#raymond!

Reference under the cut

good luck on the SATs or ACTs or whatever it is this weekend! and have fun at prom! (i think know brandon wants me to go with him so i might see you there O.o) but its whatever! wont be crashing any dances this time. tell samantha im sorry :o (thats her name right?!?)

But thanks raymond! SERIOUSLY YOURE GREAT SERIOUSLY FOR SERIOUS THANK RAYMOND. FOR REAL

and next time we go to the park ill run with you... just gimme a few weeks... o.o

When we last saw Raymond K. Hessel, the hapless convenience store clerk tormented by a deranged Tyler Durden, he was sprinting down the street, chased by the threat of a bullet and the promise that the next meal he eats will be the finest he’s ever had.

And it was. 

Bodies react to stress in different ways.  Fear can induce vomiting in some; for a number, it’s sexual arousal. Still others feint away, choosing to abdicate awareness from whatever horrors may come. 

Raymond’s very being burned with an insatiable hunger as he sprinted up the street.  With each step the command reverberated:  Eat.  Eat everything.  Unused to strenuous activity, his body cried out for sustenance, and five minutes after the moonlit conversation with Tyler, he turned a corner to behold a 24 hour Chinese food storefront.  Stomach rumbling at a disturbing volume, he obliged, and entered.

With the third heaping of General Tso’s, he confronted the ultimatum bestowed at gunpoint.

“What is the one thing you want to be?” Tyler had asked.

“A veterinarian,” he had answered, sputtering. It seemed innocuous, even slightly altruistic.  

The only problem: it was a lie.

Raymond never wanted to be a veterinarian but he had been reading about one while hunched over the counter, before the armed lunatic burst through the doors and changed his life forever.  So he blurted it out, and now he’s tied to it. 

The second problem: he sucks at biology.

After consuming the remainder of the menu, Raymond staggers home realizing with each step that his life is now changed.  He was informed that if he does not chase this (arbitrarily decided) dream and become a veterinarian in six weeks, he will be dead.  He remains in bed for the first 24 hours of this enforced crossroads, wrestling with how best to pursue a new life as well while also resisting the urge to gorge. For that need is even then beginning to blot out the fear of leather clad, shaved headed death…the hunger.

Raymond awakens mid-bite from a blackout period of indeterminate time with the remains of a doughnut binge strewn around him.  Powder covering his face, he frantically searches for the date, terrified that his six week grace period has passed.  Using his expanding waist like rings of a tree, he gauges the time elapsed as no more than a week. 

He suffers a perilous run in with his former employers, the owners of the convenience store, when he literally bumps into them loitering at a butcher stall within their local market.  Crisis is averted when they don’t recognize his new, hefty frame, simply believing that some tubby stranger was shoving them out of the way for a fresh ham hock (he was).  Suddenly anonymous, he questions his next steps.

Raymond devotes the next two weeks attached to his laptop at the local Arby’s, absorbing fledgling internet pages devoted to animal physiology and subsisting off of a steady stream of Beef ‘n Cheddars.  Listless no longer, he begins to enjoy this new purposeful life of intake and consumption. 

Frightened by what he fears is a vengeful Tyler checking on him (it is really a panhandler draped in a leather throw rug), Raymond books a ticket to Lawrence, Kansas, seat of the premier veterinary school in the country.  He is now close to 300 lbs.

At the airport he confronts a twin dilemma:

Will he score high enough for admittance to his school of choice? He has, after all, just been memorizing the body parts of randomly selected animalia.

Will he be able to afford tuition AND the cost of servicing his burgeoning bulk?