Chapter 31
The text came the following morning, and Emmett assumed by its tone of concerned coddling that his mother had heard about the fight at the restaurant. Is everything okay? If there’s anything you want to talk about I’m always here. Call me soon. Love you.
He ignored it, mostly because things were busy at the store—some woman was having a meltdown over a flatpack cabinet she’d spent three hours building before realizing it was missing a piece—then he had to dash home to shower.
He had plans to meet Aaron for a movie, some French horror thing about a student with a taste for human flesh.
They skipped popcorn, and halfway into the movie he was starving despite the stomach-turning violence on-screen.
It was slightly discomfiting, how much his mouth watered while watching it.
When the movie was over, he saw he had another text from Mom. Do you have time to talk tonight? I know you’re so busy. Miss you. He filed a mental note to call her later.
As they dined at an Indian place by the theater, Aaron shared that his new education manager had resigned. “Oh my god,” Emmett said, spooning chutney over his pakora. “She just quit? No notice?”
“She did us a favor. I’ve had my eye on someone great to replace her.”
Emmett’s eyes flicked up. “Who?”
“Don’t play dumb. I already talked to my boss, the one you met at the interview. She’s all for it.”
“Does she know we’re—?”
“Who cares? As long as we keep things professional at work, no one needs to know. You’re right for the job, and I need someone I can trust. You’d really be helping me out.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think of it as a stepping stone. It’s what you want, isn’t it, to get back into education?”
“Yeah, but…”
Aaron dropped his gaze, spearing a fritter with his fork. “All right, forget it. I thought you’d be happy, but if you want to deal with asshole customers at Target for the rest of your life—”
“No.” Emmett sighed. The insult was unnecessary, but Aaron was right: it was a great opportunity, a dream job. “It’s just the secrecy—”
“We’ll tell them. Eventually. When the time’s right.”
“What, when we’re married?”
Emmett wanted to yank the words back and swallow them. It was a joke. He hadn’t actually meant to imply—but Aaron sat back, shrugging, a twinkle in his eye. “Maybe.”
The waitress delivered their entrées, but Aaron continued to hold Emmett’s gaze. You heard me, his expression seemed to say.
Emmett’s gut churned with hope and confusion. Was Aaron for real? Emmett had never considered the possibility of marriage, at least not seriously. The dream was too big for him, or he was too big for it.
Used to be, he reminded himself. You used to be too big.
“What do you say?” Aaron said. “About the job.”
“I’d need to give two weeks.”
“Is that all? You’re not going to demand more money? Four weeks’ vacation? You have me over a barrel here.”
“I don’t know—”
“All right, you twisted my arm. Fifty-six K and three weeks’ vacation. Say yes.”
Emmett heard himself say, “Okay. Yes.”
“Amazing. Amazing.” Aaron grinned. “We’re gonna have so much fun. I’ll ask HR to send you the formal offer letter in the morning.”
Aaron leaned across the table and gave him a kiss, sweet and lingering. The thought rose to Emmett’s head, uninvited but welcome: the kind of kiss worthy of a wedding.
Aaron’s apartment was a short walk from the restaurant. They’d barely stepped inside when Emmett’s phone rang.
“Sorry, it’s my mom. I should get this or she won’t leave me alone.”
“No problem. Take it in the bedroom.”
Gratefully, Emmett slunk away and raised the phone to his ear. “Hey, Mom.”
“Not interrupting, am I?”
“No, no.” He sat on Aaron’s bed; a door off the living room closed. “I’m just at Aaron’s.”
“Shoot. I’ll call back.”
“It’s fine, I think he’s in the bathroom. I’ve been meaning to text you, it’s just been—”
“I know, honey. You’re so busy. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“Why—?” In the excitement of the job offer (and everything), he’d forgotten. “I’m guessing you heard about last night.”
“Only Abby’s side.”
There was no point trying to avoid it. Emmett narrated his version of events, how excited he’d been to show off his new look, his disappointment in Abby’s reaction.
“She was just being a such a bitch about it all night. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out she was listening at the door, trying to catch me throwing up.”
Joanna gasped. “No!”
“With Aaron there too. It was humiliating. I should’ve let it go, but I was mad and I reacted. I think I called her a hypocrite.” He didn’t bring up Abirexia; when it came to getting Mom on his side, this was how the game was played.
“I don’t blame you.”
A knot of tension loosened inside Emmett. Mom’s support was a fleeting thing, drawn to whomever she was presently speaking to, but it soothed him nonetheless.
“I just feel like no one in my life supports me,” he said.
“I put in all this work to lose weight, I have all these people online building me up, and my own friends and family just want to judge me.” He felt guilty about the “all this work” bit, but the lie was necessary; he didn’t want his mom to think Abby’s fears were justified.
“I don’t judge you,” she said. “What you’ve done, most people could only dream of. I’m so freaking proud I can’t even stand it. I sent your before-and-after post to Uncle Gene and he couldn’t believe it was you. You know what he said? ‘I told you there was somethin’ special about that boy.’ ”
Emmett smiled, but the feeling didn’t last. Was it bad that he took pleasure in being seen as “not him”? Should he not condemn the people actively celebrating his erasure, or was Lizette just getting inside his head?
“I just,” Joanna began, and Emmett braced himself. “I just want to make sure you’re healthy, honey.”
That word again. Healthy. It had always hovered around the objections made against his body.
Now it spiked his cortisol, winding his nerves like overtightened piano strings.
“Suddenly everyone’s so concerned for my health,” he snapped.
“Did you ‘just want me to be healthy’ when you were encouraging me to eat my feelings as a kid? When you guilted me if I didn’t have seconds or thirds of your cooking? ”
“I never—”
“How about when you were taking me to the Hostess outlet? When you knew Hank was abusing me and you kept me in his care for years?”
“Don’t you—” The change was instant, the nasal softness of her sweet-mommy coo steeled over into harsh declaration. “Don’t rewrite history. When I found out what he was doing, I went mama bear on his ass, and I know you know that because you wrote about it in your blog.”
“But he didn’t stop. You knew it was getting worse and you stayed.”
“I thought he changed.”
“That’s not what Dad said.”
She paused, apparently shocked. “What? When—?”
“When I was in college. We had a few drinks one night and he told me everything. That you knew you were going to divorce Hank, but you wanted to make sure you got child support on top of your alimony. You were trying to get pregnant with him, knowing you’d just leave after the baby was born.”
The heat of her fury radiated through the phone. “Fucker.”
“So it’s true. You stayed for money.”
“Money I could use to take care of you when we left. Which we did!”
“Not until after what he did to me. Not until—” Emmett’s voice cracked, his tears slicing razor blades behind his eyes. “Do you know how much that still haunts me?” he hissed, conscious of Aaron in the other room. “Do you know how much I still think about that day?”
“I’m sorry, okay? I fucked up. I was a terrible parent and it’s all my fault.
But Jesus Christ, you’re practically thirty.
At some point you have to stop blaming your problems on Mommy and Daddy.
I was a shitty parent, but as an adult, what you do with your life is on you.
No one can make you put food in your mouth. Only you can do that.”
Emmett felt like he’d been slapped. Every part of him wanted to strike back.
“So that’s it, then. It’s that easy. You just get to have kids, fuck them up, shove them out into a world that hates them, and call it a day.
You get to just—” He strained for another bruising turn of phrase, frustrated when it didn’t come.
He couldn’t find the words to express the lava surging through his heart—his revulsion at this world in which he was forced to live.
A world that never stopped telling him what he needed to be, do, look like, and own while making those things ever harder to attain.
A world where people were systematically fattened like farm animals, then shamed for it, blamed for it, refused help by the medical community that condemned them, and called lazy and stupid when they failed to overcome the odds.
A world, worst of all, that cared about none of it, refusing to ask any of the questions that mattered: How did we get here?
Why did we let it get this bad? Where do we go from here?
“Look, I know you want to hate me,” Joanna said.
“I know you want a scapegoat for all the things that’ve gone wrong in your life.
Just give me some credit for trying. Whatever I did wrong, I really tried to give you the best life and make sure you knew that you were loved and I’d always have your back. I tried.”
“You did. I’ve never questioned that you loved me. But I’m sorry: You didn’t have my back. You did just enough to make yourself feel like you did.”
“I’m sorry I was such a failure of a mother. Obviously your father was a saint.”
“I didn’t say that.” His dad had been no better, and obviously Hank was the real villain.
But the fact remained: It was his mother, with her never-ending dieting and her constant shaming of her body and others’, who had first taught him to hate how he looked.
Held up to the patriarchal beauty standards her husbands were not, she had inadvertently passed down to her son everything she had never wanted for her daughter.
“I have to go,” Emmett said at last.
“Okay, honey. Call me soon,” she cooed, as if they hadn’t just fought.
He continued the charade: “I will. Love you.”
Call over, he remained perched on the edge of the bed. His Hunger grew like a sinkhole opening inside him: a great, black, swallowing abyss that only food seemed capable of filling. Only meat.
Human meat.
The thought struck him like a hammer to the back of the head, a shock reverberating through every inch of his body. Why would he, how could he, even imagine such a thing? What the fuck is wrong with me? He blamed the movie. This was why he didn’t watch horror.
But Emmett had always been good at talking himself into food he shouldn’t eat.
He thought of the Savage Hunger exhibition at the Museum of Us.
In some cultures around the world, he reasoned, cannibalism was normal.
People had been eating each other for millennia—not just for survival like the Donner Party, but for connection to a higher power, even as medicine.
Was it any worse than whatever factory-processed slop they served him at the drive-thru?
The practice was condemned, like Emmett’s fat body, not for any logical reason, but because society had decided somewhere along the line that it was objectionable. But did that mean he had to too?
Disturbing as the craving was, part of him was tired of feeling ashamed of his desires. He resented having to deny his body what it craved.
The world had put this Hunger in him.
Maybe it was time they faced the consequences.