Turn 13 of 21

ask Lexi why she really came, and listen to the answer. She responds that she divorced your dad and wants to start a new life, away from expectations. As a result, you press her harder, insisting on ordering food and that she eat with you. She acquiesces. Introduce her to alcohol and weed. You continue as normal. A week later Lexi went from from 125 to 150 at 5'7", along with more body hair.

"Why did you really come, Mom?" Lena asks. She shifts her weight on the couch and the cushion wheezes beneath her, a sound like a tired animal. She is watching Lexi the way she watches spreadsheets — with attention, with focus, with the kind of clarity that only comes when you're high enough to stop pretending. Lexi is perched on the edge of the cushion with her beer half-finished and her blazer still buttoned and her spine so straight it looks structural, and Lena can see the effort it takes. The effort of holding herself together, of maintaining the shape she's decided her body should be.

Lexi takes a drink. She takes another. Her jaw works for a moment and then she sets the beer on the coffee table beside a stack of crusted takeout lids.

"I left Dad," she says. The words come out flat, like she's been rehearsing them.

"Three weeks ago. The divorce went through. I packed the suitcase and I drove here because I couldn't —" She stops. Her hands are in her lap, fingers laced tight.

"I spent eighteen years being his wife. Eighteen years before that being his girlfriend. Being careful. Being controlled. Watching every single thing that went into my body and every single thing that came out of it. And I just — I couldn't do it anymore."

She looks at Lena and her eyes are wet but her voice holds.

"I didn't come here to fix you. I came here because I don't know how to be someone who isn't performing, and I thought — maybe — if I watched you not performing, I'd figure out how to stop."

The apartment is quiet. Lena feels the words settle into the space between them like the warmth of the wish, and something opens in her chest that isn't hunger.

"Then stop," Lena says. She reaches for her phone.

"I'm ordering food. Real food. Not a salad, not a portion-controlled plate — food. And you're going to eat it with me. You're going to sit on this couch and eat until you're full and you're going to stop pretending that thin is the same thing as alive."

Lexi starts to shake her head but Lena is already scrolling, already tapping, already ordering — pad thai and drunken noodles and spring rolls and a whole roast duck and two orders of crab rangoon. Lexi watches and doesn't stop her. When the food arrives forty minutes later the delivery driver leaves it at the door without knocking and Lena waddles to fetch it and comes back with her arms full and her belly swaying. She sets the bags on the coffee table and the smell fills the room — garlic and oil and roasted skin — and Lexi's nostrils flare.

"Eat," Lena says. She pushes the duck toward her mother. Lexi reaches out with careful fingers and pulls a piece of skin from the carcass and puts it in her mouth and chews slowly and her eyes close. She reaches for another piece. Then another. She unbuttons the blazer.

The week that follows is Lena's life extended outward like a warm hand. She eats, smokes, drinks, works, grows — 238 by Wednesday, 240 by Friday, the wish humming steadily beneath her skin. But now there is Lexi beside her, slowly loosening. The blazer comes off on day two. The ponytail comes undone on day three. Lena hands her a pre-roll on the third evening and Lexi takes it and coughs and laughs and takes another hit. By Thursday Lexi is drinking beer with lunch. By Friday she is eating on the couch with her shoes off and her blouse untucked. She has gained weight — visible weight, the kind that shows in the softening of her jaw and the way her skirt sits tighter across her hips. She steps on Lena's scale on Saturday morning and the number reads 150 and her eyes go wide.

"Twenty-five pounds," she says. She is standing in the bathroom in her underwear and her body is different — fuller, rounder, the beginning of a belly pressing against the waistband of her panties, her breasts heavier, her thighs touching for the first time. Dark hair is visible under her arms where she has stopped shaving, a thick thatch of red darker than the hair on her head. She looks at herself in the mirror and her expression is complicated — loss and wonder and something that looks like it might be relief.

"How do you feel?" Lena asks from the doorway, her vast body filling the frame, her own belly resting heavy against the doorjamb.

Lexi touches her stomach. The skin is warm.

"I feel like I ate something that made me happy," she says. And then, quieter: "I think I want to eat it again."