Tyler was fretting. He was getting quite good at it.
Tyler had always had lingering, uncertain feelings about members of the opposite sex who possessed what some of high school’s more Neanderthal elements might refer to as ‘some junk in their trunk’. As a skinny, uncommunicative slacker whose social skills usually only extended to bizarre conversations with the school potheads who ordered pizza at 2am, Tyler wasn’t really looking for any more problems in his life. In addition to school, his job, his divorced parents, his non-existant love life and his pet gerbil Harry, he didn’t need any more issues complicating things.
So he tried, whenever possible, to tuck those horribly enticing thoughts of blooming love handles and overgrown tummies in the back of his mind. So long as he didn’t think about it, he reasoned, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. Okay, maybe keeping his desires a secret would cause him to have a nervous breakdown when he was forty, but judging by his parents, that seemed to happen anyhow. Just ignore it, he told himself, and everything will remain normal.
And then he met Alice. And that plan got shot straight to hell.
Alice was sweet, funny, kind and above all, innocent. Where previous girls Tyler had liked had seemed so together and in control that they never needed someone like him, Alice seemed to be assaulted by all sides - idiot ex-boyfriends, rampaging mothers, conniving squad captains. And because she couldn’t cope - who could? - she came to him. Or more specifically, to the increasingly huge pizzas he made.
He kinda felt bad about that. He wasn’t sure if there was a rulebook for chubby chasers, but using the emotional distress of pretty girls to add some flab probably wasn’t on their ethical ‘To Do’ list. But he decided that, with his luck, this kind of dream couldn’t last. The gods had sent him enough miracles - letting Alice into his life, and then letting him watch her expand dreamily, across the border from chubby into plump and borderline Fat. He knew the other shoe was going to drop sooner or later, so he might as well enjoy it while he could. Besides, he was bringing pleasure and comfort to a girl who obviously needed it.
With the situation rationalised, Tyler felt like he was getting a handle on things. Then, the plan had been blown straight to hell again. Because, in a moment of adolescent weakness, he’d asked her out. And she said yes.
She said yes. She said yes. She. Said. YES. There were miracles and there were miracles, but Tyler was beginning to wonder if he’d accidentally sold his soul to Satan. He had skipped all the way back to the pizza parlour and strutted through the rest of his shift feeling like Casanova on Viagra. Until he realised that his plan to just play along with Alice’s appetites, wherever they may take her, could no longer work. If they were going to go out (even if it was just for five minutes, which is how long Tyler estimated it would take her to dump him), he needed to be honest with her. Confess his adoration for her ballooning bod and face the consequences. He would’ve done it when he asked her out, if he hadn’t been stunned into an idiotically happy silence by the sight of Alice’s obviously overindulged tummy.
So here he was, standing outside Alice’s home a few days before their ‘official’ date, trying desperately to figure out a way of telling a girl she was fat and that he liked it that wouldn’t result in her hitting him. Unknown to him, it was a problem that had been wrestled with by countless other young FAs. So far, a satisfactory answer had not been found.
He took a deep breath, and stepped up to the door and knocked. As the door opened, his nervous smile froze and a look of horror crept into his eyes. Standing in the doorway was not the adorably pudgy object of his adoration, but the lean, skeletal figure of Alice’s mother, eyeing him with contemptuous suspicion, a Martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She glared down at him.
"Yes?" "Um... I’m... s-sorry... Is, ah... Is..." In Tyler’s mind, alarm bells were ringing. He hadn’t considered this contingency. He desperately tried to make a connection between his brain and mouth. "Is Alice in?"
"Who wants to know?" she snorted, blowing smoke in his face. Tyler tried not to gag.
"I’m, ah... a friend. Tyler?" He hoped this would be enough. She was looking at him like he was a dead rat. She laughed. She had this weird, cackling kind of laugh. It wasn’t pretty.
"So she was telling the truth. The little blimp found a guy desperate enough to chase her." Tyler winced. Is THAT what Alice had said? "Well, sorry boy. You can’t go hoggin’ tonight. Or any night for quite some time. By the time Alice gets back, she’ll be slim and svelte and beautiful enough to get someone way better than you."
I’ve hit a new low, thought Tyler. I’m being insulted by a girl’s mother. A spark of unfamiliar anger flared within him.
"Where is she?" he asked, in a level tone that was nevertheless as cold as ice.
"Sgt. Sandra Sphincter’s Crazy Christmas Image Enhancement Camp."
Tyler looked at her for a minute to make sure she wasn’t joking. With mounting horror, it dawned on him what the old witch was saying.
"Fat camp?" he said. "You sent Alice is FAT CAMP?!"
"Don’t say that like she doesn’t need it. The little piglet needed to be taught some discipline."
Tyler bunched his hand. Into a fist. For a moment he fantasised about shoving this hideous harridan in the big pizza oven back at the restaurant, just like in Hansel and Gretal. But it passed.
"She’s not the one that needs to be taught a lesson," he said. "You might be seeing her sooner than you think." And with that, he turned around and walked away.
"What the hell do you mean by that, you little punk?!" Alice’s mother called after him. But he didn’t hear her. All he could think was, Well, that’s another plan shot to hell.
***
Of all the places Alice could’ve made new friends, she never would have guessed ‘Image Enhancement Camp’ - or ‘Boot Camp for Fat Booty’ as Amber had dubbed it - would’ve been top of the list. She was having a blast. Their cabin was large, but it was camp policy to keep ‘new inmates’ separate from the rest of the camp population for the first few weeks, so that the girls who’d been here longer didn’t give them any comfort or encouragement. Luckily, that wasn’t a problem. Alice thought Heather and Amber were the sweetest people she’d ever met, even though the two were very, VERY different.
Heather was more similar to Alice. She was bubbly, innocently sweet and a little naïve, and had been open and welcoming since the first moment she’d been shoved through the door. Amber was somewhat different. No less kind or sweet, but she was far more... worldly. Alice had never met a lesbian before - she didn’t have an ounce of homophobia in her body, but living in a small town, there wasn’t a big gay and lesbian population. She swore as easily as Alice said please and thank you, but never in a mean or snarky way, except when referring to her parents. Despite her proper upbringing, Alice found herself nurturing similar thoughts towards mummy dearest herself. If nothing else, Amber had certainly expanded Alice’s vocabulary.
And she was enraptured by both girls’ stories. After initially being stunned by their tales of weight gain, she soon found herself curious to know more, but she wasn’t sure how to broach the subject. Luckily, she didn’t have to. Heather leaned over - giving Alice and Amber a view of her expansive, jiggling rear (Alice noticed Amber bit her lip and smiled a little at this) and pulled open a drawer beside her bed, filled with the meagre personal items they had been allowed to take with them. She pulled out a wallet and removed a photograph from it. "There!" she said triumphantly. "This is what my ‘it’s for your own good’ mother wants me back to."
She handed the photograph to Amber, who whistled. "Nice progress, Heather sweetie," she said. "Makes me nostalgic for the days when I was that scrawny."
Alice felt her curiosity piqued as Amber passed her the photo. It showed two friends, sitting on a park bench and laughing uproariously. One of them - an exotic-looking brunette - looked fairly hefty - about 170-180 pounds, Alice estimated, with most of it going to her bust and hips. The other... Alice looked up at the proud, smiling face of Heather to compare. Yep, it was her all right. The picture showed a diminuitive high school senior, with incredible red hair tied up in a ponytail that reached down beyond her shoulders. She wore a belly top that revealed her trim middle and cargo pants - a (failed) effort to conceal her less-than-substantial butt. Alice was never one to judge by these standards, but the girl looked pretty... flat in the chest area. She looked up again. The Heather that stood before her was the same person, but you’d never have guessed it apart from the face her face remained broadly unchanged, save for the development of a cute little double chin. She still had the same sparkling green eyes and fiery red hair (a legacy from Irish ancestry, Alice learned). But apart from that, incredible developments had taken place. Her previously non-existant bosom had thrust forwards, verging on the D range and bouncing and shifting with the slightest movement. Downstairs, Heather’s once bony hips grown round and womanly and her flat bum looked like a pair of inflated basketballs. She was almost spilling out of her tight camp uniform, with slightly flabby love-handles and a tubby tummy poking out between her shirt and shorts.
"Wow..." was all Alice could whisper. "You really, uh, blossomed?"
"Did more than that!" she said happily, jumping on her bed and reclining happily, resting her hands on her mammoth gut. "Fattened up good and proper! All for my boy Justin!" A look of sadness suddenly crossed her face... "Justin... by the time I get out of here, I won’t be the girl he fell for! I don’t wanna go back to the skinny little flatass I used to be!"
"None of us do," said Amber. "And we’re not going to. We’re getting out of here, one way or another..."
Alice wasn’t sure exactly how big Amber was. She was so huge that she couldn’t have weighed less than 500 pounds; she was almost perfectly round, and she had some difficulty moving around at her size. Her enormous, jiggling gut hung out of her bursting camp shorts, and her shirt continuously rode up her gut, bunching into rolls just beneath her giant, watermelon-sized knockers. Her large, globular boobs pressed against the flimsy shirt with such pressure that the stitching was breaking and the outline of her heavy-duty brassiere. Amber’s camp uniform seemed to have been sized for a much smaller girl.
“Don’t worry,” said Amber, “My girlfriend Sally would never let them starve me into submission. She’d freak. She’ll be here to bust us out in no time.”
“Um,” said Alice, “Speaking of, uh, busting out…uh…no offense or anything…but..uh..isn’t that uniform the wrong size?”
Amber grinned widely. She seemed to be enjoying Alice’s discomfort. “You mean, am I too fat for this uniform? You bet I am! I’m so damn fat that you couldn’t find a uniform big enough to fit me. Just you wait, though, if Sally doesn’t get us out soon, well, I’ll see to it somehow that this uniform is even smaller soon…”
“Besides,” said Heather, “They purposely try to give you a tight uniform to make you more self-conscious, so you won’t resist their weight-loss propaganda. Wait till they size you, Alice. You’ll see.”
“Joy,” said Alice sarcastically.
***
“C’mon, you’ve got to let me in! There’s a girl in there who’s not supposed to be here!”
Sgt. Sandra eyed Tyler suspiciously. She didn’t like people who tried to get into her camp. Well, she didn’t like them when they weren’t campers, because non-campers didn’t pay fees. So she wasn’t going to make any money letting Tyler inside. She was a huge muscular woman and she filled the front doorway of her camp cabin, the only entrance into the fat camp complex, towering over the scrawny Tyler.
“What’s this girl’s name?”
“Alice.”
Sandra ran her fingers down the list of campers. “Alice, Alice, Alice…oh, yes, her. The chunky blond. Nope, looks like she’s supposed to be here. Her mother signed her up. Just who are you anyway?”
“Um…well, I guess I’m sorta her boyfriend.”
“Oh, of course. I know your type. You think your chick’s just perfect or something, because you’re blinded by love. Bleh. You totally miss that your girlfriend’s a big chunk. That or your one of those freaks that like fat chicks. Whatever your deal is, you can just get lost. You’ll get your girlfriend back when she’s nice and slim. Till then you can just wait.”
She turned on her heals
One of them was a tall, tanned, well-built guy about Tyler’s age, wearing reassuringly scruffy clothes and a mean expression on his face. His eyes were blazing fury, all fire and brimstone. He was pacing the sidewalk outside the camp gates, muttering something that Tyler couldn’t quite catch, save the occasional bitter expletive.
The other was... Tyler couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed her before. For one thing, she was hard to miss. The girl had to be over 250lbs. She was wearing hipster jeans - Tyler was amazed they made them to fit her size, and judging by the thicks love handles that spilled over the waistband and the tightness with which the denim clung to her massive thighs, they didn’t - and a belly shirt. Tyler was surprised and enthused to see a girl that wasn’t afraid to show off her body, especially when sporting a belly that, if he hadn’t seen the rest of her equally meaty figure - he might have guessed at being pregnant with twins. She was sitting on the sidewalk, looking glum. She glanced up and gave him a dirty look.
"Dropping someone off?" she asked bitterly. "Another poor soul who needs to be saved from donuts and chubby thighs?"
This triggered a violent response from her male compatriot, who kicked a trash-can hard enough for it to dent severely. He decided to choose his words carefully. "No, actually..." he said slowly. "I was trying to get someone out."
This was enough to get their attention. The guy stopped pacing and the girl, with some difficulty, got to her feet. Then, slowly, she smiled at him curiously, and wandered over. "Really," she said.
"Yeah, my..." Well, he might as well say it, he thought. "My girlfriend, actually. Her mom packed her away to this place against her will, and I was trying to get in to see her."
The two strangers exchanged glances, as if the same idea was dawning on each of them at the same time. Then, the girl extended one chubby hand. "I’m Shelley," she said, "and this is Justin."
Tyler took her hand and shook it cautiously. The girl’s excessive poundage gave her a painfully strong handshake. She took out a candy bar (caramel and hazelnut, Tyler noticed - Alice’s favourite) and started chewing thoughtfully, her pretty, double-chinned face moving rhythmically with every mouthful.
"We’re organizing a break-out. You in?"
Silence for a moment.
"Yeah."
To Be Continued...