Chapter 1: I Was A King Until The Queen Arrived

My first two weeks at the New Beginnings juvenile correction center were a lot better than I expected them to be. The food was decent, the bunks were soft, and there were a bunch of barns and silos where we could sneak cigarettes after the counselors went home. It was a better place to serve out a sentence than the other juvenile facilities that I used to go to back in Nebraska. Heck it was a better than being back at home and going to that stupid secondary high school. I was 17, so most of the other kids were a few years younger than me, and when I told stories about pushing my Firebird up to 100 mph or how easy it was for me to buy smokes, they looked up at me like I was a king. And I kind of was a king until Becky Finklestein showed up.

I had a group of little punks that always sat around me in the cafeteria during lunch. It was a few girls that liked to check out my muscles and a few guys that wanted me to talk about banging my girlfriend Angie. The chicks were kind of plain and the guys were pussies, but I could always get someone to give me their dessert or their pop, so I was cool with it. Every once in a while I would flex for the girls or show the guys one of the pictures of Angie that I kept in my wallet, just to make sure they knew who was king. Then one Monday that all stopped, because Becky Finklestein stopped it in about fifteen minutes.

Monday mornings are always some dumb group therapy session, but lunch is usually pizza with cookies for dessert so it’s not that bad. After lunch I asked this kid Tony for his cookie. “I can’t Stephen,” he squeaked.

“What do you mean you can’t?” I asked him, getting all up in his face, because I’m like twice his size.

Tony gulped. “Becky Finklestein checked in this morning and she told everyone in the girls’ dorm that from now on she wants everyone’s cookies.”

One of the uglier chicks, Suzanne I think, got all uptight all of a sudden. “I was at the Hope for a New Life center with her. I thought they sent her to penitentiary or something.”

“I think she’s pretty,” Tony said.

“Who the hell is Becky Finklestein?” I asked.

“I’m Becky Finklestein,” said a voice from behind me.

I followed over my shoulder as Becky walked around to the end of the table. She was about four and a half feet tall, with tangles of red hair pulled back in pigtails, thick glasses, fat lips, and freckles all over her face. She was wearing a gray sweatsuit that was about five sizes too big for her. Heck it would have been two sizes too big on me. Her sweatsuit top had some logo on the front, except you couldn’t really see the logo because she had this giant rack that she pointed at people when she talked to them. I could see the twerp guys at the table trying not to stare at her tits, and failing. Me, I like skinny chicks like Angie, so I just thought she looked stupid being that short with boobs that big. I thought that if I pushed her over, she would be stuck on her back like a turtle.

“Everybody give me your cookieshhh,” she said to the table.

Oh man she had a chirpy voice and a retainer that made her lisp. I about lost it right there. She didn’t lisp all the time, but she did it often enough that she sounded like a girl dork from a cartoon or something. Everyone else passed their cookies down to the end of the table, but I just went back to my lunch. “Hey you big goofy dumbass, give me your cookie,” she said, pointing her funbags at me while she pointed her tiny index finger at my cookie.

This was too much. I held up the cookie and looked her right in all four eyes at once. “Look kid, no twelve year old is going to shake me down for a cookie,” I said. “Besides it will mess up your headgear.”

Like a flash, she reached over Tony and snatched the cookie away, almost knocking him out of his chair with those giant cans. I was legit impressed with her speed, but I probably could have kept the cookie if I really tried. She held all of our cookies together in her dainty little hand and glared at me. “I’m not twelve, I’m fourteen,” she growled. “And I don’t wear headgear, I have a retainer. Since you don’t know me, I’m going to let you get away with that little comment. But from now on, when I ask for cookieshhh, you give me your cookie.”

Then she threw our cookies on the floor and stepped on them with her tiny high tops as she walked away.

“Has her chest gotten even bigger?” one of the girls at the table asked.

“Yeah,” Tony sighed.

I snorted. “Big tits just get in the way guys,” I said. “And they get all saggy and veiny.” What you want is a girl like Angie.” I took out the picture from my wallet and the guys all craned their necks over to get another image for their wank banks. “She’s dumb as a sack of hammers, but she looks like a model and she weighs 90 pounds soaking wet so I can split her in half with my dick.”

I winked at the best looking girl at the table, and she rolled her eyes but I knew she totally wanted it.

No one had cookies for me to take after lunch, but I got this kid Kevin to give me a piece of his gum, so that was cool. After lunch we had to walk to the barn so one of the counselors could teach us about horses or some shit, and Becky Finklestein was right in front of me. I couldn’t help myself. I took my gum out and squished it into her hair. She stopped instantly but I kept walking. “Oops,” I laughed.

“You are shhho dead,” she hissed at me as I walked away.

I looked over my shoulder and saw her picking at the gum in her nappy ginger curls and heading back to the main building. There were a bunch of old school desks set up in the barn, and each one had a horseshoe and a bridle for us to look at during the presentation. The old farmer dude that ran the barn was talking about horses and how we could work with horses so we could learn about ourselves. It was dumb. I was trying to decide which one of the chicks I would bang if I had to, when I heard straw crunching behind me. Becky was marching toward me. Without saying a word she picked up the horseshoe from my desk, wrenched it out of shape, set it back on my desk, and went to a seat on the other side of the barn in the back row of desks.

I looked down at the piece of metal on my desk. I couldn’t believe it; it was almost completely straight. I wanted to be a strongman back before I found out how hard it is to lift weights all the time, and I saw guys at the strongman shows bending horseshoes. If they really busted their asses they could twist them a little bit out of shape in a couple of minutes, but this half-pint girl just straightened one out completely in about a half second. I held it up to make sure it wasn’t some kind of trick metal or something, but it was legit heavy. I looked across the barn and Becky Finklestein was sitting there, her eyes locked on me. Everybody was watching the old farmer dude do something at the front of the barn except for her and me. She held her right arm out and curled her hand into a tiny fist, and then she slowly started to flex her bicep.

A bitchy little smirk spread across her face as the baggy arm of her sweatshirt started to fill out. The first thing I noticed was how skinny her wrist was, and I got a real good look at her wrist as the cuffs of her shirt pulled down and distorted under the strain of the sleeve tightening around her forearm. It was unreal. That sweatshirt would have been baggy on me, and I’m a jacked 17 year old stud who spent his entire junior year shooting steroids and lifting weights. Her forearm had to be as big around as a softball to stretch out that sleeve. And she hadn’t even really started flexing. The baggy folds of fabric around her upper arm slowly disappeared, like someone was inflating a balloon in her sleeve. As she slowly brought her arm into a full bicep flex, the sweatshirt sleeve went from baggy, to full, to tight, to skin tight. And it wasn’t a balloon in there inflating, it was the biggest, most sharply peaked bicep I’ve ever seen in my life. Becky stopped for a second with her arm up at a ninety degree angle and her fingers fanned out. She blew a pink bubble and popped it, but I couldn’t hear anything because my heart was pounding in my ears. Later, I remembered thinking that you weren’t supposed to chew gum with a retainer in, but at that moment all I could think about was her bicep. It wasn’t possible for a girl that small to have muscles that big. Especially not a fourteen-year-old girl who stood less than five feet tall. “It’s not possible,” I heard myself mumble.

But it was possible, and it was happening right in front of my eyes. Becky Finklestein’s arm had stretched a XXL men’s sweatshirt tight enough for me to see the perfect cuts of her massive deltoids bunching around her shoulder and the double head of her gigantic bicep. She might as well have been wearing spandex. Then her eyes narrowed and her smirk turned into a scowl as she flexed down. Her arm got even bigger, and even bigger, and even bigger, and from across the barn I could see the gray fabric at the top of her bicep split, exposing a slice of freckled skin. She popped another bubble, and flexed down more, and that slice of freckled skin got even bigger, and even bigger, and even bigger.