UPenn was fine.
It was fine - the people weren't as smart as he thought they'd be and the girls weren't as hot as he thought they'd be - and, like, aren't all rich girls supposed to be the daughters of Wall Street bankers and their model wives, and therefore six feet tall and tan and as thin as gold leaf?
The classes were a waste of time (because if he was having trouble figuring them out, then clearly the professors were fucking idiots) and the campus didn't seem worth half the tuition his mother was probably paying. Hell, UPenn boasted not just one but two statues of Benjamin Franklin, sitting there with his smug fucking face and his bulging belly and balding head. Dennis took them as a constant reminder to work hard, to keep himself from ever becoming such a disgusting failure.
A bad photograph is one thing, but to have your belly immortalized in bronze, forever? How embarrassing.
Fine, okay, whatever - on second thought, UPenn was generally disappointing.
Except for the dining hall. The dining hall was everything he'd imagined.
It was a shrine, a temple, a palace: gleaming, spotless tile floors, table after table of hot and cold and creamy and sweet and salty and crunchy. He liked to go during the off hours: three in the afternoon or eight at night, the times when nobody would be around to mess with his headspace. Nobody to block his way with their huge, stupid, lumbering bodies as their little brains tried to decide on what salad dressing they wanted to drown their lettuce in.
Those times, too, it was less likely someone would see him eating.
Rule #1: Consistent weightlifting must always accompany controlled starvation in order to avoid the condition known as "Skinny Fat." There is nothing on this Godforsaken Earth as disgusting as a thin-passing man who takes off his shirt and reveals himself to be a lumpy, soft abomination. Muscle definition is paramount.
Dennis had developed a series of rules, originally roughed out when he was fourteen and slowly refined through experience and expertise. At 23, Ivy League educated and world-weary, he had settled on five. They were good, solid rules, the very foundations of his physique, the infrastructure upon which he built his finely-muscled frame. It would have been easy enough to achieve a thin-passing body with little more than three hours of daily cardio and a strict no-dairy, no-oil, no-sugar, no-wheat diet. But "good enough" should never be settled for.
Never in the history of mankind had "good enough" done anyone any favours.
Dennis pulled at the skin on his hips, at the back of his upper arm, under his jaw: two fingers pinch-pinch-pinching like crab claws to feel for fat underneath.
"You're getting jowls," he told his reflection, leaning forward towards the bathroom mirror and dragging his hands down his face, the skin and meat of his cheeks sliding around on his skull and oozing against the skin of his neck.
His mom used to have a phrase she liked to say, when she hit forty and started to lose her figure. She'd tell him, "Dennis, as a woman ages, she has to choose between her ass and her face. I chose my face."
He'd always figured it was just a way to make herself feel better about her fat ass.
But the phrase crawled its way back into his head as he inspected the lines on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes, as he dragged a finger down the rings of wrinkles strangling his throat. Am I old? Dennis wondered, trying to relax his face into something blank and neutral and unwrinkled, focusing-but-not on letting every single line on his forehead smooth itself out. You're 23, he told himself, poking a finger into the dip of his cheek to feel if it was concave enough.
Of course you're old. 23 is exactly the age at which you start to get old.
"Well," he glared at his reflection, "I'm not not going to choose my ass."
Rule #2.1: Maintain sun exposure to counteract anemia and low blood pressure and to enhance muscle definition. Nobody can appreciate the hollows under your cheekbones or the sharpness of your jawline if you look like you've just stumbled out of a bomb shelter or (God forbid) the Midwest.
The fact that under-eye concealer is exclusively marketed to women is demonstrative of the toxic stranglehold that women in America have on the fluidity of masculinity, as well as their monopoly on the market of Looking Awake When You Think You Might Faint In the Middle of Macroeconomics.
The whole point of going to college isn't to learn things. That's a common misconception. In reality, college exists as a bridgeway between your old life and your new life, leading you away from the losers you were born into and towards the family you deserve.
This inarguable truth was why Dennis considered his frat brothers his real brothers. They were only people who truly understood him and had his back. The combination of his winning good looks and their privileged backgrounds would propel him into a lifetime of success, money and a twenty-four-seven parade of naked models.
"Who said you could make eye contact with me, Reynolds?" His frat brother Mike (soccer star, perfect quadriceps and a chiseled calves) barked at him, lunging forward with his fist pulled back. Dennis winced, hands flying up to shield his head, but Mike paused at the last second, laughing and slapping Mason (captain of the rowing team, 8% body fat) on the back. "Loser," he scoffed.
"You got me!" He laughed along with them. Dennis' heart fluttered and his face got hot - there was nothing better than some good old fashioned joshing to build a tight-knit brotherhood. There were dozens of other frat members they could be paying attention to, but they chose him.
They stopped laughing and stared down at him.
"Fuck off, faggot," Mason growled at him. They made eye contact, and Dennis was certain he saw a flash of appreciation behind Mason's eyes: over the last few weeks, he'd made sure to coordinate his gym time with Mason's, making extra effort to catch Mason's eye and flex every time he completed an intense set of bicep curls. It must be working, Dennis thought. I've got rower's muscles and he knows it.
"You're right, I'd better go to class." He waved at them, winking at Mason (in a distinctly hetero way) for good measure. "See you later, bros!"
The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb, and the covenant of Delta Omega Lambda was sacred above all else.
Rule #2.2: One meal per week, consisting of three unseasoned sirloin tip steaks, may be consumed without purging in order to maintain muscle mass. Must be neither relished nor savoured, but instead consumed as quickly and shamefully as possible.
Contemplating the table of hot trays, Dennis weighed the pros and cons of each item laid out in front of him: he had to consider the satisfaction of the flavour, weighed against the flavour as he vomited it back up, later, combined with the textural satisfaction, which also had to be weighed against the ease-of-purging qualities of that same item.
Chicken cordon bleu, no . Dry-as-the-desert grilled mystery fish, definitely not . The cheese-and-broccoli casserole was a contender: delicious going down and easy-as-pie to vomit back up (easier than pie, probably, depending on the kind of pie , Dennis thought , something like pecan would be too sticky and chunky). On the other hand, the casserole would taste like reheated death pouring back over his tongue and smell even worse. The scent of rancid cheese is remarkably hard to rinse off of one's fingers, and attractive, successful Ivy League men do not smell like rancid cheese.
Forget the hot food. It wasn't what he was there for.
He flagged down a member of staff and asked her, in his nicest, most patient voice, "Is there any Strawberry Fluff Jello Salad today?"
She stared at him, little gears working in her little brain.
"No." She paused, tapping a finger against her chin. Dennis could practically hear the sound of gears squeaking and straining. "I think we've phased that out. We're doing fruit salad now, as a healthier option." Then she smiled at him, making him stare right at her snaggle tooth.
I could murder you with my bare hands, right in the middle of this room, and nobody in the world would care or miss you at all , he thought.
"Thanks," he said, smiling back at her. "Fruit salad sounds wonderful."
Rule #3: For every hundred calories consumed, up to a maximum total of two thousand calories per day, fifty calories must be burned through exercise (which shall be defined as any activity producing both sweat and an elevated heart rate, including but not limited to: sex, weightlifting, and ultimate frisbee).
Any instance of purging will remain subject to a 400-calorie exercise tax to account for human error and to discourage weakness of character.
It was important that he, by all means, avoided the dining hall during peak hours. He could not be seen eating after all the time and effort he had spent carefully cultivating his chiseled-marble aesthetic. Being seen by the entire UPenn populace as collected, confident and controlled enough to limit his food intake down to nothing was imperative to his image.
Image is everything, and all successful, beautiful people starve themselves. Fact.
Only losers shove their faces with food they don't need and vomit it back up in secret. Weaklings who'd never amount to anything, not if they couldn't even stop their fat little fingers from stuffing carbs and saturated fats into their gaping maws.
Dennis wasn't - would never be - one of those people.
Ivy League people are different from other people: they drink champagne for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and dine on morsels of tiny food, like sexy birds. That's the world he belonged in, the flock he belonged to. He was beautiful and pure and had the stomach definition of a Greek god and, most likely, an invitation to join the rowing team coming down the chute.
Ignoring his bowl of chicken soup, Dennis caught himself preening a little, locking eyes with himself in the mirrored diner wall and tilting his head so the sunlight caught his cheekbones at just the right angle.
"Are you okay?" Dee asked, squinting at him.
His eyes left his reflection to carefully follow the way the little bone on the inside of her elbow, the one that only shows when you're good and truly underweight, jutted out in perfect contrast to the nearly concave line of her upper arm.
Her arms never touch her body, he realized. No fat spreading out and flattening like a pancake and wobbling around. Just bones knocking against bone and thin, thin skin.
He thought about how satisfying it would be to strap her down and forcefeed her; mountains of fries and burgers and chicken parmesan and milkshakes, pushing them past her teeth and right into her ugly, crying face until her stomach burst and she died.
"I'm so great," he said, flashing her a smile. "Why do you ask?"
"Oh, nothing." Dee shrugged, picking at her fries. "You just look like a dead person is all."
"Don't be silly," he scoffed, narrowing his eyes and willing her to eat another fry. He felt the corner of his mouth twitch in satisfaction as she lazily folded another one into her mouth, a glint of grease on her bottom lip catching the light. "I look fantastic."
Rule #4.1: Beer and liquor are exempt from any and all calorific penalties.
Rule #4.2: Drinking until the point of vomiting shall not be counted as purging but instead as a Consequence of both Partying and Brotherhood.
The easiest way to not eat food is to convince yourself that you don't need it, or even that you don't even like it all that much. Who likes food, anyway? Plebs with base desires, with no appreciation for the finer things in life. Like sex, or lifting weights - the kinds of things that only those with ambition and beautiful bodies can truly appreciate.
Fucking, in particular, is a great distraction from a grumbling stomach and, on most nights, finding a girl at the campus bar who is just drunk enough to let you stick it in is time-consuming enough that you can avoid eating for hours .
"Lean down and arch your back," Dennis instructed, folding a below-average freshman over his bathroom sink. She smelled like CK One and blue curacao and vomit.
"Why?" she mumbled, trying to look up at him through her sweaty hair, but he placed a firm, not-at-all-gentle hand on the back of her head and pushed it back down.
"Because you're blocking the view of my abs," he explained, yanking down her underwear in one rough motion without even glancing down. His eyes stayed trained on his reflection as he flexed, muscle group by muscle group: pecs, abs, biceps, traps.
The top-down lighting of the frat bathroom really did wonders for his core definition.
Sometimes, when he didn't eat for two or three days straight and subsisted only on black coffee and air (and maybe liquor), when he was so exhausted couldn't stay awake in class anymore, when some gross, half-forgotten part of himself wanted to eat something and let the warmth of it actually sit in his stomach, Dennis tried to remember that old saying - what was it?
"Brains were something-something whatever, but beauty was fleeting. So you should hold onto beauty as tightly as you can for as long as you can."
Something like that.
School is stupid, Dennis decided. So fucking stupid. What the fuck did 'academic probation' even mean, anyway?
He stalked across campus, his hands clenching and unclenching with fury. The glint of sunshine on metal stung his eyes and he lifted a hand to shield them. Peering at the figure fifty yards away, he thought, what in the fucking fuck and took off towards it, his brain pinpointing on a new focus for his rage like a nuclear missile homing in on its target.
Dennis lowered himself onto the bench, legs jittery and his ass perched right on the edge, and leaned over to stare into Benjamin Franklin's eyes. He squinted for a long moment at the blank, bronze pupils, trying to get a read on him. Why the stupid fucking grin? What could he possibly be happy about? Why the fuck would UPenn put up a statue of Benjamin Franklin on campus when there were much more attractive Founding Fathers they could have chosen instead of this piece of shit?
Fat and balding and dead. He poked the statue hard, right in the belly.
"You fat motherfucker," he spat. "Nobody ever achieved shit with a shit physique like that."
Benjamin Franklin stared back at him, blankly, his expression unchanged. It was like Dennis' words didn't affect him at all . He just held Dennis' gaze, the same stupid fucking grin plastered on his face. He poked him again, index finger jamming against the disgusting metal swell of his stomach (so disgusting and huge that his clothes wrinkled from the strain, buttons about to pop off).
"React!"
Nothing.
Dennis punched him in the chest, hard. His knuckles bounced uselessly off the metal with a soft thud and he hissed in pain, sucking in air between his teeth and shaking his hand like it was on fire.
"You're going to regret that," he warned, shoving his throbbing hand into the pocket of his jacket. Then he got up, kicked Benjamin Franklin in the shin, and stalked off towards the dining hall, only glancing back once, twenty feet away, to shoot Benny a quick double-middle-finger salute and shout, one last time: "Fat, loser motherfucker!"
"Asshole," a mousey girl barked at him as she passed, her nose wrinkled with disgust like she thought he was referring to her. From the looks of it, it might have been with good reason: sparing her a quick glance, his eyes flicked over her frizzy hair and her wire-rim glasses, the way the meat of her legs was packed like sausage into her too-tight sweatpants, combined with, God , white orthopedic sneakers? It was like the girl was trying to max out at a 2 out of 10.
"The greatest asshole you'll never have a chance with," he shouted back, winking at her and feeling a burst of satisfaction as she flicked him off.
Rule #5: You are better than everyone else, and it's your job to prove it.