Chapter 11: The New Normal

The memory of Mexico had faded, which was the natural order of things. Memories of freedom always did. It was now several months later, the first week of her junior year, and the trip existed in Violet’s mind as a series of disconnected sensory impressions—the chemical warmth of the pills, the taste of salt and cheap tequila, the feeling of not caring. A pleasant dream you couldn’t quite recall upon waking.

She lay in bed. This was her default state, the position her body assumed when not actively being moved or fed. The reinforced mattress accepted her form without complaint. Morning light, weak and gray, filtered through the perpetually dusty window. The house was quiet with that particular first-day tension, everyone mentally preparing their schedules and their personas.

Junior year. The word felt heavy, though not as heavy as she was.

Her academic shift was complete. She’d declared a communication major over the summer, a decision made via a five-minute online form while eating a bowl of Hannah’s “study snack mix,” which was just M&Ms and peanuts glued together with melted caramel. Engineering was a closed door. A locked door, actually, with a sign that said “Academic Probation: Do Not Enter.” The calculus failures, the botched computer science final, the butter project that probably counted as a war crime—they’d stacked up into an immovable wall.

Communications was different. Vague. It involved papers about media theories and group projects where your contribution could be minimal. It was a major for people who didn’t have a major, which suited her perfectly. She didn’t have the mental energy for formulas or code anymore. Her brain felt like it was packed in cotton wool, thoughts moving slowly through a thick, greasy medium. Thinking about signal transmission models or the ethics of journalism seemed manageable, mainly because she couldn’t imagine caring enough about either to get stressed.

It was a surrender, obviously. But surrender had lost its sting. It was just logistics. You couldn’t major in something that required a functioning prefrontal cortex when yours was permanently fogged by a caloric overdose. So you switched to something soft. Something that wouldn’t fight back.

The door opened without a knock. Privacy had been dead for so long its ghost didn’t even haunt the hallway anymore.

Hannah stood in the doorway, backlit by the hall light. She held a clipboard. The clipboard was never a good sign. It meant business.

“Good morning, sweetie,” Hannah said, her voice warm but purposeful. She stepped inside, letting the door swing shut behind her. She wore a crisp Chi Omega polo and khakis, her hair in a neat ponytail. The motherly sorority leader, ready for the first day of term. “Time for our annual kick-off weigh-in.”

Violet didn’t move. She stared at the water stain on the ceiling tile that sometimes looked like a rabbit and sometimes like a deformed skull. Today it looked like a blob. “Now?”

“Best time,” Hannah chirped, already moving toward the bathroom. “Empty stomach, well, relatively.” She gave a little laugh that didn’t ask for a response.

Violet listened to the sounds from the bathroom—the scrape of the scale being pulled from its corner, the plastic thump as Hannah placed it squarely on the tile floor. The scale lived in there permanently now, a sleek digital model with an extra-wide platform that Hannah had ordered special last year. It could measure up to eight hundred pounds. An optimistic piece of equipment.

“Come on, Vi,” Hannah called, her voice losing some of its musicality, gaining a thread of command.

With a sigh that started in her toes and traveled up through her congested lungs, Violet began the process of sitting up. It involved bracing her hands on the mattress, shifting her weight sideways, and using momentum to roll forward until her feet—swollen and pale—found the floor. The wood creaked under them. She stood, the room tilting slightly as her blood pressure adjusted to the new altitude. Her knees gave their usual twin twinges of protest.

She shuffled to the bathroom doorway. Hannah stood beside the scale like a flight attendant gesturing to an emergency exit.

“Step right up,” Hannah said, smiling.

Violet looked at the scale’s blank digital screen. She hadn’t stood on it since before Mexico. There had been no point. She knew the direction things were heading; precise numbers just made it official in a way she preferred to avoid.

But avoidance wasn’t an option on Day One. This was procedure.

She stepped onto the platform. The plastic was cool under her bare feet. Her weight settled, distributing unevenly as she tried to stand perfectly still. The scale whirred internally, processing.

The digital numbers flickered to life.

They climbed quickly, three digits blurring past in a rush before slowing at the higher end. They settled.

490.

Violet stared at the red LED numerals. Four hundred and ninety pounds.

Hannah leaned over to read the number, her pen

poised over her clipboard. Her smile didn’t vanish, not exactly. It froze, then reconfigured itself into something thinner, more analytical. She wrote the number down with a quick scratch of her pen.

“Four-ninety,” Hannah said, her voice now devoid of any musical notes. It was flat, factual.

She looked from the clipboard to Violet, her eyes scanning Violet’s body as if it were a quarterly report with disappointing margins. “You were four-ninety-eight at the end of last semester’s final weigh-in.”

Violet just stood there, the cool plastic of the scale seeping into her feet. She hadn’t known the exact number. Four-ninety-eight. It sounded like a freight designation.

“That’s an eight-pound loss, Violet.” Hannah’s tone wasn’t accusatory. It was worse—it was professionally concerned, the tone of a manager addressing a dip in performance metrics.

“I didn’t…” Violet started, then stopped. She didn’t what? Didn’t try to lose it? That was true. The weight had just… gone. Or rather, it hadn’t continued arriving at its previous rate. After Mexico, the routine had reasserted itself—the feedings, the snacks, the constant pressure. But maybe something had shifted. Maybe her body, pushed past some unknown threshold, had started metabolizing differently out of sheer panic. Or maybe she’d just moved more those first few weeks back, adjusting to her new size, and burned a few extra calories without meaning to.

It didn’t matter. The number was the number.

Hannah sighed, a soft exhalation of disappointment. “We’ll need to adjust the intake schedule. Obviously.” She made another note on her clipboard. “I’ll have to call an executive meeting.”

As if summoned by the word “meeting,” other sisters began to appear in the hallway outside Violet’s open door. Susan first, then a few others whose names Violet could never quite keep straight—Megan? Morgan? They peered in, their faces curious.

“What’s the number?” Susan asked, her bubbly voice tentative.

“Four-ninety,” Hannah repeated, turning to address them. “She’s down eight from May.”

A visible ripple went through the small group. Susan’s smile faltered. The other girls exchanged glances. It wasn’t anger. It was something closer to dismay, the kind you feel when a team project you’ve all invested in suddenly gets a lower grade than expected.

“Eight pounds?” one of them murmured.

“Over the summer?” another said, her voice laced with disbelief.

“She must have been slipping,” Susan said, more to herself than anyone. She looked at Violet with an expression of wounded confusion. “We sent you home with so much food, Vi. Mom was on the plan…”

They talked around her as if she were a piece of malfunctioning equipment. Their disappointment was a tangible thing in the room, colder than the bathroom tile. They weren’t mad at her; they were disappointed in the results. Her body was the product, and the product was underperforming.

Hannah clapped her hands once, a sharp sound that cut through the murmuring. “Alright. We have data. Now we make corrections. Violet, get dressed. We have a surprise for you downstairs.”

The surprise was in the main foyer, parked where a grand piano might have gone in a normal house.

It was a mobility scooter. A heavy-duty one, with a wide, padded seat, a black plastic body, and a small basket attached to the front handlebars. A charger cord was coiled neatly on the seat. It looked brand new, gleaming under the chandelier.

A small crowd of sisters had gathered around it, their faces a mix of pride and morbid fascination.

Hannah gestured to it like a game show hostess revealing a prize. “Ta-da! We pooled our funds. It’s for you.”

Violet stared at the machine. Her face grew hot. “I don’t need that.”

“Of course you do,” Hannah said smoothly, walking over to pat the seat. “Think of the calories you burn just walking to class. Especially now with the Communications building being all the way across the quad from here. That’s wasted energy. Energy your body could be using to… well, to do its job.”

Its job. Building fat cells.

“This way,” Hannah continued, her voice taking on a lecturing tone, “you conserve every possible calorie for mass retention and growth. No unnecessary expenditure. It’s strategic.”

Susan bounced over. “And look! It has a cup holder! For your shakes!” She pointed to a plastic ring on the handlebar.

Violet looked from Hannah’s earnest face to the scooter’s bland, utilitarian bulk. The embarrassment was a solid lump in her throat. This was a new tier of visibility. Before, she was just a very large girl moving slowly. This would be a very large girl on a medical-looking vehicle.

“I can walk,” she said weakly.

“Not efficiently,” Hannah countered, her smile firming into something unyielding. “We’ve run the numbers, Vi. This is an investment in our victory. In your victory.” She picked up the charger cord. “It plugs into a standard outlet. We’ll set up a station by your bed.”

There was no arguing with the clipboard. There was no arguing with “the numbers.” Resistance would just be another sign of her “slipping,” another data point for their concerned corrections.

Violet walked—slowly, painfully—over to the scooter. She turned and lowered herself onto the seat. It was surprisingly comfortable, contoured to support wide hips. Her thighs spread over the sides of the seat cushion. She fit.

Hannah showed her the controls: a lever for forward and reverse, a speed dial, a simple key ignition. “Top speed is five miles per hour. Perfect for campus paths.”

Violet turned the key. A green light on the dash glowed. She tentatively pushed the lever forward.

The scooter whirred to life with a quiet electric hum, gliding smoothly across the polished hardwood floor. The sisters parted for her, watching her pilot this first, slow lap around the foyer with expressions of approval.

“See?” Hannah beamed. “Freedom!”

It wasn’t freedom. It was the opposite of freedom. It was a mechanized enclosure.

Using it on campus was its own special kind of hell.

The first time she rode it to class—Introduction to Mass Media—she felt every single stare like a physical touch. Students parted around her on the pathways, not out of courtesy but out of startled confusion, as if a slow-moving vehicle had suddenly appeared in a pedestrian zone. Their eyes would flick from her face to the scooter and back again, their expressions cycling through surprise, pity, and then careful avoidance.

She was no longer just fat. She was fat and broken. The scooter announced that her body had passed some functional threshold, that ordinary locomotion was now beyond her. It medicalized her in a way her size alone hadn’t quite managed.

She kept her gaze fixed straight ahead, navigating the gentle slopes of the quad with her hand clenched on the lever. The electric whine of the motor seemed deafening to her, though it was probably barely audible over campus noise. The basket held her backpack, which contained only a notebook and two protein bars Hannah had placed there “in case of emergency hunger.”

She parked it at the back of the lecture hall, where there was space beside a railing for accessibility seating—another term that now applied to her. Dismounting was its own awkward spectacle, requiring her to heave herself up using the handlebars while the scooter rocked slightly on its base.

The professor didn’t blink an eye. He probably saw scooters every semester.

The class itself was a blur of terms—“agenda-setting,” “cultivation theory.” She took notes slowly, her handwriting grown large and childish from lack of practice and from fingers that always felt slightly swollen. Her gut pressed against the underside of the narrow desk, a constant, dull pressure.

After class, as she was maneuvering the scooter back onto the path, she saw Carmen across the quad.

Carmen was walking—shuffling, really—with two Phi Kappa sisters flanking her like escorts or guards. She moved with immense effort, each step a deliberate transfer of weight that made her whole body sway. Her face was slick with sweat despite the mild fall air.

Their eyes met across twenty yards of grass and concrete.

Carmen’s gaze dropped to Violet’s scooter. A flicker of something passed over her face—not judgment, but recognition. A grim understanding. Then one of her sisters said something, tugging at her elbow, and Carmen looked away, resuming her slow, painful pilgrimage toward whatever building housed her own undemanding major.

Violet powered up her scooter and whirred away, the encounter leaving a residue of shared shame. They were both in it, but they weren’t in it together anymore. The temporary alliance of Spring Break belonged to another timeline. Here, on campus, they were just rival products again, each being transported to their designated holding areas.

The pains started as they always did—a deep ache in her lower back after sitting too long in the lecture hall seat that wasn’t designed for anyone over two hundred pounds. Then came the gut pain, a heavy, distended feeling as if her intestines were packed with wet sand. By evening, back in her room, the two pains had merged into a constant, throbbing discomfort that made it impossible to find a position that didn’t hurt. Lying flat made her back scream. Lying on her side made her stomach pull and ache. Sitting up required energy she didn’t have.

She groaned as she shifted on her bed, the sound escaping before she could stop it. It was just another noise in the house, like the pipes clanking or someone laughing downstairs. But someone heard it.

Susan appeared in her doorway maybe ten minutes later, holding two mugs. “Hey,” she said softly. “You okay? Sounded like you were in pain.”

Violet didn’t bother lying. “My back. And my stomach. It just… hurts. All the time now.”

Susan nodded, setting one mug on Violet’s nightstand—hot chocolate, smelling overwhelmingly sweet—and keeping the other for herself. She pulled Violet’s desk chair over and sat, her perky demeanor dialed down to something approaching sympathy. “Yeah. That makes sense. You’re carrying so much now. It’s hard on your frame.” She said “frame” like Violet was a piece of architecture undergoing stress tests.

“It just hurts,” Violet repeated, the simplicity of the statement feeling pathetic even to her.

Susan sipped her drink, thinking. Her eyes scanned Violet’s body on the bed, not with hunger or calculation for once, but with a clinical assessment. “You know,” she said after a moment, her voice dropping into a confidential tone. “I took a sports therapy workshop last semester. For my kinesiology minor. I learned all about myofascial release and deep tissue techniques. For athletes with chronic pain from overuse.”

Violet just looked at her. She wasn’t an athlete. She was the opposite of an athlete.

“I could help,” Susan offered. “I could give you a massage. A real one. Focus on your lower back, your glutes, your shoulders. It might… ease things up a bit.” Her expression was open, helpful.

A flicker of desperate hope sparked in Violet’s chest. The pain was a constant companion, a background hum that colored everything gray. The idea of it easing, even for an hour, was like imagining water in a desert. “You could do that?”

“Totally,” Susan said, nodding vigorously. “But.” She held up a finger. The helpful expression gained a businesslike edge. “It’s a trade. My time and expertise for your commitment. If I do this for you—say, three times a week—you agree to an extra feeding session with me before bed on those nights. A dedicated one. Just you and me. To make up for any… metabolic boost from the pain relief.” She smiled, a friendly, reasonable smile that didn’t reach her eyes. “It’s only fair, right? We help your body feel better so it can do its work without distraction. And we make sure it has all the fuel it needs for that work.”

The spark of hope guttered, then settled into a familiar, cold acceptance. Of course. Nothing was free. Not comfort, not relief. Everything was a transaction, calibrated down to the last calorie.

The pain in her back gave a particularly sharp throb, as if emphasizing the offer.

Violet closed her eyes for a second against it. Then she opened them and looked at Susan’s expectant face. “Fine,” she said, the word tasting like ash. “Whatever.”

“Great!” Susan said, her cheerfulness snapping back into place. “We’ll start tonight. After your nine o’clock shake.”

The massages, to Violet’s profound and conflicted surprise, actually worked.

Susan approached them with a startling professionalism. She brought a special unscented lotion, claiming fragrances could “overstimulate.” She had Violet lie on her stomach on the bed, a position that was difficult to achieve and left Violet feeling dangerously exposed, her vast back and rear presented like a landscape.

Then Susan’s hands went to work. They were strong, much stronger than her bubbly persona suggested. She didn’t tickle or use feathery touches. She dug in with her thumbs and the heels of her palms, finding knots in Violet’s lower back that felt like marbles buried in clay. The initial pressure was brutal, stealing Violet’s breath. But as Susan worked, a strange alchemy happened. The clenched muscles, held tight for months against the strain of carrying her front half, began to relent. A deep, aching warmth spread from the points of contact.

Susan was quiet while she worked, her breathing measured. She focused on the mechanics—the iliac crest, the lumbar spine, the glut muscles that had turned to concrete from disuse and constant pressure. She used long, gliding strokes up Violet’s spine that made her skin prickle, then returned to specific points of tension.

After twenty minutes the first night, the ever-present throb in Violet’s back had receded to a dull murmur. The sharp pinch near her tailbone was gone. When Susan told her to slowly sit up, the movement came easier. There was space between her vertebrae again.

“How’s that?” Susan asked, wiping her hands on a towel.

“Better,” Violet admitted, the word thick with reluctant gratitude. It was undeniably better.

“Good,” Susan said with a satisfied nod. “Now, our deal.”

The extra feeding session was a stark contrast to the therapeutic darkness of the massage. Susan turned on the bedside lamp, its harsh light revealing every crumb and stain on the sheets. She produced a large blender bottle filled with a thick, beige liquid—a “nighttime synergy shake” of peanut butter, oats, heavy cream, and a scoop of weight-gainer powder that smelled like stale cake mix.

“Drink up,” Susan said, perching on the edge of the bed with an encouraging smile.

Violet drank. The shake was cloying and dense, coating her throat. But her body, unclenched from pain for the first time in months, didn’t revolt as violently. The physical relief created a weird permissiveness. This was the price, and the price, for once, felt like it had been worth it.

The pattern established itself over the next two weeks. Every other day, Susan would arrive after the evening shake. The massage would provide genuine, temporary relief from the musculoskeletal agony of her size. Then Susan would present the extra caloric toll—sometimes another shake, sometimes a plate of microwaved nachos dripping with congealed cheese sauce, sometimes just a family-sized bag of caramel corn to be mindlessly consumed while Susan chatted about her classes.

Violet began to look forward to the massages with a desperate hunger that had nothing to do with food. The thirty minutes of physical ease were a sanctuary. Her skepticism never fully vanished—she knew this was just another form of management—but her body, starved for comfort, overruled her mind. She agreed to the terms each time. The trade felt clear, almost fair.

Her pain levels decreased noticeably. She could sit through a full fifty-minute lecture without shifting constantly to alleviate the stabbing in her lower back. Getting on and off the scooter became marginally less of a ordeal. The relief was so profound it created a dangerous illusion: maybe things could be manageable. Maybe she could exist in this body with slightly less suffering.

She never considered what else might be shifting inside her.

Jecka watched all of this from a distance. She had been quiet since Mexico, a sullen, simmering presence. She attended feedings and meetings but spoke little, her eyes often fixed on Violet with a cold, unblinking focus that was worse than her old active cruelty.

She saw Violet’s pain ease under Susan’s hands. She saw the transactional feedings that followed. And she saw something else—a plateau. The scale at the weekly weigh-ins crept up slowly: 492, 493, 494. Steady, but not explosive. Not winning.

Jecka’s approach was not transactional. It was chemical.

She began with the shakes. Hannah prepared them in the kitchen each morning—a grim smoothie of ensure, ice cream, and flavor syrups. Jecka would linger nearby, offering to clean the blender or take the finished shake up to Violet’s room. In those moments alone in the kitchen, she would take a small plastic baggie from her pocket. Inside were homemade weed edibles—gummy bears she’d melted down and re-formed into a dense, sticky paste. She’d scrape a pea-sized amount onto a spoon and stir it into the thick shake until it dissolved completely, leaving no trace except a faintly herbal undertone lost under the artificial chocolate.

She did it to the afternoon protein drinks. She did it to the mug of “sleepytime” cocoa Hannah sent up every night—a drink already laced with melatonin, now boosted with cannabis.

She was careful, methodical. Never enough to make Violet obviously stoned or paranoid. Just enough to create a low-grade, persistent brain fog and to gently pry open the gates of her appetite.

Violet remained unaware. The edibles didn’t hit like smoking; there was no sudden rush or giggly high. The effect was subtler, a gradual softening of the edges of her consciousness that she attributed to her own declining mental state or sheer exhaustion.

She just found herself… hungrier.

The feeling was different from the forced fullness of a feeding session or the painful distention after a challenge. This was a hollow, gnawing sensation that started in her stomach and seemed to spread upwards into her mind. An itch that only food could scratch.

Between scheduled feedings, she’d find herself staring at the closed door of her room, thinking about the bag of cheese puffs in her desk drawer. Before, she might have ignored it, too lethargic or too resigned to move. Now, a restless anxiety would build until she heaved herself up and retrieved them, eating one after another not because she was told to, but because she wanted to. The salty crunch satisfied something deep and primal.

During lectures on media ethics or the history of broadcast journalism, her mind would wander not to daydreams, but to specific foods—the gooey center of a cinnamon roll, the cold shock of ice cream, the fatty richness of pepperoni pizza. Her mouth would water. She’d start counting down the minutes until she could get back to the house and eat something, anything.

She began accepting snacks from sisters without prompting, even seeking them out. If Hannah offered a second helping of mashed potatoes at dinner, Violet would nod silently, her plate already clean. If Susan left a bowl of candy on the common room table, Violet would take handfuls on her way through.

The hunger felt insatiable because it wasn’t purely physical. It was neurological. The THC was stimulating her cannabinoid receptors, tricking her brain into believing it was in a state of starvation, amplifying the pleasure of eating while dulling the signals of fullness. Food tasted better. The act of chewing was more satisfying. The discomfort of overeating was muffled under a soft blanket of chemical indifference.

Her consumption became more frequent, more voluntary. It looked like dedication from the outside—a Pig Girl finally embracing her purpose with gusto.

Her sisters noticed, of course. “Someone’s got their appetite back!” Hannah would say approvingly, watching Violet finish a large plate of pasta carbonara meant for two. The weekly scale numbers began to climb more steadily: 497, 502, 508. The eight-pound loss was erased, then buried under new gains. Hannah’s clipboard showed satisfying upward trends. Susan beamed, taking credit for the “holistic pain management approach.”

And Jecka watched, silent and satisfied from her corner, her chemical intervention perfectly camouflaged by what everyone wanted to see: Violet’s willing participation.

The cost was extracted elsewhere.

In Introduction to Mass Media, they were assigned their first major paper: a 10-page analysis of framing in contemporary news coverage. A year ago, even six months ago, such an assignment would have filled Violet with manageable stress. Now, it felt like being asked to climb a mountain.

She would sit in the library—or more often, just stay in her room—with her laptop open on the shelf of her stomach. She’d read the same paragraph from a scholarly article three times and retain nothing. The words slid off her brain like oil off Teflon. Her thoughts moved through syrup.

The brain fog from the edibles was constant now, a low-hanging haze that never quite lifted. It blended seamlessly with the mental sluggishness of her obesity—the sleep apnea that fractured her rest, the bodily strain that diverted oxygen and energy from her brain, the sheer metabolic burden of maintaining five hundred pounds of tissue.

Trying to formulate a thesis statement felt like trying to solve advanced physics. Her mind would drift mid-sentence, latching onto thoughts of the bagel bites in the house freezer or wondering if there was any leftover pie from last night’s dinner.

She started writing anyway, her prose simple, repetitive, devoid of insight. She padded sentences. She repeated points. The arguments were juvenile, the kind of thing she might have written in high school. Worse, honestly, because high school Violet had cared. This Violet just wanted to finish so she could stop thinking and eat something.

Her other classes fared no better. In Public Speaking, a required comm course, she had to give a three-minute informative speech. She chose “The History of Chi Omega at St. Ore”—a topic she could recite in her sleep. Standing at the podium, her body aching even after Susan’s latest massage, she lost her place twice. Her voice, weaker now, less used, trailed off into mumbles. She saw students in the front row exchange glances. The professor’s feedback was gentle but clear: “Needs more vocal energy and structure.” She got a C-.

In Media Writing, they practiced press releases. Her sentences were grammatically correct but utterly lifeless, devoid of any persuasive force. Her professor wrote “Flat.” in red pen at the top of one assignment. “Where’s the hook?” on another.

Her academic performance, once a source of identity, was now in freefall within a major designed to be forgiving. She was failing at failing-proof classes. The communication degree, her soft landing spot, was turning out to have a concrete floor.

She stopped checking her student portal for grades. The emails from professors about missed participation or subpar work piled up in her inbox, unread. It was too much effort to face. Thinking about it made the restless, munchies-fueled hunger stir again, offering a simpler solution: eat. Don’t think. Just eat.

One afternoon, after a particularly confusing lecture on semiotics she hadn’t followed at all, she whirred back to the sorority house on her scooter. Her head felt thick, woolly. Her stomach growled, empty despite the large breakfast Hannah had supervised just three hours earlier. As she parked her scooter in the foyer, she smelled something baking—brownies, maybe, or blondies. The rich, chocolatey scent bypassed her brain entirely and went straight to her gut, triggering a saliva response so strong she had to swallow.

Susan popped her head out of the kitchen. “Oh good, you’re back! Jecka just made a batch of special ‘study brownies.’ Want one? They’re still warm.”

Violet didn’t hesitate. “Yeah.” She didn’t ask what made them special. She didn’t think about the paper she hadn’t started or the speech she’d botched. The hunger was there, insistent and chemical, and the solution was right there in the kitchen, warm and smelling like oblivion.

She ate two brownies standing at the counter, the chocolate dense and fudgy, leaving her fingers sticky. A pleasant, floaty sensation began to seep into the corners of her mind, further blurring the sharp edges of her academic failures. The hunger quieted, replaced by a heavy contentment. Everything was softer now. The numbers on the scale, the red ink on her papers, the stares on campus—they all mattered less, receding behind a gentle, hazy curtain.

She ate a third brownie, because why not? It tasted so good. And for now, with her mind pleasantly fogged and her body demanding nothing more than to be still and digest, that was all that mattered. The system had co-opted her moment of freedom not with punishment, but with calibrated relief and chemical persuasion. The trap had simply become more comfortable, its walls padded now with massage lotion and THC-infused chocolate. And inside it, her thoughts slowing to a crawl under the dual burdens of fat and drugs, Violet barely noticed she was trapped at all