When I was eight, my mom bought me Burger King for breakfast every morning before daycare. I always got the same thing: the egg croissant with cheese and hashbrowns. The croissant was a funny shape that I always remember thinking looked like the pointer finger and thumb making an “o” shape. It was thick on one side and thin on the other. I could usually eat the whole thing in just five bites, and I would chow it down fast enough that I wouldn’t realize it was too hot until it was already gone. I swished it down with chocolate milk which usually cooled my mouth down, and gave me a sugary revival at the same time from having to get up so early. The hashbrowns were these round circles in a paper bag with the crown logo, just small enough that you could eat more and more without realizing how many calories you were accumulating.

 

I left that drive-thru with a full stomach in the back seat, my seat belt strung on me loosely. The back seat always smelled like fast food and grease because my family frequented those places, and we always had fries from somewhere squished in between the cracks of the car seats. I grew up eating a lot of food, so by the time I hit first and second grade, my stomach protruded out like a pregnant woman’s.

 

Now, eight-year-old me’s mind never would’ve went there, as eight-year-old me still thought babies proofed out of magic air. The only reason the thought came to me was because a kid in my first-grade class told me I looked like a pregnant lady. I then took it upon myself to look it up. I didn’t pay any attention to what pregnant meant, I only paid attention to the photos that were showing up on Google. There were women in dresses that looked like they were hiding basketballs and soccer balls underneath them. Their abdomens did look a lot like mine, only there was no fetus growing inside mine.

 

Childhood is running around making mistakes you won’t wake up remembering at 3 am in the morning. It’s eating as many scoops of ice cream as you want and not giving it a second thought. I didn’t have that. My peers stole it from under me, then dropped it, shattering it on accident, regretting it once they grew old enough to see they didn’t mean any of it. It doesn’t take away the hurt they caused though.

 

I still remember them creating a ‘witch game’ where I was the witch, and they were the princes and princesses all running away from me on the playground. I was the villain because I was the ugly one. People shouted “stink bomb” every time I came out of the bathroom. My own friends in the class gave me diet tips, and when kids would test me on what vegetables I had tried and which I hadn’t, the teacher would look away. She wasn’t speechless, she just refused to speak; there was a difference.

 

No adults in my life were saying anything to me as blatantly as all the little kids were. My classmates told me I was fat straight to my face, because kids do that. It was like telling me Santa Claus isn’t real, but more personal. I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong, until they told me I was.

 

From then on, food turned into my enemy. It was gross and I didn’t want to touch it, smell it, or be associated with it at all. They destroyed my relationship with food. Little kids did.

 

I know the bullying I was on the receiving end of was trauma not just because my therapist told me so, but because I remember so many moments of it so vividly. I don’t remember good things. My parents tell me happy memories and they are nowhere to be found. They’re either lost on me or didn’t happen; I place my bets on the second one.

 

I can still see my pediatrician’s office like I’m still there. The sink was to the left and the table I had to lay on had that awful crinkling paper that sounded like nails on a chalkboard. I laid down on the rectangular table on my back, and I had to feel my doctor’s cold hands squeezing the fat on my stomach. Her gloves smelled new, and when they touched me, I could feel them lose even more maturity. After kids had pointed out my fat to me, I wouldn’t look in the mirror or so much as even try to acknowledge the fat, but there I was in that doctor’s office, helpless to stop her from making it extremely known. She was squeezing it all over like it was cookie dough she was getting ready to cut up; only unfortunately my sort of dough could not be cut, it was stuck there. I could sense her judgement while she did it.

 

It didn’t matter that her stomach wasn’t flat either; her job was to inspect my body, not her own. She had me get up and then made me start listing a bunch of exercises that I would have to do to start losing the weight. She told me I had to lose weight, but hearing it from her was different from hearing it from little kids. When I heard it from her, it validated to me that the little kids were right. I was fat.

 

The next scene I can still see like I’m there was me in my bedroom. My tall dresser was next to me, and I was covering my face in my comforter while my parents were trying to talk to me. The second I made eye contact with them, I started bawling my eyes out. My mom had the most empathetic look on her face. She knew before I even told her that I was being bullied for my weight, and she was guilty. Her face was white, her face was about to cry too. She felt so bad and so powerless that there was nothing she could do. The only thing she could’ve done was never feed me the way she did, but she couldn’t change that now. She hugged me and gave me compliments, but I couldn’t remember what specific compliments she gave me. I could only remember how I was crying with my entire face, the only time my mouth was open and there wasn’t food being thrown into it.

 

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I open my eyes and I’m still on the scale. I’m looking at the bathtub in front of me instead of at the number though. I’m trying really hard. I already know I failed by hopping on, but if I don’t cheat and look at the three-digit (hopefully two-digit) number, then it doesn’t count. I can still take it back. The tan tile of the bathroom is rock hard but slightly elevated. I tell myself that it probably adds a few pounds based on the angle. I step off it and drag it so it’s on a flatter part of the floor, denying the fact that the floor is all the same level.

 

I look in the mirror and see a squiggly line where I am; the glass is all fogged up from the steamy shower that I just took. I shaved off all the hair on my legs, and on my back, and shaved it two, three more times after that. I liked showers because you could drown your body with soap. You could be naked peacefully. And when the thoughts came, they faded away behind the firm and loud pressure of the hot water coming out of the shower head. Sometimes I forgot it wasn’t a camera stalking me; the tall cord sometimes mimicked a perusing neck.  

 

I’m doing perfectly fine not looking at the number on the scale until my foot hits the wrong part of the tile and is instantly plagued with a cold sensation. My mind feels my pediatrician’s cold hand again and suddenly I am back on that table and she is feeling my stomach all over again. Because of her, it’ll take me ten years before I’m comfortable with my significant other touching me there.

 

It’s what makes me look at the number, see a two-digit number and aspire for a one digit one at the same time, and gradually become—and not become—what my fellow first graders told me I was.