Voracious by Wrath James White Read Free Book Online Page A

products. She was every bit as obsessed with beauty as Dr. Mahendru. They were mirror images of each other.
    Star knew her mother was repulsed by her obesity. Star could see the disgust on her mother’s face every time she looked at her and in every sarcastic word she uttered about her appearance. Her so-called “words of encouragement” were just mean-spirited jabs that hurt and sent Star scurrying to the candy store in defiance. She hadn’t taken her daughter to a movie premiere or a public event in years, not since the baby fat had multiplied.
    Without consulting a doctor or a health specialist of any sort, her mother diagnosed Star with Prader-Willi Syndrome at the age of four, mistaking a normal healthy appetite for a condition characterized by an inability to efficiently convert fat into energy, leading to intense hunger pangs and a constant, insatiable urge to eat. Her solution was to starve her young daughter, putting locks on the refrigerator and pantry and restricting her to 750 calories a day. Star rebelled, hoarding food in her room and binging on junk food at school. Each time she was caught with candy and pastries stuffed under her mattress, in her mother’s mind it reconfirmed her diagnosis. Her daughter was sick. She couldn’t stop eating. Her hideous corpulence was ample evidence.
    Now, as Star’s body consumed itself and she shed pounds by the hour, gnawing hunger pains turning her guts inside out, her cries for food seemed to her anorexic mother like another symptom of her disease.
    “Mom, please! I’m dying! I’m so hungry!”
    “You’re not dying. You’re becoming beautiful! The treatment is working! Look at you! You’re almost skinny!”
    Star turned and looked at herself in one of the full-length mirrors her mother had hung on the back of every door in the house as a punishment, to remind her of what a fat cow she had allowed herself to become. Only now, the girl who looked back at her was not fat at all. There were still a few bulges here and there. Her hips were still wide and her thighs were thicker than they should have been, but far from the elephantine pillars they had been just yesterday. The rolls of fat under her chin had reduced from two to one. Her FUPA (fat upper-pussy area) as her mother called it, a large roll of gelatinous flesh that bulged out from just below her navel and hung down over vagina, had completely disappeared. She was losing weight, a dramatic, terrifying amount of weight in so short a time. She must have dropped seventy pounds in the thirty-six hours since she’d had the treatment.
    “Something’s wrong, Mom. I’m losing too much weight.”
    Her mother waved her off with a flick of the wrist, a chuckle, and an exasperated roll of her eyes.
    “Don’t be silly, Star. You can never lose too much weight. As Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, said, ‘A woman can’t be too skinny or too rich.’ If you’re hungry, here’s a rice cake.” She pulled out a pack of rice cakes she’d stashed in her oversized Prada handbag and reached inside to grab one of the crisp, Styrofoam-textured discs from the package.
    Snarling, Star launched herself across the room, leaping like some sort of overweight housecat attacking a bag of catnip, and snatched the entire package from her mother’s hands. She crashed against the kitchen wall in a heap, knocking over the table in the kitchen nook, denting the drywall, and smashing one of the kitchen chairs. She began mindlessly shoveling handfuls of rice cakes into her mouth.
    “Jesus! What’s gotten into you? That’s disgusting! I said you could have one. You give those back, young lady! You’re eating like an animal!”
    Star watched her mother reach for her food, and a sudden, overwhelming rage surged through her. Her lips peeled away from her teeth, and a snarl rumbled up from her throat. She lashed out so suddenly and savagely, her mother barely had time to react before Star’s curiously elongated canines clamped