When my parents’ marriage began to fall apart in the year I started eighth grade, I started eating the way my mother ate, and the eating was the specific eating of someone who is trying to fill a space that food cannot fill but that food at least occupies temporarily.
By the time I started high school, I was significantly heavier than most of my classmates.
By the time I started high school, the decision had been made.
The decision was: Claire is the one we can do this to.
Not a formal decision.
Not a meeting.
The specific informal consensus of a social group that identifies a target and processes that identification into behavior so gradually that it becomes ambient.
I was the target.
I had been the target since middle school, but high school amplified it in the way that high school amplifies everything.
The jokes in the hallway.
