It was right in the middle of AP Literature when the first changes started happening. While Jenny was busy pouring over her copy of "The Great Gatsby" for her monthly analysis paper, she felt a little bit of a tingling in the back of her skull. At first she paid it no mind, as the feeling wasn't so pronounced as to distract her from her work, but as the minutes ticked by the tingle seemed to gradually grow in strength. She scratched at the back of her head, hoping to relieve herself of the sensation. Nothing seemed to change, not in the direction Jenny was going for anyway. In fact, the tingling only started getting worse, spreading around her head. It started to become a huge distraction, but realizing there was nothing she could do about it she got back to her book.
That's when the swelling began.
It started with her cheeks. They began to gradually inflate with fat, with the sound of a water balloon slowly filling up. When she could see her cheeks out of the corners of her eyes, the rest of her features began fattening and rounding out. A random student in the class noticed that Jenny's head was starting to become perfectly spherical, and thus announced as such to the rest of the class. Soon, all eyes were on Jenny, and she could suddenly feel her peer's gazes focusing on her head. She poked her cheeks, as they were the most evident at the moment, realizing how big they suddenly seemed. She looked around at the class, a nervous sweat starting to form above her brow.
"Holy hell, what happened to you?" one student asked.
"It's like your head turned into a basketball," another one said.
"Oh god, please tell me that isn't contagious!" a girl squeaked with fright.
Jenny, upon hearing these inquiries, started feeling around her head. It felt... round... perfectly round... and a little squishy too? That would have been bad enough, but she could also feel it starting to get bigger... and bigger... until it was double the circumference of a regulation size basketball.
"Wuh... wuh... what's going on?" she started to stammer, "What's happening to me?!" She quickly pulled out her iPhone and turned on the selfie camera. There she saw it, her head inflated to ridiculous size, with her tiny (comparatively speaking), unchanged face smack in the middle. She even seemed to have spontaneously grown more hair. The sight she saw reflected in her camera filled her with incredible fright, and she screamed loud enough to be heard two doors down.
"Sshh-!" Mrs. Hornblower, their professor, began before suddenly seeing what was going on, "Miss Smith, are you quite alright?"
"I... I... I...," Jenny stammered, bursting into frightened tears, "I don't knoooooooow!!! Waaaahhhh!!!"
"Jenny's head is turning into a watermelon," one of the students explained, "It just sorta happened out of nowhere."
"I can see that plainly, Mr. Rickshaw," Mrs. Hornblower replied before telling Jenny, "I'd recommend you head to the Nurse's office immediately Miss Smith, and have that melon of yours examined. Just leave your things with me."
Jenny weepingly nodded as best she could, and cautiously lifted herself out of her desk. Her enormous head was heavy, and it seemed to jiggle with the slightest movement. She slowly made her way into the hallway, holding up her inflated cranium with her hands. It felt like a water balloon filled with jello. As she walked along, troubling thoughts began to surface. What if her head kept on inflating like this? What if some other part of her started growing too? What if all of her started growing? What if she got so big she couldn't lift herself off the ground? What if she got so big she crushed the Earth, choking on the vacuum of space? Her already fit to burst head filled up more and more with these sorts of terrifying thoughts, distracting her and preventing her from seeing where she was going. She was so preoccupied with her internal turmoil that she almost blindly bumped into someone.