“?‘Becoming the true you,’?” Emmett said.
“Love!”
A photo shoot was scheduled for the second week of December to allow him to lose as much weight as possible. Monstera kept dropping hints that they’d like him to be back down around 165 pounds for the shoot.
Truthfully, he was more worried about keeping himself out of jail long enough to see it happen. Not long after Justin Matthews’s body was found, it was reported that forensic investigators had recovered from his apartment “fingerprints and DNA thought to belong to the assailant.” Emmett had thought then that his days were numbered, but although the police had his DNA, they still hadn’t shown up at his door.
“I don’t get it. Why haven’t they figured out it’s me yet?”
“Haven’t you ever seenForensic Files?” Lizette said.
“You know I don’t have the stomach for that murder stuff.” She shot him a look and he said, “You know what I mean.”
“You could probably watch anything now. I betThe Jeffrey Dahmer Tapesis like yourMaster Chef.”
“All right.”
She explained that because Emmett had never been arrested before, his DNA and fingerprints weren’t in the state or county databases, which was probably why the police couldn’t find a match. “As long as you don’t get arrested for eating anyone else, you should be fine.”
The day of the photo shoot drew near, but though he was losing weight again, it wasn’t coming off as quickly as it had been when he was bigger. He was averaging less than half a pound per day. He called in sick to Thanksgiving dinner at Chris and Jayla’s to avoid temptation, ignored texts from a “worried” Abby, and then managed to overdo it on the leftovers Lizette brought home from her parents’. Between that and his birthday a couple of weeks later, when one slice inevitably became a whole cake, he lost almost a week of progress.
The day before the photo shoot, he was still seven pounds over target and getting desperate. Even more than he feared Monstera’s wrath, he stressed knowing the photos would represent him in a national campaign.
He recalled losing six and a half pounds overnight by tripling up on EmaC-8. Even four or five pounds would be great. He’d just had his six-week check-in with Dr. Halleck, who’d been happy enough with his progress to give him his next cache of doses.
Equally, he recalled the consequences: the terrifying (though temporary) ballooning of his fat, then waking the next morning with a hunger that food couldn’t sate.
He’d done so well since then. He couldn’t risk another backslide, a sloppy murder that put him into the firing line of the police.As long as you don’t get arrested for eating anyone else, Lizette had said.
Three doses were too many. But two… two was doable.
He took them and was pleased when his body barely reacted. No sudden weight fluctuations, no popped buttons, just a light fluttering of his heart. Overdoing it before seemed to have upped his body’s tolerance.
But what mattered was the number on the scale.
He struggled to sleep, finally sinking into a nightmare of being arrested while flayed open on the operating table. Organs tumbled out of him as the police dragged him away, his feet tripping over a spill of intestine.
The second his eyes snapped open the next morning, he could feel the serum had done its work.
The scale confirmed: four pounds down. Good enough.
His hunger was savage, but Pamela and Rachael were beside themselves when he arrived on set. “Emmett, you look incredible!” they said.
“One sixty-eight,” he said apologetically.
“Don’t worry about it,” she insisted. “We were planning to help you out anyway.”
“Help me out?”
“In post. Good retouching can take off ten or fifteen pounds at least!”
Emmett hadn’t needed those extra doses at all.
CHAPTER 44
Between his increasingly demanding online persona, his new role as pharmaceutical spokesperson, and the mounting threat of being arrested, Emmett had neither the time nor energy to address his relationship with Aaron. It had been limping along for months, held together by occasional sleepovers and the fear that if things ended badly, both their jobs would be in jeopardy. An undercurrent of unacknowledged tension crackled beneath every interaction, as if they both knew that one wrong move could bring the whole thing crashing down. Aaron spent Christmas with his family in New York, and Emmett told his family that he’d gone with him; in reality, he spent the day at the Castillos’ being force-fed tamales and pozole by Lizette’s mother and tías, wondering if Aaron was equally grateful for the distance between them.
Emmett wasn’t necessarily opposed to quitting the museum. As much as he’d wanted the job, it involved far more meetings, admin, and management of his younger team members’ emotions than actually educating. Aaron had no interest in his ideas for new programming, and the office politics and gossip were verging on toxic.
