Chapter 30
Appendix R—Interview Transcript
LC: Thirty-one. I own a fashion brand. Emmett’s best friend and roommate.
FD: It took some convincing to get you to speak with me today. Any reason why?
LC: I told you in my email. I don’t trust anything about you or that fucking Monster Corp.
FD: By that you mean Monstera BioSciences?
LC: I knew something was off about that clinical trial. I begged him not to do it, and then look what they did to him. I was there, you know, when it happened.
FD: At the museum?
LC: I’ll never be able to unsee it.
FD: The blood? The mayhem?
LC: The look on his face.
FD: Right. Well. I just have a few questions.
LC: You’ve got five minutes.
FD: I spoke with a couple of Emmett’s former coworkers at Target, and they said he changed in the last couple months before he left. Not just physically. Did you notice that?
LC: It was that drug he was on, that Emaciate.
FD: EmaC-8, I believe it’s called.
LC: That’s what I said.
FD: So you think the treatment was to blame.
LC: The treatment, the weight loss. And the social media, my god, the fucking social media. All those people telling him how great he looked, how amazing he was for dragging himself out of the fat gutter.
FD: You think it went to his head?
LC: He for sure started acting different.
Started keeping an eye on what I ate. Making little comments.
He convinced me to join his gym. At first it was fun, helping him take video for his Insta.
But if I said, “I don’t feel like it today,” he’d call me lazy.
He’d get on me about not working hard enough, taking too long on the machines.
“Are you almost done? People are waiting.” It felt like he was embarrassed of me.
FD: He’d never been that way before?
LC: Not with me. Maybe himself. He was bullied his whole life. He internalized that shit pretty bad.
FD: It sounds like he started to become a bully himself.
LC: I didn’t say bully. Just… one of them. One night we got into a big fight—
FD: Did he hurt you?
LC: Never touched me. He got pissed at me, though, for giving him a hard time about the weight loss, saying fat was beautiful and there was nothing wrong with it.
He said, “You sound like those idiot women on your Twitter feed. Stop trying to use body positivity to make excuses for your poor life choices.”
FD: Harsh.
LC: I’ve had worse, but coming from Emmett? If Mando ever found out—
FD: You don’t really believe that, though, do you? That there’s nothing wrong with being fat?
LC: What are you trying to say, dude?
FD: I mean, from a health perspective—
LC: Being Latina isn’t so good for my health. It increases my risk of pretty much everything—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes. Which I’ve got. Would you say there’s something wrong with having brown skin?
FD: That’s not a choice.
LC: If being thin was just a choice, don’t you think most people would choose it and not have people like you judging them all the time? That’s why drugs like Obexity exist, right? ’Cause it’s not that fucking simple.
FD: Obexity is a medical treatment. To help people improve their health—
LC: Health, health. I’m going to write a children’s book called The Boy Who Cried Health. Like any of you give a shit. You talk about health because it’s more acceptable than admitting you hate fat people. Fat women especially.
FD: I don’t—
LC: At the end of the day, Emmett was being a hypocrite.
That’s what riled me most. Like yeah, his body changed, but he hadn’t really.
He still ate more in one sitting than most people eat in a day.
He still hated his body even when he was being an asshole about mine.
No matter how much weight he lost, he still wouldn’t take his shirt off at the beach.
FD: Why’s that, do you think?
LC: Because fat isn’t something you wear, like a piece of clothing. When you live with it long enough, when it’s a part of who you are, that shit goes all the way down.