The peril of pop

Pearl loved pop. She loved how the bubbles danced on her tongue, how the sweetness gave her a warm and fuzzy feeling inside and how many colours and flavours they came in. It was all she drank. She drank it with her cereal-and sometimes on it-at breakfast, with her sandwiches at lunch, with her vegetables at dinner. She drank it on the bus after school, in the bath before bed, in her class under the desk. Pearl loved pop.

Her parents tried everything to stop her from drinking so much of the stuff. They gave her fruit juice but she poured it down the sink; they gave her water but she poured it into the dog's bowl; they told her that if she drank too much her teeth would fall out but she didn't believe them; they even stopped buying pop altogether, but Pearl cried and cried and stamped her feet until her mother ran out and bought her a bottle. Nothing was going to stop Pearl from drinking pop.

When Efferfizz, the local drinks company, heard about Pearl's passion they asked her to be their official spokesperson. In return for having a picture of her holding a can of pop with a big beaming, toothy smile on billboards and newspaper adverts and posters in bus stops Pearl was given a year's supply of their most popular drink, the Tonguetwister. Pearl was happier than a hyena, happier than a bee in a jar full of honey, happier than a dog in a choc drop factory. But it didn't take Pearl a year to drink all her Tonguetwisters. She' d drunk them all in a month-twelve cans a day. Pearl didn't think anything of it, although did notice her belly expand like a balloon. She was so inflated with pop she couldn't fit into any of her dresses. She couldn't even fit through the door. But Pearl wasn't discouraged.

Efferfizz delivered another year's supply of Tonguetwisters to her house and Pearl carried on drinking and drinking and drinking. She consumed that batch in two weeks and had swelled to the size of a car. Her parents could no long move her. All they could do was leave her where she was-rooted in the lounge, wobbling on the sofa like giant jelly.

Pearl was happy, but after a month of not seeing her friends, not being able to go out and play and having to wear her mother's maternity clothes, she started to feel unhappy. She wished she was a normal size again. She stopped drinking pop but it did nothing to deflate her. Then one night, whilst Pearl was fast asleep, she accidentally rolled off the sofa, across the lounge floor and over her mother's bag of knitting. One of the needles, jutting from the bag, pierced Pearl's stomach and with a pop and a hiss, she was suddenly zipping across the room. Pearl jerked awake when she bounced off the walls. She had no idea what was going on. The loud hissing sound woke up her parents too. They burst into the lounge just as Pearl plopped down onto the sofa. She looked down at the dress that hung off her body like a sack and smiled. "No more pop, mum" she said.