Chapter 3: The Older Guy
Charm, looks, charisma — the bad boy wrapped in a pretty package. That’s what drew me in, and that’s what held me there. I desperately wanted to be seen publicly with him, but if all I could be was hidden, I would take it. I even confronted him about why we had to stay a secret, but I was never given an answer.
There was always her. Rough around the edges, a reputation that trailed behind her everywhere she went, but she was the one who got to stand beside him in the daylight. They stayed together through thick and thin, no matter how messy it was. And me? I couldn’t stop wondering what that said about me. Why wasn’t I as good as her? Why was I the one kept in the shadows?
That period taught me something brutal but necessary: if you tell yourself you aren’t worthy, if you convince yourself you don’t deserve more, you won’t strive for greatness—you’ll settle for mediocrity. My bulimia was part of that cycle. It kept me thinner, and it gave me the illusion of control. I felt empowered when he chose me, but that empowerment always collapsed into immense sadness when I sat alone, waiting, hiding.
Most of the time we were in his car—the cool blue Nova, cigarette smoke hanging in the air, music spilling from the speakers. If I went to his house, I had to crawl through the window. His room was plastered with posters—Sting, The Police, Led Zeppelin—and he told me once that “Wrapped Around Your Finger” was our song. In those moments, it felt like I belonged to something bigger, even if it was only in secret.
But then came the day at my house, when he was excited to watch my family’s old 16mm tapes. We popped one in, a reel from a business trip to Canada with my dad and sister just a few years before. Without missing a beat, he blurted out:
“OH MY GOD, FATSO IN CANADA.”
The air left the room. I couldn’t breathe. In a single moment, he had taken my worst thoughts of myself—the ones I worked so hard to keep buried—and flung them in my face as a joke. I saw how he really thought of me when he looked at me, and I knew he knew it hurt me. That moment was pivotal. We didn’t recover. “Fatso in Canada” would die with that hidden relationship… or so I thought. But he didn’t need to be in my life for the name to linger. It stayed.
Even now, certain things take me back. When Wrapped Around Your Finger plays, it’s his face I see, his car, his posters, that cigarette smoke. And when my mom passed away, my dad gave me some of the things she had quietly saved over the years. Among them was the jacket with the Canadian flag on it—the very one I had on in that old video. She had folded it neatly, sealed it in a Ziplock bag, and kept it safe. Holding it in my hands, decades later, I felt the weight of both memory and survival.
That day in my living room — “Fatso in Canada” — it branded me. He didn’t just humiliate me; he confirmed the voice already living in my head, the one whispering that I would never be enough. The nickname lingered long after he was gone, curling itself into my self-worth. One boy gave me the spotlight, another kept me in the shadows, but both left me emptier than before.
And in the quiet after, when the smoke cleared and the music faded, the only words I had left were the ones I whispered to God: Why am I not good enough? Why am I the one who gets hidden? Why me?