Io

Spring

That spring, I went from skinny to flat-out chubby, but I was still a bit shorter than may mom. I can tell you; I didn't care for that not a smidge.

But if there is one thing my dad taught me before he ran off on us, it was 'Son, never be a quitter.'

I started bodybuilding like crazy. I'd heft dinky weights in our basement. I'd do sit-ups by the gazillions in my bedroom. I walked, jogged, ran, jumped, and bounced for measureless miles around our measly backyard.

After each workout, I'd weigh myself on the bathroom scale. Then I'd use the tape measure my mom lent me to calculate my height, shoulders, and waist.

"You'll want your hips and bust too," my mom told me.

My labors got me nowhere—fast—not a smidge of muscle. Blessedly, I did lose some of my baby fat though.

What scared me most at that time was that I didn't so sprout up as spread out. I put on a couple of inches alright—all in the hips. Going from twenty-nine inches to a whopping thirty-three. My waist, pretty much, stayed stuck—maybe shrinking an inch down to twenty-six inches. Worst, my height seemed to be stuck at a measly five-foot-two.

The thing I hated the most though was my jelly belly. No matter how may sit ups I did it remained round and soft.

I thought my luck had finally changed for the better when my chest started to grow. But my hopes soon turned to ashes. You know, what a man's nipples are supposed to look like? Well, mine didn't look like that, not a tiny bit. They got pudgy and pokey—tenting up my tee-shirt and embarrassing me something awful me. And each day the brownish circle around them, like a bull's eye, just seemed to get larger and darker.