Anything for You

Chapter 1

I’d heard all the rumors, about how big she had gotten; how she had become a total recluse in her mother’s house, spending her days and nights gorging on junk food, getting fatter and fatter. I hadn’t seen Kellie since sophomore year of high school. That was the year that she dropped out of school, and since then she had become something of a mysterious legend around town. Like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, people made claims to have seen her, talking about how astoundingly obese she had become. The truth was however, that no one really knew for sure what had become of her.

“Umm, hello Mrs. Wallace,” I said nervously as I approached the front door, “is Kellie home?”

“Who wants to know?” the middle aged woman fired back bitterly. “Who are you?”

“My name is Morgan,” I said, “I used to go to school with Kellie.”

“Well Kellie doesn’t talk to anyone from school,” said her mother with a scowl as she began to close the door, “don’t you come around here trying to bother my daughter anymore!”

Just as the door was about to shut completely, I could hear a far off voice coming from somewhere deep inside the little one-story ranch home. “Mom, it’s okay,” said the voice, “he’s a friend, you can let him in.” 

The fact of the matter was, I never really knew Kellie Wallace all that well. I would see her around school back in the day. She was hard to miss, as she was tall for a teenage girl, and she was quite hefty, even back then. Of course, people used to tease her and make fun of her, calling her cruel names like Kellie the Belly or Wallace the Whale - because, you know, kids are assholes.

She never smiled, looking absolutely miserable every day that I ever saw her. I could tell that she hated school, and I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t at all surprised when I found out that she had dropped out of school, but still I missed seeing her everyday. Even though I don’t think I ever said more than two words to her the entire time that I had known her back then, I always admired her and looked forward to seeing her waddle her way down the halls of our school. I guess you could say that I had a crush on her, but I was just too shy or scared to actually do anything about it. 

“Alright,” said her mother as she slowly pried the door back open, “you can come in for a minute I guess.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said politely as I made my way over the doorstep and into the living room of the small house.

“Are you the fella that Kellie says she’s been talking to on the computer?” the woman asked, still glaring at me as if I were some sort of a dissident or malicious foreign actor coming to steal highly classified state secrets.

“Yes,” I said to her, “that’s right.”

“So you know then,” she said to me then, trying to gauge my reaction, “you know how she is right now.”

Not knowing quite what to say, I just nodded my head and appeared to be sincere. The truth is that I knew very little about Kellie or what her life had been like in the last dozen years or so. One night while I was surfing around on social media, I happened to notice that she had a profile up. Her profile pic was just a close up shot of her face, but I recognized her right away. I started messaging her, and I was thrilled when she actually messaged me back. We started chatting off and on, and I told her that I would really like to come visit her.

“I don’t get many visitors,” Kellie confided in me as we chatted online, telling me that her life had become something of a nightmare over the past decade.

“I’m sure it can’t be all that bad,” I wrote back, “can it?”

That’s when she told me the truth about what had become of her. She told me that after she dropped out of school she fell into a deep depression, and she turned to food for comfort. She told me that she had started gaining weight after her parents got divorced when she was just nine years old, but things got really bad for her when her mother briefly remarried.

Kellie’s stepfather was a cruel and abusive man who made fun of Kellie far worse than any of the kids in school did. Things came to a blow with him when Kellie’s mother walked in on him trying to sexually assault her.

Fortunately her mother was able to intervene before things got too far, and he was out on his ass after that. Still, the damage was done, and Kellie was even more traumatized than she was already.

“Both of my parents felt so guilty after that, they’d just let me do whatever I wanted,” Kellie confessed to me during our internet conversations, “and all I really wanted to do was sit around the house and eat. So that’s what I did.” 

Kellie’s mother led me down a dark and narrow corridor towards a room at the end. As we grew closer, an overwhelming smell of stale bacon grease and sweat filled the air. As the older woman slowly pushed the door open, I was shocked to see what looked like a massive bean bag chair with a sheet draped over it placed on top of a mattress, and I was even more shocked when I realized that the bean bag chair was actually Kellie.

“Don’t stay in here too long,” Kellie’s mom said as she retreated from the room, leaving me to stand there helplessly in front of this young corpulent woman that I barely knew.