There are times when you just wake up somewhere, and you have no idea how you got there, nor how long you've been there. Sometimes it can seem like you blacked out for years, and just now got out of the coma you were in for so long. In a coma where you were dreaming a dream of everlasting bliss, yet you have memories of your actual life in between the time when you blacked out, and the time you wake up. Life is so good, that you can't tell if it's a dream or if it's real. It's like when a really strong narcotic finally leaves your system, and you experience that all powerful hangover of hangovers. It's like waking up in a recovery room after dental surgery, that feeling of gauze magically materializing in your mouth. It's the feeling I'll be feeling right about...now.
But let me back up a bit. My name's Alice Quent. For 8 years of my life, I had a very good life. I had loving parents, nice clothes, everything I could ever want. Home, if you could call it that anymore, was a mansion in Beverly Hills. Mother was a B-list actress, and Father was the owner of a very successful law firm. They didn't by me everything I wanted, but they bought enough things for me to be happy. I never went hungry, I never had to work a day in my life, and most of the time, I was happy. I was always a little chubby, but my parents never really seemed to mind. Her "snuggly teddy bear," my mother used to call me before poking my stomach. That was when I was eight, and I was about a hundred, hundred and five pounds. Now, fast forward five years and a hundred and twenty-five pounds later, my parents started to treat me a little differently. Maybe it was because they thought I would have grown into my body by now that they were so loving then. I guess in their eyes, their cute, little chubby girl had turned into a not so little, fat teenager. They seemed love me less. After all, my beautiful mother and handsome father couldn't have their daughter be so fat and ugly. None of us new what happened, I ate like a sensible person, and exercised enough, but I was still fat. A little after my thirteenth birthday, they started making jokes about my weight. I began to get depressed, and was beginning to wonder where my parents' love for me had gone. Home wasn't the only place I was getting abuse like this, school seemed like a big plate of it that I was being force fed every day. It used to be that I had friends, that I had a good time at school. Now those friends had become faces in the mass of students that constantly taunted me. Where I was once very happy, I was now an outcast. All of this continued until a few days ago when my parents sat me down and gave me the "Alice, you're getting fat," speech again, but this time, Mother had what looked like a brochure of some sort in her hands. "It's a camp for people like...well...you." she said trying not to hurt my feelings for once. "Your father and I really think it would be best if you went." she continued on. That was actually one of the parts where I put up the "But I don't want to go to fat camp," argument, but I had a feeling that if I didn't go, they would never love me again. So, now I awake here on the bus to Camp Fitting In. A camp for rich parents to ship there fat kids, ages 10-14, off to, to get them in the preferred shape, so they can come back and be like the rest of their friends who's parents will either let them get liposuction, have been "blessed" with "perfect" bodies, or don't know their anorexic and/or bulimic.