Fat Camp

"But why are you making me go there Mom, why?” Abigail sobbed as she sunk to the living room carpet.

"You have to go, sweetheart, I care too much about you to not let you go." Her mother replied from the other end of the phone, "After what happened to your father, I couldn't stand the thought of what would happen to you otherwise." Jeanette Richter paused. Losing Abby to stroke or heart failure, or how she had lost Marty eight years ago, in a diabetic coma, would be torture.

"But why can't you stop them? Tell them that they can't do this, please!"

"Abby honey, please, just go with them now and you'll be back soon. Before you know it. A few weeks, a month maybe and you'll be good as new."

"But I'm ok right now! And you know they never keep anyone for just a few weeks, Mother."

"Honey, I never said you weren't ok, you just need some help. I think you're beautiful but this new program, it's better for your health. In the long run, maybe you'll be happier, healthier at least."

Abby got up on her knees, slowly rose to her feet and put down the phone down on the heavy lead glass coffee table that sat in the middle of the room. She pulled off her blouse to inspect herself in the mirror that hung over the couch. She stood there in her jeans and bra, her ample stark white flesh rolling over the sides of the denim, her hand tracing over the lines and folds of her skin. She picked the phone back up and placed it between her shoulder and ear, but had tuned her mother out.

The program her mother was referring to was a new service provided in her town of Lawnfield, NY. It had begun two summers ago when the town council passed a law that equated childhood obesity with child abuse. Basically, if your kid was fat you were a bad parent so the town had to step in to take care of your child. Forget about genetic reasons for being overweight or how completely inappropriate it was to take children from their parents or any other reasons that might have gotten the town to stay out of the personal lives of it's residents. As far as officials were concerned, if the parents were beating their kids, they could take the kids away and what they were doing now, by feeding them fatty, processed sugar-laden food and letting them sit on their couches, glued to their TVs, couches and video games was far worse than any corporal punishment. So any overweight kids in town were sent to mandatory fat camp for a month or six months or a year or however long it took for them to get down to their ideal weight as prescribed by the doctors at the camp.

It was a cross between boot camp and boarding school and the town paid for the whole thing, which was in turn subsidized for by the President's Challenge Awards Program. Lawnfield drew national attention for their unorthodox approach to dealing with the nation's growing obesity problem, and garnered further attention still when the program worked, with unforeseen levels of success. Kids who were previously spent their days molded to their couches were now all-state in soccer, lacrosse and cross-country. Lawnfield High School had participated in the state championships in tennis, basketball and swimming, and took home the trophy in football. Lawnfield was the model for burgeoning "fit camps" as they were called, which were popping up like wildfire across the United States. But being the first and so far most successful hadn't missed the attention of various college recruiters. Lawnfield High graduates, who used to anticipate spending the four years after high school attending one of the many mid-level public colleges scattered across New York State were now being offered scholarships, (full rides!) to the nation's top private universities.

Darrell Winslow, the center for the high school's football team, had been offered a scholarship to Harvard. Darrell had always been a smart kid, with a specific interest in science and math, but he never had an aptitude for athletics, choosing physics over the physical. At the end of 9th grade, he weighed approximately 350 pounds and stood at 6 feet 3 inches. When the law was passed that July, he was once of the first wave of children sent to the camp and when he returned home for his junior year 8 months later and 150 pounds lighter, he tried out for the high school football team and made the varsity team. Darrell was the reason, many said, that the team made it to the championships, let alone won. He had been interviewed on the Today Show and David Letterman. There was an article written up about him in Newsday where he praised the fit camp he attended and said how it changed his life and how it made him a better overall person.

But Lawnfield had run out of kids, the population of people who were under the age of 18 were remarkably fit, and attendance at the town's skate parks, soccer fields and basketball courts was higher than ever. Now that the health of the town's children wasn't a concern, attention started to be paid to the adult residents in the town. The biggest problem initially laid in the fact that the town couldn't demand that the adults to attend camp. At first the officials thought that the parents of the children would mimic the behavior of their healthy children, but the adults were content to drive their children to and from practice and sit in the bleachers cheering on their winning teams. The town then tried using a mass marketing campaign to guilt its' citizens into compliance which only succeeded with about a quarter of the town's population in visiting the camp, with far fewer staying and only a small number of people completing the program and reaping the benefits experienced by the children.

There had been a rumor that attendance at the Lawnfield Health and Wellness Camp had been so low that the city council had considered closing the center and selling the land to private housing developers who would divvy up the acres and build a new neighborhood of McMansions. Alicia Curtis, Councilwoman since 1983, voiced her opinion that if the remaining overweight adults wanted to destroy their health and ruin their lives, then the town had done more than had been expected and should now be able to benefit financially off of the land so that the money could be used towards other, needier programs.

Lawnfield Health's (as was the town shorthand) turning point came when Hector Kohlman's parent's had him committed to their program under a mental health law that had been on the town charter since the 1800's, but hadn't been enforced in over a century. The law stated that any person who was willfully doing harm to themselves was automatically insane and could be committed against their will. Hector, who was 28 at this point, weighed in at 340 pounds and was five feet six inches. Hector was fat, yes, but he was happy. Perhaps if we were living in another era or a different culture, no one would have cared that Hector was as fat as he was, but in fitness crazy Lawnfield, it was like living next to a well-known cannibal and no one saying anything.

The matter for discussion was never whether of not 18 was the legal age for adulthood, it's at which age do you stop being a child? What age do you stop being a parent to your children Mr. and Mrs. Kohlman? This child needs help! The guilt had jumped from the billboards to the front lawn and Mr. and Mrs. Kohlman, perhaps if they were stronger people, made from better meddle than they were, perhaps they wouldn't have caved to the public perception of their son, taken it on as their own. They argued and pleaded with Hector to go the camp for weeks, but he remained steadfast. He liked himself. When they threatened to have him committed, he stopped talking to them, so they hired a lawyer (for his own good! they insisted) and took him to court.

Hector could not afford a lawyer, for while he worked and had his own apartment, there was not extra money for frivolous lawsuits brought on by his parents. His parents brought the case before Judge Jonathan Martin, himself a supporter of the Lawnfield Health and Wellness program for children. He saw the merit of the Kohlman's case and agreed that Hector was putting himself at undue risk and that this was a matter of protecting Hector from himself. After that, the floodgates opened, and men and women in their 20s and 30s were being sent by their middle-aged and elderly parents to fit camp. Lawnfield was able to stay open to live off the fat of the land for just a little bit longer.

Jeanette drew her lips close to the phone to blow her daughter a kiss when she heard the loud banging from the other end of her receiver.

"Abby, I gave them my set of your keys. Honey, I'm sorry."

Abby sat back down on the square oriental rug trying to figure out what her mother had just said when her front door swung open. Standing in the doorway were four men, veritable clones of each other. All of them were over six feet tall, had trim builds and dark hair. Only one stood out, he sported a closely-cropped beard. Out the corner of his mouth he held a hollowed out tube, a pea shooter. Abby looked at the prop confusingly until she ran her hand up to the side of her neck and felt the arrow sticking out. It had seemed too obvious that he would be the one in charge, his beard a badge of superiority above his men, but he made the first move to grab her. They said nothing and moved with precision. Each of them must have been assigned a quadrant beforehand, or maybe they always had they same part.

"Did you really have to fucking drug me?" she slurred at the officers, "I was already lying down. I was on the phone with my mother."

Abby was brought down the steps of her apartment building, a crowd of her neighbors had gathered near the truck that was waiting for her and the men at the curb.

"Well, it's the best thing for her," said Mrs. Spencer to Miss Whittier "can't do her any more harm than she's doing to herself already."

"Fuck you Mrs. Spencer, you dirty cunt! How can you just stand there?” Abby snarled as she was pushed into the back of the truck and driven away.