I didn’t die when I fell into the candy river, you know.

That mean girl didn’t die when she got flushed down the fake novelty toilet. Neither did the other one, the one who ate so much jelly that they rolled her away to pump her stomach. I think she set the record for the highest ever blood glucose level, but she’s alive. We write sometimes.

The one who got hit with the shrink ray, he still lives at the factory. They put him into one of those miniature Christmas villages, and he does a one-man production of A Christmas Carol that’s pretty derivative of Patrick Stewart’s act, if you want to know the truth. But he’s four inches tall, so no one gives him any shit. He lives alone in a ceramic inn, watching movies on an iPhone that lights up his whole house. I don’t think he does much of anything from January to November.

The guy who won, who got the factory at the end despite his dad sneaking into the secret coca powder room, he’s a real asshole. I mean, nobody who gets rich at an early age like that really stands a chance. He started on the bottom and now he’s a CEO who thinks the poor are lazy. He only brings kids around when he wants new blood in his veins.

He and I don’t talk.

Anyway, I was surprised to find that everyone on the internet thinks I died. Listen, there would have been a lawsuit. The waiver our parents signed said they would have had to go to arbitration rather than a trial, but there would have been an even bigger settlement. I might be fat, but I was my mother’s favorite child. It’s incredible, the things you read about yourself, the shit people project on to you. I apparently ate my father, I’m currently dead, and my body was cut up and made into taffy. It’s like Sinclair’s Jungle for Disney adults.

Nobody died on the widely publicized tour for minors at the mysterious candy factory. Christ, there were cameras absolutely everywhere. Can you imagine the circus they’d have made of our deaths?

I was out first. The way they edited it, the way they played it for laughs just proves that I made the right choice.

That was a miserable day, start to finish. He kept us waiting outside for ages, even though we were the winners. We had to wait around out there with the whole crowd filming us, asking us questions, and taking cheap shots. I was the only fat kid to win a trip to the candy factory. Guess what most of the jokes were about.

My mom made me wear this thing under my clothes, basically Spanx for babies. I was nine! She said it would make me look better on camera. Mother dear, I have seen the footage. I was always going to look fat, but I also look uncomfortable. Because I was.

The factory was also just a bonkers place. I expected stainless steel and paper coveralls. But he had tried to make it all whimsical inside and not like a clean, modern factory. Everyone working there avoided the cameras, masked up and not making eye contact. I know it came out later that they were all undocumented and he was bringing them in from some island. I felt sorry for them, but I was too young to understand it at the time.

What I did understand was that every camera was trying to catch us doing something funny or stupid, because given opportunity, anyone will. Especially kids. They were watching the rich girl and the iPad kid, because they seemed like good bets. When that sadist let us loose in the edible environment, though, all eyes were on me.

We were all chewing the scenery! Kids like candy, and they love being in a space where the normal rules are suspended. Another group of kids might have been shy, but I always thought that the contestants weren’t randomly chosen.

None of us were shy. None of us had a disability, or even braces. We were like the cast of a reality show: oppositional to one another, strongly opinionated, different enough to stand out, but uniformly cute white kids. Can’t have been a coincidence.

Also, not a coincidence that I was the first one out.

The rich girl was going to town on a gummi worm the length of her arm. The soon-to-be jellyroll figured out that if you shook tree branches, they rained candy-coated chocolate raindrops. The shrieky-shrinky kid was literally eating dirt, once he realized the ground was cake. And that little fucker who won sat down with his dad and basically posed, drinking chocolate from those waxy yellow cup flowers.

Listen, I’m not saying the whole thing was rigged. But I knew from the beginning.

I didn’t want to eat on camera. My mom and I argued about that before we left home. I hated when people watched me eat, hated that she’d made a spectacle of me. I was the Vienna Sausage! People came from miles around to see me beat a food challenge in a pub. Chubby-cheeked and chewing in every picture and video. And I loathed it.

So, when the cameras all swung toward me to see me do some fat kid shit like lick the wallpaper, I could see where this was going. I pretended to drink from the candy river, and then I “tripped.”

Getting stuck in the pipes was the worst of it. But at least when they fished me out, nobody was watching.

I took off my sausage casing and got a shower before the flight back home. I stopped eating competitively. I think my mom missed the attention, but the money from the factory kept her quiet.

It kept me quiet, too. Until now.

Now the new factory owner has named his “kids’ fitness challenge” after me.

Now I’m coming for him.