Emmett comes home to find Lizette celebrating; she has secured funding to expand her fashion brand into menswear. She insists on throwing a party that night. Despite Emmett’s request for no surprise guests, Lizette invites Aaron. 

The apartment is soon filled with a loud party. Aaron compliments Emmett’s appearance, and the two spend an hour talking and drinking, developing a clear romantic tension. The mood shifts when Lizette’s cousin Oscar begins dancing with Aaron. Seeing them whisper to each other triggers Emmett’s memories of past rejections, and he retreats with a plate of food. He finds Aaron waiting for him in his bedroom. After a flirtatious conversation about Pokémon, they share a passionate kiss.

In a journal entry dated August 28, Emmett celebrates losing 100 pounds, bringing his weight to 224. Though his BMI still categorizes him as having obesity, he feels much happier with his “cuddly” body type but still aims to reach a goal weight of 150 pounds. 

Emmett notes significant health improvements, including resolved sleep apnea and a normal blood-sugar level. His professional life is also thriving since his promotion at work. The biggest change is in his love life; he has reconnected with Aaron. Emmett admits that he’s still insecure about his body and nervous about being intimate, but he’s scheduled to go to Aaron’s home that weekend and anticipates that they will have sex. He concludes by stating that the weight loss feels like a second chance at life.

Emmett brings Chinese food to Aaron’s upscale apartment in Hillcrest. Aaron is on the phone and learns that Georgina Hodge, the woman from Future Makers, has been found dead in a park, her death attributed to a coyote attack. 

While watching a movie, Aaron makes a comment about an actor’s physique that makes Emmett feel insecure. Aaron soon initiates physical contact, and they kiss. However, the encounter takes an unexpected turn when Aaron reveals that he has a foot fetish, asking Emmett to command him to kiss and suck his toes. Uncomfortable but compliant, Emmett allows it. Later, in the bedroom, Aaron masturbates while kissing Emmett’s foot. Emmett stops him from lifting his shirt, concealing his loose skin. After Aaron finishes, Emmett anxiously checks his Instagram follower count.

Emmett joins Lizette and her family at SeaWorld to celebrate her 30th birthday. The visit reminds him of a past incident when he was nearly unable to fit on a roller coaster due to his size, which humiliated him. 

While there, he misses a series of urgent texts from Aaron, who’s waiting for him at a comedy show. Emmett realizes with a jolt that he has no memory of making these plans or of the text exchange in which he agreed to go. Panicked, he calls Aaron and fabricates a story about Lizette cutting her hand and needing to go to the emergency room. After the call, Lizette expresses concern over his significant memory lapse.

At work, Emmett feels an insatiable hunger, despite having just reached his milestone of weighing under 200 pounds. He reflects on his growing success as a social-media influencer and his new side business as a personal coach. 

During his shift, Emmett is asked to help a regular customer, Myra, who uses a mobility scooter. As he gathers her groceries, he’s disturbed to find himself having judgmental thoughts about her weight and choices of mostly frozen processed food. He accidentally drops and breaks a bottle of cocktail sauce, and the smell triggers a wave of intense hunger. Later, when he sees that Myra has left the cocktail sauce at the checkout counter, he takes the bottle and follows her out of the store.

In a journal entry dated September 29, Emmett reports that his weight is down to 192 pounds but that his mental health is getting worse. He describes experiencing significant memory loss, which he suspects is a side effect of the clinical trial. He cites forgetting his plans with Aaron as a prime example. He then reveals what happened after he followed Myra out of the store. His memory of the event is a blank, filled only with disjointed, impossible images of following her into her apartment and hearing her scream. He remembers returning to the store two hours later, well after nightfall, with a red, sticky stain on his shirt that he claimed was cocktail sauce. He admits to being terrified by the blackouts and his increasingly strange cravings for raw meat.

Emmett is scheduled to self-administer his next dose of EmaC-8 but hesitates, feeling a dark instinct that the drug is dangerous. His attempts to contact Monstera BioSciences are unsuccessful; the participant hotline is unresponsive, and a receptionist blocks his access to Dr. Saito. 

Worried, Emmett reviews the trial paperwork and discovers a profile of a Phase I participant who experienced identical side effects: extreme hunger, amnesia, and “unnatural cravings.” The profile ends with the note that the participant was “incarcerated on charge of murder” (184). 

A quick Google search leads Emmett to a news story about Tanya Swygert, a woman who confessed to killing her abusive ex-husband. The report mentions her rapid, significant weight loss and her lawyer’s plan to argue that she was under the influence of an experimental drug.

Unable to reach anyone at Monstera, Emmett searches for an alternative contact. After a failed attempt to call the company’s founder, Cecil H. Smith, he finds Monstera’s Instagram page. 

He recognizes an intern tagged in a photo, Blake Whitmore, from the initial information session. Emmett follows Blake, who follows him back, allowing them to message each other directly. Emmett explains his urgent need to speak with Dr. Saito. Blake, who dislikes his boss, complains about her but is reluctant to share her contact information. However, out of frustration with his unpaid internship, Blake has a change of heart. He reveals that Dr. Saito is at an off-site meeting with her lawyers and provides Emmett with the address.

Emmett goes to the law office and lies to the receptionist to gain access to Dr. Saito’s meeting. While peeking into the boardroom, he sees a presentation displaying graphic images: Tanya Swygert’s blood-crusted mugshot alongside a mutilated body, and a photo of Georgina Hodge’s corpse on an autopsy table with visible bite marks. 

Dr. Saito spots him and pulls him into a private office. She apologizes for being unreachable and dismisses the presentation as part of a potential partnership to study the medicinal properties of coyote saliva for weight stabilization. When Emmett describes his memory loss and his fears of having hurt someone, Saito normalizes his feelings by describing them as anxiety. She implies that she has taken the drug herself and delivers a speech about the societal pressures on marginalized people, framing the trial as an essential mission to alleviate that pressure. Her reassurance works, and Emmett leaves feeling placated, though a small doubt about her explanation lingers.

Emmett attends a celebratory dinner for Abby, bringing along Aaron to introduce him as his new boyfriend. Abby is openly alarmed by Emmett’s dramatic weight loss and repeatedly questions how he achieved it, creating tension. She also criticizes his social-media presence as superficial. When Emmett excuses himself to the restroom, he catches Abby listening in at the door. Emmett confronts her back at the table, and she accuses him of having bulimia. In retaliation, Emmett cruelly references her own past eating disorder. After Abby flees in tears, Emmett storms out. 

In his car, Emmett is comforted by supportive comments on his Instagram posts. Aaron joins him, calls his family jealous, and invites him over for the next night. Feeling validated, Emmett returns home and learns from Lizette that her partner Armando’s baseball bat is missing. Emmett then administers his next injection of EmaC-8.

On January 6, 2025, Frank Darrow interviews Lizette, who is openly hostile and blames Monstera for what happened to Emmett. She states that the drug, his weight loss, and his social-media fame changed him for the worse. He became critical of her eating habits, pressured her at the gym, and acted embarrassed by her. 

Lizette recounts a fight in which he dismissed body positivity as “excuses for [her] poor life choices” (206). Lizette argues that fatphobia, rather than a concern for health, drives the demand for drugs like Obexity. She concludes that despite his physical transformation, Emmett never truly changed. He continued to hate his own body and remained deeply insecure, proving that the psychological burden of his past was something he couldn’t let go of.

Emmett goes on a date with Aaron, who reveals that his new education manager has resigned. He offers Emmett the job. Emmett accepts the offer, which includes a salary of $56,000 and three weeks’ vacation. Aaron then makes a comment that implies that he’s open to marrying Emmett someday. 

Later, at Aaron’s apartment, Emmett calls his mother, Joanna. The conversation quickly becomes a heated argument about the past. Emmett accuses her of failing to protect him from Hank and of staying with Hank for financial gain. Joanna defensively tells him to stop blaming his parents for his problems as an adult. The call leaves Emmett seething. Overwhelmed with emotion, he’s struck by a new, intense craving for human meat, a desire that he begins to rationalize instead of resist.

Emmett wakes on his bedroom floor, covered in dried blood, with no memory of leaving Aaron’s apartment. His room is splattered with blood. Just then, Aaron arrives looking for him. 

Emmett hides in the bathroom, jumping into the shower with his bloody clothes to wash away the evidence. He lies to Aaron through the locked door, claiming that he came home for his CPAP machine. Aaron enters the bathroom anyway, intending to kiss him. As he pulls back the shower curtain, his playful expression turns to one of horror. He isn’t looking at the bloody water but at the loose, wrinkled skin on Emmett’s stomach, which Emmett had always kept hidden. Disgusted, Aaron recoils and flees the apartment.

Devastated by Aaron’s repulsion, Emmett cleans the blood from his bedroom and car. At work, he overhears coworkers discussing a severed arm found nearby, and in the same conversation, they note that Myra, the customer with the mobility scooter, has been missing for weeks. 

Emmett attempts to give Rick his two weeks’ notice. Rick reacts angrily, accusing Emmett of becoming arrogant since his weight loss, and fires him on the spot. Overcome with a sudden violent rage, Emmett insults Rick and storms out. 

Outside, a horrific smell of decay leads him to his car trunk. He opens it to find the corpse of a man he recognizes from his gym. The body is missing an arm and is covered in bite marks. Alongside the corpse is the baseball bat belonging to Lizette’s partner. The truth crashes down on Emmett: He killed and cannibalized this man during his blackout. As he grapples with this horror, he’s overcome by an overpowering hunger to eat more.

An entry in Emmett’s health journal dated October 10 records his current weight at 177 pounds, a loss of 146 pounds since the trial began, placing him in the healthy BMI category. However, the numerical data is overshadowed by his written entry, which reads as a raw confession and accusation directed at the trial’s administrators. 

Emmett declares that this isn’t what he signed up for and demands out. He recognizes that he isn’t the first, invoking Tanya Swygert and asking whether she experienced the same hunger. He accuses the researchers of turning the participants into monsters but then wavers, wondering if he’s having a mental-health crisis after 28 years of being gaslit by the medical community and told his weight was the result of weakness, laziness, and depravity. He asks how he can live with himself after what he was made to do. He summarizes his emotional and mental state in two words: Fiesta Island.

A News 8 San Diego Facebook post reports that the remains of a human body were discovered in a burning Ford Taurus on Fiesta Island early Monday. Used matches at the scene indicate that the fire was premeditated, and the police are investigating a possible link to a severed arm found the previous morning two miles away.