“Obviously nothing better than a burger from O’Reilly’s” has always bee the time-honored slogan of the burger chain. It has always been there, even before Britney, but not like it is now. It seems now that everyone eats there for everything. Natalie eats them, Adam eats them, even thin and petite Tracy eats them. Every channel is saturated with them, and so the people flock to its branches.

A young and thin 17-year-old boy sits at a table with his girlfriend. The girlfriend is dressed in tight jeans and a pink T-shirt, but it is almost comical given her broad figure and love handles. She doesn’t seem to notice, just flaunts it like she’s Britney.

“Like, you know, in Russia, you need to make a reservation a year in advance to eat at an O’Reilly’s? I’m sooo glad I live here, I’d, like, starve before I ever got to the counter!” the girlfriend, Sarah, says.

“Didn’t you say you were watching your weight?” Mark, her boyfriend, asks as he looks over his salad, or more accurately cream dressing with cheese and some lettuce floating in it.

“Uh, yeah, I am! Didn’t you notice? I ordered the single Big O burger instead of the double! Wanna fry?” Sarah replies, waving a fry around like a cigarette, counting the days until she's old enough to light up for real.

Mark tries not to laugh. He loves Sarah, but he just can’t understand how everyone says that she's so voluptuous and sultry. He’s every man’s envy because he got to pick up sexy Sarah, but he just doesn’t see it. He loves her personality but whenever they go out she all but gorges herself. He can barely watch her eat. She's so messy, attacking the burger, letting the meat (if he can call it that) slide out from in between the bun, sauce dripping on her hands before licking it off. He looks around and it's not just her, or just some girl thing; everyone is that taken by this excuse for food, be it old ladies or families with children. He’d rather just have an apple and a sandwich any day, but Sarah likes it here. She finally finishes and returns to staring at him wide-eyed, grabbing his hand just to let him know.

“Mmmm, you’re cute when you are looking around. You sure you had enough? I never find those salads filling, and MAN, you didn’t even finish! You sure you feeling ok, hon? You really should eat more,” Sarah says.

“Oh, I’m fine,” Mark says, but inside he longs for different days. San Francisco has changed so much since he entered high school. He remembers when Sarah could bring about many a daydream in English class, when she didn't touch up her natural blonde hair with bleach and who always was very neat and obsessive about her looks. They all still followed God, and being near the edge of the suburbs, they were one of the first to go to computer-based education in the city. He misses his old friend, Lee, but he still thinks he deserved to be expelled if he really slipped madness poison into the cafeteria sophomore year. He accepted everything he was taught, bought the same shirts, wore the same letter jackets, but he never got the food. It just never tasted good to him. He misses the variety. Even his mother no longer cooks him the great spaghetti that she used to make; instead she makes those awful, fatty Elizabeth Coppell casseroles that he can't stand. Everyone around him seems to have inflated like balloons over the past 4 years, and it disturbs him. He just smiles at Sarah. He just can’t find her beautiful anymore, but he doesn’t have the heart to tell her, not yet.

Three weeks later he’s at the movies with Sarah, waiting for her to get the popcorn; he lets her get it because she always complains that he doesn’t put enough butter on it. He is captivated by two girls, both brunette, both thin and beautiful. Their short hair should alert him that he shouldn’t look at them, but he is more taken by their slender bodies, the type of figure he hasn’t seen since he was a young boy. His natural instincts take over and he can barely stand, at least not without stepping behind a strategically placed trash can. Sarah sees this and rubs his hair from behind.

“Awww, honey, you’re so in control of your emotions, hiding all that anger at those two filthy dykes showing themselves in public. I’m proud of you, want some popcorn?” Sarah pulls out a greasy handful of popcorn and Mark grudgingly accepts her offer. He misses the days when straight girls could be that beautiful. He blushes slightly as he walks into the theatre with Sarah and only then grows furious that a lesbian could look so good to try to tease innocent young men like that.

May Day rolls around, and he’s ready to move on to Arizona, looking for something more than he had in the unstable area of San Francisco. Sarah goes with him to grow into his wife, learn to cook and clean and be a good girl. Mark doesn’t say anything yet but he’d rather hoped she’d go elsewhere. He used to her a lot but she’s so unattractive now. It’s not just the weight anymore- he's noticed that even he’s put on a few pounds- but she just acts so gross, stuffing her face whenever she gets the chance, as does everyone at his high school. Mark figures that maybe the hot desert climate would make the girls a little thinner, or at least less grotesque. He moves in but he finds the same thing as he did at home; he'd even swear that they were all the same girls. He finally works up the courage to confront Sarah about her weight in the cafeteria one day.

“Don’t you think you could, you know... I mean I still think you’re beautiful but…you could lose a few pounds…I mean so can I, honey…”

“What? You want me to starve myself like the actresses? I’m just the right size, I look just like Tracy, I see it in the mirror every day! Besides, can't keep 'em this real and this big without a few O’Reilly burgers, silly, want some chips?” Sarah hands him a handful of broken-up potato chips, crumbs all over her shirt and face. He flips on the TV, relaxes, and puts his arm around Sarah as she nestles her head in his lap, smiling at her man. Midnight rolls around and he grows sleepy, but Sarah tunes in to the romantic programming on Channel 9. She starts caressing his chest, learning the little things to satisfy her man throughout college so she’ll be ready when they get married and she can give herself to him and give him back the blessed gift of children. He rolls his head around and sees that Sarah has changed into a revealing nightgown so that her thick curves can be seen. He knows he loves her, she really is charming, but her trying to flaunt her body like that almost makes him break up in hysterics. As much as he tries to keep his emotions to himself, he knows that Sarah can tell that he isn’t attracted to her, as she gets up, furious.

“Not everyone can be Natalie!” Sarah exclaimed. “I just want you to love me!”

“Sarah, I do love you, you don’t have to dress like an actress for me to love you. It just doesn’t look like you when you do that. You don’t have to turn yourself into what’s on TV to be beautiful. You’re always beautiful to me."

Sarah ponders this and then looks in the mirror with tears in her eyes, and she asks Mark the question that optical distortion was created to avoid.

“Honey, does this make me look…fat?”

“It would look better on Lisa or Natalie, but wouldn't anything?” Mark tactfully replies. Something inside tells him that this is the first time that Sarah can see how much she has changed from the dainty and beautiful days when they first met, how much she's let herself be seduced by advertising and fatty food, among other things. Sarah tries to quell her emotions with a cigarette but she goes into a coughing fit.

“Phew! I forgot how strong those are!” she says.

“You know I never liked to smoke much, only at parties when everyone is doing it so it would feel weird not to,” Mark replies, putting his arm around her waist; for some reason she appears just a little thinner and beautiful to him now.

The next day, however, she's back to stuffing her face with an O’Reilly burger instead of joining him for an afternoon run. He can sense that it isn’t her fault, or anyone’s fault. He feels bad for her but worries about himself. He sees Amanda, the thin little softball pitcher. He knows she's a lesbian; everyone knows it and only dares to look at her when she racks up fifteen-strikeout games on the diamond. He walks up to her after class.

“How do you do it?” he asks.

“I was born like this! If you don’t believe me, fuck off, asshole!” she replies, thinking he's just another guy who can't stand to see her love go to waste.

“No, I mean, how do you stay so thin? I know you’re a dy…sorry I mean you like girls. But the girls here are so…so...”

“Fat?” Amanda replies, seeing his sincerity and a chance to mock the morons. “Well, it makes it easy for me to be a lesbian, the queers get all the cuties!” she adds, trying to see how under Mark remains. When she notices that she isn’t dead and that he hasn’t run off screaming she smiles.

“So, you like your girls not to be total pigs?”

“I love Sarah, but no one here can control anything about themselves, that’s the scary thing. She says she wants to lose weight, but she just wolfs down more and more O’Reilly burgers. And to make it worse, she dresses in tight shorts and low-cut shirts, it’s embarrassing. I mean, the first time I touched her breasts it was to clean out potato chip crumbs.”

“Gotta get the moral fiend to advance to second somehow!” Amanda says with a laugh.

“I don’t know, it must be tough for you. I really don’t understand what’s happening. What they say on TV, it’s like gospel now,” Mark says.

“I like you, Mark,” Amanda pauses. “Ahh, man, you really are breaking out! I said I like you and you didn’t jump on top of me.”

“I know you’re…what DO you call yourselves? I forgot the real term, or is it really dyke?” Mark ponders.

“Oh, Abby likes being called a dyke, it gives her cause to kick people’s asses. You, however, can just call me Amanda. That’s all the respect I need because the only time someone calls me that instead of dyke is when I win a ballgame. That’s the only thing that makes me angry instead of sad, they don’t even know my name.”

With that, Amanda gets an idea. She takes Mark under her wing and teaches him what they never taught him in school, showing him a past age of tolerance, acceptance, and true freedom. It's a time he barely remembers but now will never forget. He drops the excess pounds and permanently swears off O'Reilly's. They're constantly in conversation, and he realizes how much he missed true friendship. He watches Sarah run off with another man, just as large as she is, and Amanda feels bad for him. So she breaks her vow once and kisses him in public; he looks dumbfounded but she just laughs at him.

“Isn’t that what having a boyfriend is all about? Never was sure if it was the same as a girlfriend,” she whispers to him when no one is looking.

Finally the pressure comes to be too much and they escape to New York. Mark settles in with another Sarah, this one a hardnosed, anti-government hotheaded Jew from Brooklyn, someone who had meticulous table manners and a wonderful figure. Then he sees her, standing in front of an O’Reilly’s, someone big but not like the brainwashed, someone he can tell is a lesbian from her trying to prove that everyone is. He walks up to her. “How do you keep so beautiful for your size?”

“Oh, I’ve lost weight, it’s just chocolate, no O’Reilly shit here! Hey, want a story?”

So he reads about Natalie showing Tracy how to have sex for the first time. It reminds him of Amanda- now a star at NYU- and then he remembers his first Sarah, and who she was, and he thought to himself, “Quite the price for just a burger”.