Author's note: Hey everyone, my schedule was thrown off a bit last week and now I am playing catch up. I'll be sure to hit my wordcount by the end of the month, I'll start catching up today by sharing this draft of a short one-off I am working on. It is just under 2,000 words. Feedback would be appreciated, as I feel something is just missing from this draft. Let me know what you think.
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Party Girl
I outgrew being a party girl. Literally. I got fat. In my late 20s. Well, not fat-fat, but fat from the subjective opinion of someone who once flawlessly fit the personification of society’s generally unobtainable standards of conventional beauty. In college I was perfect, tall with long toned legs, blonde hair with blue eyes, full lips, hips, breasts, and butt, with a slim stomach. Along with my roommate, Hayden, who was practically my twin, only with long brown hair and matching brown eyes, we were the envy of every woman on campus and target of every guy on campus. We didn’t even hit the gym that hard; we were just lucky.
Copious amounts of beer, late night mac and cheese, and ramen noodles over the course of our four years never really seemed to stick to either of us. We did do a lot of walking to parties and dancing at parties, so I guess we moved enough to offset all the calories we were consuming. Or maybe our youthful metabolisms were just that invincible. I don’t really know.
What I do know is after graduation I got a desk job at a local hospital, and Hayden started waitressing full time. Since we were living in the same town it made sense to room together after college. It was a no-brainer. We were best friends, and we figured that was never going to change.
Spoiler alert. It changed. Slowly. It all started when I started putting on weight.
About a year or two after graduation I noticed some of my clothes weren’t fitting me the way they used to. I attributed this change to a coincidental change in where we did our laundry usually. Our apartment complex had a laundry room, but it got closed for a while for renovations so we were forced to start hauling our laundry to a laundromat down the street. Needless to say, I was willing to believe any excuse rather than face the facts that I was gaining weight.
At work I was sitting more than ever, moving less than I’d ever moved before, and strangely enough I was also more tired than ever. Hayden still went out clubbing all the time, and I joined her plenty, but it got to the point I couldn’t keep up with her anymore and started to enjoy my personal quiet time when she was out late, and I was alone in front of the TV with a pint of Ben and Jerrys. Around the house, I started opting for comfier clothes, like stretchy pajamas or sweats, rather than the stylish attire I was known for in college.
In the two years since graduation, I’d probably gained 15 or 20 pounds. I still looked good. I still fit into my stylish clothes, barely. I still partied a little, but I was also maturing and coming to see the value in public spaces where I could actually hear myself think. I was expanding my tastes and horizons, as my body did the same. I’d been a picky eater in college, mostly opting to devour junk food when I was too drunk to care, but as a young adult food became an adventure. Where once I got my thrill from hunting for exotic places to mix and mingle with cute guys, I’d learned to find it, far easier, in an oversized serving of pasta, pizza, or even ice cream with some melted peanut butter and chocolate on top.
While I was too in denial to recognize what was happening to my once flawless figure, Hayden surely wasn’t. She’d tease me that I needed to start hitting the gym, that I was starting to show my age, or that I could afford to drop a few pounds, but I never took her little petty criticisms too seriously. In truth, I just didn’t believe her. I convinced myself she was jealous.
So, the trend continued. We worked, we played, I kept slowly packing on weight, and the two of us continued to slowly drift apart. Four years later, on my 28th birthday, my longstanding denial was finally broken. In college I weighed around 135 pounds, six years later I was closer to 195. Hayden had gained some weight since college too, maybe five or ten pounds, but it had all gone to her curves, not to her waist. I had developed a fat spare tire, and an expansively thick butt to act as a counterbalance. I’d gotten big enough to outgrow my college wardrobe but dismissed the warning signs. I didn’t go out with Hayden much at all anymore, I was content to stay at home, watch TV, do my nails, chat with friends or occasionally venture out of town to a winery in the countryside or something like that to change things up.
The only exercise I was getting was walking up and down the steps to the front door of our apartment. I was eating more than ever. I snacked at home, at work, and had started eating out almost every other day. I was just too tired to meal prep.
It was on my 28th birthday that Hayden convinced me to go clubbing with her like old times to celebrate. I reluctantly agreed. When I was getting ready, I struggled to find a cute dress in my wardrobe that my soft flab wouldn’t spill out of. In my head, my struggles weren’t because I was overweight, I always blamed it on something else. Always. When I eventually found a dress that actually made me feel good about myself, I decided I needed to ask for Hayden’s help to zip it up. The dress fit, but it was tight. When I poked my head out of my room, I overheard Hayden talking on the phone to one of her other friends we were planning on meeting up with:
“We’re leaving soonish. Little miss porkchop is trying to squeeze into something. So, who knows when she’ll be ready haha!”
My cheeks blushed red, my hands reached for my soft chubby gut, and Hayden’s words echoed in my head, ‘little miss porkchop??’
Then Hayden continued, “No, I actually love going out with her. I feel like dragging a porker along makes us look even hotter by comparison!”
My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe Hayden was talking about me that way. We used to talk like that about other girls, other friends even, but never each other. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten that big, but then I looked in the mirror and saw the truth. I was a far cry from my former self. My bad habits had caught up with me. Hayden didn’t see me as a friend anymore, she saw me as a tool to use for her own personal gain.
Instead of finding some spiteful resolve to get back in shape and prove Hayden wrong about me. My laziness took over. Losing the weight would take a lot of work, a lot of energy, I simply didn’t possess anymore. Instead, I didn’t want to better myself to prove Hayden wrong. I wanted to drag her down with me. I wanted to ruin her, like I’d ruined myself, then we’d be even and we could be friends again.
My mission started that night. Hayden and I were two girls, out and about drinking dancing, having a good time, all smiles, but underneath the friendly facade the truth was she was much more conventionally attractive than I was now, and confident. It was my birthday, but she was getting all the attention. So, I pushed her to drink, and drink and drink. By the time our night concluded, and we made it back to our apartment, she was putty in my hands.
“Tonight was so much fun!” Hayden slurred stumbling onto the couch.
“You drank a lot, you should eat something.” I urged her, pulling out a cake I’d been keeping in the fridge for just this moment.
“I’m too tired to eat anything.” Hayden complained, but I wasn’t going to take no as an answer.
“Then I’ll feed you.” I suggested, as I used a fork to force some cake right between her flawless lips.
“Mhh! Yummy!” Hayden moaned not sensing my true intensions, “Feed me more!”
“Oh don’t worry. I will. I promise. I’m going to take good care of you.” I chirped in almost a motherly tone.
From that night onward, I used Hayden’s addiction to partying against her. Every night she’d returned drunk from a night out on the town, I’d take care to feed her to my hearts content. It started slowly, but quickly snowballed. Once overeating late at night, practically every night became a drunken habit, it was all over for my 28-year-old former best friend. Her metabolism, like mine, was a shadow of its former self. The food and alcohol began to stick. First to her tits and ass, but eventually everywhere else.
A few months later, she’d gotten a little pudgy in places and was in complete denial. She claimed her issues were just related to bloating and kept going about her normal routine. Too much food, and not enough gym. As her conditioning got worse, she stopped dancing as much. The less she moved, the more she drank and the more she ate. I felt like I was fattening a pig for slaughter. A year after I started my mission, Hayden was actually starting to look a little chubby, and yet she didn’t seem to really notice. Her clothes no longer fit her properly, so she’d started raiding my closet whenever I wasn’t looking. I knew she was doing it, but I didn’t say anything. I wanted her to feel safe and sneaky.
There was only one problem with my mission, I was still gaining weight too.
It was bad. I was actually gaining weight faster than Hayden was. For every pound of fat I forced onto her frame, I was gaining at least two. She’d gotten chubby, and I’d gone from overweight to fat. At least in my mind, 250 pounds was pretty fat. I know among my coworkers I was now average, with a few being fatter than me, most being around my size and only one new girl being really noticeably skinnier than the rest of us. It was like there was nothing I could do about it. I figured my weight would plateau, but it never really did.
Two years into my petty revenge plan, Hayden didn’t get wise to my scheme, but she did meet the guy of her dreams and got engaged. Like I had done years earlier, at roughly 215 pounds, Hayden had finally grown out of partying. She was moving out, and settling down, and I couldn’t have been more jealous.
When Hayden moved out, my mission ended, for a brief time, my life lost its day-to-day purpose, but then I found a new roommate. Brittney. She was fresh out of college, a friend of my younger sister, and far too flawless for my tastes.
And get this, she liked to party…