The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

I made it a few months at UCLA. My classes were cool and I started to make friends right off. But little things kept piling up. I went to the student store to buy myself a UCLA hoodie and they had nothing that would fit me. It wasn’t even close. I looked at the largest size in the men’s section and even then it would have clung to me like the skin of a sausage. I decided I could live without that ubiquitous symbol of college life, but I was pissed. I even thought about buying one just to snip the logo out and sew it onto a hoodie in my size from Walmart.

Then Walmart stopped carrying plus sizes altogether.

There were no desks on campus that I could sit at. A few of the classrooms had long tables with detached chairs and those were all right. But the majority of my freshman classes were in those big lecture halls, with the rows and rows of wooden chair-and-desk combinations. I couldn’t wedge myself into one to save my life. My first or second day I tried really hard in the back row and just got a big bruise over my lowest rib for my troubles. I sat in the aisle, on the steps, or against the back wall every day. There just wasn’t any space for me.

My dorm room was the same way. The bed was narrow and I could hear the whole frame groaning the second I lay down. The bathroom was so small that I could touch both walls with my thighs when I sat on the toilet. My roommate was so thin I knew she hadn’t taken the Pill—​she still looked too original. But over the course of the first week, I realized that was because she never ate. I asked her to lunch a couple of times, but she always said no. I couldn’t save her. I was working on how to save myself.

Days ticked by and Thanksgiving break was bearing down on me. My mom kept calling, telling me how great it was going to be when I went back to the school in my ideal body.

“I don’t know that it’ll be my ideal body,” I told her. “It’ll just be different.”

“Don’t you want to go on dates like the other girls?” Her voice was so whiny I could barely stand it.

I looked across the room to the other girl I lived with. She was in her bra, and every time she breathed in I could see the impressions of her individual ribs against the skin of her back. She was doing her reading and sucking on her bottom lip as if her lip gloss might offer some calories.

“I don’t know that I want anything other girls have,” I told her. But that wasn’t true. Most girls had fathers.

“You don’t know what you’re missing,” Mom said. “Come on home and let’s get you squared away.”

“Soon,” I told her, counting the days until I had to let them try to kill me for being what I am.

I had been there about a month when I knew I wasn’t going to make it. The stares had become unmanageable. I wasn’t the last fat girl in LA, was I? People on campus avoided me like I was a radioactive werewolf who stank like a dead cat in a hot garage. I remember one time I tried to take a selfie to send home to the Visionaries and someone gasped out loud. In the picture, I could see him, mouth open like he’d glimpsed a ghost.

And in a way I guess I was. I was the ghost of fatness past, haunting the open breezeways of UCLA. I was what they used to be, what they had always feared they would become. I became obsessed with the terrible power of my fatness; I was the worst that could possibly happen to someone. Worse than death, had to be, because somewhere my dad was rotting in a box because that was easier than living in a body like mine. I knew when I frightened people and I pushed my advantage. I took up their space. I haunted them with my warm breath and my soft elbows. I fed on their fright.

It was early November, and I could not adjust to the lack of seasons. It was still warm and sunny like June on the California coast. I missed home, but the idea of home repelled me. I needed comfort.

I walked myself over to the cheap pancake house and ordered the never-ending stack and coffee. The all-you-can-eat pancake special was always a favorite with frat boys, and its popularity had only increased since the Pill hit the market. People who really loved to eat could finally do it without worrying that it would ruin their lives.

The hostess tried to seat me in a booth and I just rolled my eyes at her. I was not about to eat my weight in pancakes with a Formica tabletop wedged just beneath my sternum.

“A table, please.”

She stuck me in the back, next to the restrooms. I didn’t care.