Penny was freaking out.  This had to rank up there as one of the worst days of her life.  First her boyfriend dumps her, then she gets picked up and dumped again, and now there’s a good chance she might not make it back to civilization.  And all she wanted to do was go shopping.

It all started last weekend, when Penny and her boyfriend Phil decided to go to the city.  Well, OK, it was Penny who wanted to go, but Phil had to come too since he had the money.  Well, he couldn’t just expect her to be happy with the same closetful of clothes for over a month, could he?  There were no department stores in Essex, or anywhere near, for that matter.  Essex was a town of 160 people located off the old Route 66 in Southern California.  The nearest town was West Essex, about a mile away, but it only had a population of 40.  No help there.  No, the only place to go for some new clothes was Los Angeles.  And that’s where Penny wanted to go.

Phil and Penny had hooked up a few weeks earlier.  Penny was the 16-year old daughter of two wealthy Bel Air attorneys, who never had time for her.  They had always thrown her money and gifts and hair-do’s and makeovers and pretty dresses to keep her happy, but Penny was a big girl now and could see through their dishonesty.  She knew they didn’t love her, and decided to run away so they would notice her.  Or notice her missing.  Then they would find her and bring her back and feel sorry and love her again and everything would be different.  Or something like that – she really hadn’t thought that part through.

Anyway, she packed up her lipstick and hair dryer and a change of clothes, grabbed $500 out of her piggy bank, and left.  She took a taxi to the edge of town, and then started walking North on Route 15.  Pretty soon Phil came along in his pickup.  Knowing something was out of place here, he stopped to offer help.

“Hey, miss, can I give you a ride somewhere?”

Penny looked up and smiled.  She hadn’t known it would be this easy.  “Yeah,” she said, throwing her suitcase into the truck bed, and climbing into the cab.

Phil waited for her to continue, but she just looked at him.  She really did have a very pretty smile.  And he couldn’t really help noticing that the rest of her was very pretty as well.  He wondered whether she always dressed in her high school cheerleading costume when she went for a hike.

“So,” Phil prompted as he put the truck in gear, “where’r we headed?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Where are you going?”

“Me?  I’m heading back to my place, a couple of hours from here.  That going to get you any closer to where you want to go?”

“Yeah, that’s where I want to go.”

“Where?”

“Where you’re going.”

Phil was starting to understand that this girl wasn’t too bright.  And that thought gave rise to a different thought: “Maybe I can get into this chick’s pants.”

So Phil nodded and picked up speed, surreptitiously glancing at Penny’s rather large bosom and rather long legs.  “Ok, well, I live in Essex.  You know where that is?”

“No.”  She really didn’t care.

“It’s as I say, a few hours East of Barstow on Route 40.”

Penny had never heard of Barstow.  Or Essex, for that matter.  She hadn’t paid much attention to her California Geography lessons, preferring instead to keep her fingernails perfectly polished and trimmed.

 “Sounds good.  What’s your name?”

“I’m Phil.  What’s yours?”

“Penny.  Do you have a hot tub?”

Phil laughed despite himself.  Actually Penny found his laugh pretty disgusting, since he snorted and sprayed spit all over his steering wheel.  But she just made a face.

When Phil finally got hold of himself, he shook his head.  “No, ma’am, no hot tub.  Got a bath tub, though.  That good enough?”

“Guess so.  It’s just really bumpy and dirty on this road.”

Ok, Phil thought, this is a major interstate highway.  Wait til we get off onto the dirt roads.

Anyway, that’s how Penny met Phil, and she had stayed with him in his grungy trailer home for three weeks.  Phil did eventually make it into her pants, which he liked and she found very unsatisfying – but that’s a different story. 

Last week, Penny was starting to get homesick, but she convinced herself that what she really needed was to go shopping.  She remembered that she had given Phil her wad of cash the last time he went out to get cigarettes (something he seemed to have to do really often).  When she asked for the change, Phil said it needed to be protected, and that he would take her where she wanted to go.

So they got on the road back toward L.A., but stopped in Barstow for lunch.  Barstow, it turned out, was not much more than a glorified truck stop, but it had a Denny’s which was “Always Open”.  While they were there, some of Phil’s buddies showed up, and they all high-fived each other.  They had a few beers, maybe a few too many, and the comments to and about Penny were starting to become lewd.  Penny didn’t like it so she told Phil it was time to go.  Phil resisted, and it all turned into a big screaming match.

Finally, Penny said she had to go to the bathroom, where she managed to climb out the window.  Twenty minutes later she found herself back on Interstate 15 with no money and no suitcase, and with her thumb out.  But then, it didn’t take long for her to be picked up by a semi driver.

“Where ya’ headed?”  Penny thought this sounded familiar, but she was busy trying to get a view of the road behind them through the passenger side rear view mirror.

“Back to L.A.  Anywhere in L.A.”

“That’s good,” said the guy.  “I know a shortcut.”  Penny didn’t notice him leering at her ample chest, and it also didn’t occur to her that Interstate 15 was basically a straight shot across the desert from Barstow all the way to the city.  That would have made the idea of a shortcut rather illogical.

“Good,” she said.  She wanted to get there before Phil or his cronies figured out what happened to her.

A few minutes later, the driver took an unmarked exit from the highway.  The ramp went to a maintenance depot, but he kept on driving past the fenced-in yard onto dirt, and finally unmarked desert landscape.  “This is that shortcut I was telling you about,” he said amid the dust and noise.  Penny just nodded, her thoughts on whether she should try to stay with one of her friends when she got back to Bel Air.

But she was jolted out of her reverie when the truck bounced to a halt in the middle of nowhere.  The dust was settling and Penny realized she couldn’t even see the highway from here.  That thought hit her just about the same time the driver’s right hand snaked its way behind her back to land on her right thigh.  His hot breath was getting uncomfortably close to her face, and she was unpleasantly reminded of the games Phil had played with her.

“I don’t like this,” she said.  He ignored her, planting his big left hand on her right tit. 

“NO!” she screamed, and somehow managed to squirm out from under the big man, getting the door opened and falling to the ground.  She got up and ran, and it wasn’t long before she heard the man running and yelling behind her.  But she was young, and he was fat, and pretty soon the sound of his huffing and puffing faded away.  Penny sat down on a root in a grove of low trees and waited, her own panting slowly calming down.  Finally she heard the semi’s engine start up and head away from her.  She put her head in her hands and cried.  Then she stopped crying abruptly and looked at her hands.  There was no mascara to wash off.  She cried again, louder.

Time passed.  Penny didn’t know how long, but she found herself now in a grove of trees, her clothes torn, with no makeup and no money, and no idea how she was going to get home again.  She got up and looked around, but she couldn’t really figure out which way she had come.  She couldn’t see the road, either.  She looked up at the setting sun, thinking, “is it rise in the East and set in the West, or rise in the West and set in the East?”  This was pretty dismal.

And worse, she was thirsty, too.  All that running in the dusty wasteland had completely parched her throat.  She really needed a Diet Coke.  Not knowing what else to do, she just started walking.  Toward the sun.  She soon left the little grove of trees behind, but it wasn’t long before the sun set and a cold wind started up. 

Penny was feeling pretty down, and just beginning to think that maybe she shouldn’t have left home, and that if her Daddy were here he’d fix everything, when something bright and half-buried in the ground caught her eye.  It wasn’t really bright, she noticed, but it was glowing.  Kind of greenish, like the skeleton on a Halloween costume in a black light.  She picked it up and saw that, of all things, it was an old glass Coke bottle, and it was glowing.  Penny thought that was a bit weird, but the cap was still on it, so maybe there was still Coke inside.  She managed to twist off the cap and found, much to her delight, that the contents were still fizzy!  She quickly downed the whole thing and said, “Aahhhhh!” – just like the Lipton Iced Tea commercial.

 

While she was unconscious, a rather miraculous thing happened to her body.  Gradually, each of her cells pinched in the middle and divided into two cells, which then grew back to the original cell’s size.  Where there had been one cell, now there were two.  This phenomenon repeated itself all over Penny’s body.  Then it repeated itself again.  And again.  The net result was that Penny was growing.

It began slowly: her jeans beginning to appear too small on her, and then too tight as well.  Her torso grew also, her bosom filling out the blouse she wore until stretch lines were plainly visible across her nipples.  The jeans lost it first, as her expanding thighs thickened just enough to split both legs down the outer seams.  The split extended upward to her growing hips, and the waistline soon tore as well, along with the leather belt which was snaked through its loops.  Meanwhile, the loose-fitting blouse was beginning to look more like a short-shirt, exposing more and more of Penny’s inward navel and smooth midriff.  Its short sleeves began to tighten as her upper arms expanded to the size of a champion weightlifter, at which point those seams split as well.  Her breasts, already large to begin with, were now stretching the material to the limit, until the buttons which ran down the middle of her blouse began to pop, one by one.  As the breasts continued to grow, the fabric of both sides caught on Penny’s erect nipples and was pulled apart and away from her back, causing the blouse’s side seams to gave way. 

Penny’s growth accelerated, leaving her tattered clothes in the dust.  As she reached twice her size, her head encountered a large rock, which was slowly pushed out of the way.  By the time her size doubled again, her legs had straddled a small boulder, and her naked crotch was approaching it.  After another doubling, her body had rolled over the boulder, which was now situated under her spine.  The growth continued to accelerate, until Penny’s size had doubled two more times, and then suddenly, it stopped.

Penny began to snore.