal tray with a fwap.
Lizette agreed, sneering. “Not worth shit.”