punch this girl right in her mouth … but I don’t.
This time, I’m glad to say I walk away.
This time, I make my mother proud.
SIX
MY DAD WAS A TALL, SKINNY GUY WITH RED hair and freckles. My friends liked to call him Mr. Weasley, and he always laughed when they did. He liked Harry Potter, too.
He worked as a district sales manager for a computer company. He knew a lot about computers. He was always fooling around on his laptop—watching movies, playing games. My dad played
The Sims
more than I ever did. He knew about computer viruses and how to get broken emails to work, and he knew how to use netspeak properly even though he always told me that if I was going to be writing something, it would behoove me to know how to spell it correctly.
That’s how my dad talked.
Behoove
. He had red hair but not the temper that’s supposed to go with it. He was usually pretty quiet, even if we were annoying him, which I know we did because we were kids.
My dad was also part of the first wave of the Contamination.
He and my mom had decided it was time to go on a diet. He spent too much time playing computer games and was getting a little potbelly. Her job in an insurance office meant she spent too much time at her desk. My mom joined a gym close to where she worked, but my dad decided to try the popular new diet everyone was raving about. All the talk shows, all the Hollywood stars. All the magazines had ads for it, every TV show had commercials for it.
The ThinPro diet plan was everywhere. High protein, low carbs, six small meals a day. The weight, according to the ads, would fly right off. They had special candy bars, cereal, bread, pasta, protein bars … the works. And, of course, the water.
All kosher! All vegan! No animal products used! Protein water was already popular, but sales of the ThinPro water went through the roof. Even people not on the diet bought it and drank it by the case. It was supposed to be the best, the healthiest. Not the cheapest, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was designer water, like shoes or purses or sunglasses. You couldn’t look anywhere and not find a vending machine dispensing it or see it in some starlet’s hand at some red-carpet party. Even the president drank it.
My dad bought cases of it. He guzzled it. And, yeah, he lost weight. Dropped ten pounds in a couple of months, right from the start, while hardly exercising at all. My mom,who was spending hours on the treadmill and not ever having dessert, held off a little longer, but pretty soon she was on ThinPro, too.
Why not? Everyone else was, at least everyone in America. It was so popular, a famous late-night comedy show even started doing skits about it. I watched them, up late on a Saturday night with Tony on the couch beside me, both of us eating popcorn and drinking soda in between kisses. I didn’t think the skit was that funny when I saw it, but I’d laugh really hard if I saw it now.
The premise of the joke was that the ThinPro company had put something addictive in the water to keep people buying more and more. It was based on one of those urban myths that get passed along in email chains and posted on blogs. In the skit, the guest host gulped water from the bottles, spilling it down her face and over her body, while the others shouted “Chug! Chug! Chug!” until she started to twitch … and shake, and with a quick use of special effects makeup, she became a monster. In the skit she grew to Godzilla size and destroyed New York.
That might’ve been better than what really happened.
See, the diet did work, for whatever reason. And the product sold so well, they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Shelves were empty all over the place. People were getting into fistfights over it in convenience stores. The ThinPro manufacturers figured they’d better get some more, fast. The problem was, their suppliers couldn’t keepup, either. So they did whatever businesses do when they can’t get what they need to
This time, I’m glad to say I walk away.
This time, I make my mother proud.
SIX
MY DAD WAS A TALL, SKINNY GUY WITH RED hair and freckles. My friends liked to call him Mr. Weasley, and he always laughed when they did. He liked Harry Potter, too.
He worked as a district sales manager for a computer company. He knew a lot about computers. He was always fooling around on his laptop—watching movies, playing games. My dad played
The Sims
more than I ever did. He knew about computer viruses and how to get broken emails to work, and he knew how to use netspeak properly even though he always told me that if I was going to be writing something, it would behoove me to know how to spell it correctly.
That’s how my dad talked.
Behoove
. He had red hair but not the temper that’s supposed to go with it. He was usually pretty quiet, even if we were annoying him, which I know we did because we were kids.
My dad was also part of the first wave of the Contamination.
He and my mom had decided it was time to go on a diet. He spent too much time playing computer games and was getting a little potbelly. Her job in an insurance office meant she spent too much time at her desk. My mom joined a gym close to where she worked, but my dad decided to try the popular new diet everyone was raving about. All the talk shows, all the Hollywood stars. All the magazines had ads for it, every TV show had commercials for it.
The ThinPro diet plan was everywhere. High protein, low carbs, six small meals a day. The weight, according to the ads, would fly right off. They had special candy bars, cereal, bread, pasta, protein bars … the works. And, of course, the water.
All kosher! All vegan! No animal products used! Protein water was already popular, but sales of the ThinPro water went through the roof. Even people not on the diet bought it and drank it by the case. It was supposed to be the best, the healthiest. Not the cheapest, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was designer water, like shoes or purses or sunglasses. You couldn’t look anywhere and not find a vending machine dispensing it or see it in some starlet’s hand at some red-carpet party. Even the president drank it.
My dad bought cases of it. He guzzled it. And, yeah, he lost weight. Dropped ten pounds in a couple of months, right from the start, while hardly exercising at all. My mom,who was spending hours on the treadmill and not ever having dessert, held off a little longer, but pretty soon she was on ThinPro, too.
Why not? Everyone else was, at least everyone in America. It was so popular, a famous late-night comedy show even started doing skits about it. I watched them, up late on a Saturday night with Tony on the couch beside me, both of us eating popcorn and drinking soda in between kisses. I didn’t think the skit was that funny when I saw it, but I’d laugh really hard if I saw it now.
The premise of the joke was that the ThinPro company had put something addictive in the water to keep people buying more and more. It was based on one of those urban myths that get passed along in email chains and posted on blogs. In the skit, the guest host gulped water from the bottles, spilling it down her face and over her body, while the others shouted “Chug! Chug! Chug!” until she started to twitch … and shake, and with a quick use of special effects makeup, she became a monster. In the skit she grew to Godzilla size and destroyed New York.
That might’ve been better than what really happened.
See, the diet did work, for whatever reason. And the product sold so well, they couldn’t keep up with the demand. Shelves were empty all over the place. People were getting into fistfights over it in convenience stores. The ThinPro manufacturers figured they’d better get some more, fast. The problem was, their suppliers couldn’t keepup, either. So they did whatever businesses do when they can’t get what they need to
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