Chapter 1 - prologue: the stranger

Kate bit at her lower lip nervously, feeling like the room was so stiff she could shatter the air itself like glass. She didn’t like this. Not one bit.

But she looked at her father and saw the look on his face, the one where he set his jaw and hardened his eyes. She knew there was no changing his mind when he made that face.

Still, looking across the table at the supermodel pretty woman who had traipsed into their home not an hour before, she couldn’t help but feel they were about to make a mistake.

The woman met her eyes making Kate gulp. Her perfectly wavy hair fell over her sharp, fitted business suit. Her smile was easy, but it didn’t meet her eyes which were steely and bore into Kate as if daring anyone to try to challenge her.

Kate turned away. It was too much.

“So we have an agreement then?” The woman asked, laying out the paperwork, the paragraphs that bound Kate’s family to her.

There was a silence.

“H… how big is she going to get?” Kate couldn’t help but pipe up. She was trying to wrap her mind around this strange plan, this negotiation that she would have thought impossible before this woman walked into her home. Even now, there was part of Kate that didn’t – couldn’t – believe it was really real. How could it be?

“That depends on you. All of you,” the woman answered. “Once you write her name on this contract and sign it, you’ll be bound. For every pound she gains, you three will lose a pound between you. You three will get the perfect bodies you always wanted but never thought you’d get.”

“And she’ll get huge,” Kate said quietly.

The woman shrugged. “You said it yourself, Kate. She seems to be a pretty vain, privileged person. It’ll be good for her to learn life isn’t always so easy. Besides, once this is over, you’ll part ways and never see her again. She’ll never know her weight was because of you.”

“I guess…” Kate said, but it wasn’t right. She wanted to be thin so bad. She never had been. The daughter of two overweight, bordering on obese parents, she always felt like she had no hope. She had grown up with a soft belly and chubby cheeks. When her classmates started growing taller and thinner, their baby fat giving way to adult muscles or curves, she just stayed pudgy.

Her mother was the type that was always dieting but it never seemed to matter. She just had wide hips, thick arms, and thunder thighs that refused to go away. Her father had a beer gut and a double chin. They all put on airs that they didn’t care, that they were happy as they were. But they’d be liars if they didn’t say they didn’t look at the thin families with envy, weren’t convinced they had it better.

“Ok. Where do I sign,” Kate’s father asked.

“Peter, are you sure?” Kate’s mother grabbed his hand and caught his eye.

“Sandy, this will change our lives forever. Think of how good you’ll feel in clothes when you know everything flatters your figure, even swim suits. We’ve lived with our bodies long enough, don’t we deserve to be happy?”

Kate’s mother bit her lip. “I suppose… I suppose we won’t really be harming her so much… Plenty of people are bigger and perfectly happy…”

‘We aren’t,’ Kate couldn’t help but think.

“Where do we sign?” Kate’s father asked.

The woman smiled a smile that made Kate’s stomach churn. It was the look of a predator who knew they were going to feast tonight.

“First, put your goal weights here, then the girl’s name here, then you sign at the bottom.”

“Kate, what weight to you want?”

Kate hesitated.

“Might I mention this is a onetime offer, and I need to be on my way soon…” the woman said, lifting an eyebrow toward Kate’s father.

“Kate, now.” Her father sent her a glance that she hadn’t seen since she was 17 and borrowed the car without asking. She had thought now that she was in her junior year of college, she would be over seeing that glance. But she reacted to it the way she always did; doing whatever it took to make it go away.

She quickly scribbled the weight she had always dreamed of being. 115lbs. Near 85lbs lighter than she knew the scale now read when she stepped on it.

She passed the paper back to her father and felt dread overcome her as she realized what she had done. Her poor classmate was about to take on every pound that Kate lost, and her parent’s weight too.

Kate placed a hand on her belly, feeling how it reached out before her. She was intimately familiar with how it sat on her lap, formed rolls at her sides, and jiggled with every step she took.

Could she really subject another person to this life?

She tried to imagine how much weight her parents would put down for themselves. How big would this girl get before they reached their goals?

She felt queasy and was tempted to grab the paper out of her parents hands and rip it up, but instead she made fists and pressed them between her thick thighs as her parents signed the form.

“Excellent,” the woman said, a smile creeping across her face, her eyes becoming slivers as the grin finally reached them. Then she pulled out four small bottles of liquid from her briefcase.

“You three drink these,” she said, separating them. “This one is for the girl, connects her to you and even helps her appetite. Slip it into a drink or something and once she ingests it, your journey to your perfect bodies will officially begin.”

Kate’s father passed out the bottles and then held his aloft. “To what we deserve,” he said indignantly. The family clinked their bottles and then drank them down.

Kate coughed once it was down, her palms sweaty and chest tight.

The woman across from them placed the contract in her briefcase and stood with a wide smile. “I can’t wait to see what becomes of you all…”