Fattened Faculty (Chapter 7)

    Amanda quickly spotted Leah Benson in the corner of the food court. Even from behind, her red hair and overall size made her easily recognizable; she stuck out quite plainly against the more modestly proportioned bodies that made up the rest of the Friday afternoon lunch rush. Amanda, still working on a greasy pretzel-dog she'd purchased from a stand by the entrance, managed to resist the other vendors' temptations as she made her way over to her friend's seat.

    "Leah!" Amanda blurted out. "Are you ready?"

    Leah looked up from her phone and jumped, not expecting so much belly to have appeared over the remains of her lunch. Her eyes continued up until they connected with Amanda's smiling face.

    "Damn," the bigger teacher laughed, "you scared me a little!" She heaved up and out of her seat, inadvertently dragging the chair back more than a foot across the floor before it disconnected from her bottom. "Yeah, I'm ready. Let's go."

    Many judgmental eyes followed the teachers' bodies as they shuffled out of the food court, stopping first at the trash can to relieve themselves of a heap of junk food wrappers. Any eyes that followed the heifers long enough would then see the two ladies sashay predictably into the plus-sized clothing outlet, where both of them made great use of their membership cards. Whether Bailey's Big-and-Tall had been placed next to the mall's food court strategically, jokingly or coincidentally was up for interpretation, but nobody who actually shopped there seemed to take offense.

    Regardless of the reason, Leah and Amanda were always thankful that their two favorite mall destinations were so unstrenuously close to one another. Next to eating, shopping was their second favorite thing to do when hanging out in public. It was very practical, since working at Beaumont consistently prevented the two teachers from fitting into the same clothes for very long periods of time. By always going with a friend, their trips to the mall were made to feel much more like recreational visits than what they actually were: necessary responses to their concerningly rapid, mutual weight gain.

    Bailey's was a Big-and-Tall by name, but it certainly put more emphasis on the former than the latter. Undoubtedly, it was this part of the country's most impressive plus-sized clothing outlet. The store still had quite a ways to go before it rivaled its more mainstream counterparts, but it nonetheless catered more than well enough to the needs of its clientele. It sported both a men's section and a women's section, and it carried clothes all the way up from the upper fringes of mainstream size to the upper echelon of modern obesity. It was also perhaps the only chain in the area to offer plus-sized clothes which weren't insultingly unfashionable. Although still somewhat modestly sized, the particular Bailey's which Amanda and Leah were going to was one of the biggest in the country, having managed to find a great deal of business in their area for some reason.


    As Amanda pored through various sizes and styles of jeans, Leah took the opportunity to inquire about the event which had brought them here so urgently in the first place.

    "So you didn't mention what happened this time," she said. "What was it? A button?"

    Amanda sighed. "A seam."

    "Oooh!" Leah cringed. "That's rough. Where'd it rip?"

    "Guess."

    Leah's jaw dropped into the plush of her second chin. "Oh no. Not the butt! Was it your butt?"

    Amanda blushed, seeing that a teenage boy had overheard. Carrying a Spencer's bag, he snickered and did a double take at them as he and his mother walked past. The scrawny kid was clearly only in this store for the sake of his mom, whose shelflike rear-end undulated ever-so-slowly in front of him as she led the boy towards her section. 

    "It was the butt," Amanda muttered when the coast was clear.

    Leah laughed, albeit empathetically. "Oh God, no, that's the worst!"

    "Ugh, I know! It's the first time it's happened to me this year."

    "Who was there? Did anyone see?"

    "The whole class was around, but I was sitting, so nobody saw. Thank God for that. And thank God for Vicki, too." She draped a couple of pairs of jeans over her arm as she spoke, specifically picking ones that looked comfortably oversized. "I would've had to like, drag my ass against the lockers all the way to Mary's office if that girl hadn't lent me her jacket to hang over the rip."

    Leah laughed. "Oh my God, the locker thing. I kind of want to see that now."

    "Well hopefully you never will!" said Amanda. "Honestly, I shouldn't have even let it happen in the first place. I'm usually so good about keeping my clothes fitting, but I've been so, so much worse lately."

    "I guess I've noticed a little bit," Leah admitted, perusing some blouses which were fairly similar to the one she currently had on. "Why do you think that is?"

    "I don't know," Amanda said. "I think I'm just used to outgrowing things a lot more slowly. Now it happens so fast. I feel like I can't buy anything that's actually cute without it ripping off of me within a couple of weeks. The worst part is that I don't even know what I could be doing differently."

    "Well, there's that boyfriend of yours. How often are you guys going out to dinner nowadays? Twice a week? Three times?"

    "I guess," Amanda said.

    "Maybe he's trying to put some meat on your bones." Leah snickered.

    For whatever reason, hearing that sort of remark for the second time in one day made Amanda a little uncomfortable. "It's not him," she said, somewhat unconvincingly.

    Leah sensed discomfort in her friend's voice and changed the subject after a brief, awkward silence. "Anyway, I'm just surprised it happened. I've actually never ripped a seam like that. I pop buttons all the time, but like, that's not so bad. Usually you can kind of stretch your shirt down over that, at least long enough to get some new pants. I've still never torn jeans down the back though, which is why it's so weird to me that you did. You'd think I'd be the first one, since I'm a lot bigger than you."

    "Well lucky you," Amanda said.

    "I don't know. Maybe it's because I carry more of my weight up front than in the back," Leah pondered. "I'm a little belly-heavy, after all."

    "Ha!" Amanda snorted. "Is that it?" she asked, grinning coyly. "Is it because you're belly heavy?"

    Leah looked over at her friend, then bursted out laughing at the silliness of her own remark. It was easy to forget just how royally oversized Amanda's tummy had become when Leah wasn't looking directly at it. The redheaded woman may have been larger and slightly apple-shaped in her own right, but she clearly had nothing on her friend's belly-centric proportions.

    "You're right," she chuckled, "I guess that can't be it."

    "Speaking of that, I think I'm gonna go see if they've got anything cute over with the maternity dresses," Amanda said.

    "Okay, cool," Leah said, "I'll be right over here. Text me if you can't find me."


    The maternity section was Amanda's favorite place for one-piece outfits. Lots of the dresses in other areas of the store were too big around her chest and her butt, but the maternity dresses were always sure to be properly proportioned for her body. Even as she got bigger and the rest of her body began to catch up, she still found that plus sized maternity clothes tended to fit her quite beautifully. She was happy that they even catered to such a particular niche.

    Amanda spent a while there, flicking through the Big-and-Tall's assortment of big-bellied dresses. Her endeavor to find a few cute ones was slowed by her constant need to look back over her shoulder for Beaumont students. Ever since Susan had told her about the rumors that Amanda was pregnant, the last thing Amanda wanted to do was to be caught in the maternity section on some kid's Snapchat story. It was a theory she didn't want to reinforce, especially now that the news of her relationship with Jordan was also beginning to spread.

    Amanda's paranoia was anything but unwarranted. Beaumont's students and staff usually made up at least 50% of this store's patronage on any given day, since the school was fairly large, as were its inhabitants. In fact, despite how isolated the maternity section was in the corner of the store, Amanda did successfully spot and avoid two such threats by pretending to answer her cell and speed-walking into a nearby aisle.

    The first such encounter was practically a role-reversal of the thin-boy and fat-mom dynamic that she'd seen earlier during the same trip to the store. She recognized a girl from one of her junior classes there, shopping with a skinnier man who must've been her father. The girl shared her father's light complexion and blonde hair, but her fat loosely pear-shaped body must've weighed twice as much as that of her scrawny dad. It was fat all over—clearly too fat for any of its clothes. She was at the sort of breaking-point size that said she would've been clotheable in regular stores just a few pounds ago, and the awkward wandering of her and her father reinforced the notion that this might've been their first time at Bailey's.

    The second group she had to dodge were a bunch of seniors from her last-period class. It was a mix of teens—some girls, some boys—all of whom, however, were among the school's most obese. They were all dressed fashionably, sporting vast distortions of the same preppy clothes that more typical popular high-schoolers wore. The t-shirts that covered their jiggling breasts and the jeans that rose miraculously over the crests of their bellies were undoubtedly from Bailey's, but they skillfully mimicked the same sorts of clothes that a skinnier kid might get at Hollister or American Eagle. All of them were likely either eighteen or soon to be eighteen, proving, despite their parents' and doctors' probable fears, that their extreme baby-weight was going to accompany them into their adult years. It was too late for obesity to be a phase; they were going to shop at stores like Bailey's for the rest of their lives.

    Even after finally having grabbed enough of the maternity clothes to restock her wardrobe, Amanda ran into a third student on her way to the store's dressing room. This one was a junior named Cindy Hecker. She was a huge, dark-skinned girl with far too much cellulite for her age and fat-folds on every part of her body. She'd been one of the fattest in her class, even as a freshman, and that hadn't changed as she and the rest of her grade grew fatter. She struck up an enthusiastic conversation with her math teacher for nearly five whole minutes before an equally obese Asian boy called her to join him at the register.

    "Ugh, I gotta go," Cindy lamented, "my boyfriend is calling me. He's so impatient."

    "Aw, that's okay, honey," Amanda said, "I don't wanna hold you guys up. It was nice getting to chat with you outside of class!"

    "You too, Ms. Harris," the girl assured her teacher. Then, she pulled Amanda into a totally uncalled-for hug, inadvertently matching the quivering rolls of her form with the valleys of Amanda's. Cindy was fatter than her teacher, and thus seemed to nearly envelop Amanda's belly-heavy body.

    "See you later!"

    Amanda watched low-mobility teen waddle off to join her equally stubby lover. The teacher sighed, worrying that she now felt a little bit stickier in the places she'd made contact with the sweaty student. Cindy and her boyfriend were a devastatingly cute couple, and Cindy was an extremely sweet girl, but Amanda couldn't help being secretly relieved that their long and one-sided conversation and awkward embrace were over.


    Finally free of student distractions, the potbellied math teacher made it into the dressing room with an armful of upsized clothes. Only one of the dressing room stalls was occupied. Naturally, Amanda decided to settle into the one on the other side of the room, far opposite that customer, so as to maximize her own privacy.

    Once the door was locked, she got comfortable, removing her shoes and setting the contents of her pockets on a small shelf beside the mirror. A quick glance at her reflection was enough to remind Amanda just how silly she looked in this stripey, outgrown top and a borrowed pair of Beaumont pants. To say the garments clashed would've been an understatement.

    The shirt would be the first thing to go. This was no easy task; after a day's worth of sweat and a showerless night at Jordan's, the fabric hardly seemed ready to release from her body without a decent fight. Nevertheless, Amanda managed. She peeled it off like plastic wrap from a piece of fruit, wringing it away from the skin of her belly inch by inch until it had enough slack to be slid rest of the way up. Once it was over her head, a bit of wriggling was all it took to get the garment off of her arms and onto the floor, freeing her big belly to sag forward unrestrained and wobble of its own accord.

    Uninhibited, at last. With her pink, naked belly sprawling out over the waistband of those lazy-looking Beaumont sweats, the schoolteacher's ungraceful fatness was truly impossible to ignore. Amanda examined herself in the mirror, running a hand over her belly and grimacing at how much worse her stretchmarks had gotten since the beginning of the year. They were always getting redder and more pronounced, as if in direct protest to the speed and intensity of her expansion. She rarely paid much mind to the extra girth—a bit of healthy size fluctuation was normal and healthy, after all—but these unwanted striations were much more difficult not to worry about than an advanced helping of winter-weight.

    After standing still for a few moments, Amanda suddenly became aware of the steady sound of labored breath and swishing fabric coming from the other occupied stall. Whoever was in there, it sounded like they were having a hard time getting an article of clothing on or off. However, given the sheer girth of this store's typical clientele, Amanda knew there was an equal chance that the woman was winded merely from the effort of standing long enough to wrestle a pair of pants up or down the bounty of her legs. Was this a chubby girl trying to squeeze into something small, or an immobile housewife merely fighting to stay on her feet? At Bailey's, you could never be sure. Other than one single local woman who was 6'4" and 130 lbs, there wasn't a single female Big and Tall customer in this town who was under two hundred and fifty pounds. The biggest regulars reached up into the upper five and six-hundreds. One thing was for sure: whoever it was in that dressing room, they likely weren't going anywhere any time soon. Amanda recognized the creaking sound of the stranger's ass plunging onto the bench of her stall, signifying that she was probably going to be taking a break before trying on anything else. 

    Finally deciding to ignore her company, Amanda resumed disrobing, sliding the sweatpants down onto the carpet and leaving her swollen body all but naked, cheeks and panties exposed to the cool changing-room air. The breeze across her buttery thighs was heavenly; although the Beaumont sweats were comfortable, they weren't much for breathability. Just as Amanda's hand flitted out to grab a pair of store pants, another sound caught her attention: this time, it was her phone, vibrating from the little shelf in the corner. Leah had texted her.

    "Did u find anything good with the dresses?"

    Amanda quickly keyed a reply.

    "They had some cute stuff, nothing too special. I might buy some if they fit well"

    As soon as she hit send, another vibration sounded from the opposite side of the room, timed too perfectly to be coincidental. Suddenly, everything clicked into place.

    "Leah?" Amanda called out.

    "Well..." Leah muttered from the other stall. "This is awkward."

     Shrieks of laughter promptly filled the room. For both women, it was somewhat of a relief to learn that the other person half-naked in the dressing room with them wasn't the total stranger they'd expected.

    "I'm sorry, I should've said something!" Amanda chuckled. The room was fairly small and otherwise quiet, so the two women could hear eachother perfectly quickly. "I didn't know it was you!"

    "Said something?" Leah laughed. "What the hell would you have said? 'Oh, hey there, are you my friend Leah by any chance? Just checking.'"

    "Yeah, haven't you heard?" Amanda joked. "That's how I start every dressing room trip."

    "Nice strategy," Leah said. Their mutual sarcasm wasn't lost, despite the handful of walls between them. Amanda hadn't heard the creak of her bench again, so she knew the round redhead was still firmly planted in her seat. "How're things over there?"

    "Pretty good," Amanda said, quite happy to have just successfully buttoned a pair of jeans over the crux of her belly. "It looks like the pants I grabbed still have some room to like, shrink in the wash or be grown into a bit. How about yourself?"

    "I'm just taking a breather," Leah said. "I kind of got stuck in that last pair. It was one of those jeans that was a lot easier to get up my ass than back down it, you know?"

    "I feel you," Amanda replied. She'd had similar luck in the past, even if today was a bit easier. This time, she'd grabbed sizes that were more of a jump up than usual, and her guesses were seeming to have been fairly accurate so far.

    "Think I'm gonna take a break from pants for a while and try on some of these shirts while I'm sitting down," Leah grumbled contentedly, swiping a blouse from her load of potential purchases.

    Amanda snorted. "Lazy much?"

    "Lazy?" Leah responded. "More like considerate." Amanda could hear the fabric grazing her best friend's skin as she began battle with another unpurchased garment. "I don't wanna get these things all sweaty if I have to put them back!"

    "True, true." Having successfully unbuttoned the jeans, Amanda slid them down and prepared to try on another piece of clothing. "Honestly, now that I think about it, that's not such a bad idea... I might steal it when I'm done with all of these pants."

    "Did you go up a size?" Leah asked.

    "Two."

    "Two?!" Amanda heard another fabric-swish, followed by the sound of flesh clapping against other flesh. Whatever part of Leah had just been clothed was probably naked again.

    "Hey, if it works, it works!" Amanda said. Although the ease of getting those jeans up had briefly bolstered her confidence, Leah's surprise quickly reminded Amanda that the only reason she wasn't having much trouble was that she'd correctly accounted for her troubling weight gain.

    "I'm not judging!" Leah said. "I went up a size, but it might not have been enough with some of these brands."

    Amanda went quiet for a moment. Should she be concerned about going up two sizes at once like this? She was reminded of the darkness of her stretchmarks, and then of what Leah and Mary had said earlier. Before there was a chance to second guess herself, she found herself bringing it up.

    "Hey Leah, we're the only ones in here, right? Can I ask you something?"

    "Of course, what's up?"

    "So, like, I've clearly been getting bigger really fast lately. That's obvious. And, um..." Amanda wasn't sure how to ask this nonchalantly, so she forced it out in its plainest form. "Do you think there might be any truth to what you said earlier? That Jordan's, like, into it?"

    There was a brief pause as Leah took a moment to respond. "Do I think he could be into you getting bigger?" She paused again, then answered with a nonchalant chuckle. "Maybe. I mean, I was just teasing earlier, you know that. But I can't say that it's not an actual possibility."

    "Well you actually weren't the first to say it today," Amanda sighed. "Mary made the same exact joke earlier in her office, and Martha said it last week too. Hell, even that wasn't the first time. I mean, whatever. I get the joke. Everybody knows I've gained some weight and everybody knows I'm with Jordan. It's just weird that people would put them together so often."

    "I definitely didn't mean it earlier. I was just messing around," Leah assured her friend. "But I get the feeling you must think it's possible too if you're this concerned about it."

    "I don't know. I mean, he obviously doesn't care that I'm as big as I am now. A lot of things would make sense." Amanda thought about mentioning how frequently Jordan touched her belly, especially during sex, but decided against getting that personal in such a public setting.

    "Have you thought about how would you feel if it was true?" Leah asked.

    Amanda thought to herself for a moment. "I guess it'd make me feel less scared about gaining too much weight for him. But at the same time, wouldn't it be a little weird? Like, to want a girl to be fat?"

    "I don't necessarily think so," Leah said. "I mean, everybody has a type, right? And if he's attracted to you, I really don't see much of a negative there." Amanda could hear Leah standing up again, probably to try out another pair of pants. "Did I ever tell you I dated a guy like that in college?"

    "What?" Amanda said, taking Leah's lead and grabbing another pair of pants to try on as she spoke. "No, definitely not. Tell me about it."

    "Well he was a chubby chubby chaser, just like that. The only difference was that he told me. I was a lot skinnier back then, but I was still pretty fat. Like, almost 250 pounds at the time."

    "What was that like?"

    "It was weird when I first found out," Leah said. "I mean, it started out normally. His name was Josh. I met him at a party and he asked me out, totally normally, and I felt pretty comfortable saying yes since we had a few mutual friends and a class together. We went on a bunch of really normal dates. I guess I noticed that he was touching my belly and my little folds and stuff a lot, because I was always kind of embarrassed when he did that. But otherwise, I had no idea he was into anything like that. And then, one night..." Leah paused, then laughed, dropping the buttons of the pants she'd been struggling with. Her gut—which she'd been holding out of the way—dropped heavily back down over her thighs, swishing against her crotch and the the denim of the pants rather loudly.
    
    "What happened?" Amanda chuckled. She was almost afraid to ask, given Leah's reaction to the memory.

    "Oh my god," Leah sighed. "I haven't thought about this in years. We're alone here, right?"

    "As far as I know."

    "Good." The bigger teacher hushed, but her words still reached into Amanda's stall without a hitch. "So, one night, Josh and I are going at it, and it's like, really good. He's saying all of this stuff, like, oh, you're so hot. That feels so good. You know, etcetera. He's getting super into it. I'm on top, looking right at him, and he just goes... oh, babe... you're so fat."

    Amanda gasped. "Jesus!"

    "Yeah. Not something I was really prepared to respond to during... you know... that."

    "What did you do?"

    Leah resumed the effort to button her pants as she continued with her story. "Well, obviously, it was incredibly awkward, so we just kind of stopped. Right away, as soon as it slipped out, he knew he'd gone way too far. He apologized. We put our clothes back on. I asked him why he said it, and he explained that he was into big girls and that those were the kinds of things he thought about during sex. That's the only thing that got him off."

    "Whoa," Amanda said. "Yeah, you've definitely never told me about this before. I would remember something like that, for sure. Was that the end of it?"

    "Definitely not. We dated for two whole years after that, actually."

    "Oh, wow! Even after you knew?"

    "Well yeah. I mean, I was offended and really weirded out at first. But after I had a couple of days to think about it, I figured it didn't make much of a difference. Like I said, I was like 260, maybe 270 pounds at the time, so I knew I was fat. That wasn't an insecurity, it was true. If you're able to round your weight up to 300 pounds, I feel like you can be certain you're not a skinny girl with a distorted self image."

    "Hm. I guess that makes sense." Amanda wondered how close she was to that range, not having weighed herself in at least two years.

    "So, I definitely wasn't offended that he thought I was fat," Leah continued. "And then, I thought, what's the difference if he does or if he doesn't like that I'm fat? Neither of us is desperate. I'm not necessarily looking for a boyfriend for the sake of having one. There are lots of other fat chicks he could've chosen. There were still things about our attraction to eachother that were definitely separate from my weight. I'm fat regardless of whether or not he thinks I'm fat. So, with all of that in mind, I figured... what's the difference? I mean, hell, if anything, now I wouldn't have to worry."

    "That's really interesting."

    "I didn't decide that stuff all at once, though. It took a while. We didn't see eachother for a week. I thought about some of that stuff, but even by the time he finally invited me over to his dorm again, I still didn't think I was ready to promise him I'd continue. But then, once I was actually there, we started talking about it openly, and then that turned into, like, a chubby-chaser version of dirty talk that was surprisingly sexy, and then..."

    "Did you guys sleep together again?"

    "Of course!" Leah, shirtless in her stall grinned at her mirror and flared her freckled double-chin. "And it was the best I'd ever had, at least up until that point."

    Amanda, who had previously been uncomfortable with the idea of Jordan liking her fatness, was suddenly intrigued by the idea of a night like that in his apartment. Their sex had already been the best she'd ever had. The thought that Jordan had always been holding back and that things had the potential to get even better was undeniably appealing.

    "Maybe I should ask him," the brunette said, rubbing a tummy that was suddenly filled with butterflies before finally squeezing back into her regular clothes.

    "Maybe you should! Jordan's awesome, I'm sure he'll be honest with you."

    "I hope so." Amanda's door opened and she stepped back out in her original striped top and Beaumont sweats. "Thanks, Leah."

    "Anytime," Leah said, emerging subsequently from her own stall.

    The two continued talking as they headed up towards the registers. Amanda's chosen clothes had all fit, but Leah had to set some down for the employees to put back on the shelves. Apparently, the bigger teacher was also growing faster than she was used to, even if it wasn't as quite as quickly as her rapidly expanding friend.

    "You know," Leah muttered, "if Jordan is a chubby chaser, you shouldn't feel like it cheapens his attraction to you. In Beaumont, dating only fat girls rules out pretty much nobody."

    Amanda snickered. It was true.

    "Seriously," Leah said, "I can't think of a better place to be into that sort of thing."

    "I wonder if he's the only one," Amanda mused. "I mean, if he's even into it at all."

    "I kind of doubt it," Leah said. "Beaumont's a big place, and I know it's not too rare of a preference. I can't imagine only one person would get that lucky."


    Eventually, the two teachers got to the front of the line and purchased the new clothes. Amanda was rung up by a familiar, egg-shaped teenager whose shift had started right after her classes at Beaumont. The employee discount, she told her teacher, was absolutely killer.