Dwellers Read Online Free

that read,
Fuck your heart, appearance is
everything.
     
    APPEARANCE IS EVERYTHING.
     
    Immediately following this is a list of food and measurements, like this:
     
    Oatmeal – 40 g – 150 cal.
    Coffee – 240 g – 5 cal.
    Adobo chicken – 227 g – 300 cal.
    Mixed fruit – 140 g – 59 cal.
     
    Nilaga – ? – 210? cal.
     
    Resistance training – 30 min. – 143 cal. burned
     
    THIS GOES ON for three or so pages.
     
    Then:
     
    I AM DOING my best. I really am, but I lose the weight and then gain it right back.
     
    I WANT TO do this for myself. I think, This is for my health (though I am healthy! I am!), but I feel like I am doing this to lord it over my mother, to wipe the smirk off my
cousin’s face, to answer the girl who had the audacity to ask me, What the hell happened? This is what happened, bitch.
     
    BUT I FAIL. I fail and I fail and I fail.
     
    I HEAR THE girls talking about fasting but I can’t do it. I want to. It’s the fastest way to make myself disappear.
     
    WHY CAN’T I do this? Why can’t I just slice off this flab and get on with my life?
     
    I FEEL THE urge to jump on a bus, any bus, to anywhere, and just go away and never come back.
     
    CAN WE JUST stop making me feel like shit already? Can we do that?
     
    I WANT TO love myself, but it appears that I am not allowed to.
     
    YOU ARE SO fat, you are so worthless, you take up the space meant for better, more disciplined people, WHY DO YOU EVEN BOTHER, MERYL?
     
    THE VERY LAST entry is dated January 1, the New Year, and reads:
I am so tired of this body.

7
    I MISS PACING. I miss putting my hands in my pocket and striding from one end of the room to another, because I can, because I want to, because I am frustrated and anxious and
movement helps ease this sinking feeling.
    I push myself away from the table and wheel out of the dining room, through the living room, and out the door onto the front porch. There is a soft breeze. I wonder where the breeze is coming
from. Is there a sea nearby? The street we are on is narrow and quiet and sad, the sea’s antithesis.
    I think of everything other than Meryl and her last words, but of course every thought circles back to her.
    I hear the door open behind me. Louis steps out to sit on the porch ledge.
    “It’s probably the most harrowing thing I’ve read in my life,” I say.
    Louis looks past the gate, at the other houses. “If that was her in the chest freezer,” he says, “it looks like she was starved to death.”
    “She sounded like she
wanted
to starve to death.” I shake my head. “It’s a horrible fixation.”
    “Why was she here?” Louis says. “What was her connection to you and me?”
    To Louis and Jonah, you mean
, I think.
    I think about the planner, where we found it. I wheel across the porch toward my bedroom window. I peer inside. The low bookshelf. The bed, the bedroom door beyond. It is a bungalow, after all.
The window is large. It is a short drop.
    “She was trying to get out of the window,” I say. “Someone trapped her in the bedroom, blocking the doorway. She hoisted herself up onto the bookshelf to open the window and
her planner fell into the gap.”
    And then what? She wasn’t able to open the windows fast enough. Someone wrapped his arms around her and pulled her back into the house. I imagine her kicking, scratching, her sneakers
hitting the books, the books falling to the floor.
    We go to my room. We look at the hardwood floor. We can see scratches, but we don’t know how long they have been there. Last night, last month, years ago?
    “But why?” Louis asks.
    Why would she come here? Why would anyone want to keep her here?
    Why do we need to care?
    “Louis,” I say, “let’s not get involved in this.”
    Louis sighs and sits on the edge of the bed. “We keep the body a secret,” he says. He says it deadpan; I can’t tell if he’s judging me.
    “Yes.”
    “And the planner?”
    “We bury it. Burn it.”
    “And then