Turn 18 of 226

Weigh myself Monday morning before work. I'm at 145 now. Everything about me is bigger and I love it, especially my tits and ass. Wear the same clothes again

The alarm pulls Lena out of a dreamless sleep at six-fifteen. The carpet has worn a second impression into the pile beside the first — a faint twin of her body, a ghost of the shape she was two days ago, slightly smaller. She does not look at it. She stands, and the standing takes longer than it should because her thighs are still vibrating with yesterday's squats and her shoulders ache with the kind of deep-tissue soreness that means something grew. The apartment is a disaster. Containers everywhere, the air thick, the fridge standing open and empty and pale in the early light. She closes it. She walks to the bathroom.

The scale sits where it has always sat, half-tucked beneath the sink cabinet, and Lena steps on it with both feet. The digital display blinks, hesitates, as if the number is arriving from a distance. Then it resolves: 145. Fifteen pounds in six days. Lena looks down at the number and feels the warmth surge so hard it makes her dizzy, a flush that runs from her belly up through her chest and into her face. She steps off. Steps back on. The number does not change. It is real.

She looks at herself in the mirror. The woman there is someone she does not fully recognize and someone she recognizes completely, and the contradiction does not bother her. Her breasts are fuller — visibly, tangibly fuller, the crop top straining across them now in a way that is less about exposure and more about structural failure. They sit heavier on her chest, and when she lifts her arms they shift with a weight that is new and that she can feel in her shoulders. She turns sideways. Her ass is the thing that stops her. It is rounder, wider, the athletic shorts stretched across it so tightly that the fabric has gone translucent at the fullest point. She flexes and the muscle beneath the fat jumps, visible, and the combination — soft and dense, yielding and powerful — makes her breath catch. She puts her hands on it. On her breasts. On her belly, which hangs lower than it did Friday, round and heavy and warm. She is bigger. Every part of her is bigger. The warmth pulses and she feels the word again — more — and it is not a request.

The crop top smells like it has been worn for two days of exercise and eating and sleeping on the floor because it has. She pulls it on anyway. The fabric protests, riding up immediately, bunching beneath her breasts and refusing to cover the expanse of her belly. The shorts are worse — she has to work them over her thighs and ass, hopping slightly, and when they are on they sit low on her hips and dig into the soft flesh there, creating a visible muffin top that spills over the waistband on all sides. She does not own other clothes. She does not want other clothes. She brushes her teeth for the first time in six days — an impulse, not a decision — and then stops, the brush still in her mouth, because the impulse feels foreign. Like someone else's habit. She spits, rinses, and leaves the bathroom.

The walk to work is quiet and warm. Monday morning traffic hums on the street beside her, and her bare feet find the familiar path from sidewalk to lobby to elevator. People look. They have been looking since Friday, but today the looking is different — heavier, more sustained, the gaze of people who have had a weekend to talk about what they saw and are now checking whether it is still happening. It is still happening. Lena's belly leads her through the lobby like a prow, bare and round, and the crop top has given up entirely and become a kind of bandeau that covers her chest and nothing else. Her thighs rub together with each step, soft and dense, and the sound is audible — a faint whisper of skin on skin that she can feel in her teeth. She steps into the elevator. The doors close. The warmth hums. Monday is here.