So now, with a mop of thinning ginger fur, I must endure hair’s latest streak of sabotage. It wasn’t enough to plague me through childhood, to cast a dark and itchy shadow over puberty, or to bring home bugs that one time we went swimming in an unfamiliar lake. It looms over me still, now armed with the sharpened knife of the gays’ piercing judgment, staring back at me in the mirror every morning with an ever wispier glare.

Maybe I’ll just wear wigs.

ON BEING “THE BIG GUY”

I first discovered I was fat the day I no longer fit beneath the bed. I was playing hide-and-seek, and this was my go-to spot, mostly because it was dark and quiet and I could pick at the fuzzies that dangled from the bottom of the box spring. But this day, I couldn’t quite squeeze my stomach beneath the metal frame. To be fair, my family had very thick carpeting and very short bed frames, so the space between bed and floor was very difficult to squeeze into to begin with. But still. One day I fit, and the next day I didn’t.

It’s a harsh way for a kid to discover he’s fat, especially when there’s a kid in the next room counting down from ten, which is a really short amount of time to both process your newfound fatness and also find another equally sufficient hiding spot. There should really be a hide-and-seek rule for a scenario like this. Like “The hiding countdown may be extended from ten seconds to twenty-five years in the event of an existential crisis of the body. Adjust accordingly and may God have mercy on your portly soul.” But let’s face it, the rules of hide-and-seek were never that solid to begin with.

In my parents’ eyes, I was never fat, I was just a “growing boy” with a healthy appetite who needed to eat whatever he wanted in order to grow big and strong. Never mind that I went up three pant sizes each year, or that I could barely run across the backyard without suffering severe stomach cramps, or that I was developing my own petite little boy breasts. This is what happened to all little boys. We’d grow into it, the logic went. For now, eat your burgers and fries (read: protein and vegetables), because little boys need all the nutrients they can get.

You can pinpoint the year I got fat by looking at my school pictures. You can clearly see the year my metabolism realized it was in for a lifetime of grueling hard work and gave the fuck up. In first grade, I had discernible cheekbones and the hint of a jawline; by second grade, puffy red cheeks and the beginnings of a double chin.