Campus Pigs- Chapter 7

Lindsey blinked in the light, irritated to find herself waking up for a third time that day. Her constant oversized binges were sending her into consistent and, by all appearances, unavoidable, food comas, and she’d napped after her breakfast shake, after her lunch, and now again after her post-lunch snack. Her days had become entirely monopolized by eating and sleeping, and Lindsey was full, uncomfortable, and most pressingly of all, bored. 

She shifted beneath her covers, unsure of what time it was but certain that she hadn't missed dinner. Abigail would’ve never allowed that. She fumbled for her phone lost among the tangle of blankets and clicked it to life, confirming it had only been a few hours since her last meal. She didn't have to start dinner for a while, and now that she was more alert and her naptime fog was clearing, she could smell whatever Courtney was working on. 

Lindsey had to admit that Courtney was an amazing chef and, despite the treasurer's sycophantic adherence to Abigail's rules and expectations, Lindsey actually liked Courtney. At least, when Courtney wasn't the one in charge of feeding her. Lindsey knew what was on the line for her sisters and could agree that an out-of-house suspension was unthinkable, but simultaneously felt little sympathy for her not-quite-volunteer prisoner guards. 

Making bland conversation with the girls she didn't know as well as they watched her eat was one thing, but being fed by the girls she spent more time with was like torture. The whole thing felt so contrived, so unreasonable, but there was nothing either party could do. As much as Lindsey hated to admit it, she’d follow Abigail's instructions the exact same way if she were in their position. She’d be sad if it were Karina or one of the other girls she considered a friend, but truthfully she'd mostly be glad that she wouldn't be the one stretching out her belts and waddling around with food on her face. 

She shifted into more of a sitting position and winced as she felt a pang of overfullness shoot through her middle. She was becoming more and more accustomed to the feeling of perpetual fullness but nonetheless no more accepting of it, and the odd, pressing feeling dominated her attention and made her own body feel foreign to her. She swung her feet to the floor, unsure of what to do with extra time where she wasn't required to stuff her face until it hurt, and sat on the edge of her bed for a moment in limbo, socked feet pressed to the floor and one hand resting on the small swell of her bloated tummy in an attempt to recreate the effects of Courtney’s earlier belly massage. 

Her phone buzzed and she jumped for it, eager to have anything other than food to think about. 

‘Come to my room’ Aubrey had sent, no superfluous emoji to redress any tension like most girls their age would send. 

‘Y?’ Lindsey sent back, already pushing herself into a standing position to follow Audrey’s instructions despite her feigned reluctance. 

‘Guard duty. Don’t feel like coming downstairs’ came Audrey's simple reply.

Lindsey stood, brushing crumbs off her sweatshirt and mentally tearing through her closet for something to wear. She’d been living in sweats for the past four days and wanted something slightly less slouchy to wear in front of Audrey, Lindsey's desire to impress the impossibly beautiful, standoffish girl that Lindsey had always felt she wasn't cool enough for higher than unusual. 

She decided against jeans, well aware that the buttons would have to come undone once she started in on her dinner, and settled on a pair of black leggings and an oversized t-shirt featuring an obscure band she couldn't name a singular song from that she’d stolen from a former fling. Her inclination to impress Audrey had been strong from the moment Lindsey first laid eyes on her, but since the conversation she’d had with her the day of the pizza-eating contest, that unconscious desire to be accepted by the striking, whip-smart loner had been exacerbated dramatically. 

She stood in her mirror posing back and forth, analyzing herself from every angle to make sure that her chosen outfit covered her bloat. She sucked in her cheeks and frowned, hoping that her face, rendered puffy from an excess of sodium over the last few days, didn't make her look too fat. 

She made her way up the stairs to Audrey's room, exercising the one bit of defiance she could by not asking Abigail or Courtney if she could take the stairs and burn a few calories, and found herself rapping on Audrey's door, her heart unexpectedly thrumming. Audrey had always been intimidating, but this feeling was markedly distinct from intimidation. Lindsey was nervous. 

She wasn't sure if it was the fear of judgment at her new gluttonous role within the sorority or if it was concern that Audrey was watching her more closely than the other girls, was taking careful note of her gain and the way that it impacted her life. Knowing that Audrey's dissertation was based entirely around the campus pigs contest and the social constructs it emphasizes and tests the limits of, Lindsey felt like an experiment, a lab rat whose actions Audrey would be assessing and dissecting. She didn't know how to act in front of someone who was studying her every move in an academic context, and that uncertainty settled in on her all at once as she stood waiting for Audrey to answer the door. 

“It’s open,” Audrey called from behind it, and Lindsey turned the handle slowly, already self-conscious about everything she did and every choice she made. 

“Hey,” she squeaked when she walked in, grimacing at the warbling pitch of her voice. 

Would Audrey write about that? Make a note of how the onset of the subject's weight gain immediately led to reduced confidence? Lindsey shook her head, steadying herself, and tried again.

“Hey,” she repeated more evenly.

“Well, hey hey to you,” Audrey said without taking her eyes off of her laptop screen, her fingers flying over the keys uninterrupted. “You can sit.”

Lindsey crossed the room to sit on Audrey's bed, wondering how it was possible that her first time doing so was only four short days ago that felt like lifetimes. She sat, crossed-legged, and watched Audrey's back and she continued to type furiously, the silence punctuated by the pocking of her keyboard. Lindsey settled in further, getting comfortable as she realized that Audrey would be this way for a while, and pulled out her phone. 

“You don't have homework?” Audrey asked without turning the second Lindsey’s phone lit up, startling Lindsey and making her jump.

“No,” Lindsey assured quickly. “Well, yea, a little, but I'm going to do it later,” she corrected, considering for the first time what her workload after four days off from classes would look like. 

“Suit yourself,” Audrey said with a shrug, returning to her task. 

Unsure if the initial question had been a way for Audrey to invite conversation, Lindsey hesitantly tested the waters. 

“So, is that…is that for your project?” she asked after a while.

“Yup,” said Audrey, popping the p as was her trademark. 

Lindsey immediately cringed at the silence that followed, coming to terms with the fact she’d misread the situation and the girl didn't want to talk, when the rapid typing suddenly stopped. Audrey swiveled her office chair towards Lindsey and gave her an inquisitive look that spoke volumes and yet was simultaneously near impossible to read.  

“Are you doing ok?” Audrey asked, looking deep into Lindsey's eyes as if searching for a truth. “Really. Are you?”

“Yea,” mumbled Lindsey quietly. “Yea.”

Audrey waited, still staring.

“It’s weird,” Lindsey finally went on, pressured by the intensity of Aubrey's gaze. “It's all really weird. To eat this much, to eat this kind of food, to have everybody focusing on me. It's making me feel crazy.”

Audrey nodded, her attention rapt. 

“And I hate the fucking guard duty, it’s so twisted.”

“Why?” Audrey prompted

“Cause it's literally insane! Like, am I wrong? That it’s insane, and we’re all just pretending it's normal. Abigail is force-feeding me, the whole sorority force-feeds someone every year, and we all just act like it's normal.”

She paused her rant, realizing that this was the first time she’d been completely honest about the things she’d experienced since being chosen as the house's pig. She hated every element of the situation and thought she’d made that clear, but as she spilled her guts to Audrey, she realized that there was much more to complain about, much more that she hadn’t addressed whatsoever. 

“And all the food is so greasy and heavy,” she went on, her tirade building steam and only serving to make her angrier. “And they make me eat till it hurts, it's like a punishment for something I didn't even do.”

She paused again, her hand falling to her middle as it had so many times over the past four days. 

“And I feel like I already see differences,” Lindsey admitted, shocking herself. “I feel like I'm already getting fat and I see it every time I look in the mirror, you know? My face looks like a moon, like, it's so swollen. My whole body is so bloated. And I know I've already gained some weight. I mean, at least a little. Based on the amount of calories they've had me eating, I should've gained like 4 pounds by now. I'm literally four pounds heavier than I was the last time I was in this room. It just makes me feel so out of control, you know? So helpless. All I have time to do is eat and sleep and yet I’m somehow still exhausted, it makes me feel so lazy.”

Audrey nodded encouragingly. 

“And this is all just the beginning!” Lindsey cried, largely unaware of the fact that her volume had increased right alongside her discontent. “It hasn't even been a week yet, imagine how big I'm gonna be in a month? In two months? I’m gonna be waddling around and stuffing my face while all of you guys watch to make sure I’m still eating enough, it's a fucking nightmare! How is any of this even allowed? And, and-”

Lindsey cut herself off abruptly, realizing that Audrey was still watching her carefully as her rant became a meltdown. 

“It's just not fair,” Lindsey finished quietly. 

Audrey nodded. 

“It’s not,” she agreed, her gaze as hypnotic as ever. “I’m not gonna tell you it's not so bad because I know you probably don’t wanna hear that right now. But if you’re the numbers type, I can tell you that your odds aren't so bad.”

Lindsey scoffed.

“Yea, they aren't so bad, they're perfect,” Lindsey scoffed. “Phi Lambda wins the campus pigs contest every year.”

“No, no, your odds with the weight. And losing it. I’ve been looking into a lot of former pigs for my research and more of them were able to drop the weight than you might think.”

Lindsey's eyebrows crinkled in confusion and disbelief. 

“Pigs lost weight?” she asked incredulously.

“Tons of them.”

“But the only one I know about is Tiffany, and-”

Tiffany is certainly an outlier," Audrey excitedly interjected, her passion for her work evident in her tone. “There haven't been many Phi Lambda girls, at least, not many that I've been able to get in touch with, that dropped weight after the contest. Even fewer that dropped back to size, although I’ve personally only been able to confirm one. But what I've found is that other houses, both sororities and fraternities, have much higher rates of success in terms of regaining their previous health and size. Did you ever notice that?” she asked, giving Lindsey no time to provide an answer. “Because I didn't. Other houses lose weight. Not all the weight, but as a whole those participants don’t stay at the size of their largest weigh-in. Some houses have insane success rates, and it's always the losers. The losers can drop the weight after, and for some reason, the winners don’t. It’s added this element of intrigue to my hypothesis that really broadens the complexity of the topic, it's been fascinating. 

Lindsey nodded, unhappy with the information Audrey had provided but pleased that the standoffish girl had chosen to nerd out in front of her. 

“But that doesn't really help me, right?” Lindsey confirmed. “Cause nobody from Phi Lambda actually loses all the weight they gained.”

“Except Tiffany,” Audrey corrected. “To the best of my knowledge, Tiffany is the only person in history to both win the contest and actually return to her original size. No one else has ever done it.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Lindsey muttered, drawing a laugh from Audrey. 

“You can do it,” Audrey encouraged, still chuckling. “You can do whatever you set your mind to, but fair warning, everything you’re doing now just works against that. The contest creates an addiction, and it's not just to food. Obviously, sugar consumption can be habit-forming and addicting, yea there can be a physiological or emotional dependence on food, but the results of this contest are really specific. It's how full you always are. You’ll get addicted to the feeling of your stomach being completely full. Eventually, you’ll start to feel hungry without it. I’ve realized that the addiction component is the most significant impediment to weight loss after the contest. The winners can’t drop weight because they keep eating the same way they did when they were still competing.”

Lindsey closed her eyes, feeling dizzy. The thought of eating the way she had been of her own free will, of stuffing her face till she couldn’t move because she wanted to, was enough to make her want to cry. She couldn't picture it, couldn't imagine a world in which she was that greedy, that much of a true glutton, but it had happened to countless girls before her. According to Audrey, it may as well have been an inevitability. To eat like that when no one was forcing you? Lindsey took a deep breath, trying to stay upright. 

“You wanna see Tiffany's after pictures?” Audrey offered, clearly feeling guilty about Lindsey's reaction to her last statement. “She looks really good, and she did it so fast. And all natural too, if you believe her," Audrey added into the semi-uncomfortable silence. 

Lindsey nodded, eyes still closed. 

“When she finished the contest she was pretty big. Bigger than a lot of previous winners. She really went all out. The vast majority of the subcutaneous fat she developed was in her abdomen, which is another important consideration as far as my thesis goes. Girls whose initial weight gain is concentrated in their hips, ass, or tits get treated very differently when compared to girls who get huge bellies, I mean the way they’re generally regarded and discussed is night and day. It's an obvious observation but it's simultaneously worth further investigation due to the ever-shifting expectations surrounding patriarchal beauty standards. Essentially, what factors have led to this modern-age perception that fat accumulation can be positive depending on its concentration? It's odd, but anyways.”

She swiveled back to her laptop, clicking a few keys before picking up the slim silver device entirely and spinning back to face Lindsey, her screen displaying a collection of photographs surrounded by a litany of typed notes, certain sections of some photos highlighted or circled in red. 

“This is the Tiffany you know,” Audrey began, clicking a key and swiping the screen to a recent picture from the burgeoning influencer's Instagram account.

The bright-eyed, honey-blond beauty was displaying two rows of vibrantly white teeth as she grinned brilliantly at the camera, the perfectly tanned skin of her blemish-free face looking almost airbrushed in its near uncanny flawlessness. She was posed on a plush-looking, purple yoga mat that coincided with her matching athletic set, and the skintight, deep violet workout garments left not an inch of her enviable figure to the imagination. Although the sleeves of her spandex purple crop top were full length and the adjoining leggings were the same, her entire midsection was exposed, truly, flaunted, by the outfit. The faint outline of abs on her perfectly flat, toned middle immediately drew the eye, but Lindsey also couldn't look away from the lithe thinness of the girl's arms, the shapely yet slim thighs that tapered upward into a perfect hourglass figure. She looked like the picture of health, the epitome of fitness, and Lindsey was certain that her followers would be shocked to know that just four years earlier, that teeny, athletic model was the fattest girl on her campus. 

Lindsey nodded, taking it all in. She had seen the picture, just as Audrey suspected, but that didn't make it any easier to look away from. Tiffany had always fascinated Lindsey, even before Lindsey had been selected as the Phi Lambda pig, and she couldn't go long without scouring the older girl’s social media accounts like she was attempting to solve a mystery. She was, in a sense. How had Tiffany been able to do it? How was she the only crowned campus pig in history with no evidence of the hog she ate herself into visible on her body?

“How did she do it?” Lindsey breathed, completely unaware that her volume had been reduced by her reverence. 

“Still dunno. I haven’t interviewed her yet, I still have to do a little more research and compile my final list of questions. But I'm much more interested in the why.”

“Why what?” Lindsey asked distractedly, still locked in a one-sided staring contest with the photograph of Tiffany. 

“Why she did it. Not how. The ‘how’ to weight loss and weight gain is boring, it's just a math equation. Calories in versus calories out. But the ‘why’, that's a question worth asking in both a specific and general sense. What was the personal catalyst, and how was the personal catalyst impacted by societal factors? It's the true intrigue here.”

Lindsey nodded despite her acute disagreement, eyes still locked on Audrey's computer screen. Audrey’s viewpoint was one that only a girl beautiful enough and intelligent enough to be unconcerned with the way the world sees her would have. Anyone else would immediately be able to tell you the ‘why’ of a weight loss journey; it was because nobody wants to be fat. It's because of the way you’re treated, the way you’re viewed, the ways you feel. For most girls their age, it was a punishment worse than death, meaning that in Lindsey's opinion, the ‘how’ was the only unanswered question. The ‘why’ was as obvious as the button nose on Tiffany’s structured, angular face. 

“But this,” began Audrey, angling her laptop so she could press the forward arrow. “This is the Tiffany you don’t know.”

Lindsey gasped, surprising herself with her dramatics but allowing her hand to fly up to cover her mouth nonetheless. Tiffany wasn't just unrecognizable. She was an entirely different person. She had to be well over double her weight compared to the violet workout set pictures Lindsey had just seen, and the world of difference between the two images made a sick, sinking feeling rise in Lindsey's still-stuffed stomach.

Tiffany was crammed into a pair of pink sweatpants so tight they looked painted on, as if they would explode at the seams if Tiffany moved even an inch. The tightness of the legwear allowed Lindsey to take in the fullness of Tiffany's lower half expansion, and even her calves were pudgy, swollen, and testing the limits of the straining sweats. Her thighs were bulging and pressed together tightly in the armed chair she was squeezed into, her fleshy hips pushing out of the gap created by each armrest and flowing over the sides of the chair and her ass so large and rounded that she was spilling over at every possible angle. The stretched waistband of the sweatpants was pulled down low on her hips to let her impossibly spherical gut swell forward, and one tubby hand was sunken into the plump flesh as the other gripped the remains of a half-eaten fast food cheeseburger. 

She wore a t-shirt whose lower hem couldn't even be tugged down halfway to her belly button, and instead, the shirt was buried in the double rolls of fat encircling her middle and her bra line, the former roll deeper, fleshier, and giving her a distinct double belly. Her gut was covered in too many fatty rolls to look pregnant but it was impossibly large and swollen, bulging far in front of her as her comparatively modest tits were dwarfed by its protrusion. Her grease-covered face was a swollen jumble of chubby cheeks and double chins, and her mouth was clearly crammed far too full with her most recent bite of burger. Her arms were plump, swollen hams testing the integrity of the sleeves of her too-tight t-shirt, and the chair she’d pressed herself into looked far too small as if she was only a few bites away from finding herself wedged in by her overfed body. 

“Big difference, huh?” Audrey said, watching Lindsey take it all in. “That wasn't even her peak. They planned for her to gain more moderately during the last few months of the contest but she blew every goal out of the water, she just couldn't stop eating. That's part of why I said that the addiction is the most all-consuming part. She was addicted to stuffing her face, and it made her one of the fattest winners in history. I mean, she looks like she’s about to pop.”

Lindsey sighed heavily and dropped her head into her hands. 

“But,” Audrey corrected quickly, a hint of panic in her tone. “But she lost it all. Every pound. And you’re not gonna get anywhere near as big as she did, you have no reason to. You could win without going so hard. So if she could lose it, you can too.”

Audrey frowned. 

“Sorry. I'm not good with consoling people.”

“Yea, you're not,” Lindsey griped from between her hands, and Audrey laughed. 

“I’m not!” She conceded, hands up in surrender. “I'm not. But I do have the facts, and the facts are on your side. If you want it bad enough, that is. But you didn't even know what you’re going to want yet, you’ve just started all this.”

“I know what I'm going to want, Audrey,” Lindsey said more seriously, raising her face and making eye contact with the brainy beauty. “I know I'm not going to want to be fat. Nothing is ever going to change that.”

Audrey shrugged. 

“Seems really definitive,” she observed lightly. “A real, ironic, foreshadowing type moment, you know? You haven't gained any weight yet, you don't actually know how you’ll feel about it.”

“This isn't a literary analysis,” Lindsey scoffed. “Trust me, I know. And I have.”

“Have what?”

“Have gained weight. I’ve been eating Courtney's stupid diet for the past four days, that's at least 7,000 calories a day. And the most exercise I've gotten since this all started was walking up the stairs just now. That's at least a pound a day, I'm four pounds fatter.”

Audrey's eyes narrowed as she looked Lindsey up and down twice, scrutinizing her carefully. 

“Can't tell,” she finally decided dismissively. “Can’t tell, so it doesn't count.”

“Well, I can tell,” countered Lindsey combatively. “I can feel it. In my stomach, my boobs. My whole body just feels heavier and, like, more…sensitive. Like I'm more aware of everything, I guess. I feel my body more.”

Audrey shrugged again.

“Doesn't mean you’re getting fat.”

“What, cause you were fat you're, like, the fat expert? You don’t know.”

Audrey laughed again, a fuller, more endearing laugh with far less abandon, and shrugged for a third time. 

“Actually yea, I am the fat expert. And not just cause I've been studying the way that fatphobia permeates and defines certain cultural structures. It’s cause being fat is something you can only understand if you’ve experienced it. When I got fat in high school it wasn't necessarily what I wanted, but I realized I enjoyed it. You don't know until you actually know. You know?

Lindsey giggled at the repetition and focused her attention back to the photograph still displayed on Audrey's laptop screen. 

“I just can't imagine it,” she finally said quietly. “It’s going to happen but I can't picture it. Being that size. Getting that greedy. Stuffing my fat face on stage in front of everyone and not caring about how much of a whale I turn into, all of it just seems…impossible. Like it can't happen, like it won’t. And seeing Tiffany do this to herself-”

“Well, she didn't do it to herself,” Audrey corrected. “The girls did it to her. Courtney’s diet did it to her.”

Lindsey nodded listlessly, trepidations unchanged by the statement. 

“And that matters,” Audrey went on as if she could hear Lindsey's thoughts. “That matters because at the end of the day, the real Tiffany was still buried under all that fat. The Tiffany that had the goals she had and wanted what she wanted. That means that it doesn't matter how deeply you fall into what someone else wants for you or how swept up you get in it all, you’re still there, at your center. If you want to lose the weight you will. No matter how big of a pig you grow into.”

Lindsey sighed, not wanting to be encouraged by the words of advice but feeling slightly lifted regardless. 

“You wanna see a video?” Audrey tempted, knowing that Lindsey could be distracted by her morbid curiosity surrounding Tiffany's gain. 

She clicked another key and a video of the same day appeared, Tiffany still crammed in the same too-small chair with her fat fighting to spill over the sides and stuffing herself with the fast food feast that had been pictured earlier. 

The porky blond was groaning with each oversized bite yet shoving them down faster than Lindsey would’ve thought possible, her face slick with grease and sauce as she began to pant from the task of packing her enormous belly full. She pressed a tubby hand into her still-soft gut every few seconds to produce a huge, deep burp, and Lindsey internally cringed with each belch, wondering how such a polished, pretty sorority girl could let herself become that much of a gluttonous hog. She devoured the rest of the burger in her hand in a few bites, crumpled the wrapper, and moaned “more” before letting out her loudest and deepest burp yet. 

“Jesus,” Lindsey muttered, watching the porker make a spectacle of herself. “Where did you even get this?”

“Courtney keeps meticulous records of everything. Photos, videos, weigh-in numbers, diet plans, she has it all organized on these flash drives. She loaned them to me for the project. There's so much footage to go through, it's absolutely insane.”

“I can't even believe it’s her,” Lindsey marveled in a near whisper, her voice still lowered as if there was a possibility of Tiffany overhearing their discussion. 

“I don’t know,” countered Audrey, watching the screen intently. “She kinda looks the same to me. Just, you know. Fuller. Less confined. More.”

Lindsey looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

“You don't think? It's like her current pictures are so closed off, and posed, and fake and shit, and this…”

She allowed herself to trail off. 

“I don't know. This is what she’d actually want to be. This is who she is at her core. No control, no willpower, no rules. Just a slave to the id despite the desire of the ego. It's wildly interesting. It's almost-. I don't know. It's just kinda cool.”

Lindsey wrinkled her brow, unused to hearing Audrey sound unsure or have any trouble expressing herself. 

“Why do you care?” she asked. 

“Cause I’m writing about it,” Audrey offered. Because I lived it. I don't know. It's just-... It's an academic topic rife with insight that applies to other disciplines,” she finally finished. “Besides, the more I know, the more I can help you.”

“Yea, help me get fatter,” Lindsey shot back with a hint of playfulness. 

A grin split Audrey’s face and she lifted her wrist to her line of vision, grinning even further when her watch confirmed what she’d suspected. 

“Speaking of, it's almost your dinner time. C’mon, let's go see what you’re eating next.”