the embarrassed emoji, framed with very long, dark lashes. His voice was soft, something of a murmur, and it made me want to move closer to him. I noticed that I was disproportionately happy when he said I was funny. There were definitely flurries in my stomach. But it wasn’t what I felt when I looked at Miriam, not that lustful trance I had with her at the restaurant. Still, I wanted him to want me. If he didn’t think I was attractive, it negated the fact that he found me funny. I wished it was enough that he found me funny.
“Yo, I’m starving,” he said. “You hungry?”
Of course I was hungry. But that would be taken care of shortly, upon return home to my allotted 150-calorie diet ice cream and 80 calories of cereal.
“Not really,” I said.
“There’s a great hot dog place around here.”
“Hot dogs?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Really good chili dogs and stuff.”
I looked at him, all jaw, so casually trumpeting chili dogs. He was safe from judgment in his body, this naturally skinny, handsome actor. He had an armor to protect him from any consequences to his own hunger. In Miriam, it was different. She wore the fruits of her hunger on her body at all times.
“How good?” I asked.
CHAPTER 30
“You don’t know how nice it is to hang out with a woman who eats,” said Jace, as we downed our second hot dogs. I’d copied his order: one dog with chili and cheese and one dog with ketchup, mustard, relish, and onions. The cashier was a fan of Breathers and gave us the dogs on the house. She’d been the one who suggested onions. The fact that Jace took her up on it made me certain that he liked me as nothing more than a friend. Clearly, he didn’t care what happened to his breath.
“The women you know don’t eat?” I asked, playing totally dumb.
“Not the actresses on Breathers. I think they exist on charcoal lemonade.”
Oh, the fucking naïveté of this asshole. Did he really think the average woman could be skinny enough for TV and also eat? Whenever an actress in InStyle or Marie Claire or People said, “I have fries every day,” we all knew she was fucking lying. I wondered what Jace would think of Miriam if he saw her.
“Well, their job is to play the dead,” I said.
“The undead,” he corrected me.
“What exactly are the undead?”
“You don’t watch the show?”
“I do,” I lied. “I just want to hear your perspective.”
“Wow. Well, my take is kind of out there.”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay. So, traditionally, a zombie is a bad dude. He’s back from the grave, he’s empty, and he wants to eat your brains—”
“Like Frankenstein.”
“No, not at all,” he said very seriously. “Frankenstein is not a zombie. He’s a monster.”
“Oh.”
“But what’s so special about Breathers is that the zombies are, like, less dead than the three main characters. It’s like the zombies reflect the emptiness of our culture. They’re forcing us to wake up from it. They still want to eat our brains, but they’re giving us a gift, because with the threat of death, they’re making us become more alive than ever. That’s the emotional reality I’m trying to bring to Liam.”
I watched him finish the hot dog with gusto, his strong jaw pumping up and down. He squinted every time he took a bite, and I wondered if that was a studied move—something he’d learned in acting class. He was using the hot dog like a prop. I felt a sudden urge to knock it out of his hands.
CHAPTER 31
In the morning I woke up with a microwave pizza in bed next to me, half-eaten. I was acidic, burping sour. I shoved down a handful of Frosted Flakes from a box on my nightstand.
On my way home from hot dogs with Jace, I’d stopped at 7-Eleven and bought a bunch of junk. I was only going to give myself until midnight to eat everything. I didn’t want the food to permeate another day. But at 12:02 a.m., I was still chewing, so I’d decided to give myself another full 24 hours of limitless consumption. Maybe if I ate for 24 hours straight it would cure me of my bingeing problem.
I had 18 hours and 34 minutes left. Anything I wanted for breakfast could be mine. I decided I would stop and get a dozen donuts on my way to work, keep them hidden in my car. Throughout the day, I could sneak out to