Justine, muscular-to-fat football girl

Justine Montambault, a tall Canadian blonde girl with blue eyes, appears for the first time a few weeks after the beginning of the book. At the time, she was a Grade 7 student in music concentration who was a little shy but less than Zacharie and who, like him, was a member of the Environment Committee. She was also in her physical education and math groups. The day after their ornithological trip to Cap-Tourmente in the fall, crossing him alone on a staircase, she invites him to take a walk around the school one following noon and she confides to him that she is tired to see him told by other guys that a girl will never be interested in him, neither in love nor in friendship and proposes to him to become his friend. This immediately results in another walk, that evening, then she invites him to dinner at her place and plays a piece on the violin on the occasion. However, Zacharie discovers that behind appearances, Justine is not happy in music. She just does not want to become a copy of her sister Camille but does not dare to tell her parents for fear of shattering their dreams and especially since she does not yet have any alternative in mind for her future. The following year, in Grade 8, her grades were too bad and she was no longer part of the music concentration. She then begins to move away from Donna, Léa and Marine, her quiet music friends since elementary school, to get closer to Kristina, a popular girl who invited her to her table during the first art class. At the end of the year, she starts to smoke and sometimes goes swimming in the swimming pool of neighborhood park with her friend Zacharie, who is secretly in love with her, which she ends up deducing and replies that this is not reciprocal. In Grade 9, Justine is in the midst of her adolescent crisis while most of her classmates have passed theirs. Rendered with a smoker's voice, even though she's only been smoking for a few months, she doesn't hesitate to be angry to her teachers when it doesn't suit her and to swear bad words like a carter. However, towards the end of the year, she calms down and decides to stop smoking. During the summer, her smoker's voice almost disappears completely and when she arrives in Grade 10, she is again wise as she had been in Middle School although she is now less embarrassed to speak in class unlike Zacharie, who is still her friend. At the start of the year, she signed up for the girl's handball team and started hanging out a little bit with the girls of music concentration again while continuing to be best friends with Kristina. Outside of school, she starts weightlifting in a gym with the strongest guys of her grade. The results become particularly apparent after Christmas as she becomes stronger and more muscular than any athletic students of her level except one: Alexandre Archambault-Girard. Then begins a rivalry between them. That winter, Justine is approached by Aaron, the school's football team coach, who tells her that with the strength she has, she should think about joining his players next fall. next. She doesn't commit to anything, but the idea is slowly working in her mind. At the same time, she begins to work in a submarine restaurant that has just opened with her classmate Nicolas Pouliot. In the summer, after several months of preparation, she leaves with her parents, a couple of friends of them and a few other teenagers - Alexandre, Federica, Kristina, Nathan, Patrice, Roxanne and Zacharie - for a two weeks trip to Europe. Upon entering Senior Year, she began a romantic relationship with Nicolas, her first in life, and joined the football team. Her extraordinary performances earned her an article in the local newspaper. This first media appearance will be far from the last. She now spends the majority of her lunchtime in the school's weightlifting room with Alexandre, Patrice and Nathan with whom she forms a gang that Zacharie nicknamed "the Quartet". She also begins to fight with certain athletic guys who do not hesitate to ridicule her musculature, including David Hamelin, with whom not a day goes by without a fight occurring, to the disappointment of her friends, girls like guys. In May, she stopped working at the submarine restaurant and became a garage mechanic in a garage in the West district. She wears a red dress at the Prom and is accompanied by Nicolas, who is still her boyfriend. However, she breaks up with him few days later not finding him serious enough. Then begins a celibacy that will last more than a year.

In the fall, she entered the local college in Civil Engineering Technology and was a linebacker in the football team. Then, she then spent most of her free time with her teammates on the football team, but mostly with Alexandre, although he is not enrolled in college. In the previous summer, when they had tied for height, strength and musculature all the last year of high school, she ended up far outstripping her rival in every way. Also, during her first months at college, Justine invited Zacharie, who was still her friend, to drive her new car in the parking lot of the local shopping center one evening, a black 2006 Toyota Yarris paid by her parents, knowing that the mother of her friend wouldn't let him drive her car. However, Zacharie did not like the experience, she did not try again to teach him to drive. In February, the garage where she had worked for almost a year closed. The owner had offered to sell it to her and Alexandre because he found them very enterprising for teenagers, but she refused. One afternoon of the same month, in a rooming house, she starts, not without hesitation, to take steroids. She was reunited with about twenty guys, footballers and other jocks, who told her that if she wanted to have biceps like those of François Châteauneuf and Hugo Deschatelets, the two strongest guys of the college who were also her friends, she had no choice because they too were taking it. She had a glint of uncertainty in her eyes, worrying about what it might have as a side effect on her health given that she was not a guy unlike her teammates and gym partners but Francois encourages her and the others say nothing. So she figured there shouldn't be too many side effects and so left - she had taken a sabbatical for the winter session - for a few months in Alberta with peace of mind. Returning to her hometown early in the summer, she discovers her parents' intention to sell the family home as her two sisters and her brother had now left. While talking about it with Nicolas in his living room, Mr. Pouliot alias Raymond suggested to his ex-daughter-in-law to come and live with them until she find an apartment. Justine knew very well why she was being offered such an offer. Raymond was an avid football fan and given that his eldest son did not play it and that his youngest son, Andy, was still in high school, his ex-daughter-in-law seemed at the time to be the only person he could project his dreams of grandeur which she filled wonderfully. Indeed, on the oval ball, Justine's proof was no longer to be done. As she entered her second year of college, the steroids, which she had continued to take at a distance and denied to her family and non-athletic friends, had the desired effect. She was now the strongest person in college, having biceps an inch bigger than Francois and lifting 20 pounds heavier than him on a barbell. On the other hand, he was still an inch taller than her 6’6’’, her final height she had just reached. However, the use of illicit substances had left a marked side effect in her: a particularly virile voice easily confused with those of François and Hugo, to her great misfortune. However, she ended up taking the situation with a touch of humor and had shaved head in order to appear even more like a guy, which worked to such an extent that her friend Zacharie didn't realize it for five minutes after she had greeted him. Nicolas, her ex with whom she lived and who was her college locker partner, had to let him know. In addition, she changed her Toyota Yarris for an extremely polluting modified black Ford F150. In the course of the fall, while with François and Hugo it was raining and shining and all three were becoming legends of Quebec college football, she began to go out with Alexandre, her dream since Grade 9 that she could not afford at the time because he was the boyfriend of her best friend Kristina. However, during the eight months they will spend together, they will hardly see each other, he being 75 km away. When winter comes, Justine starts to gain weight worryingly, but it is no longer muscle mass. Fat begins to coat her muscles. With the onset of the cold season, she stopped jogging for several miles every morning and living with the Pouliots is not good for health. Besides, she doesn't hesitate to stand up to Raymond on this matter. She even threatens to go live in an apartment, as initially agreed, but does not. She is so happy to be able to talk about her favorite sport every day at the kitchen table and to watch it on TV with the three men of the Pouliot family, the father and his two sons. To tell the truth, she almost felt more at home with them than she had been in her real family with Camille and Arnaud who kept tormenting her. In the spring, she returned with a good belly and equalizes the weight of her heaviest teammate, Carl Tousignant, who weighs 320 pounds. She doesn't worry too much and tells herself that with the summer she will resume jogging daily and lose the accumulated fat mass. It did not happen. Upon returning from another trip to Europe at the end of June, this time alone with Zacharie, the inclement weather stuck her inside most of the time. At the college football selection camp, Georges Désilet, the coach, told her that he had no choice but to change her position, that she would go from linebacker to lineman, a position held by other heavy players and which was a little less prestigious. Also, during the summer, tired of having to let underage girls of 13, 14 or 15 years old entering the nightclub where she works because "that's how things are", she resigns as a bouncer, a job she had since her return from Alberta with her friends François and Hugo who, unlike her, did not hesitate to let underage teen girls enter, but not their male comrades if they did not have false cards. Disillusioned by these depraved mores and since her two friends are leaving the city for university, one in Montreal and the other in Quebec City, she decides to distance herself from them. The fraternity they had shown on community television after the football games for two years was no longer in order. A few days before the start of her third year of college, she and Alexandre agree to break up after hardly seeing each other at all during the months they were supposed to be "together". Right after Labor Day, when the football roster goes public, the shock is terrible. Justine realizes that in one year she has gone from 275 pounds of muscle to 350 pounds of muscle and fat. The gain is so important that journalists who cover college football ask her why, to which she responds with a humor not shared by her coach that she did not really care. If Zacharie was worried that someone would disclose his weight after a physical education weigh-in, he considered what his friend was going through as nightmarish. In Justine's case, it was not just a few comrades who had access to this data, but the entire population. It was definitely more humiliating, but she didn't take offense at it. In fact, no sooner had she left Alexandre and her bouncer job than she already had a new boyfriend and a new job. Her third boyfriend was Antoine Laforest, a receiver on her team, shorter, weaker and above all less fat than her. As for her job, she had just taken up the post of cook in a fast-food left vacant by her ex, friend, "housemate" and now almost brother Nicolas. In November, she makes a new trip with her friend Zacharie. She takes him to Rivière-du-Loup where her mother lives now with her grandmother aboard her pick-up which, for sure, meets all the rules in terms of environmental protection. On the way, they stop at La Pocatière to visit her former friend Léa who is studying at this town college, then afterwards, they will spend a night in Rimouski to visit the Musée de la Mer and then the Quebec Maritime Institute where Justine has made a surprise appointment to Zacharie, wanting him to see all the possibilities for his future, regardless of his age-old financial argument. The two friends were not on their first trip in Quebec together, the previous year they had traveled to Varennes to visit Mr. Montambault's house there at the same time as Marguerite d'Youville's hometown. In the winter, she takes another sabbatical and after helping Zacharie move from his father's to an apartment of his own, she leaves to live in California for three months with Kristina who was still her best friend. On her return, she goes to Victoriaville to see her more-or-less friend François who is visiting his parents. While going to run on the athletics track of the college, while sitting down, she breaks a plank of the stands and her former mentor recommends her to give up football in favor of competitive weightlifting, by letting her know that there, weight is not a problem. If she categorically refuses to even think about the first idea, the second interests her and she takes steps in this direction.

After three fall at college, she graduated, cohort 2010, and at the end of the summer entered her city university in Civil Engineering. Despite having made the selection camp of the football team, Coach Blanchette, the severe and demanding coach of the linemen, does not allow her to play. 405 pounds is too much. At his eyes, if a player isn’t thin and muscular or just thin, then is place is not on a football field. Fat and muscular, like Justine, therefore does not meet her expectations. Certainly, as he takes care of the heaviest players, he has to accept that some have a small belly but not from there to provide them a 3XL uniform and even less 4XL as was now the need of the old legend of the college football, which he didn't care about. For him, there was no other choice: Justine had to lose weight or stay on the bench for the rest of the season. Unable to come to terms with this eventuality, the 20-year-old girl did everything possible to return to her "reason of living." Unfortunately, with all her willpower, she not only did not lose weight but to her dismay, continued to gain and as a result did not leave the bench of the fall. However, something happened to help offset all this positively: in October, she won the gold medal in weightlifting at the Commonwealth Games in India. It wasn't bad for someone who wasn't a professional weightlifter a year ago. She had climbed the ranks quickly and had seen her fear of the steroids she had taken in her first year of college dispelled. The anti-doping agency saw nothing in her blood. It was past. She could bury it for good. At least, she believed. At the same time, she sold her pickup, which was more polluting than a sinking tanker, and decided not to have a vehicle for a while. She would go to class by transit bus and evenings and weekends, if necessary, she would borrow Mr. Pouliot's minivan or Nicolas' car. In the spring, a new tile falls on her head when Antoine decides to break up with her. The reason ? At 440 pounds, she’s too heavy. The news does not fail to arouse the ire of Justine. When they had started dating a year and a half earlier, one of the arguments Antoine had made in his interest for her was precisely her massiveness. As she was relentless in football, he was convinced that it had to have advantages off the pitch too. Apparently he had been disillusioned ever since. Of course, no matter how much the receiver argued that she had smashed the passenger seat of his car as well as a sofa in his parents' house, for Justine, that was no reason to break a heart. Because of the heaviness that Andy, Nicolas and her had, there were always breaks in the Pouliot's and she had seen Zacharie more than once having to face humiliating situations due to his weight. Did anyone abandon them for this? No. So, Antoine's behavior in the present situation was most childish. A few weeks later, in May, she accompanies Zacharie at his request to his college prom in a beautiful blue dress. Faced with his embarrassment at being too close to each other, she points out to him that unlike the high school prom, where they'd dance, again, as friends, she too has now a big belly. He tells her that's not it, that it's just that he doesn't quite know when and how to touch her shoulder of hands without fear of making a mistake. She then explains to him what she thinks about it. The following month, a few days after Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, she was invited to a talk show because along with her best friend Kristina, she was the only university girl playing football in Quebec. Although she has lost about forty pounds since Easter, not because of Antoine's criticisms but because of her fear of spending another whole season on the bench, she takes a stand in favor of massive players, in her favorite sport as in the others, arguing that normally - Nicolas being the exception - no one gets fat on purpose, that she had become so against her will even if she knew that the eating habits she had adopted since living with the Pouliots and the abandonment of her morning jog were the cause. Watching her from their living room, Andy, Nicolas and Raymond could only applaud and hiss their approval at the person who lived under their roof. At the end of August, Justine learns that she will once again be able to meet her teammates on the field. The roster puts her at 390, 15 pounds lighter than the previous year, except in the meantime she had managed the feat of losing about 50 after gaining 40. Coach Blanchette couldn't say anything more. Also, at the start of the year, she is running for the post of vice-president of students of the Faculty of Engineering. Zacharie is skeptical about her chances of winning. She replies that they are no longer in elementary and secondary school, that at university no one is judged on his weight anymore outside of sports and that she has not met anyone who resented her massiveness. And as in fact, she wins the ballot. In November, things continued to be positive as she once again won a medal, this time bronze, at the world weightlifting championship held in Paris. However, she failed to qualify for the London Olympics the following summer. Plus, throughout the school year, she sees the numbers start to go in ascending order on the scale again when she believed she was done for good with this nightmare telling herself they could only go descending. But no. To her great misfortune, she regains all the weight lost and even a little more and begins her third season in university football at 450 pounds! She can take comfort because Andy is breaking his first there and is heavier than her. The two give way to their respective benches in the locker room during their first training. At the end of August, along with many others, she agrees to get involved in her friend Zacharie's Weight Problems Students' Committee project even though she doesn't really believe in his purpose. Problems and insecurities about body image are old issues of completely outdated teenagers that no one cares about now at 22. At least, that's what she and many believed until a certain evening in September. While at the Université de Sherbrooke stadium, the Université Laval Rouge & Or face the Vert & Or, Justine becomes infatuated with her ex, Antoine, who plays for the opposing team. He does not get up and death is declared on the spot. After minutes of constantly shouting the name of the guy who left her, she found herself in a catatonic state for the rest of the evening and into the next morning. She wakes up in her father's house in Varennes where he is with Arnaud and their mother. Her transgender brother decides to cut her off from the media for several days given the sports channels no longer talk about anything other than what happened to Antoine and the same question is on everyone's lips: Should we forbid heavy people from play team sports because of the danger they represent for other players? The population is divided into two very distinct camps and the anti-fat comments are very harsh. When she returns to campus after a few days, she keeps hearing murmurs as she walks by and in class. She tries not to pay attention to it. When once she arrives at her locker with Kristina, she sees "MURDERER" painted in red on the door and goes into a rage, telling everyone in the hallway that Antoine's death was an accident. She wanted to break everything and her best friend ever who, like her, was among the five strongest students of the university - the other three being guys they didn't know and who didn't play football - struggled to hold her back by the size of lashing out at anyone who passed in the hallway. At the same time, the university administration, wishing to show the media and the population that had things well in hand, dismissed Luis Almeida, the head coach of the football team and replaced him with Blanchette who hastened to nail Justine and Andy to the bench for the remainder of the season. The former linemen's coach was unable to stop them from playing earlier due to Justine's glorious past in college football who had played in her favor with the other coaches on the team. As if all that weren't enough, media revealed that she and Luis had been in a secret romantic relationship for several months, which due to the man's position of authority, was illegal even though the two consented. In front of it all, her parents but especially Arnaud convinced her to give up her position of vice-president of her faculty then her entire session, which she does just like her position of cook in a snack bar, which she has been given no help in preventing her from gaining weight. Her transgender brother then urges her to go on a trip with Zacharie to clear her mind and let the dust settle, which she does in late November and early December. However, as their trip to Spain and Portugal comes to an end, a guy from Quebec recognizes her in the terminal at Barcelona airport and doesn't hesitate to tell her what he thinks while making sure to keep a good ten meters away from her. Even on the other side of the world, she couldn't have peace! After the holidays, in her first class of the winter semester, there is still a lot of murmur about her, although not as bad as it was the fall before she gave up. She then makes a new and unlikely friend in Natasha Lavigne, her desk neighbor, who at 4'10, is the slimmest and smallest of their class. This is her first new girl friend since high school. Since then, she had spent time almost exclusively with guys, whether they were athletes like François or Hugo or non-athletes like Nicolas and Zacharie. As for the girls, her only friends were footballers like her, namely Kristina, Daphnée and her sisters. Natasha therefore brought a wind of renewal from this point of view. At the end of February, during a wine and cheese dinner at the Delta Hotel, seeing that the many couples around her table look at her as an alien if not a "murderer" due to the events of the previous months, she cracks and goes outside to take out all her pain. Charles-David, another bachelor present, who despite being thin, neither athletic nor muscular, tries to reassure her and the two begin to go out together. He then became his first “official” boyfriend since two years. However, that does not prevent her from deciding to drop out of her session again, convinced that she will never be able to resume a normal life in the anonymity of the university in Sherbrooke. She also decides to leave the Pouliots, knowing that after five years, the temporary solution had practically become permanent, much to the disappointment of Lysanne, Raymond's wife and mother of Andy and Nicolas who couldn't hear about football anymore. Not without sadness, shared by her ex and her father, she told them that she would go to live with her father in Varennes and that she would continue her studies in Civil Engineering at the University of Montreal, more precisely at the École Polytechnique, but that she would come back to her home city as often as possible to see them and especially to watch the Superbowl with them! The choice of the University of Montreal was no accident. Its football team was known for its fairly heavy linemen, so she figured she had a better chance of being on the roster than staying in Sherbrooke with Blanchette in charge. She is just living and in the fall, at 535 pounds, became the heaviest footballer in history, a title previously held by New Jersey American Reny Nunes, who in high school weighed 517 and not pursued his career with the oval ball in college. On the occasion of her move in the spring, Justine had purchased an Azure Honda Civic sedan, her first personal vehicle in three years. She also has a new job and is a mover for a business on the South Shore. Now, no one whispers as she passes through the hallways and classrooms: in Montreal, she seems to have found peace, even though many of her teammates have heard of the event. However, as the coach has silenced the subject and other footballers are too afraid to deal with her legendary physical strength anyway, she doesn't get angry with it anymore. Her first year at Polytechnique is going without any problem, like the second, during which she still plays university football and where her weight finally stabilizes at 560 pounds! Fortunately, even though she's made heavier than Andy and Zacharie, Nicolas is still heavier than her, much to her relief. Only one thing comes to shame at the end of his university career: a meeting with François, her former mentor, friend and teammate, on Mount Royal. Without trying to be openly condescending, he let her know that if she had taken charge, weightily speaking, instead of letting her go for years with the notable exception of the few months when she had lost about fifty pounds, she could have become the professional footballer she dreamed of at the end of high school. This does not fail to cause her great pain. She therefore graduated from the University of Montreal in 2013 and then moved to Beloeil with Charles-David who, although having finished his studies, still lived with his parents in Sherbrooke.

Not without having had all the misery in the world in interviews, she manages to get hired by her father's consulting engineering firm and begins working in a skyscraper in downtown Montreal. In the fall, she joined a civilian football team in Magog, in order to pursue her passion with former college and university teammates, but they, fearing that the disaster that had occurred with Antoine would happen once again, encourage her not to come back after the first match, which she accepts, but more because her former performances are no longer there and she struggles to find her breath running or at least trying to run. During the first few months at her new job, she lashes out at colleagues who always come to her office or call her rather than offer to come to theirs. She tells them that just because she is breathing hard and being overweight does not mean that she is unable to walk and that she wants to have the same back and forth as others and not to be treated differently, a request which they nod. In September 2016, she married Charles-David in a church in her home city, the same one attended by her friend Zacharie and her brother Arnaud, which was followed by a reception at Manoir Hovey on the shores of Lake Massawippi. Over the next several months, without being encouraged or discouraged by Charles-David, she began to buy only organic products in the hope of losing weight, always at her peak. If her efforts were rewarded, she did not manage to go below the 450 pound mark. In March 2017, she was invited over the phone by Pénélope, a former high school music concentration girl who managed to find her, to sit on the organizing committee for the reunion. She refuses, fearing that many will only tell her about Antoine's death and unwilling to show those who are unaware that she has become fat and how much. If Nicolas would be happy to himself, it was a feeling she did not share. In January 2018, while she was an occasional analyst of football matches on TV in addition to her office job, she had to co-host the Superbowl with François Châteauneuf. When they both find themselves alone in the studio, she takes revenge on him. Justine has learned in the previous months that she could not have children, not because of her obesity, the not always gentle falls she had in football or the punches she had receive from the Drunken part of the days when she was a bouncer or when she fought with David Hamelin but because of steroids. They might not have been detected during the weightlifting competitions in which she had taken part and although she might have found a certain femininity in her voice a few months after having stopped taking them in the middle of her second year of college, they had caused long-term damage. So she was angry to Francois for not warning her against taking it being that since he had been in college football and on steroids longer than her, he had to know what can be the consequences. She was also angry with him because he, on her Facebook, distinguished himself with his girlfriend and their son, who was already 3 years old. He had been on steroids too, but unlike her, it had no effect on his plans to start a family. She was so angry that she thought about using her fists, which she hadn't done for a long time but restrained herself, telling herself that she was now a responsible adult who needed to put her emotionality aside. So she went on air with him, reluctantly, and did not let viewers show her resentment towards him. During the following years, Charles-David and she adopted two children and led their family life in their house in Beloeil, even if in Justine's eyes, she would have preferred they come from her husband and her and not from a host family.