CHAPTER 1 

A week ago, I got a message from Tommy saying he was coming back into town. He was a high school buddy of mine who left Jersey for the West Coast after graduation. Hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

When I browsed his Instagram to catch up on what he’d been up to, I had to double-check to make sure I had the right profile. In a little more than five years, he’d become a monster.

In school, he’d always been tall and lanky limbed. Six-foot-five or more (after a certain point, people don’t care, and you’re just tall as fuck). The type of guy who gets worried when passing through doors, ducking down and looking silly when he had enough clearance, or risking getting another bruise on the forehead when he didn’t.

We needed a tall guy like him on the high school basketball team. But the poor kid was hopeless with dribbling the ball, no matter how many hours of practice and drills we made him do. He was no better at volleyball. So many inches gone to waste, was what we would always say to him, jokingly. Not sure if we would joke about it now that his biceps were as big as balls; to say they were basketballs would be exaggerating but not by much.

Sports weren’t his thing. In the last year at school, he was getting chubby with lanky spaghetti arms. He was more into binge-watching movies and reading and writing than playing sports. That was why he’d gone out to the west coast, to try to get one of his screenplays picked up by Hollywood.

His Instagram showed no trace of success in regard to that project. It was doubtful he’d be coming back to Jersey if his script was becoming the next blockbuster.

We were meeting for burgers at Beefy Moe’s for an early afternoon lunch. He was already sitting in the booth with two glasses of milk when I arrived. He was bigger in person, completely filling one side of the booth. To his previous fear of bumping his head, he now had to also worry if the door frames were wide enough to not scuff up his shoulders as he passed through them, for real.

The odd thing was he looked impressively good. His skin didn’t have any of that rubbery gleam like the bodybuilders at the gym, and he had a full set of hair. Things you wouldn’t find with guys on enhancing cycles—which there was no way he wasn’t on. I mean, his arms were so massive I feared the table would collapse when he rested his elbows on it. Damn impressive if you ask me.

The first thing he mentioned after we were done with the common bro chitchat was if I was still with Evelyne. I wasn’t. She’d broken up with me. The bitch.

It wasn’t until he asked about her that I recalled he was the one who’d first introduce me to her. Truth is, he wanted to have her for himself, but she refused to date him. Their families were so close she considered him a brother, at least that was the excuse she gave Tommy when he asked her out. To keep her nearby, he set her up with one of his friends, me for that matter. It was a bit creepy when you think about it. We had some good years until she left me for an older guy with more money, which wasn’t very hard to beat as I was always struggling to get by.

Beefy Moe’s was the type of place with sexy waitresses and mediocre burgers. Stacey, the waitress working our table, was a stunner. I knew her from the gym. Knew her might be pushing it a bit far—I recognized her, saw around, you know. I doubted she knew my name, but that didn’t matter; at least she recognized me when I came in to eat and acknowledged our crossed path by asking me if I had a good workout.

She came over to our table and gave me the friendly, “Hey, how’s it going?” then proceeded to take our order. When she left, Tommy leaned over to tell me something without being overheard.

“Tell me she’s on OnlyFans,” he said softly.

“You’re kidding me,” I said, surprised he hadn’t noticed her gawking at his forearms or at the traps bulging through his shirt. “You didn’t hear her sloshing in the puddle she left because of you.”

“You’re funny, Steve.”

I thought about it afterward: the reason Tommy didn’t notice her eyes crawling over him was because he’d developed a self-preserving habit of not paying attention to women’s stares. You see, most women feared guys like Tommy. You hear them all the time, not liking too much muscle and thinking the network of veins covering their body was disgusting. They feared guys like him, and Tommy trained himself to not give a shit about their judgment.

What Tommy didn’t yet know was that Stacey was among the type of girl who thought there couldn’t be too much man on a man. At my gym, Stacey, Sarah, and Caramel (Yes, that is her real name; she is Vietnamese, not that I know if that makes it more common) were women who obeyed the laws of gravity, the bigger the mass (of muscle, of course) the stronger the attraction. The cool thing with this, for the big guys at least, was that all three of these girls spent plenty of time at the gym and were drop-dead gorgeous themselves.

“You’ve been working out?” he asked me, as if the answer wasn’t obvious. That hurt, badly. I’ve been busting my ass in the gym for over a year, ever since Evelyn ditched me. At first, I just went to hang out with the boys. As my body firmed up and I became stronger, it became more of a passion. My mom said it was an addiction. Whatever, it felt good to get the pump. But my gains had stalled lately.

“Yeah, I’ve been going. Not too seriously.”

“You want to get bigger?” he asked, finishing his milk with a loud gulp.

“Who doesn’t?” I said.

He laughed. “You know what I’m saying, right, Steve? Do you feel like getting huge?”

I was in a bit of a rough spot. I saw where he was going with this and saw no other option but to deal with the situation bluntly. “Tommy, I’m not sure how to say this, but if you’re trying to get me on the anabolic sauce, I’ve already decided it isn’t for me. I don’t want to risk it.”

“You’re smart, Steve. I remember that about you. That’s why I wanted to talk to you first, man. I like you, and together we could do something big.”

“I’m not following, Tommy.”

“I’ve got something special. Directly from a lab in India. No side effects.”

“That’s not possible,” I said, doubtful.

“I’ve been taking the stuff for a little over a year, and my bloodwork showed nothing abnormal. I didn’t have any mood swings or anything like that. I’m telling you, this stuff is the next big thing, and we’ll be the first in Jersey to have it straight from the source.”

Damn, a little over a year, and he’d blown up, even on a heavy anabolic cycle it would have taken him more than that to gain so much mass. I had my doubts he was playing with me.

“What about…you know…the balls and the sex…” I asked.

“No change whatsoever, man. Everything works the same, even better, like a fucking rocket. I’m telling you...”

I shook my head in disbelief, trying to avoid the temptation of imagining myself as the most jacked guy in the gym. Trying to not imagine myself throwing around a ridiculous amount of weights with the sexy Caramel in her little tight top to spot me, placing her little hands on my oversized shoulder saying how impressively strong I was.

“Think about it,” Tommy said. “Come over tomorrow if you want. I’ll show what it is and explain to you how it works.”

I watched Tommy quietly as he ate his four burgers while I admired his full head of hair and his healthy skin, starting to believe he wasn’t bullshitting me.

Was the holy grail of muscle gain in his possession?

Could I become the next “holy shit, you’re jacked” type of guy?

I was thinking these things when a vein in his neck did something to totally freak me out. The vein was the size of my fattest finger, and I swore I saw something pass through it. Like if a solid chunk of a burger made the vein bulge as it passed, or perhaps this wasn’t a vein but a second esophagus to efficiently carry down all that food he was wolfing down.

I shook my head, wanting to unsee it. My mind was surely playing tricks on me for having repeated to myself once too many times that Tommy had become a monster.

***

 Tommy was staying in a room out back of his uncle’s business. His parents didn’t approve of what he’d become and told him to go back to school or to not come home. His uncle, who was in a dispute with

Tommy’s father, offered him a place to sleep.

Back in the day, his uncle ran a business of renting out movies: you know, DVDs before streaming existed. He had since transformed his business to fix broken phones. A business that didn’t need as much floor area as the video store did.

His uncle had suggested to Tommy to fix himself up a room out in the back. The area hadn’t been used in years, plus the space was already set up as a room, as it had been rented out by the hour with a choice of triple-X videos.

“I won’t be staying here long,” Tommy assured me.

His setup was minimal. The ADULTS ONLY sign had remained above the doorframe, which was not high enough for his six-feet-and-whatever height. As you could have guessed, the room had no windows. His mattress was directly on the floor with a nightstand next to it. He had no other furniture, just a big duffel bag with his unfolded clothes overflowing from it and a box of books he’d probably got shipped back from San Diego, where he’d been set up. “I’ll get myself somewhere fucking nice to stay once the shipments arrive. Money will be the least of our problems if you join me in this little business.”

“I’m not sure,” I said, trying to play it cool. But for real, I wanted to know more about this too-good-to-be-true enhancing substance. “Tell me about it.”

“I need your word first. If you don’t want to do it, you keep your mouth shut. Understood?” he said. His eyes honed in on me and his traps flared out, like the menacing hood of a cobra.

“You can trust me, man,” I said. “I feel privileged that you’re proposing this to me first…”

“Good, here’s the plan…”

Tommy explained how he’d spent his whole savings on securing a shipment of the new substance, which was scheduled to arrive at the New York port directly from the lab in India in a little over twelve weeks. His plan was to get someone, me preferably, ridiculously transformed to attract enough attention to get orders and secure deposits before the miraculous substance arrived.

I had to give him credit; his plan was elaborate and meticulously thought out. He had tracked down the most popular gyms in Jersey and figured out the busiest times to be there. The idea was for me to go workout with him in three of these busy gyms on a daily basis.

When Tommy entered gyms, heads turned; that’s just the way it was with bros of his size, so it wouldn’t be hard to get noticed. But people needed to notice and remember me, too. Tommy had this figured out too.

He had already found an outfit to make my presence memorable, a neon pink stringer with ridiculously short lime green shorts. Nothing I would ever be caught dead wearing, unless a generous sum of cash was being offered in exchange.

Tommy had already bought the outfits, still in their clear plastic packaging and in three different sizes, including XXL, as if I would ever get that big. (I currently wore a medium.)

Every step of my transformation would be tracked on Instagram. But that wasn’t enough to create the required buzz. Tommy wanted the social media to be a support, not the main driver. He wanted the boys to see me transform before their very eyes. He wanted live witnesses to spread the word between buddies. It was more convincing that way. He said it would be important for us to socialize at the gyms, get to know the boys, focusing on the ones who hesitated to hop on the juice. Make them understand they had something better coming for them. Tell them they were smart to wait and that their patience for something safer had paid off.

The tease of not revealing too much information was important to get the best prices possible. Tommy figured he’d sell it for at least five hundred dollars for a full three-month supply, cheap considering what it did to improve your life. His first shipment would have enough goods to sell a thousand of these kits. The math was easy; five-hundred thousand dollars was some serious income for getting others jacked.

“What do you think?” Tommy asked, sincerely curious about my opinion.

“It’s a good plan,” I said, trying to find weakness in it. “I’m not sure if I can work out three times per day.”

“On this stuff, you’ll have no trouble, I promise.”

“And my job…I’m not sure I can squeeze in all these workouts between my work shifts.”

“No, if you’re agree to do this with me, you’ll have to quit your job. We need to be on this full time, Stevie.”

The thought of quitting my job wasn’t such a tough decision to consider. I’d been changing jobs pretty much every year. My current dead-end job as a bank teller was nothing to be proud of. With only a high school education, I’d be the last one to get promoted to a better position, no matter how fucking good I was at counting other people’s money.

I’d taken the job after working construction sites, wanting something less physical to save my energy for the gym. But I was growing tired of it. It was increasingly making me sick to see how easy some people had it, with their six-digit accounts, while I had trouble maintaining double digits. Many clients with inflated bank accounts were total idiots who had simply lucked out, or had inherited some valuable estate.

One particularly annoying lady came in every fucking day for a single twenty-dollar withdrawal. She always wore purple from head to toe and looked awful in it. I explained to her that she could take out more, save herself the trouble of coming in to the bank, but she was happy to come for her twenty bucks. I was pretty sure she just liked showing off her success. She asked me every time, how much she had left in her account, somewhere in the twenty millions.

I knew everything about her stupid story. Hats for Cats, was where she’d made her fortune. She’d sewn a few hats at first, with NFL logos and stuff, to sell at local craft fairs, for people and their beloved cats. Her business savvy son noticed how they quickly sold out. He got a manufacturer to produce them for a nickel a piece in China. They sell them by the millions with social media ads, ten bucks a piece. Cat people are crazy.

If the purple lady could have the cash, why couldn’t I? Perhaps this was my chance to finally make it, live the comfortable life, and I shouldn’t let this opportunity slip away.

“What if it doesn’t work out?” I asked. 

“It will,” he said confidently.

“Just say it doesn’t. What then?”

“You’ll be twelve weeks out of work. I’m not asking any more from you. We take pictures for social media, you follow me around for workouts and mingle with the guys, show off in the locker room, wear the outfit I got for you. You do all these things, and I’m willing to go fifty-fifty with you. That’s fucking generous, considering you didn’t risk the twenty grand to secure this stuff in the first place. But you know what, I don’t care, ’cause I need a guy like you by my side to show Jersey what is possible. ”

“Can we go to jail for this?”

“This stuff isn’t illegal because it doesn’t exist in the books,” Tommy said, proud of it. “It’s not even considered pharmacological, no FDA clearance needed.”

“If it isn’t a drug, what is it?” I asked.

“It’s food. Fucking food the dinosaurs ate. Food that made the caveman strong as fuck. It’s an animal protein lost for millions of years until now, brought back by a lab in India. ”

“You call it stuff…does this stuff have a name?”

“Out west, they called it Frog Juice.” Tommy laughed.

“Frog Juice?” I said, surprised. “What the fuck? That’s a horrible name for marketing.”

“We can think of a better name,” he said. “But you’ll see where it got its name from when you see it activated.”

“I don’t want to risk my life, man. I’m still young,” I said, curious but scared to compromise my bleak future.

“Totally safe. I wouldn’t want to do you any harm, you know that, man. You do need to know two things; it

doesn’t mix with alcohol, and women can’t digest the stuff.”

“It’s only for men?”

“Strictly for men.” He examined me, gravely. “Are you in?”

This was insane. “Now?” I asked, wanting to buy myself a bit more time.

“Yeah, I show you the juice, you drink the first dose, and we go workout right now. The sooner we start your transformation, the better.”

“Can I see it first?” I said, “The Frog Juice...”

He removed the lamp on his nightstand and pulled the cloth covering it. Beneath it he pulled out a thick steel briefcase with locks. The type of briefcase you see in movies filled with stacks of hundred-dollar bills, or in action movies with elaborate electronic bombs inside. The sight of it made my heart race.

He clicked the locks open. Strapped to the inside of the briefcase’s cover were three clear tubes with tiny orange pearls inside. They looked like Tapioca pearls, or toy ammo pellets used by Nerf guns, just smaller.

“Get a glass of water,” he told me. He didn’t have a sink or faucet in his room, but his uncle had placed a water cooler just outside his door. I filled a glass and brought it back to Tommy, who let exactly ten pearls roll down into the water.

He lifted the glass and swirled it around lightly. The pearls expanded slowly, and at first I thought they were just sprouting like a seed. But as the sprouts stretched out, I could see they were little tails, wiggling tails. Fucking frog juice, no kidding. The miniaturized tadpoles swam energetically around the glass with frantic activity.

“What the…”

“Drink it now, it’s easier before they get too big,” he said.

“We drink this shit alive,” I said, imagining them in my gut.

“You have to. The way it works is that your body kills them,” Tommy said with a joyful smile.

“How? I don’t get it?” I said, confused.

“Our body kills them by producing testosterone.”

I drank it. It was as disgusting as anything I had ever tried, but I didn’t want to think about it anymore than

I had to. Just went through the motions, convinced I had little to lose and much to gain. So much to gain.

They wiggled around in my mouth like it was a playground just for them. I swallowed but felt one, or maybe two, stay behind, writhing around and knocking against my teeth. I squirmed; Tommy laughed. I held my mouth closed until they climbed up my tongue to the back of my mouth to take a deep dive into my stomach.

I was going to be huge. 

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