Reagan had begun Project: Double-Uma with the purest of intentions—to get back at that smarmy bitch who used to nag everyone about their weights and pick on them for not exercising.
For Reagan, it had been a long and arduous process. Again, for Reagan.
Most of the time, her pranks on her roommates were centered around immediate gratification. Maybe she would drag out a long con every now and then, like when she pretended to be a hot guy who matched with Phoebe on Tinder. Or that time she spent a few days e-mailing Chel back and forth to bug her with really convincing messages from an e-mail that was one letter off from her boss's address. Or, you know, that time she'd switched Aubrey's laptop's startup sound to porn noises. All in good fun, but the setup and the payoff were never that far apart.
But this process had been so much longer than anything she'd ever taken on before. Sneaking around, breaking Uma's exercise equipment, basically getting her off of the fitness wagon so that she'd unlearn all of the habits that got her strong in the first place. Then convincing her to get a job as a waitress in a bar that specialized in Texas-sized helpings of thick, fattening comfort food. And then this whole Bovigrow thing, dosing her up via the smoothies that she drank (and then quickly having to adapt to plopping it into her morning coffee cup before loading it with creamer once she stopped making smoothies) every morning that she got up early enough to pull it off...
It was a lot! And this was, by far, the most indepth fucking-with she'd ever pulled off in her life.
But as exhausted as Reagan was just thinking about all of the work that she had put into turning Uma from a retired but still relatively fit athelete to a big brown belly on two legs, it hadn't left Uma with really any of the skills required to do the job that Reagan had convinced her to get.
Now that she slept late, stopped going out on the weekends, and came home after every shift to plop down and stuff herself with a late dinner, Uma barely had a fraction of her former stamina. She got out of breath just going up a flight of stairs in the Fordham house, to the point where she was spending whole days off vegged out in her bedroom or on the couch between mealtimes. Reagan's dosing and encouragement had conditioned Uma to the point where she was grazing almost constantly throughout the day, even on the clock (and sometimes from customer's plates). She was outgrowing her uniforms, she wasn't excited to be there, and she was blowing a pretty good portion of her paycheck on the food there anyway...
Was it any wonder that Uma came home one day jobless?
"What do you mean you don't work there anymore?!"
Audrey looked like she was about to have a heart attack. Her round face was flush with emotion as her response exploded over Uma's explanation, her blue eyes looking like they were about to well up at the thought of having to start pulling even more of the financial weight around the Fordham house. Since Uma had started working, money had been far less tight around the townhouse—and that's accounting for the expanded appetites of certain residents that shall not be named. Going back to Uma being a freeloader would quite literally have meant that she, as well as everyone else at home, would probably go hungry.
"My boss took me into her office, told me I wasn't doing a good job, so I quit." Uma shrugged her heavy shoulders, forcing her prominent double chin upwards as she remained nonchalant, "I mean, she said a whole bunch of other shit too, but that's not really what we're here for."
Reagan's immediate response was a premature hell yeah. If Uma laid around the house all day, she'd get fat as hell. But then, she had the same realization as Audrey—if Uma wasn't working, then there'd be a lot less money to go around. Which meant that there'd be some cutbacks almost certainly. No more big breakfasts courtesy of her sister, no more of those Lone Star Tavern takeout trays that Uma would stack high for all of them... fuck, she might even have to get a job! At least, if she wanted to keep herself clothed. Leggings didn't come cheap at her size, and Reagan was already spending a lot of money to keep her roommate bovigrow'd up!
"But you're gonna find another job, right?" Audrey asked with a manic look in her eye, "Uma, we can't afford—"
"Jesus y'all, relax." Uma curled a flat nostril as she pushed past her roommates, lumbering belly-first into the first-floor living room so that she could lean on the back of the couch, "I wouldn't have quit if I didn't have a backup plan."
To say that Audrey and, to an extent, Reagan were not impressed with Uma's promise of a backup plan would have been an understatement. Ever since college, Audrey had been hearing about Uma's backup plans and fallback measures. Hell, before she had gotten her job at the Lone Star Tavern, Uma was about a year into her "backup plan" of not playing professionally—and that had amounted (mostly) to drinking beer and partying.
If anything, they were more concerned with Uma's idea of a backup plan. The Uma that had been bumming on their couch after giving up playing volleyball and the Uma that was busting out of her Lone Star Tavern uniform belly blubber first were hardly the same people. Uma had gone from a confident and eager (if abrasive) eager beaver to a passive couch potato, content to put in the bare minimum. She was tired a lot, she didn't really do anything throughout the day... honestly, the excuses wrote themselves. And Audrey could already hear them.
"So... you do have another job lined up?"
The hope in Audrey's voice was palpable. She might as well have had her hands clasped in prayer.
"Of course." Uma snorted, idly rubbing a chubby-fingered hand downward in a stripe along the most uncomfortable part of her uniform, "And one that doesn't require me to wear some stupid uniform, either..."
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