Tipping the Scales

Tipping the Scales, Chapter 09

"You can roll onto your back now," Melanie said.

She had used a curved upholstery needle wielded with a pair of pliers to sew a queen-sized mattress to the side of Odelia's king-sized one. It was queen-sized because the room wasn't big enough to hold two king ones side-by-side, not and leave Melanie enough room to move around Odelia when her toga needed changed.

Idly, Odelia wondered what they would do if she ever became so big she overlapped the new mattress configuration.

What was she thinking? Surely she could never become that big.

"Can you do something for me?"

Melanie paused in the act of tucking a sheet corner under the mattress. "Of course. What?"

"I'm feeling kind of curious about the weight and physical dimensions of the biggest human being on record. Could you look it up on the Guinness Book of World Records site?"

Frowning, Melanie shook her head. "You don't want to be in the Guinness Book. If people find out about you, the government will swoop down and carry you away, probably to one of those Eastern Block black-ops prisons they claim don't exist anymore. That or a lab, where they'll study you to find out how your... thingie... works and see if they can't make more of you."

Until Melanie mentioned it, the thought of applying for Guinness certification hadn't occurred to her. When your ass grows so wide it requires your king-sized mattress to be sewn side-by-side to a queen-sized one, really, confirmation from Guinness becomes superfluous.

But that didn't mean there was no reason to bother applying. As the official record holder, she'd get media attention, and if the world found out about her, she'd be famous. As a freak, of course, not a celebrity, but weren't all celebrities freaks to some extent? When you got right down to it, what was talent or beauty but a bizarre physical anomaly?

But Melanie had a point. What Odelia had become was not merely unusual; it was monstrous. Her condition was nothing short of a criminal violation of the laws of nature. There was no telling how people would react once they knew. Would she be celebrated or despised? If there really were Men in Black, she was definitely the sort of person they would come after.

"No," she said. "I don't want to claim the record. I'm just curious."

"More slop for the trough." Approaching her with a pitcher of shake mix and a sneer on his face, Brian took her extra-long twisty straw from the empty pitcher by her bedside and put it in the new one. "Happy slurping, turd factory."

Despite the increased warmth of her relationship with Odelia, Melanie didn't turn a hair at this. She even patted the little brat's back as he picked up the empty to return it to the kitchen.

Knowing that any complaint would get her nothing but a blank stare, Odelia took a sip of her diet shake. Chocolate, like always...

It was amazing how tired a person could get of the taste of chocolate, even surprisingly good chocolate, but she refused to break down and beg for real food. Despite the fact that she had continued to gain weight while eating nothing but diet shakes, that didn't necessarily mean the effort was accomplishing nothing. If she had continued to eat the high calorie stuff she'd been on before, she might have put on twice as much.

It would help if she could exercise. But that was the impossible dream... Even sitting upright was beyond her now. She had finally learned how best to arrange her fat rolls to facilitate rolling over, but no arrangement of them would allow her to bend at the waist.

"I read that it can take up to six weeks for a diet to start having an effect, and even then you might only lose a pound or two a week," Melanie said with an encouraging smile. "Since we can't put you on a scale, all we can do is be patient and wait for the loss to become large enough to show. If you aren't visibly smaller by spring, I'll try another brand. Don't give up—it's only a matter of time. We'll get it right."

Odelia nodded. Just knowing that somebody in the house was finally on her side made her weepy with gratitude. "I'm going to try to make this pitcher last longer than the last one," she said. "Because it has to be the quantity I'm drinking that's causing the diet to fail—"

"Oh, no! Don't do that!" Melanie's tone was stern. "These shakes are designed so that the more you drink, the more weight you lose! It takes more calories to digest this stuff than it has in it. That's the point of the diet."

"Really? You didn't tell me that before!"

"I wouldn't have chosen anything that didn't let you put as much in your stomach as possible. I knew that would make you utterly miserable."

And possibly, Odelia thought to herself, make my magical ass less productive. But it would be too much to ask that Melanie's motives be wholly selfless. She simply wasn't that sort of person. That she was being helpful at all was much more than Odelia had ever expected. To reward her for her efforts, Odelia drew a titanic swallow through her straw.

Hesitantly, Melanie handed her a catalog, a new one. "Could you maybe..."

"I didn't know Tiffany's had a catalog."

Jackson would have a fit if he knew she was asking for jewelry again. But she was being so helpful and so kind... and if the piece to be cloned was chosen with some care...

Cabochons were smooth. So were beads. She could manage beads, no problem.

They would actually be quite a bit easier on her than most of the other things she was making, because beads were relatively tiny and had no pointy edges anywhere. If there was something along the lines of a string of pearls in the catalog, perhaps she could let Melanie have what she wanted without giving Jackson any reason to throw a tantrum about it. It would need to be something without a diamond encrusted clasp or other finding, though, and jewelry this high-end almost always featured diamonds somewhere... She propped the catalog open on the shelf of her bosom, and began flicking through its pages.

Fingers white-knuckling around her upholstery kit, Melanie's breathing visibly quickened. "So you will?"

"Maybe," Odelia said. "I'll sleep on it, and tell you tomorrow."