January 20

This morning I woke up to a call on my cell phone. The thing was ringing over and over, not shutting off. Groggily, I reached for it, wanting to silence it. But the thing kept going, ringing over ten times. I set it to do that in an emergency, but it had never happened before. Looking at the number, I saw that it was Riley’s. I answered the call.

“H… hello…” her loud voice answered. It was trembling.

“Riley, what’s going on?” I answered. Everything seemed to be pretty clearly under control the past few days. I wondered what was going on.

“I… I’ve been taken to juvenile hall… I was arrested this morning,” the voice answered back.

“People arrested the nine foot girl?”

“Uh-huh. Can you come down and see me?” She was serious. She had been arrested.

“I’ll be right there!” I felt alone at that moment, in our house. I put everything together to head downstairs. Clothes were thrown on in haphazard order, dashing from drawers to the bed and back again, until an unmatched pair of jeans and T-shirt was on me with some Tennis shoes. I made to bolt downstairs and to the car, but my father was there.

“BOY!” He called out, staring straight at me. I made to run past him, but he grabbed me roughly by the back of my collar.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He continued, shaking me. “You aren’t going to see Riley, are you?”

“Yeah! Now let me go!” I pulled to get out of his grip with all my efforts. But he wrapped both arms around me, trying to wrestle me down to the floor.

“Were you going to live with her!? She’s fucking fifteen! And I know you’re fucking her! The giant nympho thinks she’s spechul!! I found Riley, her mother abusing everything!!! And you know what! We didn’t have to take her in! We’ve spent so much on her!!! Let her go!”

“NO!” I wasn’t going to ‘discuss’ this with him. I just needed to get out of here. But we continued to wrestle.

“She’s always been a brat and she’s going to continue to be one!” He slurred his words. He was clearly drunk. “Not to mention she has some sort of disease! Have you ever considered that she may die!” I thought about what Riley told me, that she was talking with the doctor. I wondered what he was telling her. Would she be ok?

“I’ll find out what’s going on,” I spoke calmly. “If you reported her… I can report you. Let me go.” For a moment, he kept his hands around me, before finally releasing me.

“You can talk to her,” he sighed gruffly. “But you’re not getting her out of there. I’m not the main reason she’s in there… hell… if it were just me, she’d be out in a week. You’ll see when you get over there. And you’ll be grounded when you get back. She’s made you into a brat.” He walked over to the living room, sitting down on the couch watching some inane TV show.

I couldn’t help but think of our town as I drove towards Riley. Around 10,000 people… we used to be booming. Before all the factories moved out… primarily one that just worked on shoes. Shoes. Those were made by people in sweatshops across the world now. Riley herself… the media attention she was bringing in. With the chefs she got together, her staff… paid for by the money flowing to her, she was beginning to bring jobs here. She was obsessed with growth… but it could really bring something here.

I anticipated the scene as I pulled up.

There were people standing outside, some cheering for her to be let out or to see her. Others were calling for her to be punished. There were people of different political affiliations on this group. Some saw her as a sinner. A stupid leader of the Baptist church was there… saying the same type of stuff he had been talking about since time immemorial. She was a sinner. She was lustful, attracted lust. She betrayed god through seeking attention as an idol. And standing next to him was that goddamn reporter.

“Hey…” the reporter cheered. “Do you have anything to say about Riley being brought in for violence!” He tried to jam the microphone into my face, and I swatted it out of the way.

“Not a goddamn thing to you!” I cried.

Around him were some other people talking about her being a privileged white girl. Someone who let herself be a walking billboard. That she deserved this… I just ran past them. I needed to get inside.

“ID…” A bored looking guard asked at the entrance. Despite the crowd outside, he stood there, in a simple brown uniform, looking like a droopy statue. I handed everything over, the process taking way too long. Finally, he waved me through.

“Ok… you can go… talk to the receptionist as to who you want to visit…”

I ran through to a narrow window. I rung the bell, but nobody answered. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, a woman approached.

“Visiting hours aren’t until 1:00…” she drawled. I looked at the clock. 10:30.

“Can I wait here? I’m here to see Riley.”

“Riley?” The woman raised an eyebrow.

“Riley… Matthews.” Matthews. I almost winced as I said it. The name of her mom. She loved her. She really was a good mother until the last few years. Maybe it’s why she clung to me so hard… she felt like she had no one else. As far as mom and dad were concerned, she may have been right.

“You can wait until 10:30, if you want.” The woman shrugged, and I begun the long process of sitting on a bench. There was a magazine there, surprisingly. It didn’t have anything about Riley. Just a bunch of information on monster trucks. I read through the whole thing from cover to cover anyway.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the woman approached me.

“You can come on. It’s only 12:30, but they said you can come through. Room twenty.

I put my stuff through a scanner, and then they let me walk back into the room. My footsteps echoed through the empty hall as I rushed towards Riley. They were doing a good job of keeping the commotion outside from spilling over.

I almost lost my breath at the sight. The waiting room had a glass divider, with just a small chair on each side. One for the visitor, and one for the “guest” of the facility. There was a small door for each person to enter on one side of it.

And, bit by bit, Riley walked through. She shuffled, her shoulders barely squeezing through the door. The rest of her body followed. She actually had on a loose shirt, which obscured her figure a little. Still, it was obvious, as her hips nearly got stuck in the door. Slowly, gradually, all of Riley made it through the door. Finally, she sat down, cross-legged on the floor, nearly taking up all of the area of the room. Her hair was completely askew, and her hands were shaking a little in her lap. She smiled when she saw me walk in though.

“H… hey…” Riley sighed, trying to look away from me. She wasn’t going to get out of my eyesight—she took up the whole room.

“Riley! What are you in here for! Dad was acting really weird!” I started blurting everything out the second she was there.

“He said that I threatened to kill him… I didn’t do any such thing…” Riley sighed. “There was some other stuff, the guy talked about a bunch… I don’t remember all of it… oh Ashley… like you said, I quit doing anything to her… people would do stuff for me on my own… so I quit trying to go after people like her… but she talked about it… and she said I ass… ass…” her mouth shook as she tried to pronounce it, “hurt her. Forced myself on her… they want me in here a while.” My heart sunk as I heard all of this.

“Is there anything?”

“I don’t know how much proof there is or anything!” Riley sighed, rubbing her temples, as she stared down at my small form. “A lot of people are looking up to me, but even more are scared of me. I think a lot of people will believe anything about what I’ve done, especially after I hurt you in front of the school…” Riley was tearing up, looking straight down at the floor. “And the doctor’s no help. I wanted to be big, but this is big enough, really. Just big enough to be famous and stuff… and I didn’t want this. The doctor’s useless. He doesn’t tell me anything at all. I finally told him that he’s not enough, that there needs to be a team. He said he’d get one, but… I don’t want to be any trouble. Ok? Just… It’ll be ok… ok…” Riley tried her best to smile. But all I could think of is what she just told me. She said that she loved the sense of power over people. How they all crawled to her and begged them to touch her. She hadn’t even been hurting anyone recently. She wouldn’t… rape them?

“It’s Ashley, right? I’ll talk to her. Ok.” The room seemed to move up and down for me as Riley shook her head.

“Ok. You can talk to her. Tommy, I’ll be ok.” Her stomach rumbled, slowly, angrily as she spoke. And Riley turned red.

“I’m going to get you out of here, ok? I’ll do everything to make sure I can. And Riley…”

“Yes?”

“Make absolutely sure that you get enough to eat. Maybe you can’t find out why you’re growing, but that doesn’t change the fact that you are. You don’t want to turn into a bag of bones, do you?”

“No…” Riley smiled, staring down at the floor. Even hunched over, she was taller than me. Her knees, sitting crosslegged, nearly reached my waist. She was massive. But she was still making the same expressions she did as my closest companion. As the girl I helped raise. I wasn’t going to let anything happen to her. “We’ll get our place, Tommy. I want to live with just my friends. I know… I know you care for mom and dad… but you said you wanted to as well…”

“Ok Riley, I’ll do everything I can to help you out…” but a large hand slipped through the window in the middle. It barely fit, a palm splayed open, a foot across. I wrapped my hands around two of her fingers. They were warm.

“They didn’t have anything here that can fit me…” Riley laughed softly. “But I guess they’re gonna make me something. Prison clothes.” My whole hand moved when she just twitched her fingers a little. She was so much stronger than me. Yet still so scared.

“It’s not prison, Riley, it’s just juvenile hall. And you’ll be out of here soon. And… you’re big.”

“Yeah. I know that. I’ve talked about it enough. More blood, more sinew, more flesh being added to my body. It all takes a lot of energy.”

“I’m just stressing that you need to eat a lot here. You need to make sure the people here know that. And if they don’t get you what you need, don’t hurt anyone, but throw enough of a fit to make sure that people on the OUTSIDE know about it.” I actually felt a bit like someone older than Riley again, as she nodded along to all of my words.

“Ok. I will.” For a while I just sat there, holding Riley’s hand. I felt like everything was going to be ok. Perhaps she was comforting me more than I was her. For what felt like far too short of a time, we sat there. Riley’s breathing was very loud… it was amazing how uncanny everything looked and felt and smelled like at her size.

“They won’t be able to keep me here…” Riley muttered after a while, darkly. “I don’t have to HURT anyone… I don’t plan to. But you know… you should know… I’m a spectacle… they can’t keep me here.”

“Why?” I muttered. Riley looked at me like I was stupid.

“Because you were staring right at my pussy like a man possessed a couple of days ago. Now I’m bigger than that. Soon, I’ll be bigger than that. Nothing… nothing… that anyone knows about will stop that growth. Everyone coming in here was staring at me. They’d like to help me. To win my favor… sure… some people are scared of me… but in the end, worship will win out over fear.”

“You’re fifteen, Riley, you don’t need to talk like that.”

“You are someone I will protect. At this size, I basically am the adult. Listen, if you want to help me, then do so. But I’ll get out of here on my own. I protect you. I protect those who I care about. That’s common sense at my size.”

But, after far too short a time, a staff member came back in to lead me out.

Sarah was in the waiting room.

“Everyone agreed I should be the second one…” she didn’t have another word to me as she went on, except one, which surprised me. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, I just wanted to see her.”

“She must be scared. She’s always thought the world of you. Promise me you’ll do everything you can to get her out.”

“I already promised her.” And Sarah smiled as she went on to visit Riley. I sighed as I walked back out into the sun. Into the stupid argument occurring between the entire town about my niece. Things weren’t going to be simple, were they?