"Understanding the Science," by Camille Bordas

"Everyone thinks they're on this big now," Debbie said, refilling her glass. "I've had it with the journey. I've had it with you people." "I don't think I'm on a journey," Burt said. Life's too short to find out who we really are." It was the first time the six of them had got together for dinner in more than a year (since Maria's diagnosis), and after such a long time (and in celebration of Maria's remission) they'd expected to have more interesting things to tell one another, deeper things, but they were entering dessert territory now, a cake was on the table, and only superficial topics had been broached: Ervin's promotion, Jane and Burt's move to the suburbs, Katherine's recent purchase of a metabolism-tracking device--a pen-shaped item and the cause of Debbie's rant. "How much can you know about yourself, exactly?" she said. "The therapy, the vision quests, the birth charts--do we really need the data on metabolic flexibility, too?" Jane, in Katherine's defense, said that, the more you knew about yourself, the more useful you could be to society. Knowing whether Kat is in fat-or carb-burning mode doesn't help anyone." As a result of Katherine declining cake five minutes earlier, no one had touched it. No one, Debbie included, really wanted to. They'd all overeaten already, drunk too much, made private plans to atone for it the next day. The cake presented a challenge, it sat there taunting them, and Debbie knew this, that you couldn't serve cake to a group of fortysomethings without causing ripples, but what else could she have done? She got it, no one wanted to put on weight, but this was a gorgeous princess cake, just gorgeous, she'd had to drive all the way to Andersonville to get it from that Swedish bakery everyone talked about. Staring at it now, though, she wondered if the cake didn't look a little bit like a tit, the smooth half sphere, the small pink marzipan flower nippling the top of it--and, oh, God, did think it looked like a tit?