I want to explain why I cared before I tell you what he did next. I grew up with a mother who was plus-size. My mother was, objectively, one of the kindest and smartest people I have ever known, and she was also, for every single year of my childhood, the target of a specific and exhausting kind of public cruelty that I did not fully understand until I was old enough to watch it happen to her from the outside. I remember, at age twelve, being in a Sears with my mom and a woman she did not know saying, loud enough to be heard, "Some people need to stop eating." I remember my mother's face. I remember wanting to say

something. I remember not saying anything, because I was twelve and I did not know what to say, and because my mother squeezed my hand and said "it's okay, honey, it's okay" even though we both knew it was not okay. My mother died when I was twenty-three. She never got to see me get married, or have my son, or do any of the things I have gotten to do in the fifteen years since. I think about her every time I see a plus-size woman being made smaller by a stranger. Sitting across the aisle from 14D on an American flight in June, watching that man sit down in 14E with a performative sigh, I felt my mother's hand in mine in a Sears in Des Plaines, Illinois, in 1998.