Author's note: The previous author's note has been redacted while I fix certain details. It will be reinstated soon.
The stench was familiar, nauseating but comforting. Home, or at least as much a home as she could get. Fast food odors mixed with flatulence and mildew.
It was a tiny apartment. That was all her parents could afford—would afford, seeing as she had yet to hold down a steady job that would let her get anything better. They gave her an allowance each month, and now that was gone too, wasted on too many nights of fast food when she didn't feel like using the groceries, now expired, that her mother had helped her buy. They were going to bitch about that too.
But cooking meant working, which meant dishes that had to be washed and put away, and that was so, so, so much work...
And Lucy Van Pelt thought herself above menial work.
What she wanted to do, really, was write: Write about how people had fucked up, talk to people about how they had issues that made hers look small, berate people and break them down and get paid for it. That was Lucy's style. She tore people down, and, if they really deserved to amount to anything, they'd learn from it and pay her for more of her services.
But now, as she sat on a sagging second-hand sofa, watching an old movie for the 22nd time because her parents stopped paying for cable, trying not to look at the credit card bills she had stacked on the counter... she realized that she wasn't going to get that. At all.
Four thousand—maybe five thousand—in debt, a product of too many shopping sprees behind her parents' backs, too many fancy dinners, a laptop she'd broken in a fit of rage when she'd gotten it infected with a virus. How exactly she would explain that, she didn't know. She had to get a job. She had gotten jobs before, and her best record was three whole weeks before a combination of bad attitude and bad body odor made the most "patient" manager decide she wasn't someone they wanted handling food or money.
She was 550 pounds, and undeniably morbidly obese. The last doctor had told her to her face: "You are going to die if you don't start eating better and walking."
It hurt to walk.
It hurt to do anything besides sit and eat, so that was what Lucy did nowadays: Sit, eat, struggle to the bathroom, repeat. Sit, eat, struggle to the bathroom, fail and accidentally shit herself on the way, plan on how to explain a lack of progress to parents who wanted to retire five years ago, increasingly impatient and threatening to cut her off for good, repeat.
She needed a job, but all she had were bad references and bad grades. Bad grades in high school. Worse in community college when she just stopped caring. Rejection letters from publication companies and advice columns. 35 years old and nothing to show for it but a stack of credit card bills, a few of which read "LAST NOTICE" ominously.
A lost cause, Linus had called her.
He'd moved out at eighteen, years of abuse neither forgotten nor forgiven. Mom and dad didn't talk about him much. Linus had been the neglected one, expected to suck it up whenever Lucy used him as a punching bag, and now he had divorced himself from all of them. She was all her parents had left, and she could see it in their eyes—they realized they chose poorly.
She'd show him. She'd get a job, slim down, turn her life around, and then he'd be sorry he missed out on supporting her. When she was the next Dr. Phil with a million dollar contract, and she was selling books and videos, Linus would see, Charlie would see, and...
And...
And there she went again, off on a fantasy train that went nowhere. Because, as a nasty little voice in her mind reminded her, Lucy Van Pelt didn't have the mental or physical strength to crawl out from the hole she found herself in. She didn't have the self-control to stop eating fried food for every meal, she didn't have the discipline to walk long enough to burn off the calories, she didn't have the charm needed to keep a job, and the one thing she prided herself on—her self-taught psychological assessments—had gotten her laughed out of freshman psychology.
No more nickels from Charlie Brown.
Charlie Brown...
The lowest point in her life came when the blockhead, who was always good for knocking down to make herself feel better, had torn into her in a high school cafeteria, calling her a fat, self-centered sociopath with no ambition beyond tearing other people down... And it had been with that tirade that her last vestiges of control over him were destroyed. She had become the pathetic one in their "relationship", and rather than even pay her the attention needed to torment her as she had him, he'd dismissed her as a waste of time and ignored her.
A lost cause and a waste of time, Lucy Van Pelt.
What was Charlie doing right now, she wondered? He'd spoken at graduation, she'd heard. She hadn't bothered to attend, the least of the reasons being there wasn't a gown big enough for her. What she did know was that he wasn't the same wishy-washy kid she could yank a football away from. Not anymore.
He had amputated her. Excised her like a tumor. And she knew, without her crushing him down, he'd thrive. She'd always known he would... and it scared her. A paradox that should not have been now was. So where was he now? Where was the mockery, the deflated football he was supposed to send as one last jab at her? When would he show up to gloat?
He wasn't going to, she realized.
Everyone but her parents had dismissed her as a lost cause. A waste of time. And she knew that when her parents saw the bills for $5,000 worth of junk food, unwearable clothes, and now useless tech, they'd take a long hard look at how much more they were willing to help her...
A moment of clarity hit her. She was going to be out on the streets. Alone, and barely able to walk. Nothing left in her bank account. Nothing that she could sell that would make a dent. She blinked as the tears fell down her fat, hoggish jowls, realizing with total clarity the hopelessness of her situation.
There had been one other purchase she'd made...
The waddle over to the dresser was an effort, knees threatening to give at any moment if she bent them wrong, she found what she was looking for.
A small 9mm revolver. Meant for self-defense when she'd heard about the recent break-ins in the neighborhood... or at least that was what she told herself it was for. She knew no one was going to come inside her apartment, not without a hazmat suit and major bonus pay as compensation. It took a few seconds to load a bullet in, her diabetic fingers failing her yet again, like everything else.
She waddled back to the sofa, flopped on it, hearing something snap as it sagged further.
One more revelation hit her.
No one besides her parents was going to care about this, much less be surprised. Not Linus. Not Charlie. No one. Everyone had moved on, moved forward but her.
For some reason, the barrel against her head didn't feel threatening. She managed to get a fingertip on the trigger. She waited for something to happen to stop her, a call on her cell phone, a knock on the door from a repentant Linus, anything...
The cell phone was broken from her sitting on it. Linus hated her. No one was going to save her. No one but bill collectors or angry parents would knock.
She thought of it like getting a shot at the doctor when she was a kid... "Deep breath. Close your eyes. This won't hurt much." She squeezed.
A freight train of super-heated metal eviscerated every last thought. An explosion, like the one of a dying sun, blasted her universe into a blinding supernova, then was followed by a starless darkness.
The phone rang again for the fifth time, and retired Master Sergeant Linus Van Pelt had finally had enough. He knew the number, knew it meant nothing but pain, but his wife was trying to sleep, so he trudged outside into the cold of the winter night so not to wake her...
"What the fuck do you want?" he snarled.
"...she's dead." his mother said softly.
"And?"
There was a pause. "Your sister is *dead*."
"*And*?"
"For God's sake, Linus, I know she was hard to get along with, but she—"
"Listen, if you want to keep making excuses for her, fine. But I'm not going to cry for her. Not after all the shit she did to me, to my brother, to Charlie..."
"Honey, she had issues—"
"Well so do I! I came home to a fucking war-zone that made Afghanistan look nice every day when I was a kid, having to deal with her bullshit, do her chores, patch Rerun up when she tried to kill him—"
"Honey that was only once—"
"Oh, you're right. You're absoluuuutely right. She only tried to kill him over eating the last Oreo ONCE. My bad! That's totally understandable." he pinched the bridge of his nose. "Listen, I need to go."
"Aren't you at least coming to the funeral?"
He could explain that after no one in his family showed up for his army graduation, or to meet him at the airport, or to be at his side when he recovered from a gunshot wound, that he felt absolutely no obligation to watch them dump her fat ass in the ground... But it was late, he was tired, and if they couldn't figure it out, then that was on them.
He clicked the call off, started to turn off his cell, then he remembered a promise. He fired off a text to Charlie.
"The bitch is dead. Just FYI."
Then he turned off his cellphone and went back inside to engage in his favorite pastime, snuggling up against the woman of his dreams.