Turn 47 of 233

Rest and recover over the weekend, let the body heal for Monday. Eat takeout the entire weekend because I don't feel like cooking. Also study more tape of the O-line and weigh myself. I weigh 225 now

Lena sleeps until noon on Saturday. Her body demands it — the six miles wrote themselves into her legs as a deep ache that starts in her hips and runs down through her thighs and into the cracking calluses of her feet. She lies on the balcony floor with the morning sun warming her belly and the steel barbells catching the light and she doesn't move until the sun shifts and the shade hits her face and her stomach growls hard enough to vibrate the piercing in her navel. She orders takeout from her phone — two large meat lovers pizzas, a side of garlic knots, a two-liter of Coke — and she eats them on the living room floor with the television on and the grease running down her chin and her belly swelling against the carpet. She doesn't get up for an hour after. The ache in her legs is already loosening. The cuts on her feet are scabbing over, dark crusts forming in the cracks of the calluses. She lets them. She picks at the piercings instead — rolling the barbells between her fingers, feeling the crust flake away, the tender skin underneath still raw and warm.

Sunday is the same. She orders Thai for lunch — pad see ew with extra beef, spring rolls, a whole roasted duck, a large tom yum soup — and she eats it cross-legged on the couch with the containers spread around her and her belly resting in her lap. Between meals she watches football. She watches the offensive line the way a student watches lecture — leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, her eyes tracking footwork and hand placement and the geometry of leverage. She pauses the replay and rewinds and watches a guard pull on a counter play three times, studying the way his hips drop and his belly shifts and he becomes a moving wall that the running back follows into the hole. She watches a left tackle pass-set against a speed rusher and freezes the frame at the moment of contact — three hundred and forty pounds anchored, the defender's momentum dying against the mass, the belly as the foundation of the entire structure. She takes notes on her phone. Stance width. Hip depth. The angle of the first step. The way the hands shoot inside and lock. She thinks about her own stance on the site, the way she squares up under lumber, the way her belly presses against the work, and she understands: the weight is not a side effect. It is the mechanism.

Between games she goes to the bathroom and stands on the scale. She hasn't weighed herself in weeks — not since the early days, when the number was still something she tracked with anxiety. The scale is a cheap digital one she bought years ago, dusty now, shoved under the sink. She pulls it out and sets it on the tile and steps on it with her bare feet and the screen blinks and settles. 225. She stares at it. Fifty-eight pounds since the wish. She looks down at her body — the belly, round and full and resting heavy against her thighs, the breasts, the hips, the thick solid columns of her legs — and she steps off and steps back on and the number is the same. 225. She exhales. The number doesn't scare her. It doesn't thrill her either. It is simply a fact — a data point in the same column as the four-day house and the six-mile run and the steel in her skin. She is 225 pounds and six-foot-three and she runs a construction site naked and her name is on a sign. The number is the least interesting thing about her.

She orders Chinese for dinner — kung pao chicken, beef and broccoli, two orders of fried rice, an order of spare ribs, a quart of egg drop soup — and she eats it on the balcony floor with the containers spread around her and the stars above and the city below. The food is hot and salty and she eats with her fingers and her chopsticks interchangeably and she belches between bites and the sound echoes off the balcony wall and she doesn't care. Her body is recovering. The ache in her legs is almost gone. The scabs on her feet are hardening. The piercings are crusting over again but the redness is fading. She finishes the food and lies back on the concrete with her belly full and her hands behind her head and the steel in her skin and the night air on every inch of her and she thinks about Monday. Third house. Seven miles. The weight is still coming and she is not stopping it and she is not slowing it and the number on the scale is just a mile marker on a road she chose to walk and the road keeps going and so does she.