Chapter 14: The Intern

Sunlight filtered through Violet’s bedroom window, a pale and gentle morning light that promised nothing in particular. She woke slowly, the familiar pharmaceutical fog from her nightly sedative clinging to her thoughts like cobwebs. For a few disoriented seconds, she just lay there, listening to the quiet hum of the central air conditioning in her parents’ house. No Hannah with a morning shake. No Susan chattering about a schedule. No Jecka’s demanding voice cutting through the calm.

Summer break. Right.

A sluggish wave of relief washed over her, thick and syrupy as the pudding they’d been feeding her. She could just lie here. All day, probably. She had a whole queue of anime series saved on her laptop, shows with complicated plots she usually couldn’t follow through the brain fog but enjoyed for the bright colors and dramatic music. She could watch them until her eyes glazed over, pausing only for the meals her mother would inevitably bring. It wasn’t freedom, not really. It was just a different kind of containment, one with slightly softer walls and a temporary absence of sorority-branded pressure. After the grim revelation of Carmen’s medicalized room, this passive stagnation felt almost luxurious. A pause in the relentless forward march toward total collapse.

She shifted her weight, a monumental effort that made the bed frame creak in protest. The movement stirred the constant, low-grade ache in her joints—a baseline throb the painkillers never fully erased. She managed to roll onto her side, facing the nightstand where her laptop sat, its charger cord snaking to the outlet. Just a little more effort and she could reach it, pull it onto the bed, and disappear into someone else’s story for a few hours.

The door swung open before her fingers could brush the cool metal casing.

Her mother stood in the doorway, already dressed in crisp linen trousers and a silk blouse, her hair perfectly styled. She held a steaming mug of coffee in one hand and a garment bag draped over her other arm. Her expression was one of bright, efficient purpose, the same look she wore before hosting one of her charity committee meetings.

“Good, you’re awake,” her mother said, her voice cutting through the sleepy silence. “We need to get moving. You have to be there by nine.”

Violet blinked slowly. “Be where?”

“Your internship, sweetheart.” Her mother stepped into the room, laying the garment bag carefully across the foot of the bed. She set her coffee mug on the dresser with a decisive click.

The word didn’t compute at first. Internship. It belonged to a different vocabulary, one from a life that felt like it had happened to another person. Internships were for engineering students with promising futures, for go-getters building their resumes. Not for communications majors who failed participation grades. Certainly not for her.

“What internship?” Violet’s voice came out rough with sleep and confusion.

“At Aether Dynamics,” her mother announced, pride warming her tone. She unzipped the garment bag with a swift pull. “It’s incredibly competitive. I had to call in a significant favor with Marjorie from the alumni board—you remember Marjorie, she chaired the gala last year—but I secured you a spot. A summer position looks excellent on any transcript.”

Violet pushed herself up slightly against the pillows, the motion making her breath shorten. Aether Dynamics was a local tech giant, a sprawling campus of glass and steel that designed aerospace components or something equally impressive. She’d toured it once in high school during a “Women in STEM” day, back when she still thought she’d be one of those women.

“Mom,” Violet said, trying to assemble the fragments of this new reality. “I’m not in engineering anymore. I’m communications. I don’t… I can’t code. I can barely write a coherent email some days.” The admission tasted bitter, but it was just a fact now, like her weight or her chronic back pain.

Her mother waved a dismissive hand, her attention focused on smoothing the garments from the bag. “Oh, it’s not a technical role, don’t worry about that. They have plenty of engineers.” She turned, holding up the contents of the bag.

It was an outfit. A white button-up shirt, massively sized, with a matching black tie. A pair of black slacks, cut generously through the hips and thighs.

“It’s an office support position,” her mother continued, her voice taking on that practiced, logical cadence she used when explaining things she thought were simple. “Very important for operational efficiency. They call it ‘resource reallocation and waste mitigation.’” She gave Violet a knowing smile, as if sharing a clever secret. “It qualifies them for certain green initiative tax credits. Reducing landfill contributions from their corporate cafeterias, that sort of thing.”

Violet stared at the clothes, then at her mother’s triumphant face. The pieces clicked together with a cold, sickening finality.

Office support. Resource reallocation. Waste mitigation.

They hadn’t gotten her an internship. They had gotten her a job as a professional eater.

A human disposal unit for a corporation’s leftovers, dressed up in business casual and tied to a tax break.

The calculation of it was so breathtakingly blatant it momentarily cut through her medicated haze. This wasn’t about her future or her resume. This was about maximizing gain during the summer months when the sorority’s direct oversight was limited. Her mother had simply outsourced the feeding to a Fortune 500 company, structuring it as legitimate employment. Of course she had.

“Put this on,” her mother instructed, laying the shirt and slacks beside Violet on the bed. “I had it specially tailored based on your last measurements from school. It should fit beautifully.”

Beautifully. Violet looked at the stark white fabric. It looked like a shroud.

Her mother bustled over to the closet and retrieved Violet’s most supportive—and least hideous—bra, along with a pair of control-top pantyhose designed for “full figures,” which really meant they were just slightly less likely to immediately rip under tension.

“Come on, up you get,” her mother said, returning to the bedside. Her tone was cheerful but brooked no argument. It was the same voice she’d used to get Violet ready for school pictures as a child.

The process of getting out of bed was its own familiar ordeal. Violet had to rock her weight several times to build momentum before heaving herself upright, her heart already pounding from the exertion. She sat on the edge of the mattress, breathing heavily through her nose, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

Her mother knelt before her—a surreal sight—and began working the pantyhose up Violet’s colossal legs. It was an intimate, clinical act. Her mother’s hands were firm and practiced, navigating the landscape of swollen ankles and thick calves without comment. The nylon hissed as it stretched, growing thin and translucent over Violet’s pale skin.

Next came the bra. Violet had to lean forward while her mother fastened it from behind, the hooks straining against their eyes. The underwire dug into the soft flesh beneath her breasts, creating immediate red lines that would ache by noon.

Then the shirt.

Her mother helped guide Violet’s arms into the sleeves. The fabric was a thick, sturdy cotton-polyester blend, but even so, it pulled taut across Violet’s back and shoulders as she moved. Her mother began buttoning it from the bottom up.

The first few buttons closed easily enough. Around her navel, though, the placket began to gape. Her mother gave a determined little tug and forced the next button through its hole. The fabric across Violet’s stomach went tight as a drumhead.

Violet looked down. The shirt was supposed to be loose-fitting, but on her body it became a topographical map of strain. Every curve and bulge was delineated by the pulling white cloth. The seams along her sides looked ready to shriek.

“See? Perfect fit,” her mother murmured, concentrating on the next button, which sat squarely over the densest part of Violet’s belly. She had to use two fingers to pry the buttonhole wide enough.

A soft ping sounded as Violet shifted slightly. One of the lower buttons near her hip popped free and skittered across the hardwood floor.

Her mother paused, glanced at it, then continued upward as if nothing had happened. “I have spares in my sewing kit,” she said absently.

They reached the chest. Here, the shirt was truly defeated. The gap between button and hole was nearly an inch wide over Violet’s bust. Her mother wrestled with it for a moment, her knuckles whitening, before finally forcing closure with a sharp twist of her wrist. The button sat askew, visibly stressed, pulling a deep pucker into the fabric around it.

Violet took a shallow breath. The shirt constricted her diaphragm immediately, making that shallow breath even shallower. She could feel every point of tension: across her shoulders, under her arms, around the full circumference of her torso where the shirt was meant to be tucked in but never would be.

The tie came next—a simple black noose that her mother looped and knotted with brisk efficiency, leaving it hanging loosely over the strained battlefield of buttons below.

Finally, the slacks. Standing was required for this part, which meant another production of heaving and balancing while her mother held her arm for stability. The slacks had an elasticated waistband hidden by a faux fly front, mercifully wide enough to slide up over Violet’s hips without a fight. But once in place, they too were clearly operating at their design limits. The black fabric shone tautly across her thighs and rear.

Her mother stepped back to survey her work.

Violet stood there in the middle of her childhood bedroom, dressed for an office job she could never have imagined in her worst nightmares. She felt like a grotesque parody of a professional—a beached whale trussed up in business attire. The clothes didn’t hide anything; they accentuated every pound, every impossible curve, by daring to suggest they could contain it all. The strained white shirt was a billboard announcing its own failure.

“Lovely,” her mother declared, her head tilting in appraisal. “You look very mature.” She walked over to the dresser and picked up a hairbrush. “Now let’s do something with this hair.”

As her mother began brushing out Violet’s tangled waves with brisk strokes, Violet stared at her own reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door.

The person staring back was unrecognizable. Not just fat, but engineered. Medicated. Dressed for systemic consumption. The shirt buttons formed a precarious line of surrender down her front. She looked less like an intern and more like a piece of industrial equipment that had been hastily, inadequately covered with a dust sheet before being rolled onto a factory floor. The tie was particularly absurd, a flimsy ribbon of decorum dangling over the reality of what she was. A disposal unit. A tax credit. A weapon in a weight-gain competition, now being deployed into the corporate sector for summer training. Her mother’s hands tugged at her hair, twisting it into a neat, subdued bun at the nape of her neck, completing the picture of forced normalcy. Violet held perfectly still, watching the reflection hold perfectly still. The anime marathon she’d imagined evaporated, replaced by this new, grimmer narrative. There would be no lazy morning. There would be no escape into fiction. There was only this uniform, this role, and the certain knowledge that whatever awaited her at Aether Dynamics had nothing to do with filing paperwork or answering phones. It had everything to do with what she had become, and what everyone around her was determined for her to become even more of. She took another restricted breath, the shirt tightening its grip, and waited for the next instruction

The SUV was a large, black luxury model her father had bought for “safety and space.” The back seat had been permanently modified. The center console had been removed last summer, creating a single, wide bench. The seatbelts were heavy-duty extenders, industrial-looking things with metal clasps that clicked with a definitive, final sound.

Getting in was its own humiliating ballet. Her mother opened the rear passenger door wide. Violet had to turn her body sideways on the curb, grip the roof frame and the seatback, and perform a controlled fall onto the leather. The vehicle listed heavily to one side with the impact. Once seated, she had to swing her legs inside, a motion that sent sharp twinges through her hips. Then came the slow, grunting pivot to face forward, her bulk settling into the space with a sigh of compressed upholstery.

Her mother closed the door with a solid thunk, sealing her in.

The drive to Aether Dynamics took twenty minutes through manicured suburban streets that gradually gave way to wide commercial boulevards. Violet stared out the window, watching identical strip malls and office parks blur past. She didn’t ask any more questions. The answers were all too clear now. The internship was a feeding schedule with a W-2 form. Her mother chatted brightly about traffic, about the weather, about how impressive the Aether campus was. Violet made noncommittal noises in response, her mind a numb blank.

The campus appeared on the horizon like a mirage—a cluster of sleek, glass-and-steel buildings surrounded by acres of perfectly landscaped lawns and artificial ponds. A discreet sign at the gated entrance read AETHER DYNAMICS: INNOVATING TOMORROW. The guard at the booth waved them through after her mother gave Violet’s name; apparently they were expected.

They parked in a visitor lot near the main entrance, a soaring atrium of glass that reflected the morning sun. The walk from the parking space to the building’s front doors was maybe fifty yards. An impossible distance.

Violet’s mother came around and opened her door. “Ready?”

Violet looked at the expanse of smooth concrete between her and the gleaming entrance. She hadn’t walked that far in months without aid. The scooter at school had made such distances theoretical. Here, there was only her body and the judgment of anyone watching.

“I can’t,” she said quietly, the admission tasting like ash.

“Of course you can,” her mother replied, her cheer undimmed. “It’s just a short walk. Good for you.”

Violet knew that tone. It was the same tone Hannah used when saying a few more bites wouldn’t hurt. A lie wrapped in encouragement. She braced her hands on the seat and began the agonizing process of extracting herself from the car—the reverse of the entry ritual, just as difficult and twice as public in this corporate setting.

She finally stood, leaning against the warm metal of the SUV, already winded. Her shirt strained across her back with the movement. She took one step, then another, her gait a slow, waddling shuffle. Each footfall sent jolts up her spine. Her breath started coming in short, wet gasps before they’d covered ten yards. She could feel sweat beading under her arms and at the small of her back, threatening to stain the pristine white shirt.

People moved around them—employees with lanyards and purpose, striding across the plaza with coffees in hand. Their eyes flicked toward the spectacle: the immense young woman in ill-fitting business clothes shuffling like an invalid, trailed by a well-dressed older woman who wasn’t helping, just observing.

Violet kept her gaze fixed on the automatic doors ahead, counting steps. Twenty more. Fifteen. Her vision began to tunnel slightly at the edges, black spots dancing. Ten steps. The doors sensed their approach and hissed open, releasing a blast of frigid, conditioned air.

They stepped into the atrium. It was a cathedral of corporate wealth. A three-story ceiling of glass, a living wall of ferns, polished granite floors that echoed with every click of a heel. A reception desk the size of a small car sat in the center, manned by three impeccably groomed people.

Violet stopped just inside, leaning against a pillar for support, trying to quiet her ragged breathing. The cool air did little to help; it just made her clammy skin feel colder.

“Violet Sorren?”

The voice came from their right. A woman was walking toward them with brisk, efficient steps. She was in her late forties, perhaps, with sharp black hair cut in a severe bob and wearing a tailored navy pantsuit. Her expression was neutral, professional, utterly devoid of surprise or curiosity as she took in Violet’s heaving form.

“I’m Eleanor Lee,” the woman said, extending a hand first to Violet’s mother for a firm shake, then to Violet. Her grip was cool and brief. “Head of Facilities and Sustainability Initiatives. We’re so pleased to have you with us this summer.”

“Thank you for this opportunity,” Violet’s mother gushed, beaming.

Mrs. Lee’s eyes did another quick scan of Violet, pausing on the strained buttons of her shirt, the sheen of sweat on her forehead. “The walk from the lot can be challenging,” she stated, not as an apology but as a simple fact. “We’ve arranged appropriate transportation for your on-site mobility.”

She gestured with a tilt of her head. Parked discreetly to the side of the reception area, near a bank of elevators, was a mobility scooter. It wasn’t like the one from school—that had been a personal vehicle, clunky and obvious. This one was sleek and corporate-gray, with the Aether Dynamics logo subtly etched on the front panel. It looked like a piece of office equipment.

“Company policy supports inclusive accessibility,” Mrs. Lee explained, leading them over to it. “This will be assigned to you for the duration of your internship. It’s keyed to your employee badge—which you’ll receive shortly—and may be used anywhere on campus grounds.”

Violet stared at it. They had a fleet of these things, probably. They’d ordered one for her specifically. The planning involved was staggering.

“Go ahead,” Mrs. Lee prompted, her voice leaving no room for hesitation.

With her mother’s help—a hand under her elbow for balance—Violet managed the awkward transition from standing to sitting on the scooter’s wide seat. It was firmer than her old one, less padded. The controls were simple: a lever for forward and reverse, a speed dial, a horn button. Mrs. Lee handed her a keycard on a lanyard.

“Swipe that on the reader there to activate it.”

Violet did as instructed. The scooter emitted a soft electronic chime and a green light glowed on the console. A low hum vibrated up through the seat.

“Excellent,” Mrs. Lee said. She turned to Violet’s mother. “We’ll take it from here. Violet will be in our capable hands. Pick-up is at five PM at this same location.”

“Wonderful,” Violet’s mother said. She leaned down and gave Violet a quick, dry peck on the cheek. “Have a productive first day, sweetheart.” Then she turned and walked back across the atrium, her heels clicking decisively on the stone floor, leaving Violet alone with Mrs. Lee and the humming scooter.

“Follow me,” Mrs. Lee instructed, already walking toward a hallway that branched off from the main atrium.

Violet nudged the lever forward. The scooter moved with a smooth, silent electric glide that felt alien after the strained whine of her old one. This machine was powerful, engineered to handle her weight without complaint. She followed Mrs. Lee’s straight back down a wide corridor lined with glass-walled conference rooms and open-plan work areas.

The building was a maze of quiet efficiency. They passed clusters of employees at standing desks, staring at multiple monitors displaying lines of code or complex 3D models. No one looked up as they passed. The scooter’s quiet hum was just another ambient noise in the climate-controlled environment.

They turned down another corridor, this one less grand. The carpet changed from plush corporate blue to a more utilitarian gray fiber. The walls here were plain drywall, not glass. They passed closed doors labeled “Server Access B-12” and “Janitorial Supplies.”

Finally, Mrs. Lee stopped outside an unmarked door near what looked like a loading dock area. She swiped her own badge and pushed it open.

The room beyond was large but partitioned into a grid of cubicles. Unlike the airy workspaces they’d passed earlier, this area felt buried and functional. The lighting was flat fluorescent panels overhead. The air smelled faintly of stale coffee and industrial cleaner.

Mrs. Lee led Violet to a cubicle in the far corner, away from the few other occupied workstations where people typed slowly or talked quietly on headsets.

The cubicle was small, its fabric walls a drab beige color. It contained only three things: a standard-issue office phone that looked decades old, a reinforced desk chair with extra-wide seat and heavy-duty casters, and an empty desk surface just large enough for a keyboard that wasn’t there.

“This is your station,” Mrs. Lee announced.

Violet parked the scooter beside the cubicle entrance and looked inside. It was like a cell. A bland, corporate cell.

“Your assignments will be delivered directly to you here,” Mrs. Lee continued, her hands clasped in front of her in a posture of perfect bureaucratic patience. “You are responsible for completing them in full by the end of each business day. Your performance will be evaluated based on thoroughness and timeliness.”

Violet just nodded slowly, trying to absorb it all.

“Your first assignment will arrive shortly,” Mrs. Lee said. She glanced at her slim silver wristwatch. “I suggest you get settled.” She offered no further instructions—no login for a computer, no orientation packet, no introduction to colleagues.

She gave Violet one last assessing look. “The restroom is down the hall to your left. Break room is to your right—it is stocked for staff use. Your lunch break is scheduled for noon to one. You may use your scooter to travel to designated break areas. Do not leave your assigned workstation during core hours unless for approved breaks or necessary facilities use.” She recited this like terms of parole. “Any questions?”

Violet had so many questions they formed a tangled knot in her throat. What exactly am I supposed to do? Who are these assignments from? What happens if I can’t finish? But looking at Mrs. Lee’s impassive face, she understood that asking would be pointless. The answers were already evident in the reinforced chair, in the empty desk, in the very fact of her being here. The questions were just noise.

“No,” Violet whispered.

“Good.” Mrs. Lee gave a single, crisp nod. “Welcome to Aether Dynamics.” Then she turned on her heel and walked away, her footsteps fading down the gray-carpeted hallway, leaving Violet alone in the silence of her cubicle.

Violet sat there on the scooter for a long moment, listening to the distant, muffled sounds of the building: the faint whir of ventilation, the occasional murmur of voices from another aisle, the click of a distant keyboard. She looked at the empty chair. Getting into it would be another production, another awkward transfer of mass. She decided to stay put on the scooter for now, its seat still warm from her body heat.

She was an intern now. Officially. She had a badge, a scooter, a cubicle. She was part of the system, a small, specialized cog in the vast machine of Aether Dynamics. Her function was as clear as it was unspoken. She waited, her hands resting on the scooter’s controls, staring at the blank fabric wall of her new workplace, for whatever form her first “assignment” would take

The wait wasn’t long. Maybe ten minutes after Mrs. Lee’s departure, a soft rattling sound echoed down the hallway. It grew louder, a metallic clatter mixed with the squeak of wheels.

A man in a hairnet and a white kitchen uniform appeared, pushing a stainless steel rolling rack—the kind used in restaurant kitchens to transport sheet pans. The rack was stacked high with hotel pans, each one covered with clear plastic wrap. He maneuvered it with practiced ease, stopping right at the entrance to Violet’s cubicle.

He didn’t greet her or make eye contact. He simply pulled a folded slip of paper from his apron pocket, glanced at it, then at the number on her cubicle wall.

“Sorren?” he grunted.

“Yes,” Violet said, her voice small in the quiet space.

He gave a single nod, unhooked a clipboard from the side of the rack, and held it out to her with a pen attached by a string. “Sign for delivery.”

Violet took the clipboard. The top sheet was a pre-printed form with checkboxes. Delivery: Catering Surplus – Station B-7. There was a line for a signature at the bottom. She scrawled her name, the pen feeling clumsy in her hand.

The man took the clipboard back, reattached it, and without another word turned and walked away, his footsteps fading, leaving her alone with the rack.

Violet stared at it. Up close, she could see the contents through the plastic. The top pan held a congealed mass of oatmeal, beige and lumpy, with a skin forming on its surface. The pan beneath contained stacks of cold pancakes, their edges dried and curled. Another held rows of breakfast sausages, pale and swimming in a thin layer of greasy liquid. There were more pans below—scrambled eggs that had turned rubbery, trays of pastries gone stale and hard.

The volume was staggering. This wasn’t a plate of leftovers. This was the uneaten output of an entire corporate cafeteria breakfast service, consolidated into one rolling monument to waste.

Her “first assignment.”

A cold, clear understanding settled over her, cutting through the last remnants of her morning sedation. This was the job. Not filing. Not data entry. Consumption. Quantitative disposal measured in pounds and calories per shift.

She looked from the rack to her reinforced office chair. The logistics were immediately apparent. She couldn’t eat from the rack standing up. She needed to be seated. With a sigh that hitched in her tight shirt, she began the awkward process of transferring from the scooter to the desk chair. It involved parking the scooter as close as possible, using its armrest for leverage, and performing a slow, painful pivot that made the chair’s casters screech across the floor tiles.

Once settled, she was eye-level with the middle shelf of the rack. She reached out and pulled the first pan toward her, the plastic wrap crinkling loudly in the silent cubicle farm. She peeled back the cover. The smell that wafted up was bland and institutional—steam-table oatmeal, cheap syrup, reheated pork.

There were no utensils provided.

She hesitated for only a second before dipping her fingers into the lukewarm oatmeal. The texture was gluey and unpleasant. She scooped a handful and brought it to her mouth.

The eating began.

It was mechanical from the first bite. There was no pleasure here, no pretense of a meal. This was a task to be completed. She ate the oatmeal by the handful, swallowing past the thick, pasty lumps with effort. When that pan was empty—scraped clean with her fingers—she pushed it aside on the desk and pulled down the pancakes.

These were easier, drier. She folded them into quarters and stuffed them into her mouth, chewing the dense, spongy cake until it dissolved into a sweet paste. She didn’t bother looking for syrup.

The sausages came next. They were cold and greasy, leaving a slick film on her fingers and lips. She ate them one after another, the salty fat coating her tongue.

She developed a rhythm. Pull down a pan. Unwrap it. Consume its contents using only her hands. Push the empty pan to the growing stack on the other side of her desk. Reach for the next one.

Time lost meaning. The only metrics were the emptying pans and the gradual, leaden fullness expanding in her gut. Her chewing was loud in the quiet office—a steady, wet munch-munch-munch that seemed to amplify against the fabric cubicle walls.

At some point, she became aware of other sounds resuming around her. The typing from nearby cubicles started again. A phone rang softly and was answered with a low murmur. Someone walked past her aisle, their footsteps pausing for just a fraction of a second before continuing.

They could hear her. Of course they could hear her. The sound of relentless, messy consumption wasn’t something you could hide. She kept her head down, her eyes fixed on the food in front of her, trying to become just another source of ambient office noise—the hum of the lights, the whir of a computer fan, the sound of someone methodically clearing a rack of cold breakfast foods. She imagined her coworkers, the ones in this buried department, listening to this new audio track added to their workday. Did they know what it was? Had they been briefed? Or did they just accept it as another strange element of a job that paid their bills, something not to question?

Her stomach began to protest long before she was halfway through the rack. A deep, swelling pressure built behind her navel, making each new swallow an act of conscious will. The tight button-down shirt became an active antagonist, its fabric digging into her expanding midsection with every breath. She had to unbutton the bottom two buttons—the ones near her hips that had already been stressed—just to create some slack. The shirt gaped open there, revealing the stretched nylon of her control-top pantyhose beneath.

Still, she ate. The scrambled eggs were the worst, cold and sulfurous, with a rubbery texture that made her gag. She powered through, washing them down with handfuls of dry pastry crumbs. Her jaw ached. Her throat felt raw. But stopping wasn’t an option. Mrs. Lee had said performance was based on thoroughness and timeliness. Completing the assignment meant an empty rack. That was all.

Finally, after what felt like an epoch, she scraped the last fragments of a dried-out blueberry muffin from the final pan. Her desk was littered with empty stainless steel containers smeared with grease and food residue. The rolling rack stood beside her, now holding nothing but stacked dirty pans.

She sat back in her chair as much as she could, which wasn’t far. Her stomach was a solid, painful globe pressing against her loosened shirt and the desk’s edge. She could feel every ounce of that cold, congealed mass inside her, a heavy ballast settling into her core. Her breathing was shallow and careful.

She had no idea how much time had passed. The clock on her phone, when she fumbled it from her pocket, showed it was just after eleven-thirty. She’d been eating for nearly three hours straight.

Almost on cue, Mrs. Lee reappeared at the entrance to her cubicle. She carried no clipboard this time, just surveyed the scene with those cool, appraising eyes: Violet slumped in her chair, face flushed, shirt disheveled and stained with oatmeal and grease; the tower of empty pans; the clean rack.

“I see you’ve completed your first task,” Mrs. Lee said. There was no warmth in her voice, but there was a hint of something—approval, perhaps, or simply satisfaction that a process was functioning as designed.

Violet just nodded weakly, not trusting herself to speak without groaning.

“Satisfactory work,” Mrs. Lee continued. “You may now take your scheduled lunch break.” She said it with perfect seriousness, as if announcing a hard-earned reprieve. “The break room is down the hall to your right. You have one hour.”

A break from eating. That’s what lunch break meant here. Not a break for lunch. A break from lunch, which was itself just another assignment waiting in the wings. The logic was so perverse it was almost elegant.

Mrs. Lee didn’t wait for a response. She turned and left again.

Violet sat there for several minutes, waiting for the worst of the stomach cramps to subside into a more manageable throbbing fullness. Moving seemed impossible, but she couldn’t stay here surrounded by the evidence of her “work.” With great effort, she pushed herself up from the chair, using the desk for support. The world tilted slightly as she stood upright, her distended belly leading the way.

She left the dirty pans where they were and shuffled out of her cubicle onto her scooter. The short ride to the break room felt like a marathon. Every slight bump transmitted directly into her overstuffed gut.

The break room was another utilitarian space: a microwave on a counter, a sink, a large refrigerator humming loudly, and several small round tables with chairs bolted to the floor. It was empty.

Violet parked her scooter by a table and just sat there for most of the hour, staring at the wall. She sipped water slowly from a paper cone at the sink, but even that tiny addition to the volume inside her made her feel dangerously full. She watched the clock on the wall tick away the minutes with agonizing slowness.

This wasn’t rest. It was intermission. A pause for her digestive system to begin its hopeless task so she could make room for the next act. She thought of Carmen in her medical bed, of Dr. Evans and his pills, of Hannah’s clinical notes. This was just another system, more polished, more legally insulated, but fundamentally the same. She was a processing unit, and her break was scheduled downtime for maintenance before resuming operations.

When the hour was nearly up, she made her way back to her cubicle. The dirty pans were gone—someone had silently cleared them while she was away. The desk was wiped clean. Only the empty rolling rack remained by her chair.

She transferred back into her seat just as another rattling squeak echoed down the hall.

A different cafeteria worker—a woman this time—appeared with a second rolling rack. This one was loaded differently: stacks of pre-wrapped ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread; large tubs of potato salad glistening with mayonnaise; sheet pans filled with uniform squares of yellow cake topped with thick vanilla frosting.

The woman went through the same silent ritual: check the cubicle number, offer the clipboard for signature. Violet signed again, her hand trembling slightly.

The woman left.

Violet looked at this new delivery. The breakfast had been amorphous, congealed stuff you could eat with your hands. This lunch surplus had structure. Sandwiches. Cake. It felt even more like a cruel joke, a parody of a meal served in quantities meant for fifty. The sheer number of sandwiches alone was daunting, a wall of plastic-wrapped triangles piled high. The cake squares were dense and moist-looking under their blanket of frosting, The silence of the cubicle didn't last long. A rhythmic squeaking sound approached from the hallway, the unmistakable noise of a wheel that needed oiling. It grew louder, accompanied by the heavy, measured footsteps of someone pushing a significant weight. A man in a stained white apron and a generic catering uniform appeared at the entrance to her cubicle. He didn’t offer a greeting or even look at her face. He simply maneuvered a tall, stainless-steel rolling rack into the small space, wedging it between the desk and the wall.

The rack was filled with aluminum steam trays. Even without the heat of a buffet line, the smell was overwhelming—a concentrated, cloying mixture of maple syrup, congealed grease, and the yeasty scent of mass-produced bread.

“Breakfast surplus,” the man muttered, more to the wall than to Violet. He locked the casters on the rack with two sharp clicks of his boot and left without another word.

Violet stared at the tiers of food. The top tray held a mountain of oatmeal, now cold and set into a grey, gelatinous block. Below that were stacks of pancakes, dozens of them, their edges curled and dry, swimming in a shallow pool of amber syrup that had begun to thicken. The third tray was piled high with breakfast sausages, their casings wrinkled and glistening with a layer of white, solidified lard. There were smaller containers of scrambled eggs, rubbery and bright yellow, and a basket of assorted muffins that looked dense enough to be used as masonry.

This was her assignment. The "resource reallocation" her mother had praised.

She reached for a plastic fork that had been left on the corner of the rack. The first bite of oatmeal was heavy, coating her tongue with a bland, pasty texture. It was hard to swallow without water, but she found a large plastic pitcher of lukewarm tea tucked on the bottom shelf. She began to eat.

She didn't move to the chair. The scooter seat was the only thing that felt stable enough for the task ahead. She worked her way through the oatmeal first, forcing the heavy mass down her throat. The sedative from the night before made the task feel mechanical, almost hypnotic. She wasn't Violet the student or Violet the girl; she was a biological processor.

By the second hour, she had moved on to the pancakes. They were cold and chewy, requiring significant effort to masticate. As she worked, the sounds of the office continued around her. In the neighboring cubicles, the quiet tap of keys and the occasional low-voiced phone call created a steady hum of productivity. Her own contribution to the soundscape was different—the wet, rhythmic sound of chewing, the scrape of plastic against aluminum, and the heavy, labored sound of her own breathing.

No one complained. No one even peeked over the partition. In this corner of the building, her consumption was apparently just another background noise, as unremarkable as the whir of a printer or the gurgle of a water cooler. The workers nearby ignored the spectacle with a practiced, corporate indifference that was more chilling than open mockery. She was a function of the building, a quiet solution to a logistical problem of waste.

The sausages were the hardest. The cold fat coated the roof of her mouth, a slick film that made her stomach turn, but she kept going. She thought about Carmen in her medical bed, the machines doing the work of living for her. If she stopped eating, if she failed this "internship," that bed was waiting for her even sooner. The fear acted as a secondary hunger, pushing her to reach for the next link, the next muffin, the next rubbery fold of egg.

By the end of the third hour, the aluminum trays were mostly empty, smeared with remnants of grease and syrup. Her stomach felt like a lead weight, pressing upward against her lungs and outward against the agonizingly tight fabric of her shirt. The middle button, the one her mother had wrestled into place, looked ready to fly off at the slightest twitch.

The squeak of heels announced Mrs. Lee’s return. The woman stepped into the cubicle and did a slow, clinical survey of the empty racks. She didn't smile, but her posture suggested a grim sort of approval.

“Consistent progress,” Mrs. Lee remarked, checking her watch. “Your efficiency is noted. It’s twelve-o-clock. You are now on your scheduled lunch break.”

Violet leaned back as much as the scooter allowed, her breath coming in shallow hitches. The idea of a "lunch break" was a cruel joke, a semantic trick.

“I don’t… I’m not hungry,” Violet managed to wheeze out.

“The break is mandatory,” Mrs. Lee replied, her voice as flat as the fluorescent lighting. “It is a break from active duty. You are to remain in the designated break area or the atrium until one PM. You are not permitted to work during your break.”

She gestured toward the door. Violet had no choice. She activated the scooter and slowly reversed out of the cubicle, the machine’s motor emitting a slightly higher-pitched whine than before. The weight in her gut made every movement of the scooter feel sluggish. She navigated the hallways toward the atrium, feeling the heavy slosh of the breakfast surplus inside her with every turn.

She spent the hour sitting near the living wall of ferns, watching the regular employees eat their sensible salads and lean sandwiches. They looked so light, so mobile. She felt like a different species, a creature of density and burden anchored to her grey plastic seat. The painkillers helped numb the stretching sensation in her skin, but they couldn't do anything for the sheer, suffocating fullness.

When one o'clock arrived, she drove back to the basement-level office. The catering worker was already there, removing the empty breakfast rack and replacing it with a new one.

The smell was different this time—vinegar, mustard, and the heavy, salty scent of processed deli meats.

“Lunch leftovers,” the man said, again without looking at her. He locked the wheels and vanished.

This rack was even more crowded than the first. The top trays were piled with sandwiches—ham, turkey, and roast beef on thick rolls, the bread already starting to get soggy from the moisture of the meat. There were several deep tubs of potato salad, thick with mayonnaise and studded with hard-boiled eggs. A large sheet cake, half-vanilla and half-chocolate, sat on the middle shelf, its thick buttercream frosting already sweating in the humid air of the office.

Violet looked at the piles of sandwiches. The white bread looked like sponges, ready to expand even further in her stomach. The potato salad was a sea of yellow-white grease.

She was already full. Not just comfortably full, but distended to the point of physical pain. The waistband of her slacks felt like a wire garrote cutting into her midsection. But the rules of the internship were clear. This was the work.

She picked up a ham sandwich. The bread was damp and cool. She took a bite, her jaw aching from the hours of constant motion. The saltiness of the ham made her mouth dry, forcing her to reach for more of the lukewarm tea.

She began the cycle again. Chew, swallow, drink. The sounds of the office picked up for the afternoon shift. Somewhere nearby, a woman started a conference call, her voice bright and professional as she discussed quarterly projections. Violet used the rhythm of the woman’s speech to time her bites.

A sandwich every five minutes. A scoop of potato salad every ten.

The sheet cake loomed in her peripheral vision, a mountain of sugar and fat waiting to be processed. She focused on the ham first, the repetitive motion of eating becoming a dull, grinding labor that left no room for thought or dignity. She was the sustainability initiative in action, a silent, growing presence in the corner of the room, turning the company's waste into mass.

The ham sandwiches were a slog. Each one felt like swallowing a damp sponge that expanded in her throat. The potato salad was worse—a cold, greasy paste that coated her mouth and made her want to gag with every spoonful. She had to pause between bites, breathing carefully through her nose, waiting for the leaden mass in her stomach to settle enough to make room for more.

The clock on the wall of the main office area, visible from her cubicle entrance, became her enemy. At two PM, she was still working through the sandwiches, the pile seeming to shrink with agonizing slowness. By three, she’d moved on to the turkey, her chewing now slow and deliberate, each motion of her jaw sending aches through her temples. The cake sat on its tray like a taunt, its frosted peaks gleaming under the fluorescent lights.

Fullness was no longer an adequate word for what she felt. This was a systemic crisis. Her stomach, stretched far beyond any reasonable capacity, was a hard, painful sphere that pushed up against her diaphragm, making every breath a shallow sip of air. It pressed outward against the confines of her shirt and slacks with such force that the fabrics felt like they were actively compressing her organs. A sharp, stitch-like pain had taken up residence under her right rib cage, flaring with every swallow.

She kept eating. There was no alternative. The assignment was clear. She peeled the plastic wrap from another sandwich, her fingers slick with mayonnaise, and took a bite so small it was almost ceremonial. Chewing took forever. Swallowing was an act of sheer willpower, forcing the food down a passageway that seemed to be closing in protest.

By four o’clock, she had finished the sandwiches and made a small dent in the potato salad. The cake remained untouched. The pain in her side was constant now, a hot needle jabbing inward with every heartbeat. She was sweating profusely, damp patches spreading under her arms and across her back, sticking the white shirt to her skin. Her face felt hot and flushed.

At five PM, the official end of the business day, she was only halfway through the lunch assignment. The potato salad tub was half empty. The cake was still whole. She sat slumped in her chair, one hand pressed against her monstrously distended belly, trying to breathe through the pressure.

The squeak of heels announced Mrs. Lee’s arrival. The woman appeared at the cubicle entrance, her expression as impassive as ever. Her eyes did a quick inventory: the diminished but still substantial food, Violet’s pale, sweaty face, the visible strain of her clothing.

“You are behind schedule,” Mrs. Lee observed, not as a criticism but as a statement of fact.

“I can’t,” Violet whispered, the words barely audible. “It’s too much.”

Mrs. Lee tilted her head slightly, as if Violet had spoken in a foreign language she was trying to decipher. “The work must be completed,” she said simply. “Performance evaluation is based on thorough daily completion. You cannot leave assigned tasks unfinished.”

“But it’s five,” Violet gasped, gesturing weakly toward the invisible clock.

“Then you will work overtime until it is done,” Mrs. Lee replied, her tone leaving no room for appeal. “This is a professional environment, Violet. Deadlines are met. Expectations are fulfilled.” She glanced at her watch. “I will inform security you are remaining on-site. Please ensure your workstation is cleared before you depart.”

With that, she turned and walked away, her footsteps fading down the now-silent hallway. The rest of the office workers had already left for the day. Violet was alone in the vast, quiet building with a half-eaten mountain of food and a body screaming in revolt.

Alone. The word echoed in the silence. There were no sisters here to cheer or coerce. No Hannah with encouraging words, no Jecka with threats. Just the food, the chair, and the absolute mandate to finish. This was worse, in a way. The pressure was impersonal, bureaucratic, embedded in the very structure of the internship. Failure wasn’t just disappointing her sisters; it was failing a performance review, violating a corporate policy. The system demanded completion, and the system offered no mercy.

A new kind of resolve, cold and grim, seeped into Violet’s pain-fogged mind. It wasn’t about pleasing anyone anymore. It wasn’t about belonging. It was about surviving the shift. About passing this single, brutal test so she could leave this room. The goal was no longer to gain weight for Chi Omega; it was to empty the rack for Aether Dynamics. The objective had narrowed to a pinpoint: consume what was in front of her until it was gone.

She picked up the spoon again and dove back into the potato salad.

The next two hours were a blur of agony and determination. She ate not with hunger or even habit, but with a mechanical, relentless focus that bypassed thought entirely. Each spoonful of salad was a victory over the rack. Each forced swallow was a step closer to the door. She didn’t taste anything. She just processed.

When the potato salad was finally scraped clean, she turned to the cake.

It was a monstrosity of sugar and fat, thick and moist under its crust of frosting. She didn’t bother with a utensil now. She broke off chunks with her hands and stuffed them into her mouth, the overly sweet frosting making her teeth ache. Her stomach, already stretched to its absolute limit, protested with sharp, cramping pains that made her double over between bites. She ate through the pain, tears of strain mixing with the sweat on her cheeks.

As she neared the end, something had to give.

It was the shirt. The central button, the one over the apex of her swollen belly, had been under unimaginable tension for hours. As Violet leaned forward to break off the last section of cake, reaching across the expanse of her own body, the thread holding that button finally snapped.

Ping.

The button shot off like a bullet, ricocheting off the metal rack with a sharp tink before vanishing under a desk.

The sound was followed by a low, tearing noise as the strained fabric around the buttonhole gave way. A vertical rip opened in the shirt from her sternum down past her navel, a jagged line that exposed the pale, stretched skin of her stomach and the top of her control-top pantyhose beneath.

Violet didn’t stop. She barely registered it. The release of pressure was immediate and profound, a slight lessening of the constriction around her middle that allowed her to take a slightly deeper, shuddering breath. She finished the last piece of cake, licking the sticky frosting from her fingers with a numb tongue.

It was done. The rack was empty. Every sandwich, every scoop of salad, every crumb of cake was gone. The stainless-steel trays were smeared with grease and crumbs. She sat amidst the wreckage, her shirt hanging open, her body a landscape of catastrophic fullness.

She didn’t move for a long time. She just breathed, each inhale a careful negotiation with the solid mass inside her. The pain was everywhere—a deep, bruising ache in her gut, a fiery stitch in her side, a throbbing soreness in her jaw and throat. But beneath it all was a cold, hollow satisfaction. She had done it. She had met the quota.

Slowly, painfully, she pushed herself up from the chair. Standing was an ordeal that made black spots dance before her eyes. She gripped the edge of the desk until the dizziness passed, then shuffled out to her scooter.

The ride through the empty building was surreal. The corridors were dark except for emergency lighting, her scooter’s quiet whir echoing in the vast silence. The atrium was deserted, the reception desk empty. The automatic doors hissed open for her, spilling her out into the warm evening air.

The parking lot was mostly empty too. Her mother’s black SUV sat alone under a streetlamp near the entrance.

As Violet guided the scooter across the pavement, she saw her mother get out of the driver’s seat. Her posture was stiff with impatience, arms crossed over her chest.

Violet pulled up beside the passenger door and turned off the scooter. The silence that followed was heavy.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?” her mother demanded, her voice tight with anger. “I’ve been waiting out here for over two hours. I called the main line twice—they just put me on hold and then disconnected.”

Violet looked up at her mother’s furious face. She felt incredibly tired, every cell in her body weighed down by food and exhaustion.

She didn’t explain about the sandwiches or the cake or the ripped shirt. She didn’t describe the pain or Mrs. Lee’s directive. The words wouldn’t have mattered anyway. They both knew why she was here.

She met her mother’s eyes and said the only thing that made sense in this new context of deadlines and performance reviews.

“Overtime.”

The word hung in the space between them—flat, factual, final.

Her mother’s anger seemed to falter for a second, replaced by a flicker of something else—calculation, perhaps. Overtime implied work. Work implied value. Value justified waiting.

“Well,” her mother said after a pause, her tone shifting from anger to brisk practicality. “I suppose that shows initiative.” She looked Violet up and down then, truly seeing her for the first time since she’d emerged from the building: the ripped shirt gaping open, the stains on the fabric, the utterly spent expression on her daughter’s face.

She didn’t comment on any of it. Instead, she moved to help, opening the rear door wide. “Let’s get you home. You must be exhausted.”

The transfer from scooter to car was pure torture. Every movement sent waves of nausea and pain through Violet’s overloaded system. Her mother had to physically lift one of Violet’s legs into the footwell, straining with the effort. When Violet finally collapsed onto the back seat, her distended stomach pressed flush against the back of the front passenger seat, preventing it from being pushed upright. She had to sit sideways, her body contorted to fit, her belly a firm, unyielding barrier between herself and the front of the car.

Her mother got into the driver’s seat and started the engine. She adjusted her rearview mirror, her eyes meeting Violet’s reflection for a moment in the glass. “Tomorrow will be easier,” she said, pulling out of the parking lot. “Now that you know what’s expected.”

Violet leaned her head against the cool window, watching the darkened campus recede into the night. Her stomach churned and groaned, a living thing packed far beyond its limits. The ripped edges of her shirt fluttered with each bump in the road. She closed her eyes, not sleeping, just retreating into the dark behind her eyelids. Tomorrow. Another assignment. Another rack. Another day of overtime measured in swallowed food and strained stitches. She had survived today by narrowing her world to a single task: finish. And she had. That grim, calculating determination was all that remained where hope or resistance used to be. It wasn’t agency, not really. It was compliance weaponized, a terrifying form of endurance honed to survive systems designed to consume her. As the car carried her home under the indifferent stars, the only thing she knew for certain was that tomorrow, she would do it all again