by Amy DeBellis
In my junior year of high school I gained forty pounds in three months, and not by choice. I could no more easily examine my own mental response to this weight gain than I could stand in front of the bathroom mirror and study the new flesh rounding my thighs, dimpling my stomach, turning my eyes small again. (Before: huge hollow skull-eyes. I believed they gave me the look of a mystic, a priestess, a saint.)
So I looked outward instead. Other people’s reactions to my physical change were often sharp enough to cut. I gained the first ten pounds in an inpatient facility, but that place was mercifully separate from the rest of the world; another reality. Laces taken out of my sneakers, supervised bathroom visits, the metallic taste of Ensure, feeding tubes a constant threat in the corners of our eyes.
When I returned home a few days after leaving the facility, I was still twenty-five pounds under my “goal weight.” I would gain the remainder over the next several weeks. There was no way around it (even now, as I write, I sound defensive). I was being weighed every week at my doctor’s office, and at home my parents supervised all my meals to make sure I didn’t throw food away. Even when I succeeded in stuffing a few handfuls of fettuccine between the pages of a book, the oil of the pesto turning the pages stiff and translucent, it didn’t make any difference. I was gaining, slow and steady, irrevocable and—it felt then—irreversible.
Upon my return to school, I met with four of my teachers—privately, in empty classrooms with the lights off, just us and the bookshelves to observe our stilted conversation—to go over the material I had missed during my two-week absence.
Three of those four teachers told me: “You look so much better now, Amy.”
What possible response? I blinked and said Thank you. At night I lay awake, staring up at my bedroom’s popcorn ceiling and imagining rubbing my bloated body against its nubs until I disappeared. Wishing I had said, with more than a hint of sarcasm: Thanks so much, but they won’t let me stay at this weight. I have to gain twenty-five more pounds.
Watch them stammer. Watch them search for words then.
And then, later in life, I began to wish I had said: It’s kind of inappropriate to comment on a teenage student’s body, don’t you think? It makes me feel…uncomfortable.
But the words didn’t come to me. When you’re sixteen, they never do.
Back at school, I was afraid my friends wouldn’t like me anymore. I was ashamed of my weight gain, so I assumed they were too, that they were disgusted by me. When I was skeletal, I had adored and adorned myself. I’d dripped with jewelry, holding my hollow body regal, like Cleopatra: chandelier earrings shivering against my neck with each turn of my head, bracelets clanking together on my wrists, rings spinning around and around on my branchlike fingers. But now that I was eating three thousand calories a day, my body was a waste disposal center. Unadorned, swaddled in sweatsuits, I slunk through the school hallways like the world’s fleshiest ghost. My weight gain didn’t matter to my friends at all, of course: they were just happy I was healthy again. But being thin was the only thing I had liked about myself, so I assumed my friends thought the same.
No—that’s not true. Being thin was not what I’d liked about myself. Because a normal person’s idea of “thin” was not even close to enough. It only became (almost) enough when people’s admiration wavered and turned to concern, when their envy darkened into disgust. It only became (almost) enough when I crossed that undeniable medical line: sub-15 BMI, clinical “extreme emaciation,” pain in the soles of my feet from walking. Clumps of hair falling out, dry in my hands, the color of dying leaves. My whole body one long autumn.
I had only liked myself when I was dying. So I thought everyone else felt that way too. That they had the same desire I did, deep down, so deep in the bedrock of my own mind that it took years to uncover it:
I wish Amy would just die.
At that point, I did not want death enough to take decisive action: to shoot myself, to swallow pills, to jump from a high place. But I did want it enough to feel that I only had value when I was actively in the process of dying, peeling away from the world, shivering in the air like a wet piece of paper: turning translucent. Growing thinner and thinner, until you could see the sunlight straight through me. Until you could see all the beauty of the world through me. Until there was nothing left to see through at all.
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Amy DeBellis is the author of the novels All Our Tomorrows (CLASH Books, 2025), Methuselah (ouroboros press, 2026) and The Widening Gyre (Lanternfish Press, 2026). Her writing has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and The Best of the Net, and can be found in X-R-A-Y, Write or Die, Trampset, Pithead Chapel, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and over 50 other literary journals.
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