Chapter 1

After a long day at work hunched over the keyboard, it was always a relief to sit down at home and just mellow out for a half hour. Your apartment was set up the perfect way you wanted it, with your Marvel postexers framed along the walls of your living room, the shelves displaying your collectable statues now lit by little LED lights, and your hobby desk was finally organized to a point where it actually looked clean.

The only thing left that you wanted to do was reorganize your bookshelf.

The last thing that Hannah was going to do was sit around and watch you reorganize your bookshelf.

“Ollie, come on,” she said as she was pacing back and forth between the kitchen and the living room. “You need to get yourself out there. There are plenty of fish in the sea and at least one of them has your name on her.”

“I don’t even like fish,” you said with a little smirk.

It was one of those discussions that you’d had with Hannah for years. The blonde woman was your best and oldest friend, even if you were miles apart in almost every facet of life. You worked a high-paying job coding for a Tech startup, while she worked a surprisingly moderate-paying job as an athletic trainer for the local MLS team. She was a tight little bundle of muscles and energy, you ... well, you were fat. You knew it; most fat people knew they were fat. You were very aware of it. You just ... changing that was hard.

“Fine,” Hannah said. “Then there’s plenty of squirrels in the forest. Or penguins in the Arctic.”

“You know I’m fine,” you said. “What about you? When was the last time you had a boyfriend?”

“I went on a blind date two weeks ago,” Hannah said. “And just because it was kind of awful doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying. You deserve someone who is going to love you, and so do I.”

“I’ve got you, and I’ve got Hikaru around now too. What do I need a girlfriend for?”

“Sex, Ollie! Romance! You are the sweetest, most loving person I know and you deserve to have that back,” Hannah said, throwing her hands up in the air like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

The whole fat thing wasn’t new. You’d grown up fat. Or ‘big-boned’ as people had said at one point as if they were trying to manifest you becoming a linebacker for the football team in your future. The problem was, you liked music and comics and D&D, not running around slamming into things and risking bodily injury. Sports were a dead end for you, which made your friendship with Hannah all the weirder back then considering she was good at everything physical, and up until junior year had been better than all the boys at athletic stuff too.

“Look, I heard about this new app,” Hannah said, coming over and flopping down on the couch next to you, leaning into you and resting her head on your shoulder and taking your phone from the coffee table in front of you. She typed in the password - she’d known it since the eighth grade - and went to the App Store. “It’s supposed to be a dating app for nerds. I want to make a profile for you.”