Free Loud in the House of Myself by Stacy Pershall

utility room, Zoe and I attempted to sway the house’s olfactory balance in the direction of the FryDaddy, into which Zoe tossed several Schwan’s frozen hamburger patties.
    “Do you think it’ll work like this?” I asked, taking a giant whiff of grease. It smelled so delicious I wanted to dive in, but I was already calculating the calories and figuring out how I would get rid of them.
    “Hell yes,” she said. “It’s just like putting them on a grill, except in oil.”
    Like much of Zoe’s logic, I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant. As the beef pucks sizzled away, I stood in the doorway of the den with the remote control of the VCR, rewinding Janet Jackson’s “Pleasure Principle” video over and over again to watch the part where she steps on the chair and tips it over. “We have to practice this part,” I said, tugging at my kneepads. We’d been working on it in the garage for weeks, because Zoe wanted to make the drill team and I wanted to still be her friend once she did.
    “I need some kneepads like yours,” she said, because she’d been using her brother’s old football ones, and mine were sleek new neoprene.
    “Wal-Mart,” I said absently, as if everything in her house and mine didn’t come from Wal-Mart, just like every possession of everyone else we knew. Of course, many of my clothes came from garage sales, to which my mother went every Saturday at 6 a.m., and I lived in fear someone might ask me why my new polo shirts had already been washed so many times.
    “Motherfucker!” said Zoe, whose family had the biggest collective dirty mouth in Prairie Grove. “The burgers are falling apart.”
    We fished them out of the FryDaddy and Zoe had the brilliant idea of smooshing them into meat loaf. She wasn’t exactly sure of the recipe, but knew it involved crumbled-up bread or chips or something, so she mashed in some Nacho Cheese Doritos and drowned the whole thing in ketchup. I couldn’t believe I was really going to eat it, but god it smelled so good, meat fried in oil with ketchup and orange powdered cheese, and if it was all I ate for the next two days and I exercised for two hours a day, I figured I should be able to get rid of it. I could get through up to two days without food as long as I had enough iced tea, coffee, and sugar-free gum. I made up my mind that the next time I would eat would be Saturday, when I worked my part-time job at the Skate Place in the snack bar, where my usual binge was three rectangular frozen sausage pizzas cooked in the toaster oven, all the cotton candy I wanted, two 32-ounce drinks made of every kind of soda mixed together, and popcorn soaked in extra butter-flavored grease to make it easier to purge. For some reason I had decided I need to bring saltine crackers with me from home to eat in the midst of all this, because eating disorders are nothing if not bizarre combinations of ritual and specific foods. I would eat the pizza, then slam down half of one of the sodas, then eat a cracker, then purge. Then cotton candy and half a soda and two handfuls of popcorn and a cracker and then purge. Yes, that was what I would eat on Saturday afternoon.
    “Hey asshole,” said Zoe, “stop thinking about sex. Do you want some of this?” I nodded and blinked and she used a large wooden spoon to glop some coral-colored Dorito meat onto a plate, which she shoved at me. If you asked me what I learned during my high school career, I would struggle to come up with something about cotton gins or gerunds and the meaning of synecdoche, but I will be able to describe that meat loaf in grueling detail until the day I drop dead. Food, hunger, food, hunger, food: this was my life. What food tasted like going down, what it tasted like coming up. What I ate in what order, how many calories it had. I remember calculating how many times I would have to chew each Dorito bit so it wouldn’t stab my throat on the way back up, and I remember how they looked like shards of broken