Belinda and the Bus

It was over a glass of delicious, delicious vodka and over a bag of scrumptious, scrumptious pork rinds and a dish of tasty, tasty donuts one Tuesday morning that my ex-wife endeavored to discourage me from my admittedly unhealthy lifestyle with what she would describe as an interesting story from her childhood.
    “There was a girl named Belinda,” she started, and though I wanted desperately to go watch television, I was breathing pretty heavy, and sweating through my “2 Sexy 4 You” tee shirt. Which is to say, I wasn’t going anywhere. “She was always the fat girl, and the kids would make fun of her so. Oh, it was all so cruel, and for the longest time, she would comfort herself with food. It got really bad, it really did.
    “But one day, she decided that she’d had enough. She went straight home and threw away all her favorite foods, started working out, every day. By the end of our junior year of high school, she didn’t look like the same person. She told me on the last day of that year that she was just 15 pounds from her goal. ‘Just wait,’ she told me. ‘Come the first day of next year, I’m going to be the prettiest girl in school.’”
    She stopped.
    “Well?” I said.
    “What?”
    “Well what happened? Did she do it?”
    “Oh, I don’t know. She got hit by a bus that summer. Killed her dead.”
    For most of the rest of the morning, as I huffed and puffed, unable to get up, I pondered the story. When I finally did emerge from that chair, I reckoned that the story had a moral. Something about looking both ways before crossing a street, something like that. Yeah, that's it.