Chapter 1: Shattered Trust
The dorm room air tasted like lavender and defeat. Leah’s phone was a hot, stupid brick in her hand. The screen glowed, a malicious little rectangle lighting up the hollow of her throat.
Hey. We need to talk.
She’d known. Of course she’d known. The four-day silence, the missed calls labelled “studying,” the way his goodbye kiss last week had felt like a placeholder. She’d stacked the evidence neatly in a corner of her mind and covered it with a sheet, the way she hid her laundry basket when guests came over.
Her thumb swiped. The words unfurled.
It’s just not working. I think we want different things. You’re amazing, Leah. So smart and kind. But I need to be honest. I’m just not really attracted to thick girls. It’s a me thing. You deserve someone who is.
The letters swam, then sharpened into razor blades. Thick girls. The words sat there, bald and ugly, in the same text thread that once held a thousand heart emojis and good luck on your orgo exam and can’t wait to see you.
A sound leaked out of her, a small, dry click in the back of her throat. The room didn’t spin. It just solidified, every detail hardening into awful clarity. The peeling corner of her “Study Schedule: Your Future Starts Now!” poster. The faint, greasy smudge on her laptop screen. The scent of his cologne, something woodsy and cheap, still clinging to the pillow she was clutching to her stomach.
She dropped the phone. It thudded on the comforter, face-down. She stared at the dark plastic back as if it might explode.
Thick.
Her gaze drifted, against her will, down her own body. The soft swell of her stomach under her oversized sweatshirt. The way her thighs spread against the mattress. The constant, exhausting negotiation of finding jeans that fit both her waist and her hips. She felt every centimeter of herself, a sudden, unbearable weight.
“Okay,” she whispered to the empty room.
Her pilates mat was rolled tightly in the corner, a green cylinder of good intentions. She did fifty squats every morning. She drank water with lemon. She tracked her macros on a pastel-colored app. Her mother’s voice, light and surgical, sliced through the silence in her head. Leah, that dress is a little ambitious, don’t you think? Her father, nodding over steamed fish and broccoli. Your aunt was just asking if you’ve been feeling well. You look a little…puffy.
She’d baked him cookies last month. Organic, almond flour, dark chocolate chips. He’d eaten three and said, “These are dangerous, babe. For you, I mean.” He’d smiled when he said it. She’d laughed, a bright, tinny sound, and agreed.
The pillow smelled like him. She hurled it across the room. It knocked her desk lamp, and the light swayed, making the shadows on the walls lurch drunkenly.
Her phone buzzed against the comforter. A new notification lit the edge of the screen. Probably him, sending a correction. Sorry, autocorrect! Meant to say ‘sick’ girl! You’re a SICK girl!
It was an email from the pre-med advising office. Subject: MCAT Study Group Sign-Ups.
Leah let out a choked bark of laughter. It turned into a sob halfway out, caught in the vise of her ribs. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes. Stars burst in the darkness. Don’t cry. Crying is messy. Crying puffs your face. Ugly.
A knock at the door. “Lee? You in there?” Maya, from across the hall.
Leah sucked in a breath, held it. “Yeah!”
“You okay? Sounded like you kicked something.”
“I’m fine! Just…dropped a textbook.”
A pause. “You sure? Your ‘I’m fine’ voice sounds like a hostage negotiation.”
“I’m sure.” Leah arranged her face, willing her voice to smooth out. “Big chem chapter. Stressful.”
“Okay, weirdo. Don’t study too hard.” Maya’s footsteps retreated.
The silence rushed back in, louder. He was probably out right now. At The Lantern, maybe. He’d be leaning against the sticky bar, telling his roommate Kyle about how he’d “had to end it.” She’s great, man, just not for me. You know? And Kyle would nod, because guys just got it. The unspoken rule. The preference. The girl he’d left her for was definitely at that bar. She’d be skinny. She’d be wearing one of those little tops that showed her flat, midriff. She’d laugh at everything he said.
Leah stood up. Her body felt alien, a cumbersome suit she had to operate. She walked to her closet, opened the door. Inside, hanging in a careful row, were the outfits he’d liked best. The high-waisted jeans that “minimized.” The flowy blouses that “skimmed.” The single, black bodycon dress she’d worn once, for his birthday, and spent the whole night pulling down the hem and crossing her arms over her chest.
On the floor, half-hidden under a stack of sweaters, was the unopened box of tissues. And beside it, the bottle of pinot noir she’d bought for their canceled movie night last Friday. A romantic gesture, she’d thought.
She picked up the wine bottle. The glass was cool. She didn’t own a corkscrew.
“Screw it,” she muttered. The pun was accidental and pathetic. She rummaged in her desk drawer, past highlighters and flash drives, and found a cheap ballpoint pen. She stabbed the plastic cork, twisting and pushing until it yielded with a soft, sighing pop. She wiped the pen’s inky tip on her sweatpants.
She drank straight from the bottle. The wine was bitter, tart, flooding her mouth. She swallowed and took another pull. Warmth, immediate and false, spread through her center.
She carried the bottle to her laptop, sitting heavily in the desk chair. The screen saver was a generic photo of a mountain range. She jabbed the spacebar. His text was still there, the last message in a five-thread.
I’m just not really attracted to thick girls.
She hit reply. Her fingers hovered. What was there to say? I’m not thick, I’m dense. Like a neutron star. Or a fruitcake. No. You’re a shallow bastard. True, but it wouldn’t land. He’d just feel justified. See? Emotional.
She deleted the empty reply box. She went to his contact. Her finger hovered over the block button. A final, clean severance. But blocking him felt like admitting the wound was fatal. Like she couldn’t handle the sight of his name.
Instead, she opened a new browser tab. Her fingers moved on their own, a search driven by a deep, marrow-level craving for proof.
“Are thick girls attractive?”
The results were a carnival of agony. Reddit threads. Men’s magazine lists. Forum debates. BBW vs. Thicc: A Breakdown. Her eyes skimmed, catching phrases like “slim-thick is the ideal” and “it’s about proportion” and “a lot of guys just prefer fit, smaller frames.”
She took another swig of wine. The room was softening at the edges.
She clicked on an image search. Pictures of women with bodies like hers, and bodies nothing like hers, all labelled with that word. Thicc. Some were curated, posed, empowered. Others were sneaky camera shots from behind, captioned with fire emojis. She couldn’t tell which was worse—the appropriation or the predation.
Her eyes burned. She slammed the laptop shut.
The bottle was half empty. The fluorescent light in the ceiling fixture hummed like an insect. She looked at the motivational poster, the one next to her desk. It had a picture of a sunrise and the words, “DON’T STOP UNTIL YOU’RE PROUD.”
In one sudden, fluid motion, she reached out, hooked her fingers under the poster’s bottom edge, and ripped. The tape shrieked, the paper tore in a long, satisfying diagonal. She let the ragged triangle hang there.
She picked up the wine bottle again. She didn’t drink. She just held it, feeling the weight of the liquid inside, the solidness of the glass. She looked from the torn poster to the dark, silent phone, to the pilates mat in the corner.
“Okay,” she said again, her voice clearer now. It wasn’t acceptance. It was an assessment. A tally of damages.
She put the bottle down on the desk, next to the unopened tissues. She stood up, walked to the center of the small room, and sat down on the floor. She unrolled the mat with a sharp flick of her wrists. The green foam unfurled, smelling faintly of rubber and her own effort.
She didn’t start doing squats. She just sat there, legs crossed, in the pool of lamplight, staring at the torn paper whispering from the wall. The first fissure in the perfect, papered-over surface of her life. The quiet, in the wake of the tearing, was different. It wasn’t empty anymore. It was waiting.
It was waiting.
The silence had texture now. It was coarse, like the green foam of the mat under her palms. It was patient. Leah unfolded her legs, the joints cracking in the quiet. She pushed herself up, a little unsteady, and the room tilted slightly—the wine, the shock, a toxic cocktail. She steadied herself on the edge of the desk. Her laptop was there, a closed, dark lid.
She hesitated. A smarter part of her brain, the 4.0 GPA part, whispered this was a bad idea. It was the same part that knew not to diagnose yourself on WebMD. But that part was buried under a landslide of thick girls and his cologne and the phantom smell of almond flour cookies.
She opened the laptop. The mountain range glowed, serene and untouched. She closed that tab, the one with the search history that already felt like a humiliation. A fresh, blank tab. A new portal.
Her fingers were cold. She typed in a web address she’d never typed before, one she’d only heard referenced in locker-room-adjacent conversations. The page loaded with a garish, cluttered burst of neon banners and aggressively casual usernames. An adult forum. The digital equivalent of a back-alley.
The cursor blinked in the search bar of the forum. She swallowed. The lavender in the air was cloying now, sickly sweet.
She typed, slowly, each keypress a deliberate violation of her own dignity: “Are thick girls pretty?”
She hit enter.
The page refreshed instantly. For a second, nothing. Then, a cascade.
Notifications pinged. One, two, five. The replies piled on, a digital stampede.
UserX69: Pics or it didn’t happen. How thick we talking?
LordSinister: Define “thick.” Seriously. Need visual data to provide a proper analysis, sweetheart.
ThrowAway123: Everyone has a type. But yeah, most dudes like a little something to hold onto. Post a photo and we’ll tell you if you’re pretty or not.
TruthTeller87: This is bait. But if you’re real, you gotta show us what you’re working with. Can’t judge a book by its cover, but we sure as hell can’t judge it without the cover.
CuriousGeorge88: DM me. I’ll give you an honest rating. Be detailed.
Leah stared. The responses weren’t text anymore. They were fingers, pointing. They were eyes, stripping her down to pixels. They were a grotesque parody of the validation she’d been stupid enough to seek. They reduced the complex, screaming hurt in her chest to a simple transaction: upload your body for our collective assessment.
Her face burned. Her stomach, warm from the wine, turned to cold slurry.
Her stomach, warm from the wine, turned to cold slurry.
A strange, detached curiosity cut through the nausea. Who were these people dispensing verdicts? She clicked on the usernames, one by one. Profile pictures loaded in tiny, grainy squares.
LordSinister was a blurry photo of a man, probably in his fifties, with a reddish beard stained yellow around the mouth, sitting in a car. TruthTeller87 used a meme of a scowling cartoon frog. UserX69 had a picture of a motorcycle, no person. CuriousGeorge88 was a selfie taken at a steep angle from below a double chin, in a dim basement lit by a flat-screen TV.
They were all like that. Unattractive. Older. Puffy-faced or balding or squinting with a kind of greasy resentment. Just gross. A gallery of the lonely and the entitled, lurking in the digital shadows, waiting for a sliver of someone else’s pain to make them feel powerful.
The absurdity of it was a cold slap. These were her judges? These were the arbiters of whether she, Leah Chen, pre-med, dean’s list, baker of goddamn almond flour cookies, was pretty?
A wild, reckless laugh bubbled up. It was all so hideously funny. She was standing in the wreckage of her relationship, holding a bottle of cheap wine, seeking approval from a panel of cave trolls.
The laughter died. A new, more dangerous impulse took its place. A need to prove a point to the empty room, to the ghost of him on the pillow, to the chorus of parents and cultural whispers and magazine covers. A need to scream into the void, Look at me. Just look.
She pushed back from the desk. Her closet door was still open. She stared at the safe, flowing blouses. The minimizing jeans. She bypassed them all, her fingers digging to the back, to the clothes she wore when no one was looking. She pulled out a pair of dark-wash jeans that were honest—they strained a little at the hips, hugged her thighs. A plain black v-neck t-shirt, soft from a hundred washes. It was a little tight across her chest.
She changed quickly, as if someone might walk in. The fabric felt different against her skin. Confining. True.
She stood before the full-length mirror on the back of her door. The overhead light was cruel and clinical. She saw it all—the curve of her hips the jeans couldn’t straighten, the swell of her breasts under the thin cotton, the softness of her stomach. She saw a thick girl. His words echoed.
She couldn’t believe she was doing this.
She picked up her phone. Her hands were steady. Too steady. She opened the camera, switched to the front view. Her own face looked back, wide-eyed and pale, a stranger’s face. She held the phone up, angling it down slightly. A classic, apologetic pose. She deleted it.
“No,” she whispered.
She lowered the phone. She looked directly into the mirror, at the reflection of her own eyes. She uncrossed her arms. She let them hang at her sides. She didn’t suck in her stomach. She just stood there, breathing.
She raised the phone again, capturing the mirror image. It showed the door, the peeling paint, the green mat on the floor, and her, in the center of it all. She made sure the text on the ripped poster was visible: “DON’T STOP UNTIL YOU’RE PROUD.” She tapped the screen to focus. Her face was in shadow, her expression unreadable. The lines of her body were clear.
The flash went off, a stark, blue-white explosion that bleached the room for a second and left dancing spots in her vision.
In the silence that followed, the hum of the light was deafening. She looked at the photo. It wasn’t sexy. It wasn’t coy. It was just a document. A girl in a tight t-shirt and jeans, in a messy dorm room, standing very still.
Her thumb hovered over the forum. The reply box was open, a blank maw waiting to be fed. She attached the image. It uploaded with a swift, soundless churn.
The cursor blinked in the text field. What did you say? ‘Here I am?’ ‘Judge this?’ ‘Am I pretty now?’
She typed two words. Just the facts.
LeahChen21: I’m Leah.
She hit ‘Post Reply.’
The page refreshed. For a long moment, nothing. The wine bottle was empty. The room held its breath.
Then, the notifications began. Not pings this time, but a pulsing, relentless wave. The little red icon by her temporary username blinked like a racing heart.
(23) New Replies to Your Comment.
The first one loaded at the top.
LordSinister: Well, well. Hello Leah. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
UserX69: YUP. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re fucking perfect. DM me right now.
TruthTeller87: Okay, I was wrong. Not bait. You’re a solid 8.5. Lose the shirt and we’ll talk about a 9.
CuriousGeorge88: Details. I need details. Measurements. Weight. What are you, a 36DD? More?
The comments scrolled, faster than she could read. A torrent of hunger, crude emojis, anatomical speculations, demands for more, more, more. They weren’t judging her prettiness. They were devouring the image. They were mapping her contours with their words. She was no longer a person. She was a collection of assets being appraised in a marketplace she never meant to enter.
She had wanted a verdict. She had gotten a feeding frenzy.
Her phone slipped from her fingers, landing face-up on the pilates mat. The screen stayed lit, the comments still scrolling as new ones poured in. A digital centipede of desire and degradation.
She backed away until her legs hit the bed and she sat down hard. She wrapped her arms around herself, the tight shirt now feeling like a borrowed skin. The shadows on the wall seemed to lean in, watching. The bottle was empty. The tissues were still sealed.
Outside, a car door slammed. Someone in the hallway laughed. Normal life, moving on its normal track.
Inside the room, the phone glowed on the floor, pulsing with a sick, malevolent light. She had posted the picture. It was out there. In the world. In the dark of that forum, a piece of her was now a permanent exhibit.
And the comments kept coming.
And the comments kept coming.
The phone glowed, a live thing on the mat. Leah didn’t pick it up. She stared at it from the bed, watching the screen brighten with each new notification, a ghastly strobe light illuminating the torn poster, the empty bottle, the dust under her desk.
She finally leaned over, her movements slow and thick, and retrieved it. The glass was warm.
She tapped the notification. The thread exploded.
UserX69: YUP. That’s what I’m talking about. You’re fucking perfect. DM me right now.
TruthTeller87: Okay, I was wrong. Not bait. You’re a solid 8.5. Lose the shirt and we’ll talk about a 9.
CuriousGeorge88: Details. I need details. Measurements. Weight. What are you, a 36DD? More?
But then they got worse. Coarser. A avalanche of unfiltered id.
LordSinister: Look at that waist. I’d love to see it from behind. Bet it jiggles. You should post a video. A turning video.
ThrowAway123: SHE HAS NICE TITS! Would love to suck on those.
AnonDom: LOOK AT THAT FAT ASS! THIS BITCH HAS CURVES. Fuck, I’d wreck her.
BigDEnergy22: That’s a proper handful. All of it. You built for taking dick, sweetheart?
SilentObserver99: I’d pin you against that door and just take it. You look like you’d cry. I’d like that.
UserX69: Seriously. DM. I’m hard as a rock right now. Tell me what you’re wearing under those jeans.
Leah read them all. Each one landed like a physical blow, a different part of her body smarting. Nice tits. Fat ass. This bitch. Wreck her. Take it. The words were crude, mechanical. They dissected her into components. She felt like a specimen in a jar, and every comment was a prodding stick.
A strange, buzzing numbness settled over her skin. The initial horror was still there, a cold stone in her gut, but it was now wrapped in this static. She could see her own hands, holding the phone, perfectly steady.
She could see her own hands, holding the phone, perfectly steady. The disgust was a sharp, clean blade in her mind. Animals. Pathetic, lonely pigs.
But underneath that blade, something else flickered. A low, unwanted pulse.
LOOK AT THAT FAT ASS! THIS BITCH HAS CURVES.
The words were vile. They should have made her feel smaller. They did, in one way. But in another, they landed with a strange, perverse weight. They saw her. Not Leah, the student, the daughter, the girlfriend. They saw the shape. And they wanted it. They called it fat and perfect in the same digital breath. Their hunger was a dark mirror, reflecting back a version of her body that was powerful in its sheer, unwanted desirability. It was a fucked-up equation: their repulsiveness plus her image equaled a sick kind of validation.
I’d wreck her.
A hot, shameful twinge gathered low in her belly. She squeezed her thighs together, feeling the denim seam press. The sensation was immediate and confusing. She hated them. She hated herself for feeling this. But the ache of his rejection—I’m just not really attracted—was a hollow pit. These comments, this torrent of filth, were like hot, dirty tar being poured into that pit, filling it up with something that wasn’t grief.
She let one hand drift from the phone, down over the tight black cotton of her shirt, over the soft rise of her stomach. Her own touch felt detached, clinical. She pinched the flesh at her side, the part she always tried to hide. Thick.
Bet it jiggles.
Her fingers trailed lower, over the button of her jeans. Her heart was hammering now, a frantic counter-rhythm to the hum of the lights. This was insane. This was pathetic. She was getting wet reading the grunted fantasies of men she would cross the street to avoid.
She flicked the button open. The sound was obscenely loud. She pulled down the zipper, just an inch, just enough to slip her hand past the waistband of her underwear. The fabric was already damp.
She kept her eyes locked on the phone, on the scrolling litany of tits and ass and take it. She pictured not a face, but a formless, hungry darkness. The comments were its voice. Her body was its target.
Her touch was not gentle. It was a rough, seeking pressure, mirroring the crude language on the screen. She wasn’t making love to herself; she was proving a point. That this body, this thick body, could feel this. That it could react. That it could be wrecked on its own terms, in this silent, fluorescent-lit box.
It was fast and merciless. Her breath hitched, became short, sharp gasps. The phone slipped from her other hand, face-down on the comforter, muting the light but not the voices in her head. Fuck, I’d wreck her. Her hips jerked up off the bed, back arching, a silent cry strangled in her throat. The climax was a violent wave of release that felt more like rupture—a tearing apart of the good, careful girl she was supposed to be.
It left her shaking. Empty. The buzzing numbness was gone, replaced by a thick, post-coital dread that sank into her bones.
“Oh, god,” she whispered to the ceiling.
She pulled her hand out, sticky. She didn’t look at it. She zipped her jeans with fumbling fingers, the metal teeth catching. The shame arrived then, cold and total, washing over the fading physical warmth. What had she just done? Who was she?
She couldn’t look at the laptop. Its screen was a dormant eye. She stood on weak legs, walked over, and snapped it shut. The click was final.
She didn’t wash up. She just stripped off the jeans and the t-shirt, leaving them in a heap on the floor, and crawled under the covers in her underwear and sweatshirt. She buried her face in the pillow—the one that didn’t smell like him—and willed the world to disappear.
Sleep was a black, dreamless pit. She fell into it and didn’t move for hours.
She woke to the flat, gray light of a cloudy morning seeping around the edges of her blinds. The silence of the dorm was a physical pressure. For one blessed second, she was just Leah, waking up. Then the memory descended, not as a flash, but as a heavy, sodden blanket smothering her.
The text. The wine. The photo. The comments. Her own hand.
A groan escaped her, muffled by the pillow. The sadness was back, deeper now, alloyed with a pungent self-loathing. The lonely feeling was acute, a hollowing-out of her chest. Last night’s distorted validation had evaporated, leaving a stale chemical taste. She was just a girl in a messy bed, alone.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand. No new messages from him. One from Maya: You alive? And a reminder about a biology lab at 2 PM.
The lab felt impossibly distant, a task for a person she no longer was. The thought of pulling on clothes, of smiling, of discussing mitochondria, was exhausting. The thought of sitting in that silence with herself was worse.
Her gaze drifted across the room, landing on the closed laptop on her desk.
It sat there. A repository of the worst thing she’d ever done. And the only place where, for a few sick minutes, she hadn’t felt invisible.
The pull was magnetic, awful. It was like picking at a scab.
She didn’t want to. She had to.
With a sigh that felt pulled from the bottom of that hollow chest, she pushed back the covers. The floor was cold on her bare feet. She sat at the desk, the wood chilly through her thin underwear. She didn’t turn on the lamp. The gray light was enough.
She opened the laptop. It whirred to life, asking for her password. Her fingers typed it automatically.
The browser was still open to the forum. The page loaded, a garish blast of color in the dim room.
Her thread was still there. At the top. The number next to it had grown: (47) New Replies to Your Comment.
Her stomach coiled. The sadness and loneliness inside her fused into a single, desperate need.
She clicked it.