Just Add Water by Laura Shell

Just Add Water by Laura Shell

Chloe Marshall had a growth on the back of her neck. She noticed it as she brushed her long, black hair after a shower. The size of a lentil, she scratched at it, but it wouldn’t budge. She thought perhaps she had developed another mole or skin tag. Her back was covered with moles and skin tags, so she shrugged it off and went on with her day.

What Chloe did not know was that the supposed mole or skin tag was actually an insect, that the bug had started out the size of a grain of table salt, that it would have blinked out of existence if it hadn’t found her in the park yesterday, and that by adding water…the bug had gained in size…and Chloe had lost three pounds.

But that wasn’t all the bug had done for Chloe.

A senior at a high school in Seneca, South Carolina, one of SC’s many podunk towns, Chloe longed for graduation day when she’d finally get the hell away from all the bullying from these stupid, simple-minded jackasses.

Chloe was 150 pounds overweight. Everyday, her classmates reminded her of this fact. But on this day, the first day of the bug on the back of the neck, Chloe had something to retort with—information.

Robert Keller was the first to tease her. “I see you’re still fat. Must suck to be you.”

She was sitting at her desk in first period civil war history class. Excessive adipose tissue from her hips spilled out from both sides of her seat. Students who sat behind her had to weave around her fat to get to their seats. Some of them giggled as they did so. Stupid, simple-minded jackasses.

Robert was one of those gigglers. He sat directly behind her.

Immediately after his remark, Chloe had one of her own.

She turned her head to the right, leaned back and whispered to Robert, “does your mother know that your father is having an affair with her sister?”

That caused a stupid expression on Robert’s perfect face; he looked like he’d peed his pants. He didn’t say another word to her for the rest of the day. In fact, he avoided her as if she were on fire.

And Chloe…she was a bit stressed. How did she know that particular detail of Mr. Keller’s love life?

Hmmm.

In second period calculus, she pressed her left index finger into the growth on the back of her neck as she took a pop quiz. Chloe was a C student in calculus. As she pressed on the growth, rubbed it, flicked it with her fingernail, she completed the 10-question pop quiz in five minutes, and knew she had answered all 10 questions correctly.

“Done.” Chloe held up her test paper so the teacher could take it from her. She was NOT going to press her belly fat inward in order to squeeze out of her desk just to take it up to him. She’d reserve that task for the end of class when she had to leave the room. And he knew that.

“What?” Mr. Scott said with a quizzical frown. “Already?”

“Yep.” Chloe projected a confidence she’d never experienced. The confidence of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed cheerleader with big tits who’d just given the quarterback an epic blowjob.

Some of her classmates snickered in confused amusement. One of them was Tasha Boyd.

After the calculus teacher took Chloe’s paper and returned to his desk, she leaned to her left and told Tasha, “your best friend, Heather, is going to die in a car accident tomorrow.”

Everyone within listening distance sucked in a harsh breath.

Tasha jumped up. “How dare you say that, you fat fucking cunt!”

“Tasha!” said Mr. Scott. “Sit down! You don’t say another word to anyone for the rest of this class!”

Tasha slowly sat down, grimacing at Chloe, looking as if she needed to fart.

Chloe faced front. All this secret information that she shouldn’t know…

How?

The growth on the back of her neck. It was somehow feeding her this info about those that bullied her, that called her names, that had ridiculed her since she’d moved to this podunk town and had become a student at this shit-bird high school.

Thanks, Mom.

For the rest of that day, Chloe saw her fellow students cluster in groups next to the lockers, whispering as they stared at her, some blatantly pointing at her. Some told her to go fuck herself. They called her names, names she’d heard so many, many times, but those names still upset her to some degree, either pissed her off or made her want to cry.

Regardless, she glided through the halls, believing, knowing she was the smartest person amongst them all. At one point, when she reached the end of one hall, she turned, cleared her throat, and yelled, “none of you are going to amount to anything! You’re all going to live and die in this stupid, fucking town.”

The entire hallway erupted in a slew of profanities and verbal ejaculations of her character. Their combined voices mirrored their cheers when the football team scored a touchdown. The volume was that impressive.

The crowd was about to encircle her when Principal Owen appeared beside Chloe with his arms raised. The crowd paused, but didn’t give up their verbal onslaught.

The principal yelled something but no one save for Chloe was able to hear him.

“Quiet!”

Chloe looked him up and down. He was about to be fired. She rolled her eyes, turned and left school. Fuck this place. She wasn’t going to return to this school, the bug told her so.

& & &

Chloe faced the stream of warm water. She hadn’t wet her neck yet. The longer the bug remained on her neck the more she knew. About lots of things. Like the fact that she had lost three pounds. But considering she now weighed 277, a loss of three pounds wasn’t going to show on her largeness.

Another fact she knew was that the bug would get larger with water. But how much larger?

With apprehension, Chloe turned and let the water drench her neck. The sensation felt like fingernails digging into her flesh and squeezing. It was small and localized, right where the insect resided, then the feeling spanned outward, slowly, growing in size, in a perfect circle, five inches in diameter.

Simultaneously, Chloe’s stomach and hips shrank, as if someone were pressing on her flesh, pushing the fat inward, and the fat not springboarding back. She watched it happen with a gaping mouth, saw her body lose inches. Shit, she lost twelve pounds. 15 total. And 15 pounds would show.

But the bug…

Chloe turned away from the water. She slid her hand beneath her hair and placed it over the insect, noticed its hard shell, the edges of it stuck to her neck as if attached with glue. No way she could pry it loose.

She couldn’t think of a reason why she would want to.

& & &

At the piece-of-shit dinner table with her equally rotund mother, Chloe choked down the fried chicken dinner. Normally she’d enjoy it, but after losing 15 pounds, she just wasn’t in the mood for fattening foods.

“What’s wrong with you?” Diane Marshall asked, then spit out a piece of chicken fat onto her paper plate. The woman was ugly, inside and out. No one liked her. Not even her daughter. Especially not Chloe. For numerous reasons.

“You love fried chicken. Why aren’t you eating any?”

Chloe shrugged. “Just not hungry.”

“Bullshit.” Diane threw her half-eaten KFC drumstick at her daughter. It hit Chloe’s left shoulder then landed on the dingy, dusty linoleum floor. “You’re always hungry.” Diane picked up the drumstick and continued to eat it.

Chloe stared at her mother in disgust…in dislike…in disdain…and said the only thing she could think to say— “You had sex with your boss today.”

Diane froze, just looked at Chloe as if she had turned into the barnyard creature she currently ingested. A few seconds later, Diane licked the fingers of her right hand. “So what if I did? And how would you know that?”

“He’s married.”

“So what? His wife’s a bitch.”

“She’s pregnant.”

“So..the fuck…WHAT? And how do you know any of that?!”

Chloe shrugged. “I hear things.”

“Yeah? Well…hear this.” Diane stood, picked up the bucket of KFC and dumped the remaining fried chicken onto Chloe’s lap. “Mind your own goddamn business!”

“Seriously, Mom?”

“Yeah? So what?”

Shaking her head, shaking all over with a deep wave of loathing, Chloe returned the fried bird to the bucket.

Diane asked, “Have you lost weight?”

& & &

Chloe had developed a symbiotic relationship with the bug. It was now the length of her neck, and flat against her skin, from the base of her skull to the T1 vertebra—12 inches long and six inches wide. Its body had become segmented so that Chloe could bend her neck normally, but the damned thing was still uncomfortable because the edges were so tightly attached to her skin.

But she was in no hurry to get rid of it—she had lost 150 pounds. Somehow those pounds were feeding the insect. Nourishing it.

Now back to her sweet weight, people were astonished at how she had lost so much in such a short period of time. But what was more interesting was all the secrets she knew.

Which explained why the beautiful people had abducted her and held her in the four-car garage of Tasha Boyd’s home.

Being beautiful people, they really didn’t have the stomach for kidnapping. They didn’t have Chloe tied to a chair or anything of the sort. They merely had her in a corner of the garage and were berating her with questions.

Tasha in tears, was the main instigator. Comforted by three of her equally beautiful female friends, and Robert Keller, she wanted to know how Chloe knew about Heather’s death, which had occurred two days ago.

All Chloe could think to say was that she was psychic. What else could she say?

“Look, I don’t know what more I can tell you.” Chloe hated these people. Sure she had  become one of them in a physical sense. Practically overnight. Now back to 127 pounds and at five feet, seven inches tall, her face thin again, and gorgeous… Her arms and legs buff and sinewy… Wearing those clothes she’d kept in the attic, swearing to herself she would wear again someday…

Robert shoved Chloe against a wall of the garage. “What about my dad? He admitted to me last night that he was cheating on my mother. How did you know?!”

A little afraid of Robert, believing he was the kind of football hero that would smack a girl… “Again…Robert…psychic.” Chloe pointed at herself.

Robert crossed his thick arms over his muscular man boobs. “Nah, there’s something weird going on with you. You lose all this weight in a matter of days. You suddenly know all this secret shit about people.” He stood inches from her. “Do you worship the Devil?”

Chloe scrutinized him a moment. He wasn’t joking.

She shook her head. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Typical, country bumpkin, white ass, football jock mentality.”

He stuck a finger in her face. “No, see there. You would never have the balls to talk back to me like that. Never.”

She tried to push him aside. He grabbed her wrists and backed her up against the garage wall once more.

“Let me go!”

“Tell me what’s really going on!”

“Fuck off!” Chloe tried to pull her wrists free. It was like trying to yank loose from iron handcuffs affixed to a wall.

“Tell me the truth!”

The bug unhooked itself from Chloe’s skin, causing her to lose her breath. And it hurt, felt as if a giant suction cup with teeth had suddenly lifted from her flesh. She froze as it scrambled around to the front of her throat and sat there, its numerous mini legs sticking to her like Velcro.

Robert let out a high-pitched cry as he released Chloe and backed away. “What the fuck is that?!”

The bug hissed, sounding like a chorus of cicadas.

Tasha and her female cohorts screamed.

The bug raced down the front of Chloe’s body and dashed along the garage floor, toward the beautiful people, like a rat on cocaine. They couldn’t clear the place fast enough. Chloe giggled.

& & &

The beautiful people had forced Chloe into Robert’s Mercedes SUV and had driven her to the affluent part of Seneca, to Tasha Boyd’s house. Chloe lived 12 miles away. She called her mom to come pick her up, said she’d been bullied again, had missed the bus, and needed a ride home. Her mother told her to tough it out and walk it.

“You’re such a lovely woman,” Chloe said before ending the call, not giving her mother a chance to reply.

So she started walking.

And then it began to rain.

Luckily, Chloe had on a collared shirt, but goddamn, the rain pissed down. She didn’t have a coat or any other type of cover for her neck besides her hair, which wasn’t optimal. So she  placed her hands on the back of her neck. It was the best she could do. She didn’t want to lose anymore poundage.

The bug wasn’t going to remove itself from the safety of her neck. Told her so. She couldn’t blame it.

Luckily she spotted a magnolia tree off the side of the road and sat beneath it, intending to wait for the rain to subside. Her skinny jeans were soaked, even her fuzzy socks at the ankles, and her collared Korn shirt.

She sat under that tree and damned her mother to hell. Her mother who had the fucking day off and could have easily have picked her up.

“What a cunt!”

Throughout Chloe’s life, her mother—

Straight ahead, a Mercedes SUV pulled off the side of the road.

“Oh, shit.” Chloe stood and dropped her hands by her sides. What the hell did he want? What was going to be the result of his knowing about the bug that lived at the back of her neck?

Robert drove through the weeds to the magnolia tree and stopped beside Chloe. He opened the passenger door. “Get in!”

“No fucking way!”

“We need to talk! Please. I need your help.”

Need my help?

As Chloe stared at the dry, plush leather interior of that SUV, the bug told her something that made her smile. She was reminded that not all of its premonitions were reserved for other people.

& & &

All the tables and chairs of the living and dining rooms were toppled, and one chair was broken, had been used to knock Diane Marshall’s legs out from under her.

She now lay on her stomach on the living room floor. Robert had his knees around her flabby waist as he sat on her flabby ass, had her flabby arms secured beside his knees. Chloe lifted Diane’s greasy black hair to reveal her flabby neck.

Diane let out a series of grunting and snorting and gurgling noises that sounded like a struggling deer that had launched into a windshield.

The bug, on its own accord, detached from Chloe, skitted down her right arm, tickling her, giving her goosebumps. It found a home on Diane’s thickset neck. The bug had flesh on either side of its hard, segmented shell on which to grow. And certainly had all that back fat to explore as well…for starters.

“Now we just have to get her into the shower,” Chloe revealed.

Robert nodded as if he knew what needed to be done before she even said it.

& & &

The partially clothed body of Diane Marshall lay in the soap scummed bath tub. She was in a child’s pose position—she sat on her knees, arms at her sides, head turned.

Chloe had ripped open the back of her mother’s Guns-n-Roses t-shirt so the bug could have access to her back flesh.

Within 20 minutes, the bug had dined voraciously under a constant stream of water.

Chloe and Robert stood next to the tub and watched in awe as Diane shrank from 280 pounds to 60. The bug had grown from her neck to the middle of her back and was as wide as her rib cage. It had nearly wrapped itself around her like a vest.

Chloe looked up at Robert, her jaw hanging down. She hadn’t realized that they were holding hands. Tightly. But she didn’t want to let go of him, was afraid her knees would buckle if she did.

“Holy shit,” Robert said. “I mean…holy shit.”

“Right?” Chloe looked at what was left of her mother. “I fucking hate this woman. She has caused me nothing but heartache, anger and grief my entire life. She is a complete waste of space.”

Robert cackled. “Waste of space. But she’s not wasting much space now, is she?”

They both laughed.

“So…do you think…I can borrow your bug…for my father?”

They looked at each other, squeezed their locked hands.

“Of course you can, Robert. It has that planned. But remember…just add water.”

“Ha. Smartass.”

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Laura Shell 2025