Food is such a strange thing. I hate it. I really do. You shove it in your mouth and push it around and cut it up until it starts to dissolve and then swallow it. It enters your system and either makes you fat or gives you cancer. Sometimes both. Even hating it, I consume an abnormal amount, mostly when no one’s looking. I don’t like people watching me eat. Leah told me that’s one of the first signs of an eating disorder. I don’t think anyone who regulary eats half a can of frosting and keeps it down has an eating disorder. At least not the kind she meant…there’s got to be something wrong with that somewhere.

We like to eat at Sonic, America’s Favorite Drive-In…for some reason. There is no more blissful feeling than grease. I never used to be like that; shiny food used to make me retch out my kidneys. At some point it became the main staple of my diet. And yet I dropped ten pounds. Maybe I have a tumour. Maybe it all goes into the same dimension where all Punkin’s body parts are. I think I have a sixth toe on my left foot that lives there. Onion rings are the tenth wonder of the world. (Eighth is Paul McCartney. Ninth is Pookie.) Punkin and I are going to be fat when we’re forty. Disgustingly, bloatedly, inhumanly obese. It’ll be great, because once you’re fat you don’t have to worry about not becoming that way anymore. I said that to my mom and she gave me a weird look and then got depressed because we weigh the same and I’m two inches taller. And she’s forty.

The only thing in our kitchen will be one of those Fry Daddy torture devices. We’ll make our own Ched-R-Bites with whole blocks of cheese. Screw onion rings. Go for the whole damn vegetable. Fried bananas, fried ice cream, fried pizza. Batter-dipped Hostess apple pies. Peanut butter fritters. Don’t stop until your skin is translucent and shiny. Shove it down your mouth until the hole backs up, then chug a Coke and cram some more. There’s room.

You only want icky gross fast food if you can’t get it. Last night I wanted Taco Bell so bad I seriously thought about driving fifty miles to eat it. I would have, too, but I didn’t want to waste my money putting gas in Dad’s car. I ended up with a Peanut Buster Parfait and microwaved fake pizza, but it wasn’t the same thing. The only Mexican place here is this scary-ass Taco John’s thing. All the juvenile delinquents I went to school with hang out there. Some nights it’s fun to drive by and see who’s getting MIP’s. (I was a sophomore before I figured out what that meant. I miss not knowing.)

It’s so close to impossible to get vegetarian food anywhere around here. Ever since I began refusing to eat Pizza Hut, my dad brings home Subway a couple times a week. Always the same sandwich. Lettuce, onion, tomato, green peppers, mustard, mayonnaise, and double cheese because they all think I don’t eat. Because I never let them see. Once I had that for lunch and for dinner. Mom wants me to go fill out an application to work there. I will become a Veggie Delight.

In another ten years I bet all I’ll eat is tofu and sprouts like my aunt. I look forward to that.