My experiences with Shortcake were less condensed than most of the antagonists in stories here, since she lived across the street and bothered Bearclaw with her antics more than the rest of us. Plus I keep to myself a bit more than normal, so the game nights, outings, and experiences I have are spaced out.
Per a request from chapter 1, I’ve drawn up a character sheet of the people who lived on Pastry Lane. Later on, as more people are introduced, I’ll supplement the picture. For now, here is everyone who features in both the first two chapters. It goes in order from me, Pumpkin Bread, all the way to Shortcake. If you’re having trouble remembering who’s who, refer to chapter 1.
Wintertime and springtime are virtually interchangeable in my neck of the woods, aside from a few bouts of rain here and there that we get around January and February. By the time March rolls around, all you see are shorts, tank tops, and flip flops. It was in this spirit of the Melanoma Gods that this Wednesday morning dawned bright and cheerful.
I was in my kitchen making breakfast. Usually you see ol’ Pumpkin Bread with cereal or banana-peanut butter-honey toast (yummmmm) but today I was making a smoothie. I had recently inherited several pieces of nicer kitchenware from a great aunt who had left no children, so I was excited to use her blender. It was in good condition, but it was old; the buttons were those square push-type ones and the tall bowl part into which you’d put your fixins was much thinner than I was used to.
I had blended the ingredients together, poured it out into my special Batman glass, and was left with a puzzling amount of sweet, green leftovers. My signature smoothie is a blend: frozen raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries; vanilla yogurt; a bit of apple juice; and a heaping bit of frozen spinach. It’s probably not as ‘good’ as typical ‘green smoothie’ recipes intend, but I had made it work for me. The only problem is I had nearly a serving left over, since I was used to eyeballing ingredients and the new blender had thrown me off.
That’s when Strawberry Shortcake walked in.
As I said before, the residents of Pastry Lane live in a molten orgy of comfortable closeness. We leave our doors unlocked when we’re home, we openly welcome barging in, and we learn to expect the unexpected. Many times in the weeks since I’d moved in had found me coming home from work to find Bearclaw and Coconut Cream Pie playing video games on Tiramisu’s giant TV, with Tiramisu not even home herself. It was very much like college without weekly bouts of alcohol poisoning.
“Hi, Shortcake,” I said to her. “Would you like a smoothie? I made way too much.”
“Sure!” she said brightly. “Thank you!”
I poured the leftovers into a glass and handed it over, taking a sip from mine. She made no move to take it.
“What is that?” she asked. There was a thinly-veiled tinge of disgust in her voice.
“A smoothie?” I immediately understood what she’d really meant, but I pretended not to.
“What’s in it?”
“Berries, apple juice, yogurt, and spinach.”
She nearly gagged, I swear. I was dumbfounded.
“Why are you eating spinach for breakfast?” she demanded. “That’s gross!”
“It’s not gross, it’s healthy.”
“You don’t need to be healthy all the time, Pumpkin.” She avoided the glass I was still holding out to her and shifted over to the fridge.
“I’m definitely not healthy all the time,” I laughed, putting the extra smoothie on the counter and beginning to clean the blender in the sink while I took sips from my own. “But spinach actually tastes really good, especially if it has something sweet in there too.” I had an inkling she hadn’t tasted spinach in a very long time, or ever.
She gave up a search in our refrigerator and headed to our small pantry. At this point, I was still okay with the pilfering that happened on a semi-regular basis on this street. I was still protective of my food, but since this occurred on a joint status, I was fine with giving. It meant that it was okay for me to take whatever I wanted from their pantry at another time, following short, polite, unwritten guidelines. Refer to the Oreos from the last chapter – steal those and you’re dead.
“Noooo, yuck! Besides,” she said, turning away from my pantry with a bag of marshmallows, “I can’t eat the smoothie anyway because it has yogurt. I’m vegan.”
I restrained an epic, Liz Lemon-inspired eye-rolling and put the clean blender away under the counter.
My single experience with veganism happened in high school when I watched my best friend, a lifelong ‘sister’ (our grandparents and parents had been friends since childhood) go through a bout of eating disorders and self-hatred that led down a winding, lonely road to a meth addiction and incarceration for DUI. She had taken up veganism as a way to control her eating habits and punish herself for bingeing and purging. It started as an inconvenience to me when we were first beginning our freedom of driver’s licenses and spending money from our first jobs: we could never agree on a place to eat out because she couldn’t – more like wouldn’t, to my perspective – eat anything on the menu. Since then, I recognized diet fads like veganism, Atkins, or even paleo, to an extent, as a cheap, lazy way to moderate yourself that rarely worked to keep your weight down and your mood cheerful.
Also, I don’t know if you’re aware, but because of my friend’s veganism, I had learned about a lot of things that are made with animal products that the more hardcore of hardcore vegans refuse to eat. That list includes apple juice, anything dyed red like candy or frosting, and marshmallows.
“Uhh,” I said, debating if I would break the news to Shortcake or not and wisely deciding against it. “Well anyway, I’m gonna go back to my room now.”
That was a signal for her to leave, but I already had a feeling she ignored social cues like that. Not in a spectrum way, but in that she didn’t care about anybody else’s feelings. This is of course not exclusive to hamplanets, but the behavior feels awfully familiar to me now that I’ve spent a year or so reading stories here.
“I’m gonna watch TV here, if that’s okay. Bearclaw is playing video games.” She hustled into our living room through the archway and plopped herself down onto the sofa. I was irritated, but as long as she didn’t break anything, it was fine.
Several days later, I was outside wrestling with Dog Cookie when Bearclaw stepped out onto his front stoop and beckoned me over. I closed our gate so Tiramisu’s idiot dog wouldn’t run away and went over.
“So I’m going to plant a garden,” he said without preamble.
My mouth opened in a huge smile. I love gardens.I love gardens. I had one at home at my mom’s, I had a balcony one in my dorm, and I’d maintained at least a few plants or flowers in every apartment or house I’d lived in since. I was in the middle of carving out a new plot in the gated half of the backyard (see: idiot dog) and had spent every free weekend morning with hands and knees in the dirt. I hadn’t yet gotten around to planting anything, but it was coming.
Bearclaw was not what you’d call an outdoorsman, but I think my fervent worship of home-grown vegetables had rubbed off on him. I rolled up my theoretical shirtsleeves and went into his backyard with him, helping him plan out the plot he was going to start.
Out walked Shortcake.
It was a warm Saturday, but it wasn’t yet bikini weather. Despite this, she was wearing a bright pink bikini. It was straining at the tied bows on her convex hips, and the string around her ribcage had disappeared at the back underneath a mound of fat. Her boobs were deflated and rippled with stretch marks, but she’d brushed a sparkly body powder on her generous cleavage, and I bet if I’d gotten closer, she’d smell like cheap brown sugar lotion or something stripper-y like that. (Not to disparage exotic dancers, of course.) Her hair was freshly dyed a shocking shade of pink that hung in artificially-straight clumps, a telltale sign of being overprocessed.
“Hi guys!” she chirped. “Isn’t it so nice and sunny today? I thought I’d sunbathe.”
Now, I was in shorts and a tee, but it was still at an awkward impasse of sunny but with a chilly breeze. I certainly wouldn’t want to lay out in only a bikini at this time of the year. Later on, sure, but not now. I ignored her except for a smile in her direction, but she wasn’t paying attention to me anyway. She only had eyes for Bearclaw. Uh oh, I thought, a little jealously.
“Oh, Pumpkin, I made a smoothie today! I followed your advice. It’s soooo good.” She hefted a very large drinking glass full of a thick, sickly green liquid.
“You used spinach?” I asked, shocked.
“No, yuck. I used other, yummier things.”
Wary, I turned away from the sight of her laying out in one of the two cheap lounge chairs in their backyard and talked with Bearclaw for a while. Shortcake interjected several times with non sequiturs, getting frustrated with the lack of attention turned in her direction. Eventually I got tired of competing with her and went into their house for a drink of water.
Scattered all over their kitchen counter in a mess were the things Shortcake had used to make her smoothie. There was a container of Smuckers caramel syrup and a banana peel on the counter. A small empty carton of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream was in the trash, and a spoon covered in crystallized sugar stood haphazardly beside their blender, which still had smoothie residue on the sides. I had to look closer to confirm, but Shortcake had actually added extra sugar to a smoothie (milkshake, actually, but let’s not split hairs) chock full of it already. I dipped my finger in the blender and tasted it. The sweetness made my teeth hurt. And there was still the troubling green color – I couldn’t figure out what she’d used to make the concoction green.
Then I saw it. Pushed behind the jumble of jars and ingredients was a small dropper of food coloring. The cap was still off, and the dark green color had dribbled down and stained the counter.
When I went back into the backyard, Shortcake was hunched over on the ground beside Bearclaw, leaning into him to maintain her balance because her center of gravity was skewed. They were looking at something in the dirt. One of her hands was stroking up and down his back.
“Shortcake, did you eat that entire smoothie you made?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course.” She turned around, still crouched down. Her belly was hanging over her pubic mound from that position. She pointed to the empty glass on the table beside the chairs.
“Are you aware of how much sugar was in it?”
“Yeah, I had to add extra because it didn’t taste good. The banana was sour.”
I’ve never heard of a ‘sour’ banana. Unripe, maybe, but the caramel syrup would have taken care of that anyway.
“And did you add the food coloring?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” asked Bearclaw, interrupting an identical exclamation of disbelief from me.
“Because Pumpkin would have shamed me otherwise!” Shortcake huffed. “She made me feel bad the other day about not liking spinach, so I decided to trick her so she’d leave me alone about it.” Her cheeks, already reddened from the time she’d spent in the sun, blushed even deeper, as if she was about to cry.
“I didn’t shame you-” I cried angrily.
“You did so! You were being a total bitch, Pumpkin. What other people eat is not your business.” She stood up and balled her hands into fists. In her too-small, Malibu pink bikini, with the fat underneath her skin melting into rolls, she did not pose too much of a threat, but I was offended at being called a bitch, and I was also turning red.
“Shortcake, I don’t think Pumpkin meant to hurt your feelings,” said peacekeeping Bearclaw.
“Go ahead and take her side, Bearclaw, be a pussy. Whatever.” She stormed off back into the house, slamming the door behind her.
Bearclaw and I exchanged looks of bewilderment and decided to call it a day. The garden could wait.
That was only the first fight that Shortcake would involve herself in, and it was just a taste of the drama that surrounded her like a cloud.
Bearclaw never did follow through with his garden.
Submitted April 06, 2016 at 10:43PM by yestopumpkinbread http://ift.tt/1UWsUQj fatpeoplestories
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