Chapter 4 - unconscious irony

I don't know how long I've been out for. Five minutes? Five hours? Five days? It was a mystery to me. Still stuck in a food-induced stupor, my mind is left to wander aimlessly. I dream about being with Jin. Pleasuring Jin. Getting fat for Jin. But in between the fantasies of what my new life will be like, I can't help but think about the irony of all of it.

You see, back in high school, I wasn't exactly the nicest person. In fact, I was kind of a bully. I was the most popular girl in school by far and wielded that power like a dictator. Destroying lives was an everyday routine for me, especially for those I deemed inferior. The nerds, the uggos, the fatties. Especially the fatties.

Being the captain of the cheerleading team, I had an incredibly fit, rock-solid body; one I liked to flaunt whenever I could. So to make myself look even better, I made fun of everyone with more than 2% body fat. Terms like piggy, hippo, lardass, and blimp were thrown around regularly. I would mock chubby girls with oink sounds in the cafeteria, take pictures of them changing after gym and hang them up around the school, steal their boyfriends just so no one would love them. I would poke and pinch and chastise, breaking the spirits of any girl over 130 lbs who blighted my line of vision with their flabby obesity.

Of course my cruel comments only tended to make those girls fatter. Weak souls who turned to fast food and sweets to comfort themselves. While a few girls were motivated by my tough love to shed their blubber, most just kept gaining and gaining. So I kept critiquing. It didn't matter if they cried or went home to stuff their faces. It didn't matter if the dropped out or turned suicidal. All that matters was that I felt better about myself with every hurtful word off my wicked tongue.

I remember this one girl named Betty who tried out for the cheer team freshman year. She was a cute, spunky girl who just wanted to join the team and make friends. Problem was, she was just a little too cute. A little too spunky. She could've been competition some day, but that was gonna be the top dog. So I sabotaged her.

She was a little on the hippy side, but not fat or even chubby by any stretch. However, I honed in on this. I asked her 'as a friend' if she'd be comfortable wearing the short cheerleading skirts in front of everybody. When she asked why, I told her that people were cruel and might make fun of a girl with "her figure". I praised her for being brave in the most falsely sincere way possible and said I wished I had her level of confidence to not care how I looked. As you could imagine, this made her feel self conscious.

As the tryouts went on, I continued to plant seeds of self-doubt in her head. Then I started gossiping with my friends about how big her butt was and how much cellulite she had (she didn't have any, by the way). We talked about this girl like she weighed 300 lbs. and as she started to hear some of the whispers going around school, she got more and more nervous about her figure. This affected her performance and when she messed up during a routine I called her Big Butt Betty and said if her hands weren't so greasy from pigging out on potato chips, she might have been able to do it right. Everyone started laughing and the poor girl ran out of the gym crying.

Big Butt Betty stuck as a nickname and spread from the cheer circle to the entire school. My cheer cronies continued to make fun of her and all the spunk she had on the first day of tryouts was methodically beat out of her. It didn't help that the nickname grew even more true as time went on. Betty did indeed end up with a big butt. A very big butt actually. From freshman year to senior year, she put on at least a hundred pounds, most of which centered on her lower half. So as I continued my grand ascent to Queen Bee status, she started to look more like the bear trying to steal honey out the hive. Even though I made Betty's high school life a living hell, I hear she was doing pretty well for herself now. A good job, a husband, couple of kids. So no harm done, right? More than I can say for my old friend Sophie at least.

Sophie was my lieutenant; another hot, snooty b*tch who got everything she wanted because of her looks. She was my co-captain and best friend. We both took immense pleasure in ridiculing others. And she certainly had the right to feel superior; she was stunningly gorgeous. Blonde hair, blue eyes, curves in all the right places; the true American ideal. She might have been a threat, but wasn't strong or smart enough to actually be a leader, so she fell in line behind me quite well. She may have been homecoming queen, but I was prom queen. We were synonymous with each other until we split up for college. That's when things changed.

She actually had the nerve to put on weight. I mean, didn't she ever consider how that would reflect on me? All the other girls in our cheer army stayed fit for combat, but Sophie plumped up like a hog. After only a few months apart, she started looking more like Big Butt Betty than me. It was unacceptable. So I did what I always did when someone put on weight; I bullied her. I really don't know what she was expecting. I mean, we'd been doing it for years. Just because she was my friend didn't mean I would go easy on her. If anything, it made it worse. She should've known better. I was so mad that I excommunicated her from the group. No piggies allowed in my pack of foxes.

She really pissed me off by getting fat. It made me look bad and I hated looking bad. So I decided to punish her. Her boyfriend always had the hots for me, so I planned to use him to teach her a lesson. Knowing that she'd try and talk to him about losing all her friends, I set up a scenario that would hopefully put her back in line. I went to his house and told him to ignore her calls. Then I said we could have sex if we did it on the couch with the front door unlocked so someone could walk in and catch us in the act. Then when she came, he would have to call her a fatty while she watched us do it in front of her. That aught'a teach her a lesson.

Plan went off without a hitch, she's so predictable, and the poor girl was devastated when we both called her fat in the middle of our sex session. She stormed off crying and I never saw her again after that. I was hoping that the tough love approach would help her straighten up and drop the pounds, but it seemed to backfire. Remember, she wasn't very strong. So I think my callousness might have broken her. She dropped out of school, became a shut-in, and put on a bunch of weight. Last I heard, she was still living at home with her mom taking care of her 24/7. She ending up being immobile, too fat to even stuff her own face. Her family's fortune continues to dwindle as she literally eats them out of house and home. I hear she weighs over 1,000 lbs now, maybe even closer to a ton.

I'm not the same girl I was back then. I changed. I became a much nicer person as I got older. With age comes wisdom after all. Hollywood humbled me quite a bit since I was no longer the hottest chick on the block. I felt bad now about what I'd did to Betty and Sophie and all those other girls who's lives I made miserable. I felt guilty.

And that's where this feeling of irony comes from. After all those years of mocking fatties, I was going to become one. Was it some form of karma perhaps? The universe punishing me for being such a monster as a teenager? Was the mighty Whitney Takanawa now destined to become even fatter than Sophie? To be a pig? A hippo? A lardass? A blimp?

I don't know. All I know is that it's ironic.