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wrong…
    “I’ll do my best, but I really don’t know what I’m doing,” he confessed to Baxter quietly, as he finally worked up the courage to place his hands on his friend’s festering skin.
    The sensation overtook him instantly.  Warmth radiated from his palms, and the dog’s head fell limply onto the blanket, his eyes shutting tightly.  For a moment, Jose was sure he’d killed the dog, but then, just as the heat from his hands became almost unbearable, Baxter opened his eyes and the pain retreated as quickly as it had arrived.  He lifted his hand to gaze at his palm, because he didn’t yet have the courage to look directly at the wound.  Where there should have been blood and fluid, there was nothing – only the pale smoothness of his own skin.  Upon seeing this, he forced his gaze to Baxter.
    Where there was no mistaking the wound was gone.

 
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER
    6
     
    LANYING

     
    Sunday, August 28
    Shanghai
     
    Lanying scanned the confirmation email from the airline on her phone, outlining her itinerary from Shanghai to Baltimore where she was scheduled to attend an obesity seminar the following month.  She’d already dragged her rolling luggage from her family’s storage closet in the basement of their high rise apartment building and as it lay zipped open on her bed, she wondered what she should pack.
    Although her trip to Baltimore was still over a week away, her excitement about leaving the country for the first time in her life couldn’t be squelched.  She was attending the seminar as part of her graduate degree program in which she was studying to become a certified obesity counselor.  Her career choice was not a decision she’d taken lightly or one she’d fallen into accidentally.  Lanying was no stranger to obesity or the body shaming that frequently went along with being overweight, especially in the urban Chinese community in which she was raised.
    In a culture where young women were encouraged to post online images of themselves successfully completing tasks like the A4 challenge, in which girls pose behind standard sheets of A4 paper to prove how tiny their waists are, Lanying was an anomaly.  Instead of embracing the notion that she should be able to completely hide her knees behind a six inch iPhone or wrap a 100 Yuan bill around her wrist, she wanted to challenge the ideology that the body images revered in her culture were healthy or attainable.  More than that, she wanted to help those individuals struggling with actual obesity to establish and maintain healthy lifestyles.
    As she scanned the contents of her closet, contemplating possible blouse/skirt combinations for the conference, her mother appeared at her open bedroom door.
    “What’s all this?” she asked, puckering her face into a disapproving scowl.
    Lanying flinched at the critical sound of her mother’s voice.  It was the same tone she always used when speaking with her, but it’s frequent recurrence didn’t make it any less demoralizing.
    “I’m, uh, just trying to get things ready for my trip,” she told her mother, sliding the closet door shut with her foot.
    “Do they make appropriate apparel in your size?” she asked in her characteristically passive-aggressive way.  “I assume you’re going to be expected to wear something more sophisticated than those baggy jeans you’re always schlepping around in.”
    Lanying balled her fists and forced herself to take a deep breath.  She wouldn’t let her mother offend her.  Still, it frustrated her to know that although she’d lost over 70 pounds in the years since being diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome, better known as PCOS, her mother remained quite obviously embarrassed and ashamed of her appearance.  That a disorder had incited Lanying’s sudden and uncontrollable weight gain at the age of 13 was inconsequential to her mother.  All that mattered was the shame she’d brought to her family. 
    “I have plenty of appropriate