Fifty-five gallons... How many calories was that? If there were around two hundred in the typical candy bar... She eyed the barrel, trying to figure out how many candy bars would fit in the thing. It was at least two feet in diameter and three feet in height, and a candy bar was how big...?
Hershey bars, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Snicker bars, Almond Joys, Butterfingers, Mounds, Milky Ways, and Twix bars danced past her mind's eye, each of them a different shape, none of which she knew the height, width, or depth of.
You might not know their dimensions in inches, but that doesn't mean you don't know how big they are. Use ounces, you ninny.
Of course! Ounces... How stupid of her not to have thought of that immediately. There were what...? Four ounces in an average candy bar? So how many times did four ounces divide into fifty-five gallons?
Panicky, she closed her eyes and muttered to herself while performing the necessary calculations. Eight ounces in a cup, two cups in a pint, two pints in a quart, and four quarts in a gallon...
Oh dear God. There were one hundred twenty-eight ounces in a gallon, so fifty-five gallons came to over seven thousand ounces. Seven thousand and forty, to be exact.
Dividing that by four, her little snack had been the equivalent of eating one thousand seven hundred and sixty candy bars for a total of three hundred and fifty-two thousand calories.
Unless, the tiny voice in the back of her head piped up again, unless the average candy bar is actually only three and a half ounces rather than...
"Shut up," Odelia said aloud. "Just shut your fucking mouth."
And unless the average number of calories contained in that three and half ounces was actually more in the region of two hundred and twenty...
In which case, she had gulped down nearly half a million calories in... How long had she been out? She raised her hand to her face and checked her fingernails, hoping to find they had grown.
What nonsense... You know damned well it's still the morning of the day after they left. Admit it. You drank fifty five gallons of highly concentrated proteins dissolved in butter and you did it in less than two hours, and it wasn't three hundred thousand calories, or even half a million, but at least twice that, because an Almond Joy is a sliver of Melba toast next to Melanie's super swill.
A fresh wave of growing pains in her abdomen seized and shook Odelia, and she groaned. Maybe if she threw up...
Thrusting two fingers into her mouth, she forced them down her throat as far as they could go, wiggling them for greater effect. When her gag reflex finally kicked in, she clenched her eyes shut to guard against splash back and rolled onto her side, hanging her head over the edge of her mattress as she retched, her mighty stomach muscles clenching like a giant fist.
Odelia opened her eyes to find the floor no less clean than it had been when she'd closed them.
Which could only mean the entire fifty-five gallons had already descended too far down her digestive system to be purgeable, at least from that end. Thinking of pencils with all her might, she strained to void herself from the other, but that proved futile, too. Her efforts were rewarded with not so much as a splinter. Apparently, her body had assigned the tidal wave of fuel she'd engulfed to some other purpose, one beyond her ability to either direct or abort.
Whatever it was, it hurt like hell, but worse still was the uncertainty over where, when, and even if, the transformative expansion would stop. The walls were literally closing in on her, or she on them, which amounted to the same thing.
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 '...
