Emily was the sort of six-year-old who would squash the end of an ant, but not the front, to prolong its suffering. Life had dealt her an unfair hand, and now life was dealing the insects an unfair hand. Her mother worried that she would become a serial killer and sent her to a child psychiatrist. Every Thursday she paid $300 for Emily to build Lego spaceships that symbolized her apparent penis envy. Mrs. Harris, who had never studied psychoanalysis, thought that the doctor meant that Emily had gender confusion, and donated all the child’s pants to the Salvation Army. She dressed her daughter in lacy, flowery dresses and party shoes. When Emily sat cross-legged on the floor, everyone could see her underwear. Her teachers forbade her from participating in sports. What a fat child she became! By the time she was eleven, she weighed one hundred and eighty pounds and Thomas called her Jiggles.

Everyone liked Thomas; he was the most beautiful boy in the world. He was small and thin and had curly brown hair. Emily wanted to envelope him inside herself and absorb his body into her bones. She thought about what it would be like to wake up one morning in his bed, with his curls and his penetrating eyes. How were his parents? What did his room look like? Emily saw the trophies lined up on his desk, the framed awards hanging above his bed. He won prizes in math every year, she knew because they had class together, and she knew he had baseball and basketball trophies because the principal gave them to him in special assemblies that took the students out of English class. He was always surrounded by girls but never dated any of them, and people told all kinds of lies about him, but in fact he was a gentleman and never told his friends what he did when he was with women.

“If he’s so nice, why does he call you Jiggles?” asked Emily’s mother. Continue reading