When Pam showed up at Thanksgiving last year wearing plus-sized jeans, the winner didn’t make a crack about her weight gain. When Pam’s thirteen year-old daughter Gabriella texted all the way through dinner and didn’t look up once, the winner didn’t comment on how rotten a parent Pam turned out to be. The winner instead was quietly satisfied that Pam would always be relegated to the universe of losers. This loser universe includes Pam, Pam’s ex-husband Dean and her current boyfriend Ira, whom she met at an Overeaters Anonymous meeting. Ira seems like an okay guy, but a winner has too much self-control to ever need a 12-step program.

That night, Pam cornered the winner in his old bedroom in their parents’ house. She said that her OA sponsor (loser) told her that she needed to make amends for making fun of him. The winner said he forgave her. He even allowed Pam to give him a hug. Even though the winner would have rather vomited up his own intestinal tract than to have to physically touch Pam, he hugged her anyway. That’s what winners do: They feign love when what they really feel is blistering hatred.

When the winner hugged Pam, he noticed that her hair smelled like flowers. Her arms, although pale and doughy, gripped him with a kind of fierce tenderness. It reminded the winner of when he was little, how Pam would sometimes give him a horsey ride on her back. He would bury his head in her long, dark hair and beg her to go faster, and she would, bucking up and down until the room began to spin. As the walls whipped around him, it would seem as though the world was made up only of the winner and Pam. As Pam hugged him, tears sprang to the winner’s eyes.