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At the start of his freshman year of high school, Caspian Milton is a skinny little slip of a boy—a full five-foot-eleven on the heels of a serious growth spurt and just barely a hundred-forty-one pounds. He has a sweet tooth, though, and a set of parents and step-parents who are never around. Anna, the sibling closest to him in age, is a junior. She's just gotten her driver's license and she likes to tool around in the car that used to belong to their elder brother, Gabriel, who started college this year. Luke and Michael have been off at their respective universities for a few years already. Michael's even in law school, now. There's no one else around to make sure that he gets any of his meals—breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
So, Cas ends up feeding himself, buying whatever he wants for dinner on a limitless credit card because his parents won't care about the charges, anyway. Without anyone else around to stick their noses in and without anyone else around to tell him what to do, Cas can treat himself all the time—ice cream for breakfast, if he's not up early enough to make it to the Roadhouse Diner for one of their massive specials before class; pizza and take-out and milkshakes and more ice cream for lunch and dinner; snacking on all kinds of cookies and candy all the time.
By the middle of October, all of the local pizza places and the Chinese take-out joint in town know Caspian by name, as well as his usual orders. By his fifteenth birthday in mid-November, all his jeans are painfully snug around his waist, no small thanks due to how his concave stomach's filled out, has even started getting convex instead. By Christmas, he busts the button off a too-small pair of trousers partway through his third helping of triple-layer German chocolate fudge cake and his sweater rides up, exposing the round, pudgy swell of his tummy, all angry red and hard to the touch from how much he's stuffed into it. And it's dizzying, dropping his hand to his middle, brushing his fingers down the curve of his stomach, feeling so contented and so full.
So, Cas gets a whole new wardrobe from the mall's post-holiday sales and picks up right where he left off, eating whatever he wants without concern, without thought for any of the consequences. It's not that Cas doesn't notice that he's gaining weight. It's not like he's completely oblivious. He notices, and it makes sense enough—his taste in food is far from healthy and he never really exercises, save trudging the two short blocks to school or the four long ones to the Roadhouse—but the thing is that Cas doesn't care.
Maybe he should, but he doesn't—not when his jeans get tight again, not when bigger t-shirts all start riding up on his middle, and not when early August rolls in, when the summer before his sophomore year gets winding down, and he hasn't gotten his loosest jeans buttoned up, much less zipped, for a good two, three weeks. He hasn't gone out much since the Fourth of July, either—he's even gotten the groceries delivered—because the only things that fit right now are his pajamas and his yoga pants with the elastic waistbands. Everything else is too snug and none of his t-shirts can stay down around his round, increasingly stretch-marked tummy.
Besides, it's not like he has any friends who miss him. At Kripke High, Cas stands out for being the only true loner, not one of the social outcasts who at least have each other. Cas only has his sister—Anna and their brothers are really all he's ever had in the first place—and he prefers his own company, the company of books and the TV, to hers in the first place because books and TV are so much easier to understand than people. There's no one at school who gives a damn that Cas hasn't been out and about at the mall, or the movie theatre, or the bowling alley, or any other place that people his own age like to hang out at. If the librarians have noticed that he hasn't swung by for new books lately, Cas neither knows nor cares.
There's no one who even gives two shits that he's started skipping church because none of his nice clothes fit him anymore. Most of his nice shirts are missing buttons in one place or another, his trousers are all too tight to even make it up his thighs, and he'll go back to church when he gets on a diet and loses enough weight to squeeze himself into his nice black pants with the pleats running up the legs, the ones that Mother says are supposed to be slimming. Dieting's always meant to start tomorrow, and then the day after when all tomorrow brings is Cas eating ice cream for breakfast again and figuring that he's fucked up already so it's too late to really have today count, so why not make it his last feast before he starts his diet. He always means to get on his diet tomorrow.
Finally and out of nowhere, one day while he's flopped out on the sofa, chowing down on his second bag of Doritos to the tune of some cartoon reruns, Anna rounds the corner and says, "So, you're getting pretty chunky over here, huh, Prince Caspian?"
Cas shrugs and supposes that he's gained some weight, yes—but nothing huge, and nothing he couldn't lose (or somehow make more acceptable) before school starts. Anna scoffs, bets him that he's wrong. "Here's the terms, Tubbers," she says. "You get a pair of your jeans done up—around the waist, mind you, not under the stomach—and you're right. You're not chunky and I won't bring it up again. But if you can't do it, or the jeans bust up somehow? Then I win."
Cas huffs and arches an eyebrow at her, shoves another handful of chips into his mouth and licks his fingers clean. "And what do you get, if you win?"
She doesn't answer that question until Cas spends twenty minutes flat on his back—wriggling around just to get his jeans up his plush, jiggling thighs; sucking in his stomach for all he's worth and getting nowhere—only to have the button snap clean off his pants as soon as he sits up. As it turns out, all she wants is to know exactly how much her baby brother weighs. Cas sees no reason not to oblige her—for all he's not weighed himself at all since his last before-school physical, and for all he knows that he's put on weight, he believes it can't really be that much. It only shows so well on him because he used to be so skinny. He's probably only up to one-ninety, one-ninety-five.
He takes a deep breath as he steps onto the platform. He lets it out in a heavy sigh—and his heart skips several beats when he looks down at the bright red digital read-out screaming for him: 211.5.
"Oh," Cas mutters, as though he finds out that he's put on seventy pounds this year every day. "I suppose that would explain a lot."
***
Almost two weeks after she's made him weigh in for her amusement, Anna drives Cas to Doctor Cara Roberts's office for his annual physical. Nominally, he's made efforts to shave a few pounds off before he gets on Doctor Roberts's scale—he's munched on carrot sticks and celery, stumbled all over Mother's untouched treadmill, gone out to ride his bike in the hopes of maybe getting under the two-ten marker—but his clothes don't fit any him better. He still can't get his jeans done up around his waist, and never mind that, it's getting harder and harder to do them up underneath his pudgy stomach without worrying about them bursting.
It doesn't help that Cas's appetite seems so insatiable. Cravings constantly scratch along the back of his neck, gnaw at the inside of his stomach until he satisfies him—and for all she shrugs and guesses that it's probably better for him to lose a little weight, Anna's not exactly helpful. She's still not around for hardly any meals, and when she does show up, she doesn't argue with what Cas dishes up. Not even when he eats half of an extra-large pizza, or more, for dinner and follows it up with a huge bowl of ice cream—all because he's been good about his diet all day, so he's allowed to cheat a little bit. He's pretty sure there's a rule about that written down somewhere.
Still, he's not naïve enough to expect that he's lost any weight, but on the other hand, Cas doesn't expect the end result that he gets, either. Anna waits for him in the car and when Cas trudges back out, he doesn't say anything, doesn't so much as dignify her stupid, pointless questions of how it went or if he managed to lose any weight. He just shrugs and asks if they can go get lunch, doesn't even put up a fuss when she makes him get out of the car and go into the Roadhouse instead of letting him get carry-out. Whatever, he's in his pajamas. Whatever, he has a roll of stomach-fat pooching out over the elastic waistband, along with jelly rolls along his sides. Whatever, his t-shirt exposes a good inch of soft, pale tummy—Cas can't bother caring.
He even orders a double cheeseburger with extra bacon, sauteed mushrooms, and a side of cheese fries. He makes Anna go halfsies with him on an appetizer of mozzarella sticks, then eats most of them and all the marinara sauce. To drink, he gets a Coke and wolfs down a triple-thick chocolate milkshake before he's so much as thought about dessert—which he gets: a huge slice of cherry pie a la mode and a hot fudge brownie sundae. Never mind how Anna snickers, never mind the quizzical arch of her eyebrows, never mind her little taunts of, I guess somebody's hungry and so it looks like the diet's off—what-the-fuck-ever. It's not like dieting's gotten Cas anything so far, anyway, and even once his stomach starts hurting from how much he's eaten, it growls and yells at him for more food.
When Cas continues not responding to anything she says, Anna eventually gets the hint and clams up. All through his afternoon of snacking and borderline bingeing on junk food, she doesn't bring up anything or voice anything that's on her mind. By the time he sits down to another dinner of leftover pizza and leftover almond chicken with fried rice, Cas believes he might get out of this thicket without having to talk about anything—but then Anna joins him with a passive-aggressive salad and a pointed smirk. They eat in silence—which means she might as well not be here, for all the good her presence is doing; Cas still aches with hunger, no matter how much he's eaten today, no matter how much he knows that he should probably let up.
At least, they eat in silence until, after five slices of pizza and the rest of the Chinese, Cas dishes himself up a huge bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough and flops into his favorite place on the sofa. At which point, all Anna has it in her to say is, "Do you want to talk about it, Tubby? I'm guessing there's an 'it' anyway, since you've been sulking since you got out of Doctor Cara's office."
Cas shrugs, sighs, helps himself to a heaping spoonful of his ice cream. "There's nothing to talk about," he tells her, burrowing back into the cushion, stabbing at his dessert. "It is not of import. Or anyway, it might be, but it certainly isn't any business of yours."
Anna sighs and shuts up again. She joins Cas on the sofa, leaning into one of the armrests—and after a while of awkward silence, she snaps at him, "Actually, I think it kind of is my business, so how about let's talk about it."
Tucking her hair behind her ear, arching an eyebrow at him, she doesn't suffer through his insistence that it's really, really none of her business. "My baby brother up and puts on seventy pounds in a year—and somehow, at least by his account, he doesn't notice how chubby he's getting until I point it out to him. He's oblivious enough that he didn't notice his pants on Christmas were in danger of ripping right in half or that he maxed out all his jeans about fifteen, twenty pounds ago. And since no one else seems to give a shit? I'd say that, yeah, it's my business, Butterball—so spill. What was the verdict?"
"Two-sixteen," Cas mumbles into his spoon, slurps the ice cream off it and barely chews the cookie dough chunks before he swallows. There are only two bites left, and once he's choked them down, Cas slips the bowl onto the coffee-table. Flushes all hot and pink as he drops his hands to the hem of his t-shirt, tries in vain to tug it back down over his round, swollen stomach. "Two-hundred and sixteen pounds, Anna. I've put on five pounds in just under two weeks, and I've gained seventy-five since I saw Doctor Roberts last."
And the sickest part of everything is that Cas's stomach growls again. While the shame of admitting this scrapes along the back of his neck, digs its talons along his spine and his muscles—while his cheeks get hotter and start edging into a deep shade of red—Cas's belly quivers with a need to choke down something more. He dishes up the rest of the cookie dough ice cream, scrapes the inside of the carton clean, and moans in pleasure as the sweet, thick cream slides down his throat, into his tightly stuffed belly.
***
For the last two weeks of summer, Cas diets properly. No junk food, regular exercising, eating his vegetables—and the results might not show that much on his body, but they show on the scales. For all he and Anna still end up at the mall, buying him extra-large t-shirts and jeans with forty-two-inch waists, he's down to two-thirteen on the first day of school. He even makes it to lunchtime without visiting the vending machines once, not even just for a small snack or a soda. But everything changes—everything goes to Hell—in fifth period English. That's when Caspian Milton meets one, Dean Winchester, whose middle name should be "Goddamn" for several reasons that Cas can think of.
By all rights, Dean Winchester should make Cas want to diet better, diet more. He's pretty sure that's how it's supposed to work—pretty people are supposed to make anyone who's chubby (or anyone who's not but has low self-esteem) want to get thinner and more socially acceptable, so that the pretty people will deign to acknowledge their existence. And if there's one thing that Dean Winchester is, with his enormous green eyes and his lanky, track star, swim team captain's build? It's pretty. He's pretty enough that Cas, ever undignified and unsubtle, gasps from looking at him—and yet, looking at him doesn't make Cas want to go run laps until he collapses or eat carrot sticks until he's skinny again. Looking at him doesn't make Cas long for the days when he barely beat a buck-forty, soaking wet and in a parka.
Looking at Dean Winchester—even just staring at his chiseled profile—does not help Cas's diet any. It does absolutely nothing to help him. Not even a little bit. It doesn't make him feel motivated, or better, or anything positive. All it does is make him want to eat an entire bag of peanut butter M&M's, the way he did so many times over his long, fat summer.
All it makes Cas feel is hungry. Hungrier than he's been for the past two weeks, and that's saying something because the one word that Cas could use to best describe his two weeks of dieting is starving. Once the bell rings, Cas bolts for the vending machines. He buys seven dollars' worth of snacks—two packs of Reese's peanut butter cups, and a bag of Cheetos, a bag of chocolate-chip mini-muffins, and three packages of the chocolate-coated miniature donuts—and manages to cram all of them down his throat before sixth period study hall starts. Around mid-period, he takes the bathroom pass and, on his way back, drops another five dollars on more junk food snacks that he doesn't need but finishes before the seventh period bell rings anyway.
Through all of them, his stomach gets hot and his cheeks flush, thick and pink, and something unfurls and twists around his stomach—Cas feels the shame clawing its way up and down the back of his neck, clenching around his lungs, but it's not even half as loud, half as terrible as the something that seeps through his stomach and makes it whine. And, unfortunately for the three pounds he's lost so far, the only way Cas knows to shut this something up is food. Is eating more and more and more.
Once the last bell rings, he swings by the Roadhouse and takes home two orders of chocolate chip pancakes. Sighing, Cas covers them with huge scoops of the extreme cookie dough ice cream he's not supposed to know is hidden away in the freezer. Anna doesn't come home until after he's wolfed down both stacks and half of a Chicago deep-dish pizza, and even then, she doesn't stop him from having two huge bowls of ice cream for dessert. Huge enough that he empties the container and ends up groaning and whining and curling in on himself on the sofa. Even if she'd tried to get him to stop, though, Cas knows that he wouldn't have—all he can think about is Dean Winchester's brilliantly green eyes, and all that makes him want to do is bury himself in food until this hot, heavy, pulsing something gets itself out of his chest, out of his stomach, out of his muscles, where it's wormed down deep, and gotten all stuck and twisted up in him.
He wants to eat until he doesn't want Dean Winchester—or, in lieu of that, he'll settle for eating until he can't feel anything anymore. Least of all the lust he feels when he thinks about some guy who probably doesn't know he exists, and would probably just make Cas miserable if he did know. Because beautiful people are almost never as nice as their appearances—especially not people as beautiful as Dean—and Cas is, if he's anything, a fat loser. An geek, and a nerd, and an incurable dweeb with no aptitude for social situations and a belly where he used to be locker-stuffing skinny—not to mention how much he absolutely deserves the slurs that, these days, are the only words he ever hears from his Father.
Not that Father says them about Cas. How could he? No one knows about Cas or about his predilections—not even Anna knows, and she's around him more often than anybody else. No one knows that Cas is broken, that he's wrong, or that according to Father Zachariah down at Saint Sebastian's Roman Catholic Church, he's a sinner and a pervert for reasons that he doesn't understand much less have any degree of control over. No one knows that he looks at other boys and gets these hot, sick feelings, all worming and twisting around in his muscles and the pit of his pudgy stomach—and food's supposed to keep him from looking at them. Food's supposed to satiate him and make it so he doesn't want anything else, much less things with other boys.
But now, when he eats, Cas thinks about Dean—only Dean. He thinks about those green eyes of Dean's, and his smile, and the dusty smattering of freckles all over his cheeks and nose—and all that does is make him hungrier. Because he shouldn't want Dean, shouldn't want to do things with him or any of that. He shouldn't want to kiss Dean Winchester, or ask Dean Winchester to come with him to the homecoming dance, or want to eat lunch with Dean Winchester under the guise of getting to know him better when he's really just too much of a coward to ask Dean out for himself—or else, because he's too much aware of how homosexuality is a grievous sin against nature, a deadly threat to both Cas's immortal soul and Dean's, if he so much as tries to get the stink of his perversion all over some innocent other boy.
At the very least, if eating doesn't take away Cas's painful wanting, then it'll make him too fat for anyone as beautiful as Dean Winchester to associate or be seen with. If Cas can't be strong enough to resist temptation, then he just has to see to it that temptation will never want him.
So it's no surprise when the three pounds Cas lost creep back onto his body within ten days of meeting Dean. It's even less of a shock when they bring a bunch of friends with them. Even when Cas tries his best not to overeat or binge or let himself get even bigger than he already is, his efforts end up being in vain, just like all the diets that he meant to start this past summer. Before September's out, Cas tips the scales at two-hundred and twenty-six pounds and all of his new clothes are starting to get snug.