Turn 11 of 26

Eat the brownie. It’s really good as the other start focusing on their food which the same that Ruth and you grabbed. You, Ruth and the other talk about stuff like braces and class with lisps and messed up speech while giggling to the jokes said. you don’t notice your body gaining lots of fat everywhere in the body, face, legs anf arms giving you a near identical body to everyone else.

You take another bite, then another, and the brownie is dense and warm and perfect, fudge thick on your tongue where it presses against the braces. You hum with your mouth full, and Ruth honks a laugh, and then the whole table is talking — braces stories, wire-tightening appointments, whose rubber bands are the strongest color.

"I get the thick wireth nextrt week," Priya lisps, and someone groans in sympathy, and you hear yourself say, "The firtht week ith the wortht," with total authority, as though you've had braces for years. You haven't. You've had them for two hours.

The jokes come fast and dumb and wonderful — puns about the silent teacher, an impression of Dr. Prewitt's unhurried "Correct" that sends three girls into snorting fits — and you snort right along with them, forks forgotten, cheeks aching from grinning. This is the best lunch you can remember having. You cannot remember most of your lunches. The ones you can remember were salads, eaten standing up, photographed before the first bite.

You don't notice what the food is doing. You can't — your own body is the one thing in the room you never look at. But it happens while you laugh: a heaviness spreading down your arms, your sleeves snugger against skin gone soft; your thighs spreading wider on the bench, jeans digging grooves into your waist that your sweatshirt hides; your rounder face buried in the mirror of the table's steel napkin dispenser if you'd only looked — fuller cheeks, softer chin, the delicate architecture of your jaw quietly buried under a comfortable layer of new fat. Your body is settling into its final shape, heavyset and thick-limbed, and it is becoming near-identical to the twenty-nine bodies around you, the same generous build, the same soft middle, the same heavy seat.

What you do notice is that the bench fits differently. There's a moment — small, easy to miss between jokes — where you shift your weight and your hips press the table edge on both sides, and you have to slide the tray back to make room. Your body registers it; your mind files it nowhere. You reach for the sheet cake instead.

"Thave room for the cake," Ruth says, watching you with that nurse's satisfaction, and pats your arm — your soft, padded arm — companionably. "We have two courtheth after thith, did I tell you? Lectures. We all go together." Across the dining hall, at a table full of your sorority, a girl in your letters is standing, phone out, scanning the room. She hasn't seen you yet. Or she has, and doesn't recognize you.