Eater’s friends did not address her by her real name, Geethanjali, anymore because she was an Eater. Once Bryana pilfered a package of gas-station cookies, intended for all three of the girls, of which Eater ate her share, plus more while the two of them waited for Minha to arrive. Eater then proceeded to consume the crinkly plastic wrapping, afterward exclaiming that it had an excellent, smokey taste to complement its texture, which Minha, huffy and strained by the time of her arrival, summoned the strength to roll her eyes at. Eater wasn’t built like the stereotypical pale, jiggling resultant of the American obesity epidemic–she carried her muscular upper body on two tapering, chopstick-like legs, and a bloated pot-belly somehow sat superimposed over a set of toned abdominals. The pot-belly came and went, and a light layer of chub oscillated over the girl’s back and shoulders depending on how Eater was feeling. She possessed a surprisingly delicate, rosebud mouth into which she shoved anything and everything she could find–edible or not. Eater expressed love through her mouth and stomach; all beautiful things, even passing butterflies, Eater had tried to swallow at least once.
They all remembered the time Eater fell in love. It was with a rather ordinary boy named Michael O’Laren with whom Eater was suddenly infatuated. Two (or three?) years ago, Eater had galloped over to the spot under the poplar tree (the girls’ meeting place) and explained, between bouts of wiping forehead sweat with her wrist and munching on the corner of her trigonometry calculator, that she needed a lock of Mike’s hazelnut-colored hair, stat. Why? she tried to illustrate the tangled branches of her thought process–but somehow, Minha and Bryana were able to make out that something about this boy was holy, was divine, and somehow the consumption of him would be transcendent, that it would change the way the world was to her. For days she would talk only of him in long ramblings about the mediocre joke he had told in class, or about the chocolate labrador retriever that his family had adopted, and it was only during this time that she paused before every mirror, watching her pot-belly rise and fall with the day’s contents, and it was only that year, in the eighth grade, that she began wearing makeup, a few pink and brown smears around the eyes that, evoked not beauty but the look of drunkenness and mania. For the first time, Eater understood what it was like to sink into a pit of self-loathing, as Bryana and Minha had complained about all their lives, of how they had simmered in their destructive habits long before the onset of pre-teenage solipsism and misery. Eater commented on her own body every now and then; at picnics, she draped a blanket over her lap to hide how her upper thighs seemed to pool on the ground.
Minha endeavored to aid Eater in her pursuit of Mike’s affection, instructing her to bat her eyelashes and demurely ask for help, but Eater’s awkward build and even more awkward personality kept Eater’s exposure to the boy at a minimum, during which in these rigid conversations he pursed his lip and just slightly twisted his brow line before providing an excuse about how he was late to class and scrambled away. Afterward, Eater exploded at Minha in an onslaught of slurs, calling Minha a queer pain and a useless dyke and why did Eater think Minha could help her with love in the first place? Then Bryana, being righteous and an All or Nothing try-hard that moment (Bryana had many personalities, one for each day of the week), came between the two of them and stopped their grappling. Minha and Eater looked at each other hotly for the rest of the day, but Eater got over it the following week and apologized, switching her default babbling with the girls back to the subject matter of Michael and his family and their antics.
Eventually, Eater got what she wanted with the girls’ help and some carefully placed shears. One of Michael’s curly brown cowlicks was sliced off; thankfully, the dull boy did not notice. Eater collected Michael’s hair in a plastic sandwich bag in preparation for a ritual. Unusually, she did not contact Minha or Bryana the whole night. The next day she arrived at school bawling and with dark rings under her eyes that made her look like a raccoon or an addict or some combination of both. Concerned, Bryana and Minha rushed her to the shady spot under the poplar tree, which only made Eater feel worse because of her ragweed allergies, but Eater was too congested with pollen and emotion and Michael to say anything. Minha held Eater like a baby, and Eater sniffled into the crook of Minha’s neck. In between hiccups, she mumbled into her friend’s shoulder, “I ruined something again–I ruined him–like I ruin everything else…” after which she descended into another bought of sobbing and little bits of brunet hair from Eater’s saliva dribbled onto Minha’s windbreaker. Eater puked. It was her default reaction to anything stressful. Minha patted her back, telling Eater it would get better soon, that she was beautiful and loved, and Bryana said those things too, although all three of them were too broken to believe them, about Eater or themselves or anyone else, and eventually they were all sobbing in a puddle of Eater’s acrid vomit. Then Bryana, who later came out (to only Minha and Eater) as asexual and aromantic, confessed between sniffles that she had loved Michael O’Laren, that she had always loved him, and Minha (a lesbian or a trans boy, she wasn’t sure which) also declared her undying love for Michael, and together the three of them wept in each other’s arms and spoke of Michael, of how sweet and unique and handsome he was, and how they loved him so much, but of course, they didn’t mean what they said. They said what they said because they both loved Eater more than anything, and they wanted her to feel better.