Brian belched. It smelled like tomato sauce.
They must have had pizza for the fifth night in a row, Odelia thought, a glow of happiness spreading through her. Jackson ought to be 'whisper yelling' at Melanie full throttle right about now...
Her own supper had been duck, medium rare, with pistachio and truffle dipping sauce—one bite only of course, but ohhhhh... what a bite. She had just finished washing it down with about a gallon of chocolate protein shake.
Real or not, the sensation of tasting and swallowing solid food had greatly increased her already monstrous appetite, and her swill consumption had swollen to meet it. The resulting avalanche of pencils was nightly shoveled into garbage bags, usually by Brian, who was almost always stuck with manning the final shift of the evening. Four bags, three filled and tied off, and the other open to receive the next floor sweeping, bracketed the door.
Odelia occasionally found herself wondering what was happening to the pencils. Courtney had taken a few to share with her kindergarten class, including Marshall, who had managed to get one stuck in his ear tightly enough to require the assistance of the school nurse, and Brian had been replacing his lost allowance by selling them to classmates, but that accounted for only a few dozen out of hundreds of thousands.
If Odelia wasn't careful, Melanie might wind up with enough inventory to become a pencil wholesaler.
Production wasn't the only thing on the rise, either. She was undergoing yet another growth spurt.
She squirmed, tensing and relaxing her muscles over and over, wishing she could exercise properly, or even simply stretch her legs out flat. What she wouldn't give to be able to unbend her knees...
Instead, she found herself bending them a little more with each passing day. Forced to lie with her feet pressed flat against one wall while the top of her head brushed the one opposite, she felt like she was sitting on an invisible chair whose legs were sinking slowly into the ground. If Melanie would only move back into the master bedroom suite where she belonged, Odelia could buy herself a little more time by shifting her mattresses around and lying cattycorner, but the woman showed no sign of budging.
As things now stood, she was no more than a week away from being forced to reveal her Secret Bending Ability.
The prospect occasioned only the faintest hum of underlying anxiety. Once she would have been terrified, teary and shaking in her toga-turned-blouse at the very thought, but now that she daily did battle with (and vanquished) horrors worthy of Lovecraft... well. She was almost looking forward to it.
It was a given that coiling her body into something not unlike a Chinese dragon would erase whatever traces of humanity her form still possessed, and she was unsure what the consequences of this might be, so she had decided to put off the big reveal until it became absolutely necessary in order to continue fitting within the room. But once it was necessary, she might as well make the most of the opportunity to scare Melanie's hair right off her scalp.
"—eighty carats of gemstone in solid gold! How many of your girlfriends are walking around with an eighty carat gemstone pendant? Not many, that's for sure!"
"How can you stand to listen to that?" Odelia asked Brian.
His nose remained buried in his Earth Sciences text book.
"—the hand labor in this piece is amazing. Doesn't it make your heart go pitter-pat?"
"Couldn't you talk to me a little? Just a smidge... Please?"
YOU ARE READING
Tipping the Scales
ChickLitOdelia has spent most of her life so firmly under her brother's thumb that she might as well have been an insect trapped in a chunk of amber, but now, at long last, something is happening to her. Too bad it's not a nice, normal, something, like a '...
