CHAPTER 1
Emmett’s heart thudded as he stood before the vending machine, scanning the rows of chips and chocolate held captive behind their black metal rings.Come on, come on, just pick something, he thought. The break room was empty, but it wouldn’t stay that way long. He had only moments, seconds maybe, before someone came in and caught him at it, before the warm flush of comfort he’d been craving all morning was dampened by the cold deluge of shame that came with being caught.
Hearing footsteps down the hall, he panicked and punched in the code for a bag of baked chips, the least satisfying of all possible choices.
Fuck.
As the ring swirled, pushing his selection to the edge of the shelf, Emmett could no longer avoid his reflection in the glass. In the mirror at home he almost passed for unremarkable, but set against the backdrop of the outside world, there was no getting around it—aroundhim. His five-foot-eleven frame; his hair, neon pink fading to ash brown, framing the exaggerated circularity of his face; the bulging chest beneath his scarlet parachute of a tee.
Emmett Truesdale had never been bigger, but in some ways he hadn’t changed at all. Even at the age of five or six, growing up on the northern fringes of his Southern California community, he’d daydreamed of taking a knife and shearing the fat off his body. He’d fantasized about being impaled with tubes and having the excess sucked out of him, being pricked with needles and drained like a blister. His sides had been a particular heartache, the way the flesh, bypassing his relatively flat stomach, collected like meaty saddlebags beside and behind him. His chest too—his “boobs” as his brother called them, before his hand darted out to squeeze and twist.
Imaginative Emmett had sat for hours on the toilet, Mickey Mouse undies looped around his ankles, awash in the fantasy of a procedure, medicine, or enchantment that would allow him to absorb the fat backinto his digestive tract and purge it into the bowl with a plop. Never once had he blown out his birthday candles or glimpsed a star arcing across the night sky without wringing the words through his mind:I wish I was thin.
“Hey.” His coworker Jazz came in, burgundy polo snug against her slender frame, with a Frappuccino and half a dozen paper Starbucks sleeves. “Got muffins. They were getting rid of them.” She dumped them onto the table as she sat, not even taking one for herself.
Emmett reached down for his chips, his stomach screaming. “I’m good.”
He could barely keep his eyes off the muffins as he returned to the table. But now that he had company, he was glad he’d chosen something with a sheen of healthfulness.
Jazz had taken the good side of the table, the side closest to and facing the wall, so Emmett grabbed a seat on the opposite side. He flattened his shirt over his butt crack before he sat, ensuring it wouldn’t show through the gap in the back of the chair.
It was among the greatest frustrations of Emmett’s body that clothes didn’t fit it. Most stores didn’t even carry his size now that he was a 4XL, but even made-to-measure garments rejected his physique. In his twenty-eight years he had yet to meet a tailor who could jury-rig a pant to stay up on his so-called waist, the downward slide of flesh formed between his expansive sides and the bottom of his lumpy pancake of an ass. Even when belted tightly enough to induce necrosis, pants barely stayed up a minute or two before inching down past his crack. He’d grown used to feeling it peeking out above his waistband all day, safely concealed under the untucked back of his shirt as long as he could avoid reaching up, bending down, or, ideally, moving at all.
As he and Jazz retreated into the silence of their phones, Emmett salivated over intrusive thoughts of blueberry and cinnamon sugar and began to cycle through his usual apps: email (junk), Pokémon GO (caught ’em all), Instagram (barely a like on his morning post). As he swiped through his stories—photos of ripped shirtless OnlyFans models, his brother’s kids, his mom’s morning latte—he came across an ad and paused.
The promoted story was bright, sleekly designed, and showed two versions of the same face, one morphing into the other. On the left sidethe woman was heavy and hangdog; on the right, thin, radiant, smiling, as if she’d shed a gray and dying blubber to reveal fresh, thriving skin underneath.
Groundbreaking weight loss clinical trial, read the accompanying text.Generous compensation provided.
Swipe up to learn more.
Emmett experienced an impulsive tug at the top of his abdomen like the one compelling him to reach for a muffin. Too late—the story elapsed while he was still taking it in.
He continued through his friends’ posts, or tried to, liking and commenting on almost every one. But despite his best efforts, he couldn’t get the ad out of his head. He backtracked to find it again. Grew desperate when it eluded him.
It wasn’t just that Emmett presently found himself at his highest-ever weight—somewhere in the high 310s, he guessed, having avoided the scale since the catastrophic collapse of his New Year’s resolution diet in the second week of January. It wasn’t just that “beach body season” was fast approaching, a meaningless weight loss industry scare tactic that nevertheless occupied more space in his mind than most actual holidays. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since college, surviving instead on periodic Grindr hookups that left him feeling more grotesque and disposable than the loneliness did. Or that he feared he’d already ruined his life with some as yet undiagnosed health disaster and would probably drop dead any moment of a heart attack or stroke, his lifeless body undulating across the floor, crack exposed, his fat laid bare for the whole world to see.
As much as any of that, he could really fucking use the cash.
His fifteen-minute break over, Emmett said goodbye to Jazz and resumed his post at the guest services desk. It was a typical weekday at Target. Traffic picked up around 11 a.m., and by lunchtime the line of customers waiting to collect online purchases was halfway to Bullseye’s Playground. There were issues with several orders, forcing Emmett to make hurried, out-of-breath trips back and forth across the store in search of this video game or that floor lamp—no, not the black one, thegold. A woman accused him of lying about the price of an air fryer and demanded to see his supervisor. A man insulted Emmett’s hair because the store’s AC wasn’t working.
Emmett clocked in and out for lunch but worked through, skipping his afternoon break so his coworker could leave early for an appointment. The appearance of an adorable five-year-old in a Pikachu costume brought him his only genuine smile of the day, before the child pointed up at the sweat patches under Emmett’s arms and squealed, “Ew.Fat boy stinks!”
Checkout was short-staffed, so for the final leg of his nine-hour shift Emmett was asked to fill in. His feet ached, arches throbbing. Or was it more of a prickle? He’d heard numbness in the feet was an early warning sign of diabetes. Could feet ache and be numb at the same time?
It was probably nothing, but he ought to get blood work done just to be safe. The thought filled him with dread. Unfortunately,safewas not a word he associated with the doctor’s office.
In between customers he switched to a register equipped with a stool for an off-duty cashier with a broken foot. He pulled the seat up to the counter and perched against it, his feet still throbbing as he scanned the next customer’s purchases.
A throb—definitely not a prickle.
Emmett was finally clocking out for the day when a voice spoke behind him. “Hey, Emmett, how’s it going?”
Emmett jumped. It was the store manager, Ricardo, aka Rick the Prick, a goateed goblin of a man who lorded his authority over the hourly staff like a good-humored king in a Haggar brand suit jacket.
“Hey, Rick,” Emmett said. “Scared me.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean to give you a heart attack. That’s the last thing you need, eh? Ha! Say, would you mind stepping into my office?”
