Idlewild

by James Frankie Thomas

She was a fast walker, faster than me, so I was struggling to keep up with her and trying really hard not to let it show because I wanted to come off as the good kind of fat person, not the kind of fat person who gets winded walking down the street.

That was always my mindset around Fay (around everything, really)—that I could study my way out of feeling shitty.

To this day I’m chronically sleep-deprived for no reason except that staying up too late, past the point of exhaustion, remains a pleasurable form of self-harm.

When I look back now on my teenage friendship with Gareth, I’m unsettled in a way I struggle to interpret. Sometimes it feels like resentment. Other times it feels like gratitude.

I cackled, and then I felt bad—but Eddie declared that “as people of fat-kid experience,” we’re allowed to be smug when skinny girls join our ranks.