The following week, Emmett smothered his nerves under the mindless infinity of his Instagram feed, smoothing the edges of his excruciating wait with #weigthlossinspo, celebrity fashion ads, and jacked meatheads chasing gains to grungy EDM. “Mr. Truesdale?” the woman behind the rec eption desk said, breaking his concentration. She had just returned her phone to its cradle. “Georgina’s on her way. She’ll just be a moment.” “Thanks.” Emmett put his phone away, sat back, and massaged his pant legs with sweaty palms. His Goodfellow & Co. Oxfords tapped a jittery beat on the carpet. He couldn’t stop clearing his throat. He’d been in this building dozens of times, but never back here in the administrative suite. The first time of many, he thought hopefully. A handsome, square-jawed woman entered. Her stiff mane of honey-blond hair blanketed the shoulders of her pleated silk blouse. Her buggy eyes gave the impression of intense fixation. Emmett sensed an interruption in her smile as she perceived him, but she recovered it at once, approaching. “You must be Emmett.” He rose and shook her hand, attempting to hide his horror; he had felt his shirt slide free from the waistband of his slacks, wrenched out of place by the tumult of his standing. “Georgina Hodge,” she said. “Senior director of programs.” “Great to meet you.” “Can I get you anything? Water?” He was sweating buckets. “Water would be great.” “No problem.” She craned her neck to see around Emmett, really reaching, and called out to the rec eptionist: “Renata, would you track down some water for the candidate?” Then she flashed him a thin smile. “Come on back.” They walked down a hall, Emmett surr eptitiously stuffing his loose shirttail back down his waistband while stuttering out r eplies to Georgina’s small-talk questions. “Point Loma, really,” she said, surprised. “That’s a nice area.” They entered her office and sat on either side of the desk. The rec eptionist chased them inside with a bottle of water. Turning in his seat to receive it, Emmett felt his shirt yank loose again. Fuck. “So, Emmett,” Georgina said. “Our volunteer manager tells me you’re quite the tutor.” “Oh—I’m glad she thinks so.” “You were Volunteer of the Quarter, weren’t you?” “Twice, I think.” “Very impressive. Well, we appreciate your service.” “Happy to do it. I really love—” “So you think you’ve got what it takes to be an achievement coach,” Georgina cut across him. Her tone was a strange in-between, a joke but not exactly. “I do.” “All right. Let me tell you about the position—” She broke off, eyeing the front of Emmett’s button-down. Instinctively he held his water bottle over his stomach. “Please.” He could barely process her answer, obsessing over that stray look. He was hyperaware of how his shirt pulled across his stomach, tightest between the second and third buttons. Was his stomach peeking through the opening
between them? He’d known as soon as he put it on that it was a little too small, but he didn’t have anything else; the white check was supposed to be the one that fit. “So you see it’s an important role,” Georgina was saying. “Our coaches are part social worker, part academic adviser, part big sibling. They probably have the single greatest impact on our students’ success, if not their lives, of anyone in the organization.” “That does sound important,” Emmett said. “As you can imagine, we hold our coaches to a high standard. As role models, they’re expected to be reliable, professional.” Another downward flick of her eyes. “I think you’ve come untucked.” Emmett reached around to deal with the shirttail again, smiling through the redness of his cheeks. “Whoops.” “Many of our kids are low-income, come from broken homes. They’re predisposed to issues like truancy, gang activity, teenage pregnancy, obesity. We expect our coaches to set a good example.” Discomfort closed like a hand around Emmett’s throat. “Do you—” he croaked, apologized, and paused to sip his water. He re capped the bottle and set it on the floor, pulling his shirttail out as he leaned forward. FUCK! “Do you find it helps for the students to see themselves reflected in their mentors? Is that something you look for?” “Oh, of course. Diversity is one of our top priorities, especially on the achievement team.” “That’s great to hear. I’m a huge proponent of diversity and inclusion—” He instantly regretted the adjective. “At the same time,” Georgina said, “our coaches need to be effective leaders. We hire people we think can command respect, people who reflect positively on our mission.” Emmett nodded, throttled. “But that’s enough about us. I’d like to hear about you and your”—she riffled around for his résumé—“student-teaching experience, was it? You got your credential, I assume?” “I decided to go in a different direction. It was a great experience overall. I just realized classroom teaching wasn’t for me.” Emmett felt his confidence return by degrees. He was used to explaining this blemish, comfortable in his practiced response. “I prefer working with students one-on-one, forming those personal connections that are so crucial, especially for at-risk youth. That’s why I think I’d be such a great fit—” “You know I used to weigh over two hundred pounds?” Emmett faltered, thrown off and dreading where this was going. “Really.” “Hard to believe, isn’t it? For years, after I had my kids. I used to say I didn’t like vegetables, that I hated the gym. I was a ‘cheeseburger girl.’ I loved chocolate too much. But once I finally decided I couldn’t live like that anymore, everything changed. I realized I actually did like fruit and vegetables and running and lifting weights. All that ‘I don’t like it’ stuff had just been an excuse for being, well, a bit lazy and undisciplined.”
No stray glances this time. Her eyes held Emmett’s like a crushing handshake. Painful. Unnecessary. “Anyway. Just wanted to share that in case you ever thought about finishing your credential, or—” The insinuation flickered at the corner of her mouth, then kindly vanished. Emmett stared, speechless. In that moment, he had no access to his thoughts or emotions, to his memories of two decades’ worth of failed diets, endless hours in the gym, having lost nearly a hundred pounds in college and, like the recurrence of a cancer, gained every ounce of it back. All that would come later: a thousand things he could’ve said. Should’ve. There in the room he had only the desire to make it stop: this false empathy, this force-fed advice. Like a good boy, he swallowed it down and answered, “Thank you.” Appendix C—Blog Post The Best Years of My Life By: Emmett Truesdale Published: Nov. 22, 2022 As a person of size, I live a life of humiliation, but would you believe that the most embarrassing, most shameful thing I ever did was get thin for a couple of years? I know what you’re thinking: How is that even possible?! Surely being an Austin Powers–style fat bastard like you are now would be more embarrassing than having once been thin!?! And you’re right, daring to be a fat person in the world is a never-ending saga of degradation. Like earlier this year when I was shopping for an online grocery order at work and a woman in her seventies, a complete stranger, caught sight of me in front of the ice cream freezer, stopped in her tracks, and wheeled her cart in my direction. Her eyes narrowed on my body, twinkling with savage purpose. Pr epared always for public humiliation, I was ready when she drew up beside me, laid a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Now, son, what I’m about to say might offend you.” “Oh dear.” “There’s this program on Netflix, it’s called Walk for Your Life,” she said, or maybe Run for Health. Either way, it wasn’t a real show, not on Netflix; I checked as soon as I got home. “Now, I want you to watch this program and really watch it. Because if you don’t turn your life around, you’re gonna die.” As far as I’m concerned, that’s a death threat. And yet I’d rather sit beside that woman on a seventeen-hour flight, smashing my arms down over my stomach and sides so as not to encroach on her precious space as she whispers sweet microaggressions into my ear, than run into an acquaintance I haven’t seen since I gained the weight back. Sometimes I can’t avoid it, and I imagine they look at me like one of those trailer park families who win the lottery and blow it all on diamond- encrusted teeth and nickel slots. They look at me and think, You stupid son of a bitch, you had it all and you threw it away. You had the world in the palm of your hand and you ATE IT.
I think of all the friends I made when I was thinner and how disgusted they must be by the “new” me. In my head, every person I’ve ever dated spends hours every day trawling through my Instagram photos saying, “Wow, really dodged a bullet there.” But I’m not a bullet. I’m more of a cannonball if anything! The truth is, other than those few short years, I’ve been fat my entire life, even if my adoring mother disagreed. She always said that I might carry fat on my body but I wasn’t fat; it wasn’t who I was. Like the fat was something apart from me, a temporary encumbrance around my inner, thinner self. The “true me” was somewhere inside, buried under all that flab. To this day I’m still trying to dig him out. Not unlike many a fat kid, my weight loss journey started young. I was ten when Mom agreed to enroll me in Weight Watchers. They gave me a daily allotment of points and a book detailing the point value of each food. The bad foods were high in points and the best foods zero. I would starve myself good all week and then she’d drive me to the Weight Watchers office at a local strip mall to weigh in, a few doors down from the Hostess Bakery Outlet where she’d previously taken me twice a month to stock up on discount Twinkies and Ding Dongs, complaining that her beloved Devil Dogs were only available back East. When I lost five pounds, my grandma mailed me five dollars. When I received my ten-pound badge, she sent ten. I’d never been prouder. I didn’t make it to fifteen. One won’t hurt, said a voice in my head as I eyed the bowl of tortilla chips my friend’s mom had set out for us to snack on. But one chip turned into two, then twenty. The voice told me, Today’s a write-off—might as well enjoy yourself and get back on track tomorrow. Then the next day: You’re not gonna lose any weight this week anyway—give yourself a break and start again Monday! It was the first in an endless string of yo-yo diets—fruitful in only the most literal sense—that k ept my weight in a constant state of flux, each loss of ten pounds followed by a gain of twelve or fifteen. Before I reached adulthood, I’d tried them all—Atkins, Slim Fast, Nutrisystem, South Beach, juice cleanses, the Zone—the result of which was a net gain of around seventy pounds. The summer after I graduated college, I finally decided I’d had enough. It was probably no coincidence that I’d just ended my relationship with Sebastian, my first real boyfriend and an asshole of the highest order. A snobby middle-weight finance major from Rancho Santa Fe, Seb had this super-hilarious habit of prancing around the apartment wearing my clothes with pillows stuffed inside them and counting my calories without my permission. “Tacos for dinner? Between lunch and that Starbucks, you’ve already had like twenty-two hundred calories.” He would snort and rub my belly saying, “If you’re not careful you’re gonna get fat!” That he was forty pounds overweight himself was beside the point. My problem was big enough to make his disappear. I think that’s what he liked about me. So why were we together for over a year? GREAT QUESTION. It wasn’t like I found Seb super attractive or anything. Hell, I’m not even sure I liked him. I guess I felt like he was all I deserved. In fact, I was lucky to be with someone like him—or so I told
myself. Anywho... I was a free agent now. But I didn’t feel free. My head continued to ring with Seb’s snide jokes and subtle put-downs. My confidence, low to begin with, was subterranean at this point. If I had any hope of finding a new boyfriend, I had some work to do. That summer Mom got me on the h CG diet. Human chorionic gonadotropin, or h CG, is a hormone found in placenta that helps the female body adjust to support a growing embryo. When extracted and taken as a weight loss supplement, it allegedly helps convert fat to energy while preserving lean tissue, enabling the user to withstand an extremely low- calorie diet without losing muscle mass. Mom had lost sixteen pounds on a medically supervised h CG program at a clinic, but the treatments were too expensive, so she started ordering her own cheaper supplements off the internet. It sounded sketchy even for me, but Mom insisted it was fine. Once a week we drank a few milliliters of dingy liquid from a plastic vial while maintaining a strict diet of five hundred calories per day—yes, you read that right. The list of approved foods was laughably short: plain chicken breast (three ounces), fat-free cottage cheese (half cup), some vegetables (two cups), some fruits (two servings). After the first month, I was allowed starch in the form of two crunchy breadsticks or four pieces of Melba toast per day. The hunger burned inside me like an ulcer. When I really couldn’t stand it, I snacked on cold cucumber slices dipped in yellow mustard. Positively indulgent!!! Mom eventually bowed out but I stuck with it, taking the supplements she continued to order for me. I couldn’t stop once the weight started coming off. After a month, I’d lost more than thirty pounds. Sure, I felt weak and nauseous pretty much all the time; my skin was cracked and washed out; and even resting, my heart fluttered in uneven bursts, like a stray pigeon trapped inside my chest. But I was dropping weight so fast I didn’t care, each successful weigh-in encouraging me to ke ep going, push harder, embrace the hunger. Feel the burn. Those words became my mantra, and I lived by them. By the time I started grad school, I’d lost close to eighty pounds and was the lightest I’d been since seventh grade. I paused the diet but remained obsessive about calorie counting, resenting the big pasta dinners and unhealthy food Mom served nightly, acting offended if I didn’t acc ept seconds. “You’re losing so much weight, you need to eat,” she said in one breath. Then in another, adoringly: “I’m just so proud.” As a fat person you’re taught that no one will ever love you because of your size, and perhaps because of this I’d assumed that simply losing the weight would transform my love life overnight. I’d never really fit in with other gay men. I was too big, too self-conscious. Always lurking at the fringes, watching other people find love and sex and community. But I’d make up for all that now. My grad school experience would be like the episodes of Queer as Folk I streamed covertly in high school when Mom wasn’t home: a nonstop
parade of nightclubs, bathhouses, casual sex, and recreational drugs, all the things I’d been too scared of before. But alas, I was just as hopeless thin as I’d ever been fat. I’d go out with friends in Hillcrest, the local LGBTQ+ district, but despite being almost normal-looking, I found myself clinging to the walls as I nursed my signature Malibu and Diet Coke, too anxious to speak to anyone, wishing I were anywhere else. Though smaller than I’d ever been, somehow I still didn’t fit in. All right, so “the scene” wasn’t for me—but even as a boring monogamous gay I was hopeless. There was this one guy, Aaron, in my grad school program who was sooooo cute, tall and slim with dark shoulder-length hair he wore up in a bun or pulled back in a half pony, which I’m pretty sure is the sluttiest hairstyle a man can wear, according to science. We chatted a few times before class. He was from the East Coast but a total convert to the California lifestyle—flip-flops and shorts every day—though his accent reminded me warmly of my mom’s side of the family. When his eyes were locked on mine, I felt blood chug more rapidly through my veins, an electric current glistening over my skin. In his presence, my heart hungered in a way my stomach never could. My best friend, Lizette, encouraged me to ask him out, but I wasn’t even sure he liked guys. Still, when one of my classmates organized a house party and I found out Aaron would be there, I went and—you guessed it—stood in the corner and barely spoke to him the entire night! Finally I decided to call it quits, slunk out, and was surprised to find him on the front porch, smoking joints with a couple others from class. “Leaving already?” he said. “Yeah. I should probably get back.” “Says who? You should stay and talk with us.” Pathetically I did, spellbound by his snaggletoothed smile. I don’t even remember what we talked about, just the buzz in my gut as he poured his undivided attention all over me, the glorious froth of laughter between us. The other two went inside, leaving us alone. I made some stupid joke and he shook his head, grinning aslant. “You’re so fucking cute,” he said, massaging my arm. “I just wanna cuddle you.” My heart was doing backflips. Here was my chance. Say something, I thought. Say ANYTHING. “We should do that.” “I’m game if you are.” “Want to get out of here?” Like an idiot, I froze. Then the front door opened again and more people tumbled out in a flood of music and chatter, clutching bottles and cigarettes. Aaron drew back his hand. “I should go,” I said, and before he could say another word, I was racing back toward my car, my heart leaden and heavy, pumping shame and self- loathing through every inch of me. And that was the end of that. We continued to chat and flirt before class, but never like we had that night. The perfect opening I was hoping for never came. I didn’t even have his number. The semester ended and our schedules diverged. I graduated sad, alone, already starting to gain the weight back. No matter how healthy and calorie- controlled my diet was, I’d never been able to fully
ditch my sugar habit. Little by little the pounds cr ept up on me. In an instant I was fat again. I went back on h CG, but my lifestyle had changed. I was working full- time at Target and student-teaching on the side. It’s one thing to be fatigued when you’re just sitting around and another when you’re working on your feet all day. Still, I thought I was managing okay until one night at the store my heart suddenly started pounding like I’d just st epped off a treadmill. The guest service desk spun around me, the world thrown off-kilter. If my coworker hadn’t grabbed me, I probably would’ve hit the floor. My mom came and took me to the ER. The doctors were less than impressed to hear about my five-hundred-calorie diet and the supplements they said probably contained no h CG at all. At best they were placebos. At worst I was slowly poisoning myself. “I agree,” I overheard Mom saying to the doctor. “I’ve always told my kids, if you want to lose weight, a healthy diet and exercise is the way to do it. Everything in moderation.” Such was the end of my h CG misadventure—to this day the only diet I’ve tried that’s ever shifted significant weight. (STARVATION! IT’S A WEIGHT LOSS MIRACLE!!! WHO KNEW?!?) Honestly, I never really believed the supplements were doing anything exc ept make me feel better about my voluntary eating disorder. Because when you strip away all the pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo, the h CG diet —like most of them—is pretty much just expensive anorexia. As the months passed, my old habits returned in full force, and the weight piled back on even faster. Four years later, I’m even heavier than I started—and continuing to gain. I recently ran into one of my old grad school friends at Vons and she didn’t even recognize me. “It’s Emmett,” I said, already wishing I hadn’t stopped her. “From SDSU?” Still nothing. “Sorry, I look a little different—” “No! Of course I recognize you!” she said, her cheeks flaming. “Emmett! So sorry, I’m not wearing my glasses! And you changed your hair! Wow, I love the purple!” Now if I run into someone from my skinny days, I hide. It’s easier for both of us. They don’t have to feel sorry for me, and I don’t have to hate myself (at least not in their presence—save that shit for the privacy of my home like a normal person ). But seriously, I’m glad I did lose weight that one time. It proved I can slim down. Does it mean I feel that much angrier with myself when I fuck up? Yes. Yes, it does. (Seriously, why is it so hard for me to get back to that place?? ) But it gives me something to strive for, a mountain to (re) climb. One day I’ll find him and I won’t let him go. No, I’m not talking about Aaron. I mean the true me.