“Hey, man, how’s it going?” His eyes rose to Emmett’s hair. “Whoa, wild color. I need sunglasses.”
Children raced and screamed in the background, an earsplitting blur of pink tulle.
Emmett gloated at the few extra pounds collected around Chris’s midsection, the gentle backward slide of his hairline. Small victories against the half brother who had tormented him as a kid.
“Yeah. Thanks. I’m good.”
The screaming blur stopped and tucked herself under Chris’s arm, angelic.
“Happy birthday, Harper,” Emmett exclaimed.
“Thank you.” She beamed, twisting.
“How old are you now? Fourteen, fifteen?”
“I’m four!”
“Oh,four! That’s lucky, because the store only had four balloons. You better take these.” He handed them over.
Chris called after her as she ran off inside, the balloons bobbing behind her. “Hey, what do you say?”
“It’s fine,” Emmett said.
“Come on in. Everyone’s out back.”
“Is Dad here?”
A low tut. “Yeah right. Your mom’s here, though.” She was staying with Chris, who had adopted her as his kids’ honorary grandma as Chris’s own mother had passed away when he was very young. In his excitement, Emmett had told her about his upcoming Future Makers interview. Now he wished he hadn’t.
“You bring swim trunks?” Chris said.
“Forgot them.”
“I got an extra pair you can borrow.”
“Yeah, thanks,” said Emmett sarcastically, before realizing Chris wasn’t making fun of him. Apparently old habits died hard—for him at least. “Sorry,” he muttered and stepped inside.
As he passed through the glass slider at the back of the house, it became clear just how desperately Emmett didn’t want to be there. The joy of the day couldn’t penetrate his misery—the perfect weather, the laughter of children, the army of blond moms sipping cocktails on the lawn as their hot shirtless husbands hurled screaming kids across the pool.
Already Emmett’s senses were homing in on the smell of food from the grill, the sizzle of burger patties oozing blood and melted cheese, beef franks blackening to cinders.
Chris clapped him on the shoulder. “We got plenty of grub. Grab a plate.”
“I can’t,” Emmett said, and Chris rolled his eyes. He didn’t need to say it:Another diet.
This one was necessary. He’d been driving home from the Future Makers interview when he received the email informing him he hadn’t gotten the job. It was the speed of it that made it feel personal, like a knee-jerk reaction not to what they had heard, but to what they had seen. Perhaps that wasn’t the case. Perhaps he just didn’t measure up—figuratively—and they didn’t want to waste his time. Still, he’d decided then that it was time to start dieting again. He had immediately redownloaded the MyFitnessPal app to his phone, set his daily calorie goal to 1,500—the lowest a man could safely go, said the internet—and after one final night of carnage, resumed the familiar ritual of logging every bite and sip he consumed throughout the day. The same diet he had done a hundred times, but this time was different. This time he wouldn’t let himself down. This time he would turn his life around.
The intrusive thoughts had already started.You’re dieting today? You really want to miss this opportunity to celebrate with your family? You hardly ever see them anymore. Give yourself a break and restart the diet tomorrow!
He pushed them away, but he could feel it almost physically, the vise of want tightening around him. The upward tick of the invisible meter tracking his progress toward total, inevitable collapse.
With a plate of baby carrots and broccoli he trudged through the crowd, avoiding people’s eyes. He knew too many of them from his thinner, postcollege days, when Chris had taken to forcing him out partyingwith him and his friends. He couldn’t bear the thought of their strained smiles and awkward hugs, their politeSo what are you up to’s while they pretended not to notice what he’d become.
Where was his family? He’d feel safer with them.
His mom, Joanna, was mid-gasp and clutching her chest when Emmett found her and his sister, Abby, by the screened-in trampoline. “I can’t watch.” She shielded her eyes and turned her back to the bouncing children as if they were juggling knives.
“Someone’s gonna snap their neck,” Emmett said, reciting a line from their childhood that had become one of his mother’s reluctant catchphrases.
