Finally she handed it back.
“You don’t have to tell me anything, Emmettito. I support you no matter what you do.”
“Really?” He smiled. “Thanks.”
Lizette called over her shoulder as she walked back to her room, “Just remember: when the apocalypse comes, the skinny bitches starve first.”
CHAPTER 9
The morning of the medical assessment arrived overcast, with a sickly chill of dread. Emmett’s gut churned with nausea as he punched the address of the medical office into Google Maps, partly because he’d obeyed orders to fast beforehand and partly from fear of the assessment. How long had it been since he’d seen a doctor? Three years? Four? How long would he have let it go if Monstera wasn’t forcing him?
Twenty minutes later, he took the off-ramp for Bonita Road and turned into the parking lot of a decrepit two-story commercial building. It was vaguely Spanish in style, mucky brown and sagging around the edges.
He found unit 109 and entered a small lobby, similarly shabby and decorated with Francisco de Goya prints. His entry interrupted a woman eating behind the desk. The steak in her breakfast burrito was practically raw in the middle. Blood oozed, dribbling down her chin as her eyes lifted to meet his. “Sorry.” She dragged a napkin across her face. “Name?”
“Emmett Truesdale.”
“Sign in, please. I’ll let Dr. Halleck know you’re here.”
Emmett sat down a moment later with the clipboard of medical questionnaires. The questions were endless, intrusive.Do you have any conditions? Had any surgeries? Take any medications? Do you smoke, drink, use marijuana or cocaine?Emmett answered no to pretty much everything. On a checklist of some forty medical symptoms, he marked just one:Weight gain.
Fifteen minutes after his scheduled appointment time, a nurse came to take him back. She took his weight—323 pounds, a staggering number even to him—then led him into a small wan exam room and measured his blood pressure. The cuff bound his arm so tightly it seemed possible that it might crush his bones to splinters.
The Velcro crackled as the nurse detached it. She’d barely spoken,her eyes matte and empty as she lumbered for the door. “Doctor will be right in.”
Emmett sat, fingers laced between his jittering knees. A clocktick, tick, ticked on the wall. Beneath it, a row of laminated medical posters. Diagrams of skinless musculature and viscera, caterwauling the devastating impacts of smoking, hypertension, and high cholesterol. One, focused on diabetes, depicted an obese man, his organs and arteries visible through transparent skin. Each was affected by the disease in a new, more heinous way.Vision problems. Cardiovascular complications. Kidney damage. Nerve damage. Stroke. Amputation. Even death.The man’s round face smiling all the while, dead-eyed and oblivious.
A knock at the door. Emmett put his phone away, and a gut-wrenchingly handsome man came in—thick hair swished back, bronzed skin stark against the whiteness of his coat. Emmett smirked, reminded of Joey Tribbiani as Dr. Drake Ramoray on theFriendsversion ofDays of Our Lives.
“I’m Dr. Halleck.” His tone neutralized Emmett’s amusement at once. His eyes conveyed a combination of seriousness and censure, despite having not yet seen Emmett’s medical chart.
He grabbed it from the back of the door and flipped through it. “You’re here for a clinical trial assessment, yes?”
“Yes.”
The doctor shook his head minutely as he scanned down the page, exuding a kind of bored, emotionless disgust. “Very heavy. I’m sure you know that. BMI of forty-three. That’s Class Three obesity. Do you know what that means?”
“I—”
“Morbidobesity.”
Even death.
“Hopefully the trial will help with that.” Emmett’s insides were a cold soup of shame. Halleck looked at him askance, as if he didn’t totally approve of miracle weight loss solutions.
“Are you aware you can lose weight through diet and exercise?”
Emmett almost laughed; was that a joke? “I have heard that, actually.”
“You’ve tried?”
“So many times.”
“What went wrong?”
Emmett knew this was the part where he was meant to blame himself: his inability to grasp the fundamentals of good nutrition, his dearth of willpower, his superhuman love for the taste of high-fructose corn syrup.
“I have an eating disorder,” he said.
