“So you’re saying—”
“Follow the trial protocol. Take your doses, or I’m pulling you out of the trial. This is a serious medical study, not a game.”
Do I look like I’m having fun?Emmett wanted to say. But getting off Obexity hadn’t just reversed his weight loss; in more ways than one, it had taken the bite out of him.
Halleck stared, then turned his back to his patient. “You can go.”
“I need my next set of injections.”
“You said you missed a couple doses. So you should still have some. Use what you’ve got first.”
Shit.“And if I misplaced those?”
Halleck looked around, an eyebrow cocked. “Then I’d assume you’re selling them illegally.”
“Why would I—”
“Upmarket drug dealers love experimental weight loss products. You could probably make a killing.” Halleck snorted, as if recognizing the irony.
Emmett didn’t doubt there was a market for EmaC-8, but Halleck was projecting. Participants choosing to stay fat for a bit of extra cash? He’d read studies about formerly obese people saying they’d rather get cancer or lose a limb than regain the weight.
“You doubt it?” Halleck said, reading Emmett’s expression. “Surely you’re not that naïve. Greed and obesity are comorbidities. Obexity can only cure one.”
CHAPTER 37
As fast as he’d lost the weight, it seemed to pile back on at twice the speed. Emmett should’ve been more concerned that the police were narrowing in on a murder charge—especially now that the gym bro’s remains had been identified by his dental records as those of missing Point Loma man Marco Jiménez—but it hardly registered against the horror taking place in Emmett’s weight-tracking app. Every morning he stepped onto the scale and anguished. Two, three, four pounds heavier than he’d been the previous day. A cancer-like growth: merciless, inexorable.
He bristled, guilty and oversensitive. He felt like his weight gain was hyper-visible and everyone was judging him for it, even strangers who had never known him thin. Though he was still small compared to how he’d started, the number on the scale didn’t actually matter: seeing it move in the wrong direction, even by a pound, tortured his mind with shame and insecurity. Every bite of food he put into his mouth was ripe for judgment and scorn. Mirrors exaggerated his most despised bodily features and whispered that everyone noticed.
He had to start losing again, but without Obexity he had only diet and exercise. Jumping back on the deprivation hamster wheel barely reduced his gain. It defied mathematical logic. Each pound gained equated to 3,500 surplus calories—that’s what he’d always been taught. But if that was true, how could he have put on two and a half pounds overnight when he was only consuming a thousand calories per day and practically killed himself doing it?
A few days of this and he burned out hard, tumbling headlong into an hours-long food binge that pushed him back up to 205 pounds, the upper end of the overweight category. A few weeks off the drug and he was nearly obese again.
That’s what happens when you take the easy way out, sport. When you pave your ascent with grease and fat. One wrong step, and it’s a slippery slope back to rock bottom.
He feared things were beginning to unravel, in and out of work. The education manager job that had seemed like a dream was quickly becoming a nightmare. From day one he’d had challenges with his team, namely a hotheaded coordinator named Ysella, bitter about having once again been passed over for the job, and a contingent of part-time educators and tour guides who supported her.
After being burned by the previous manager, the team was mistrustful of Emmett’s sudden hiring and set to work digging up dirt. By the end of his first week, everyone seemed to know that Emmett and Aaron were an item. He soon learned from Ry, a butch front-desk associate he was friendly with, that printouts were circulating of Emmett’s Instagram posts, on which a private account named wolfeboy3 had left romantically suggestive comments.
“I mean, I’m no expert in male anatomy,” Ry said, microwaving her lunch in the staff kitchen, “but five eggplant emojis seems abnormal.”
Emmett was tempted to add that when it came to sex with Aaron, even one eggplant would’ve been generous.
Aaron had barely touched him since the bathroom incident. When Emmett finally got around to broaching the subject, Aaron accused him of making too big a deal of his reaction, which he claimed was both minor and totally justified.
“If you found out I was lying to you for weeks—”
“How was I lying?” Emmett shot back.
“Oh, come on. You’re telling me you haven’t been hiding your skin under that man Spanx thing?”
“What did you think it was for? Like, ofcourseI’m going to have loose skin after that kind of weight loss.”
“I thought you were just using it to tighten up, I don’t know.”
“Didn’t really care, I guess. As long as you got off on your weird little—”
“My little what?” Aaron spat.
