The crisp and auburn shade of September came, ruining yet another all-too short summer for the students of East Shores High. Under falling leaves, ESH became the center of town once again, no longer an empty parking lot for the skateboarders and the solemn graveyard it had been during the summer. Its prison doors were open once more, greeting the freshman to its hell and everybody else a cold welcome back from the draft that wound through the bustling hallways. The fading colors of autumn became a vivid splash of color within the confines of school, with every student still trying to savor that last memory of beaches and the summer air by the blinding colors of their clothes.

The sun was hiding when school let out, too late in the afternoon to hit the waters and too early to go home. School buses breathed out their heavy sighs and started up, droning away from the crowded parking lot and worming their way down the streets with restless children inside. A small group of six teenagers—three boys and three girls—lingered back at the doorways of the school, leaning against the charcoal railing whose skin had begun to peel away with age.

“Sucks,” Joel muttered, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his jeans. Just yesterday he was wearing shorts. Somehow, going back to school made the whole world seem a lot colder.

Nobody needed him to clarify what he was talking about; they all knew he meant school. None of them were glad to be back and they all nodded and murmured in agreement. Then there was silence for a while, as the screams for children leaving the school grounds began to fade into the colorless autumn sky.

Andy shrugged his heavy shoulders, a football tucked under his arm. “At least try-outs begin in the fall. Been waiting all summer to get back on the field.”

“Maybe this year you’ll graduate and won’t be the only twenty-old year old playing for a high school varsity team,” Cordelia laughed.

Andy smiled at her. He loved the way she laughed—in short bursts and chippers, like that of a squirrel. Her strawberry-blonde hair blended into the season so perfectly that Andy didn’t even notice a leaf that had fallen on her shoulder until she brushed it away and her laughter died down. Somehow, the first day of school never brought much humor.

“This year’s the year,” Andy nodded slowly. “Just wait, it’s going to be awesome.”

Cassandra, a wild brunette with soft lips and a knapsack dangling over one shoulder, let out the sigh they were all holding in. “I sure hope so. I’d do anything to get away from this hellhole. Go off to college somewhere, meet a nice guy—”

“What’s wrong with me, Cassie?” Joel interjected. “I’m better than all those frat boys put together!”

Cassie laughed. “Dream on, Jo-elle. College boys are sophisticated.”

“This coming from a girl with a room full of kids’ games,” he muttered back.

She ignored him with an innocent smile.

“You guys can say what you want, but I still don’t like it,” Brad said from his spot against the wall. His girlfriend, Ruby, was busy tying her black hair back into a ponytail and he was amusing himself, tugging at the scrunchie, until she swatted his hands away with a giggle.

“Whatever,” Andy said, tossing the football over to his friend. “See you at practice, man?”

Brad grunted. Typical boy speak, really.

“This is our year,” Andy declared. “Let’s go, Wolves!” He prodded his foot into the cement a few times the way a dog does and threw back to his head to let out a howl. “Wolves! Wolves! Wolves!”

“Stop being an idiot,” Cordelia sighed, yanking his arm. But as head quarterback for the past three years, there was no chance she was going to move him. He was too busy in his fantasies of being a wolf.

“At least you’re not like that,” Ruby whispered to Brad.

He responded by pushing off the wall and howling at the sun, just beginning to peek out from a cloud, as if it were the moon. For a minute, it was just Andy and Brad howling like two rabid dogs, each trying to out yell the other while the other four just stared at them. Then they doubled over in laughter when they couldn’t holler anymore, now that they even had the principal standing at the door to see who had let the dogs out.

“Don’t you kids get enough of school during the day?” he asked. For a principal, he was awfully short and looked to be one of those kids picked on through his school years, making it no wonder he wanted to be a principal to get back at the kids who had done him wrong.

“Just showing some school spirit,” Andy said through his laughter.

“Yeah, yeah. Show it to me by passing this year.”

The principal turned his back and Andy couldn’t help giving him a quick flash. Brad burst out in laughter, stepping in front of Andy just in time to cover him up as the principal took one last glance back at the student who gave him the most trouble in all his years of teaching.

“Pull your pants up,” Cordelia sighed when the principal had left.

“They seem to be stuck,” Andy joked. “Want to come help me?”

“The help you need you couldn’t possibly get…”

Andy just laughed.

“Walk me home?” Cassie flashed a smile at Joel.

He smiled back. “See you guys.” But he didn’t look at them when he spoke, just put his arm around Cassie. She pushed it off in midstep and started down the road, two steps ahead of Joel and speed-walking. He jogged to keep up and she broke into a sprint. Joel chased her for half a mile, running through traffic to keep up, and finally tackled her into a pile of leaves on the side of the road. They disappeared under the rubbish. Cassie resurfaced after a moment, crawling onto the sidewalk, but Joel caught her ankles and yanked her screaming body back into the pile of leaves, which had become all but a cluttered mess by now that would have to be raked all over again.

Andy watched them, laughing. “With a tackle like that, he could take my place when I graduate.”

“If,” Cordelia interrupted.

“No way, man,” Brad tossed him the football. “I’ll be quarterback next year.”

“Yeah, as soon as you learn to throw!”

“I’ll throw you!”

They dove at each other, arms clashing, each trying to push the other over.

Eventually they both fell to the ground and began rolling over each other, fighting for the football.

The two sane ones, Cordelia and Ruby, were left standing side by side, watching their friends act like the idiots that they (usually) were.

“Another year of this,” Cordelia sighed.

Ruby smiled. “Ain’t it wonderful?” Then she screamed as Brad reached up, seized her waist, and brought her wriggling body down on top of him.

Cordelia saw Andy reaching for her.

“Don’t you dare,” she warned, stepping back. “Don’t you even dare.”

He crept closer, slowly, like a shark underwater.

“Don’t…” Cordelia said, backing up to the stairs leading into the school.

He came even closer and reached his arms out.

She spun and started up the stairs. “Don’t!”

But he already had her. She fell to her knees on the first step on her elbows three steps above that. Pinning her arms to the side, Andy threw himself backwards, causing Cordelia to sail through the air with him and land next to Brad and Ruby, who were already making out in plain sight. No big deal. Brad and Ruby. They did it all the time, even in the middle of class.

“I’d rather throw you around than a football any day,” Andy laughed, rolling Cordelia over in her grass.

“You’re ruining my coat!” she whined, pounding her fists helplessly into the earth. “It’s brand new.”

“You’ve had it for four years.”

“I like this coat.”

“I bought it for you.” He dug his nose into her face and kissed her roughly on the lips.

She sighed at him as he came up for air. “I hate you.”

“Will you hate me forever?”

“If you give me the chance.”

“Great,” he said, moving in for another kiss.

Cordelia finally laughed and rolled over, giving him only her cheek. He tried for her lips again, but she pressed her lips to the soft ground and curled into a tight ball. Laughing playfully, Andy tried to turn her over, but she’d only throw her head from one side to the other, never giving him a chance.

Falling back on his knees, Andy sighed happily and let Cordelia squirm her way forward a few feet—like a worm—just to be safe, before she collapsed Indian style on the grass. They stared at each other, breathing deeply, and tried to laugh.

“Your face is a mess,” Andy said, reaching out his fingers to wipe away the dirt from her brow.

“Not as much as yours!” she said, grabbing a handful of leaves and rubbing them into his face as he drew close.

He seized her hand and gently pushed her arm away. He smiled at her, but it wasn’t his usual teasing smile when he told a bad joke or wanted to impress somebody; it was a serious smile, a dreamy one made Cordelia frown slightly because she had seen that smile before.

“This is the year,” he said distantly with a single, yet empty, laugh at the end. And he said it again, because it sounded so unreal. “This is the year…”

“I’m sure it’ll be great,” Cordelia assured him, carefully. She wasn’t so sure. A cool breeze caught her bare skin and she shivered, zipping up her coat. Brad and Ruby continued to make out next to them and it no surprise that Brad had ripped off his shirt by now. What was surprising was that his pants were still on.

“Don’t they care that everybody is watching?” Cordelia asked, knowing neither Brad nor Ruby was paying the slightest bit of attention to anybody around them anyway.

“Nobody’s watching,” Andy said. “We’re alone.”

“Yeah…we are.” Cordelia leaned back on her hands and stared up at the sky. The sun was gone again and it didn’t feel so warm anymore. “We really are alone, aren’t we?”

The doors to Cordelia’s home flew open, banging against the kitchen counter. Andy held open the door while bowing his head politely for Cordelia to enter first, although his dinosaurian size made his gesture awkward, almost laughable.

“Don’t break down my house,” Cordelia said as she entered the house and checked the counter, sighing when she found it had earned a deeper doorknob imprint in the side.

“Can’t control these muscles sometimes, babe,” he said, following her and closing the door. It slammed shut so hard that Cordelia had to give him a nasty glance over her shoulder.

“Try.”

“Hey, fruit!” Andy said, grabbing an apple out of a nearby fruit bowl and sinking his teeth into it.

“…Help yourself. You know I spend my hard-earned money just to put food on the table for you.”

Andy chewed loudly. “How is cashiering at the supermarket anyway?”

“I’m a waitress,” Cordelia stared at him. “At the diner. I have been for the last six months.”

“Do you have any milk?”

“If you haven’t chugged it already.”

But Andy was already raiding the fridge, grabbing an assortment of fruits and carrying a gallon of milk over to the counter with his teeth gripping the handle since his hands were full.

“It’s always a pleasure to have you over,” Cordelia said halfheartedly.

“Need my power drink if I’m going to bring home the cup this year. This is the year of the Wolves! Where’s the blender?”

“Right in front of you…”

Andy grabbed the power cord to the blender, pushed the bread box out of the way, and plugged in it. Then he began shoving the fruit inside the glass canister.

“Don’t forget to peel the bananas first this time,” Cordelia sighed, grabbing a knife and helping him with the more complicated fruit that was most likely beyond his 2.3 GPA average.

“Lemons,” he remarked. “We need lemons.”

“I think we’re out.”

“You can’t be out.” He began raiding the fridge again, knocking jars together as he reached for the back. A head of lettuce fell and rolled across the floor.

“Would you stop!?” Cordelia exclaimed, gathering the lettuce and cups of yogurt that had hit the kitchen tiles. “I said we’re out of lemons!”

“Milk. We need milk.”

“It’s on the counter where you left it.”

Andy poured the milk over the fruit in the blender and then drummed his fingers across the buttons. “Lemons, lemons. Gotta have lemons.”

“Isn’t that shake disgusting enough without them?”

“How much are lemons at the supermarket?”

“I don’t know.”

“You work there, don’t you?”

Cordelia sighed. “You’d have to buy a whole bunch.”

“I only need one.”

“You can’t go into the supermarket for a single lemon.”

“What about one of those stupid little sweetener packets? The pink and white ones you girls are always fumbling with to put in your ice tea.”

“Stupid…little…sweetener packets,” she mumbled. “Stupid, little…”

“You got those, don’t you?”

“Seeing as how I’m a fumbling girl, I guess I do.”

“Great, babe, where are they?” He was busy searching the cupboards before she could answer him.

“Why don’t you just drink Gatorade?” Cordelia stuck her hand in the blender, pulled out a strawberry, and bit into it as her buffoon of a boyfriend continued looking for something that was sitting right out in the open by the microwave.

“Everybody drinks Gatorade. I do better on the field than them because I got my secret power drink.” He paused for a moment. “You got Tabasco sauce?”

“That’s sick, Andy.”

“Come on, pour a few drops in there. I gotta find those packets.”

Groaning, Cordelia plucked the tiny red bottle of Tabasco sauce out of the open fridge and carried over to the blender. She held it over the mixed fruit, pounding on the bottom like she would a baby, covering the fruit in little red blotches. Then, looking over at Andy, she figured he deserved a really nasty aftertaste, so she squirted a little more out and replaced the cap on the bottle.

“I can’t find the packets,” Andy complained, now that he had turned over her whole kitchen.

“Forget them. This is gross enough.”

“What about potatoes? How would those taste?”

“…I’m sure you’d love them.”

“Got some?”

“No. You’re not breaking my blender by putting a potato in there.”

“You could cut it up.”

“Would you forget it already? That’s disgusting. You could just make normal shakes like the other boys. It’s not like this concoction of yours really works miracles.”

Andy wrapped his arms around her waist, swaying back in forth in a slow dance as she began to cut up an apple into small slices for him. “Come on, babe. You’ve seen me play. I perform miracles, don’t I?”

“It is a miracle that you’re able to dress yourself in the morning.”

“At least my shirts reach my waist. Yours can’t even seem to reach your belly button.”

Cordelia was glad she had her back to him because her face turned red and she tugged at the red t-shirt under her coat with her free hand, trying to pull it down. “I’m going to change.”

“Don’t change too much,” Andy said, spying the core of the apple his girlfriend had just cut up and plopped it into the blender. “Hey, what about the sweetener packets?”

Cordelia opened the pantry, grabbed something out from the middle shelf, and tossed it over to Andy. “Here, try this.”

“Crystal Light?” he asked, turning the small cylinder container over in his hands. “Hey, it has lemons in it!”

“Just artificial lemons. Try not to make a mess, pleeease.”

“Does that mean I should cover the blender this time?” Andy laughed as he popped over the container with his thumb and pulled out a small pink packet. He tore it open, sniffing it and feeling a slight rush course through his body. He sniffed it again just for fun.

“What should I wear to your practice?” Cordelia asked, then she looked up at Andy’s goofy smile and turned away. “Nevermind. I’m putting on a sweatshirt.”

“You know I love it when you tease me,” Andy said, pouring the contents of the packet into the blender. “Hey, this stuff looks like sugar.” He thought about for a moment and then laughed. “Alright! Sugar rush!”

Remembering to put the lid over the blender and secure it in place, Andy ran his finger over to the start button and pressed it. The blender began to shake and wobble across the counter until he caught it, pinning it down under his hands while the blades worked their magic. Slices of bananas, apples, strawberries, and grapes began to liquefy among the milk and Tabasco sauce, turning a nasty shade of blood red to an awful purplish-brown that looked like something on the bottom of somebody’s shoe.

Unbeknownst to Andy, though, the crystallites from the sugar packet were reacting strangely to the mixture. Then began to reel around, spreading out like atoms among the swirling whirlpool, and sparkled like moon dust among the fruit. The crystallites began to grow harder and bigger, as it taking a solid form, and then melted away when the blender clicked to a stop. Yet the chemical reaction had done something to the drink, causing it to shimmer in a radiant glow.

By the time Andy had pried off the lid, the glow had disappeared from the drink and the sickening mauve color had returned. The crystallites had shrunk down to an almost microscopic level, broken away in the liquid, but still glittered faintly like distant stars at night.

Grabbing a dirty glass from the sink, Andy tipped over the blender and poured himself a full glass, not caring that this fruit concoction looked far more appalling than anything he had made to date.

“Hurry up, Cori!” he yelled before bringing the glass to his lips. “Don’t want to be late for practice!” Then he stared down at the drink, still with chunks of fruit that hadn’t quite broken up yet. “Well, bottoms up, I guess.”

He chugged it all. It didn’t matter how rotten it tasted or how much he wanted to spit it out, he guzzled it down and slammed the glass against the counter as if he were taking shots from the local bar.

“I love it!” he exclaimed through his clenched teeth, not really loving the taste at all, but loving the power he could feel surging through his veins. Then he felt something strange. His muscles were contacting, tightening on him, and he suddenly found himself gripping his throat for air. His lungs had constricted as well.  Stumbling back, he felt his legs give way and he collapsed next to the fridge, holding up a shaky hand. If his eyesight hadn’t gone blurry by now, he could’ve sworn his once brawny fingers were like that of a baby—still muscular and strong, but tiny. Small. Too small. He tried to grab the counter to pull himself up, but for some reason he couldn’t reach it. Something inside of him began to shimmer, glow, break away, shrink, and he could feel his molecules bubbling. Then all went black.

Cordelia came down the stairs. “I said don’t break my house down! What are you doing down there?” She walked into the kitchen, saw the blender still plugged in, the gross liquid goop still sticking to its side, and none of the leftover fruit put away. Andy was nowhere in sight.

 “Sure, leave me your mess,” she muttered. “I love to pick up after you.” She took a step forward, completely unaware of the small buglike creature on the black and white tiled floor in front of her.

The thundering footsteps around him caused Andy to roll over, lazily rubbing his eyes as if he were just waking up in the morning. But his back was on a much harder surface than his bed and he pried himself up on one elbow, looking out over the cold black sea in front of him. He stood up, realizing it wasn’t a sea, but a hard surface—the size of a room—with a hundred rooms just like it connected to his own, with no walls between them. The floors in each room alternated from black to white, in a checkered pattern, just like…the tiled floor in Cordelia’s kitchen. Andy rubbed his eyes again. This was her kitchen.

“Well, this can’t be good,” said the king of obvious. He looked up to his gigantic girlfriend on the other side of the kitchen, her back to him, as she pulled the trashcan over to the counter and began scooped the leftovers from his drink into it. He watched her, mouth agate, as her breasts were now as big as cars under her gray hoodie sweatshirt. “Then again…”

“I’m going to kill that boy one of these days,” Cordelia muttered as she unplugged the blender and dropped it unceremoniously into the sink.

Realizing her words were now about as easy to say as to do, Andy wisely decided he better get her attention. But being reduced from 6’1 to what he could only estimate as three inches in height, compared to his girlfriend at now a towering 5’7, that wasn’t going to be an easy task. And Andy was no MacGyver when it came to figuring out a solution to his problems.

“Hey, Cordelia!” he cupped his hands over his mouth and yelled. “Cordelia! Cooooooooooordeliaaaaaaaaaaaa!” But his efforts were in vain. Cordelia was humming softly as she wiped off the counter with a paper towel, but her hums easily drowned out his squeaky voice and he doubted she could hear him anyway. She had to be about three football fields away from him.

Andy began running across the kitchen floor, watching the tiles change from black to white to black again under him. His eyes stared glue to Cordelia, watching her every sudden move which he knew could be vital to his survival. Luckily, he had left a bigger mess than usual for her to clean up, so he didn’t have to worry about her finishing any time soon and walking towards him—or worse, on him. He bought her those Adidas shoes, after all; not that Andy would understand anything about irony, but somehow dying under them didn’t seem too pleasing of a way to end his life.

“Cori, come on, baby, you have to hear me!” he yelled between gasps of breath as he reached her shoes and pressed his hands against their firm, white surface. She didn’t seem to acknowledge him. Grunting, he looked around for something to use and his eyes landed on her shoelaces. He seized one of the dangling ends between his hands, checked to make sure it the slack was tight enough, placed his tiny feet onto Cordelia’s sneakers and began his ascent upwards. It wasn’t a long climb, but he wanted to make sure to get to the very top of her sneaker, where it was tied in a cute little single knot with bunny ears, so that he didn’t fall off either side.

Gripping the tongue of her sneaker for balance, Andy stared upwards, his head spinning. Past her jeans, the holes torn at her knees, the oversized gray sweatshirt with its giant pocket in the center, past her luscious breasts that he wanted now more than ever, to her still face, expressionless as she cleaned up his mess. He licked the side of his lips. Her blonde hair streamed over her face and shoulders like a golden waterfall that she kept brushed back when it dangled over one of her eyes.

“This would be so awesome if I wasn’t wetting my pants,” Andy whispered breathlessly. “Okay, baby, how am I going to get you to see me without squashing me like a bug?” Looking down at the shoelace still in his grip, he got an idea. He took a better stance with it, holding the plastic end straight out in front of him, and pushed it into Cordelia’s ankle. Her socks were short enough that he could reach her skin, but the impact wasn’t strong enough. Pulling the shoelace began, he carefully climbed the tongue of her sneaker, stood atop, and pricked her skin as hard as he could with the plastic end.

She responded simply by bringing her other foot up to scratch at the irritation—a simple reflex that she didn’t even notice, but it was enough to squash Andy between her leg and the toe of her sneaker. She began to rub the sneaker against the irritation, but Andy luckily managed to slide down her leg first and wind up under the tongue of her shoe. He stared up, watching her foot lightly rub away at the scratch and then return to its spot on the floor.

“Okay, baby, that wasn’t nice,” he said, pulling himself back onto the tongue of her sneaker. He looked down at his jersey, now soiled by the dirt on the end of Cordelia’s shoe, and he scowled. “Now I’m going to have to wash this and practice starts in less than an hour! And…dur, Andy, you’re not going to make it to practice if Cordelia squashes you. Come on, think! Year of the Wolves.”

He looked back down at her shoelaces. Sliding down the tongue of her shoe, he dug his hands into the shoelace knot and undid it. He gripped both of the laces, tightly binding them together, and shimmied down the other side of her sneaker, towards her other foot. Then he proceeded to do the same thing with the other shoe—repel up the side, undo the knot, and shimmy down the side with both laces underarms.

“Sorry about this, babe,” he said as he began tying the shoelaces, which were as thick as ropes to him, together. He looked up, to make sure she didn’t see him—and then almost wanted to slap himself for thinking that. Of course he wanted her to see him. This wasn’t the first time he had tied her shoelaces together, but it was the first time he wanted her to catch him in the act. And yet, how was he going to get her to see him if she didn’t look down? He couldn’t let her think he was a bug—a bug that could tell knots, but a bug nonetheless.

Cordelia shifted her foot slightly to reach something a bit further down the counter and the knot came undone. Andy quickly grabbed both ends, each opposite shoelaces in opposite hands, and got an idea. He tied them together once again, working quickly because he knew she was almost done, and made sure to secure the knot around his own body as well. It was like a restraint—the shoelaces working as seatbelts—but he hoped it would work. He only gave her feet about seven inches of slack, and sure enough, the moment she spun around and took her first step forward, she cried out. The knot tightened. Andy lost his lunch. Lurching forward, Cordelia fell, her shoelaces unknowingly tied together, and barely got her forearms up in time to brace her fall. She hit the kitchen tiles hard.

Andy winced. The knot was too tight, strangling the life out of him, and he strained to pull apart the knot with his hands. But it was no use. He could only stare over Cordelia’s back as she saw her head crane over her shoulder, staring in wonder at her shoelaces.

“How the hell…?” she muttered to herself, lifting her legs to see that her shoes had somehow tied themselves together.

“Andy…” she sighed, letting her legs drop and then swinging them out in front of her as she sat upright to undo the knot. Her fingers brushed it for a moment and then stopped, her mouth open, and her eyes unable to shut, as she caught sight of what was tied between the laces.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Andy said, gazing up at her. But whether she heard him or not, it didn’t matter; she just broke into a scream.

Five minutes later…

“You done screaming yet?” Andy sighed, uncomfortably nestled within the tightening bonds of her shoelaces. “I could really use some help here.”

Cordelia looked down at him with the slight recoil of her cry still caught in the back of her throat as she leaned forward. “How… That’s really not a funny trick to play on me, you know.”

“Trick!? You think this is a ‘trick’? I don’t know what your idea of a trick is, but mine certainly doesn’t involve shrinking myself down to two inches and almost getting squashed by you!”

“You’re not two inches.”

“Well, excuse me for not having time to find a freakin’ tape measure! I’ve been a little busy trying to stay alive.”

“No,” she said, flicking his head with her index finger, “I know you have some sort of voice recorder in there. Your little toy doesn’t fool for me for a second. Where are you really at?”

“I’m right here!” he shouted, thrashing his arms.

Cordelia frowned. “This isn’t funny, Andy. Where are you, really?”

“Cordelia, I’m not a toy! This is really me. Somehow I ended up—”

“Shut up!” she cried, untying the shoelaces and watching the ‘toy’ Andy fall on his back onto the kitchen tile. She rose, lifting the toe end of her shoe, and pivoted it over his body. “You have three seconds to tell me where you are or I’m breaking your little toy. I don’t care how much it costs you.”

“For the last time, Cordelia, this is really me! Take a look!”

“Not falling for it. One.”

Her foot lowered slightly and Andy stared up at the black, indented wall above him. It wasn’t exactly a pretty sight, speckled in dirt and dry mud and a chewed wad of whitish-pink gum jammed into the cavity in her treads. Andy tried to position himself so that, if she did put her foot down, he’d only end up caught in the hollow crater of her shoes, but he was a big guy. He would never fit. Running away wasn’t an option, as her foot was too low for him to do anything more than crawl away on his hands and knees and he couldn’t even do that; her sneakers were already pressed against his legs. He looked up to see his world turning black.

“Two,” he heard Cordelia’s voice bellow from above.

“Well, damn,” Andy thought, “I ain’t going out like this. Not like a bug.” Then he inhaled, Cordelia’s hard sneaker compressing his chest into the kitchen tiles, and mustered out in the loudest shout he could, “Okay, okay! Don’t break my toy.”

“Where are you?” she demanded, her foot still squashing the life out of Andy.

“In…the bathroom.”

Her foot lifted away, and Andy almost got out a sigh of relief before her other foot came down on him—not hard and not straight down, but across, like a kick, sending him spiraling across the floor and into the wall. Obviously Cordelia didn’t want to break the ‘toy’, but she didn’t mind giving it a swift boot for the embarrassment Andy had caused her. Little did she know, the embarrassment was on him.

He watched her disappear down the hallway, probably going to check in the bathroom, and realized he should’ve told her he was in some place a little further away. The bathroom was only two rooms down. It would only be a matter of seconds before she returned to the kitchen, very upset that the ‘toy’ had lied. And he knew who—or rather, to her, what—was going to receive the blunt of her anger. He’d have to somehow prove to her that he was real, not the toy she thought he was, lest he end up like that poor wad of gum under her sneaker.

“This would probably be a good time to come up with another brilliant idea,” Andy muttered to himself, racking that football-sized brain of his. He looked down at his black and white colored jersey, complete with his person number ‘00’ on the front and back. That’s what he felt like now. A double zero. He could show Cordelia the jersey, but there’s no way she’d believe it was really his; after all, how hard could it be to make a replica jersey for a doll? No, he’d have to find something that on his person that couldn’t be duplicated, that had to be his.

That’s when he saw his class ring—or, rather, Cordelia’s class ring. Both he and Cordelia had bought a class ring over the summer, but they decided to exchange them during class today as a sort of engagement present. Now, this could be his only chance for a happy ending.

Before he had time to take off the ring, Cordelia appeared back in the kitchen, angrily looking left and right for any trace of Andy. All she saw was the toy doll on the floor. She walked over to him slowly, scowling at the image that reminded her so much of her boyfriend.

“I’m tired of your tricks, Andy,” she said dryly. “I have half a mind to give you your ring back.”

“Wait,” Andy said, rising. Cordelia jumped back a little, astonished that the toy was really so lifelike. How did Andy ever afford something like this? “Before you do, I want you to look at this.” He slipped the ring off his ringer and held it up.

A little nervously, and ever so curious, Cordelia lowered herself down on one knee, her bare skin from the hole in her jeans touching the icy kitchen floor, and pinched the tiny object between her fingertips.

“What is this?” she asked, spinning the ring delicately around in her fingertips. It was only the size of a small button to her, and yet it looked so utterly familiar.

“It’s your class ring. I...don’t think it’ll fit you anymore.”

Cordelia’s eyes shot wide open when she realized, at the same time that he said it, that thing was really her ring. She turned it over and found herself staring at the miniscule jade green stone, complete with fake diamond trim and the gold band with small—now unreadable to her—scrawling across the side. Slowly her eyes drifted over to Andy.

“You…” was all that escaped her lips.

“…Are really, really small,” he finished. He looked up at her. She was breathless. “You’re going to scream again, aren’t you?”

“…I think so.”

They just gawked at each other for a minute or two, both amazed at the other’s sheer size, until Andy finally shifted uncomfortably as he realized he wasn’t going to win this stare-down.

“You win,” he sighed.

Cordelia’s mouth was gaping open, but it still took awhile for her to respond. When she finally did, it came out meekly. “I don’t even know where to begin… How’d you get so small? Is it permanent? How are you going to survive? How are—”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Andy made a puppet with his hand to mock her. “Cordelia, let’s focus on the present already. Practice begins in thirty minutes!”

“Practice!?” she exclaimed, rising up from her kneeling position so fast that the wind knocked Andy over. “Did your brain shrink too? In case you haven’t noticed, you’re about the size of a bug. And the last time I checked, bugs don’t play football.”

“But this is the year of the…”

“Wolves, I know. Look, Andy, the wolves are going to have to pee on their territory without you. Until we restore you back to normal size, we’re not leaving this house. …Well, not until cheerleading practice at seven.”

“Great. You get to go to practice and I don’t. But when the Wolves lose their first game because of you, you’re going to have a lot of angry jocks nipping at your heels, little girl!”

Cordelia only snickered. “I don’t think ‘little girl’ is a good baby name for me anymore. Maybe I’ll start calling you ‘little boy’. How does that sound?”

“Would you just get me back to my normal size?” Andy sighed.

“Sure, let me run up to the bathroom and get my magical growing cream. It always works on shrunken people.”

“Okay.”

“That was sarcasm, Andy.”

“Can you at least get me off the floor? I don’t want to get stepped on.”

“Your wish is my command,” Cordelia shrugged, falling back onto her knees. She laid her left hand, palm side up, on the floor. “All aboard, shrimp.”

Somewhat nervous, Andy hoisted himself up onto the palm and found himself sliding towards the middle as Cordelia slowly curled her fingers to form a sort of cup with her hand. Andy plopped down, embarrassed by his new size, as Cordelia lifted him off the floor, her hand like an elevator, and gently laid it down on the counter.

“You’re only about the size of my pinky,” Cordelia laughed, her free hand tucked under her chin and her elbow against the countertop. “You probably won’t be wanting your class ring back now.”

Andy hopped off her hand onto the cold blue marble of the counter. “Forget the ring. I think it was that power shake that made me shrink.”

“Mmhm… I told you those shakes were useless. Look at the size of your muscles now.” She pinched his arms, which only caused him to flail them wildly and stumble backwards into the napkin holder. Cordelia laughed.

“I’m glad one of us is getting a kick out of this,” Andy mumbled, rubbing his upper arm. “Now hang on. I’m trying to remember what I put in the drink…”

“Tabasco sauce.”

“And milk… And a bunch of fruit…”

While Andy pondered his many thoughts, Cordelia walked over to the refrigerator, tore off a sticky note from one of the magnets, and grabbed the pen out of its holder. She came back. Laying the paper down next to Andy, she began scribbling down the ingredients. “Tabasco sauce… Milk… I know you had apples and bananas in there. What about strawberries?”

“Yeah.”

“Oranges. I saw the peels.”

“And grapes. Oh, and a kiwi.”

“You ate my kiwi!? I hate you, Andy.”

“And blueberries!”

“And blueberries,” Cordelia muttered, scribbling it down. “And let’s not forget the Crystal Light.”

“Yeah, that stuff was gross.”

“Oh, gee, I’m sooo sorry you didn’t like my food. Maybe next time you’ll go to your own house and make your own ‘power shake’ in your own blender.”

“Are you mad at me, babe?”

“You ate my kiwi… Jerk.” She dropped the pen, purposely aiming for Andy, but he dodged it just in time. She paid no mind as she began reading off her list. “Tabasco sauce, milk, apples, bananas, strawberries, oranges, grapes, …kiwi, blueberries, and Crystal Light. That makes one really disgusting drink, Andy.”

“And apparently a shrinking potion as well!”

“I wonder if it was one particular ingredient or a combination of all them combined…”

“Maybe one of the fruits came from a crop field visited by aliens and they made all the food radioactive!”

“And Andy scores another for the Team of Stupid Answers to Life’s Mysteries.”

“You have any better ideas?”

“They couldn’t be worse.”

“What don’t you try eating each of the ingredients?” Andy suggested.

“Yeah!” Cordelia exclaimed with sarcasm pouring out her lips. “Then I can shrink too and we can spend the rest of our lives feasting off crumbs and dodging feet! I couldn’t think of a better way to live my life.”

“I’m going to have to do it…”

“Yeah, but I really don’t care about you.”

“Thanks, Cori.”

Cordelia picked up the pen and began twirling it around her fingers, first between her thumb and index finger, then between her index finger and middle finger, and then continuing to the rest of her fingers and back again. She hummed. “No… We’ll get one of your goofy friends over here to try each of the foods. Who cares if he shrinks?”

“Nice try, but all my friends are at the football field waiting for me. And if I don’t show up, they won’t be my friends for long.”

“It’s okay, I’ll be your only friend.”

“You’re kind of a bitchy friend.”

“And you’re kind of a squishy friend. I wonder which of us would win in a fight.”

“Okay, okay,” Andy held up his hands. “Look, all the guys are at practice. Just get one of your ditzy friends to come over. What about Elizabeth? She probably won’t notice a two-inch man running around. Hell, she wouldn’t notice a semi if it hit her…”

“Liz could kick your ass. Oh, I know! I’m going to give Shannon a call.”

“My ex!? Are you insane?”

“I bet she’d just looove to see you now! Haha.” She reached for the phone hanging on the wall. “Come on, Andy. Beg me to stop.”

“You’re not that cruel.”

“You know me too well.” Her arm fell limp at her side and she clicked the pen open with her other hand as she scanned down the ingredient list. “Well… I had at least a bite of all those fruits before you came over. The milk, too. And I didn’t shrink.”

“You’ve just always been short,” Andy grinned.

Cordelia took the time to poke his belly with the tip of the pen before returning to the list. “Unless you happened to get the bad apple of the bunch. Or banana… Or orange… And that Tabasco sauce has been in there forever. Maybe it developed some…uh, shrinking properties over time.”

“That makes sense. Not.”

“Makes about as much sense as me not squishing a bug who talks back.”

“What about the Crystal Light? That stuff was sick.”

“But I’ve had it plenty of times… And it’s not sick!”

“But maybe it had some sort of chemical erection with the other stuff…”

“That’s chemical ‘reaction’, dumb ass.”

“How would I know? I hate chemistry.”

“We’ve only had it for one day so far… And I don’t think you’ll be coming to class tomorrow.”

“Good. I could get used to life like this. No more teachers, no more books…”

“Then again,” Cordelia pondered aloud, pressing the end of the pen to her chin, “maybe we could get one of the science geeks in the class to examine your so-called ‘power drink’. They could figure out what went wrong.”

“You want to put my life in the hands of a pimple-faced, ass-kissing, glasses-wearing, greasy-haired, ‘I-won’t-date-a-girl-until-I’m-forty-seven’ pipsqueak?”

“Do you want to stay small forever?”

“No…”

“Pipsqueak it is then!”

“Great,” Andy mumbled. He turned towards the clock and realized practice had started four minutes ago. “My life as a normal boy just trying to make his way in the world is officially over.”

“Oh, please,” Cordelia rolled her eyes.

Andy watched the clock tick away as Cordelia carried him over to the sink and rolled up her sleeves. “Six minutes into practice.”

“Are you going to keep doing that for the next three hours?”

“I have to occupy myself somehow.”

“Want to help me wash dishes?” Cordelia teased, turning on the water. Grabbing a pink bottle of soap and a sponge, she began scrubbing away.

“That’s one thing I’m not going to miss… Chores.”

Cordelia didn’t respond, but she smirked out the corner of her lip as she dried the inside of a glass.

“Seven minutes.”

She began humming to herself as she started on the plates.

“Eight miiinutes!”

“Andy, shut up!”

“Nine…”

“That’s it,” Cordelia muttered, reaching over for the glass she had finished drying earlier. Turning it upside down, she placed it over top of Andy. His arms were thrashing and his mouth was flapping, but only silenced filled the air. She sighed happily.

Andy threw his shoulder into the glass, trying to knock it over, but the wide base made it too sturdy. Eventually, he just slumped down and laid his body against the glass wall, watching Cordelia scrub the dishes and pay him no mind whatsoever. She was a blur of colors through the glass and yet she still looked beautiful to him, even at this size. But eventually, he found himself staring at the clock over her shoulder, watching those minutes tick away. He could hear his friends now, out on the field, cursing at him for not showing up. Part of him wished Cordelia had stepped on him and ended his misery. Even if she could eventually restore him to normal size, his friends would kill him for letting the whole team down. How could he explain a wild story like this? He didn’t even believe it. And he was living it.

A few minutes later, the glass lifted and Andy found himself tumbling over without the support against his back.

Cordelia laughed from above. “I think I like you this size.”

“Glad one of us does, babe…” Andy straightened himself. “Look, Cori, I’m going to practice. My team is counting on me. You remember that day I had a temperature of 102? Did I give up on my team? No! I went to practice!”

“And threw up on the coach.”

“And what about when I sprained my ankle? Did I give up then?”

“No, you got tackled and broke your other ankle.”

“Do you see what I’m saying, babe?”

“Yes,” Cordelia dried her hands on a towel and rolled her sleeves back down. “You’re an idiot. Every time something is wrong, you go and make it worse. Now how exactly are you going to play football at your current height?”

“Well…”

“There has to be some sort of height limit.”

“This isn’t basketball, Cori.”

“And this isn’t a joke, Andy! You’re a freakin’ midget. You couldn’t play table tennis without getting squashed by the ball.”

“I could still take you.”

“You’re not going to practice. End of story. So sorry.”

Andy clenched his fists. How he wanted to hit her. And yet…that didn’t seem like a very good idea. She didn’t look too happy either. Maybe it was the red in her face, or the grit in her teeth, or maybe the way she grabbed a dish from the sink and hurled it across the room and shattered it against the wall in a million pieces. Somehow, though, he figured he best come up with another brilliant, jock-worthy solution to his predicament.

“She’s obviously looking out for my best interests,” he pondered aloud, “yet she doesn’t see the danger in me missing practice. I must show her that I’m safer showing up for practice than not showing up at all! Perhaps I can outsmart her using that reverse psychology thing I learned about.”

“Stop talking to yourself, Hamlet.”

“Cordelia! What if you go to practice in my place?”

“Sure, Andy. I’ll just chug a few of your power drinks to beef myself up and I’ll end up—oh, just like you. A shrimp.”

“No, no! I have a spare jersey and tons of padding in my locker at school. All you’d have to do is put on my uniform, stuff yourself full of padding, disguise your voice, cut off your hair, don’t take off your helmet, throw a few hundred passes, hide those big ass breasts, and learn how to play football.”

“Big ass breasts...?”

“And then I guess you could go to cheerleading practice.”

“Since that’s exactly what I’d want to do after running around with twenty sweaty guys for two and a half hours.”

“Yeah, see? No problem. Not for Super Cordelia!”

“Stop sucking up. You…suck at it.”

“Sorry.”

“I know you are.”

“Are you going to do it?” Andy asked, showing his puppy dog eyes.

“As if I really have a choice…”

“Just look at it like this, Cori. The longer you can pretend to be me, the longer we can hold off the fact that I’m a two-inch freak.”

“Well, the longer we can hold off the fact you’re two inches, at least.”

“Yeah! Then after practice, we can tell my parents that I’m staying over at your place for the night.”

“Which they’ll simply love.”

“And that’ll buy us at least a day or two!”

“Until you don’t show up for school.”

“I’ll work on that. You go have fun at practice.”

“Yeah, uh…” Cordelia scooped Andy into her palm. “You’re coming too. You have to teach me how to play football on the way.”

As Andy bounced around inside Cordelia’s pink gym bag, surrounded by her multi-colored cheerleading uniform and white skirt and dozens of girl-related articles that he swore never to get this close to, he questioned his very reason of living. Every time Cordelia would take a step, which was often considering the school was a mile away, he would bounce against her thigh and slide towards one end of the bag. Then she would step with her other foot, the bag would swing the other direction, and he’d find himself being hurled downwards again with all her various articles.

“This is the best way to carry you,” Cordelia said from outside the bag. Little did Andy know, though, that she was purposely swinging the bag extra high. He didn’t notice until she decided to twirl the bag around in a complete 360 and then she heard him scream.

“Cordelia!”

“Oops, sorry!”

Andy crawled out from under her uniform and was about to stand up when she started swinging the bag, purposely high, again. Then he was thrown back down and sent into a scrambling race for the low end of the bag. He was met face-first with her skirt, which covered him like a giant parachute.

“So how do I play this stupid game?” Cordelia asked.

“You should know. You’ve been cheering us for the past three years.” He crawled out from under her skirt.

“Like I watch for the game.”

“Just like we watch the cheerleaders for the game, huh?”

Cordelia ignored him. “We’re almost there. How am I supposed to sneak into the boy’s locker room without being seen?”

“I’m sure I could do it.”

“Yeah, that really helps me…”

Cordelia looked around. She was just on the other side of the school, staring out at the football field full of guys in their uniforms, running around and screaming and sweating and making gross noises and doing just about every other ignorant and rude things guys do on a daily basis. “I’m really sure I can fit in with these shmucks, Andy. Like a lamb in a pigpen.”

“Hey, you get a little dirty and nobody will know the difference.”

“You owe me so much for this,” she mumbled as she walked towards the locker rooms, hiding her face behind the shadow of her hand. The last thing she needed was somebody on the team recognizing her and demanding to know where Andy was. She could already hear what they were saying about him. She hoped Andy couldn’t hear them, though.

“I’ll show them who is a lazy and useless bastard!” Andy yelled from the bag.

Cordelia sighed and slipped around the back of the girl’s locker room, glancing around the corner at the football field. The boy’s locker room was only a couple yards away, but there were most certainly eyes on it, expecting Andy to either walk in or out of the front doors at any time.

“I’m going to make a sprint for it,” Cordelia whispered into her bag, setting it down on the grass. Just then, she heard the shrill cry of the coach’s whistle and looked around the corner again as two guys on the team were pounding away at each other in a fist brawl. The coach was trying to pry them apart and the other guys were all rooting them on and placing bets on who would be the first to fall.

“Thank the stars for your stupid gender,” Cordelia said, picking up her bag by its strap and strolling through the boy’s locker room doors without so much as a glimpse her way.

 She grimaced when she saw was inside. Between the smell, the graffiti on the wall, and the lack of an attempt of preserve at least a little sanitary hygiene, it was like stepping into the restroom of a gas station on the bad side of town. She stepped around something gross by the doorway, not wanting to even imagine what it was, and found herself standing in a large room full of lockers wall-to-wall. Fluorescent lights flickered above her and she wandered, suddenly feeling really small, over to a nearby bench and plopped her bag down.

“I should’ve expected this, I guess,” she said as she unzipped the bag. “You still alive in there, Andy?”

“If your deodorant hasn’t crushed my lungs.”

She brushed the stick of deodorant away and found Andy underneath, discernibly out of breath. “Sorry about that.”

“You’d do it again.”

“Yeah, I would.” She pulled him out of the bag and gently placed him on the bench. “Now where’s your bag?”

“In my locker.”

“No, really? And let me guess. The key is the under the mat.”

“Actually, yeah…” Andy pointed to an oversized locker, separate from the others, sprayed in gold paint and covered in football jerseys and cut-out pictures of magazine girls. It really did have a mat, too, like a red carpet rolling out from the bottom lip of the locker. Cordelia stared at it for a moment, mouth agate, and then turned back to Andy.

“A quarterback’s quarters,” he shrugged.

“I hate you beyond all reason and doubt.”

“Just hurry it up before we both get caught and have to explain why we’re here. I don’t know how I could weasel my way out of this one.”

Cordelia bent down on one knee, threw back the carpet, and peeled a golden key off the dirty floor. She clicked it into the lock, looked over her shoulder at Andy again, and opened the door.

Andy closed his eyes. He knew what was coming again.

Cordelia screamed. “You have a shrine of me built into the back of your locker!? And where the hell did you get these pictures!? What the f…!? ANDDDDDY!”

“Most girls would find it flattering,” Andy grumbled as Cordelia continued to flip out over the cut-outs of her in strange positions, the awful poems (that he wrote himself, and that’s not why they were awful), and…oh, he sure hoped she didn’t see the caricatures.

Suddenly, Andy’s gym bag hit the floor, the locker door slammed shut, and Cordelia turned around very, very slowly with a stoic look washed over her face. “…These eyes have seen things the devil would forbid. Let us never speak of this moment again.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Andy asked.

Cordelia had just finished her third layer of padding and threw Andy’s spare jersey over her head, trying to fit her arms through the holes. The ends of the sleeves draped past her hands, though she was used to it. It was something of a custom for a cheerleader to wear her boyfriend’s jersey if he played on the football team, but usually it was during in-school hours, not practice. “No, I’m sure I don’t want to do this, Andy. I’m only doing it because I hate you and I don’t want the rest of your friends sharing in the hate that is rightfully mine.”

“Your words cause flowers to melt.”

“Flowers wilt, not melt. Idiot.”

“Is that jersey too big for you?” Andy teased.

“You want to try fitting in it?” Cordelia muttered, digging through Andy’s bag and throwing various articles of clothing on the muddy floor. “Where are your spare shoes?”

“They’re called cleats. And they’re on my feet.”

“And no spare?”

“Babe, these Nikes are all I need to perform wonder on the field.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t think I take size negative seven and a half. I’ll wear my cheerleading sneakers.” She unzipped the side pocket of her own gym bag. Pulling out a clean pair of sneakers, she plopped down on the bench next to Andy and slid her feet into them.

Andy looked down at his muddy black cleats and then at Cordelia’s spotless white shoes. “Well, maybe the guys won’t notice.”

“I’ll just tell the team I washed them if they ask.”

“Cori, guys don’t wash their sneakers during the football season. It’s tradition.”

“Just like it’s tradition to jump around in the mud before school in your cleats just to get them dirty?”

“Yeah! It starts off the year on the right—”

“Don’t say it.”

“…Foot.”

Cordelia finished tying her sneakers and stood up. “You had to say it, didn’t you?”

“Would you expect anything else out of me?”

“No.” She didn’t even have to think about that.

After strapping on an extra pair of gloves, Cordelia walked over to Andy’s golden locker and lifted his helmet off its majestic pedestal. “What? No holy light? No angelic choir singing?”

“You’re supposed to kiss it.”

Cordelia stared at him. “Kiss the helmet?”

“Kiss the helmet.”

“I’m not kissing the helmet.”

“You have to kiss the helmet.”

Cordelia sighed and moved the helmet closer to her lips, briefly pecking it. “…Does everybody kiss their helmet before practice?”

“No, the tradition is for them all kiss the quarterback’s helmet.”

Cordelia’s lips curled. “Andy… I’m going to pretend I didn’t just kiss a helmet that’s been touched by the lips of every disgusting guy on the football team. And I’m going to pretend it well. Do you see me pretending?”

“You look mad.”

“I’m pretending!”

“Can you go pretend out on the football field?”

“Sure,” Cordelia said, grabbing a roll of duct tape out of Andy’s bag. She peeled off a small, one-inch strip, picked up Andy in her other hand, and then taped him to the ear piece of the helmet before she put it on. Luckily, Andy’s head was quite a deal bigger (before he shrank) than Cordelia, so Andy didn’t feel too smushed between the helmet and Cordelia’s ear, which now loomed before him like a dark tunnel. Still, after she tightened the strap, Andy felt himself pressed right up against the skin of her ear.

“What are you doing!?” he screamed into the waxy tunnel.

“You’re going to pull your weight, however small the number may be. All you have to do is whisper into my ear what I’m supposed to do.”

“But I can hardly see anything! The helmet is too tight.”

Cordelia sighed and began stuffing Andy’s bag and her own gym bag in his giant gold locker. She ignored everything else that was in there. “I’m not getting my cranium bashed around and ending up like the other dimwitted numbnuts on the team.”

“Speaking of numbnuts, you forgot to put on... Well, no, I guess you won’t need it.”

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

Cordelia kicked the locker shut and started for the locker room door. “This is one of those days I know I’m going to regret.”

“Yeah, you and me both, girl.”

“Hey, it’s Andy!” Shouts rose from the football players as Cordelia stumbled out of the locker room, decked out in Andy’s football gear, and hobbled onto the field.

“Told you my boy wouldn’t let us down,” Brad said, grabbing the helmet of the guy next to him and yanking his head down. “Maybe now you’ll take back those things you said.”

“Whatever,” the guy muttered, shoving Brad.

“Cool it, Keith,” the bearded coach grunted. “You boys start one more fight and you’ll be on water and towel duty for the rest of the season.” Then he looked over to ‘Andy’, squinting in the distant sun, and waved him over.

“Since when did his chest get so big?” the coach whispered to the team. They all just shrugged and mumbled something.

“My boy’s been working out!” Brad said proudly.

“Cori,” Andy whispered in her ear, “hide your hair!”

“Oops,” she said under her breath, stopping on the field and lowering her head as she tried to push her hair into the helmet. The entire football team, including the coach and the few people watching from the bleaches, just stared at her as she scratched at her helmet and did a little dance in place.

The coach took off his hat, revealing his gray hair. “What the hell? Does he have fleas?”

“I think your boy has some screw loose,” Keith said, elbowing Brad.

Cordelia fell to the ground and began kicking her feet in the mud as she pushed the last strand of strawberry-blonde hair into the helmet. Then she pulled herself up and dusted off her now dirty uniform.

“Real men don’t brush off their uniform when it gets dirty,” Andy said into her ear, brushing the strands of hair from Cordelia that were swathing over him like overgrown weeds now. Her hair had filled all the empty spaces in the helmet and, unfortunately for him, the hair fibers seemed to like sticking to the tape that glued him to the helmet, making him itch in all sorts of unpleasant places.

“Excuse me if I want to be tidy,” she hissed back.

“What the hell is he doing now!?” the coach bellowed.

“I think he got a little dirt on his dress,” Keith joked. “Hey, Andy! Did you remember to wear your panties too?”

Andy smacked his forehead. “My reputation is ruined.”

“Not as much as it’s about to be,” Cordelia grinned, frolicking over to the coach and teammates while tossing imaginary flowers out behind her.

Blood rushing to his already-red face, the coach slapped his hat onto his head and jerked the brim down over the bulging veins in his forehead. “ANDY! This isn’t ballet! Get out of your tutus and get your ass over here before I kick you off this team!”

“Can I be quarterback?” Keith asked.

“If you make him quarterback, I’m leaving the team,” Brad said. Some of the others grumbled an agreement.

“I’m not making him quarterback!” the coach roared.

“Oh, right,” Keith muttered. “We have fairy boy as a quarterback.”

Cordelia had, by this time, pranced her way over to the coach and the rest of the team. They just stared at her and she began to sweat, hoping they wouldn’t recognize her as a girl. Andy got the worst of it, though, as the sweat from Cordelia seemed to stick to the helmet and to him. He gagged.

“I knew you’d make it, man,” Brad grinned at Cordelia, raising his hand.

“What’s he trying to do?” Cordelia whispered to Andy. “Pretending he’s an Indian?” She raised her hand and said, in a deep, guttural voice. “How.”

Brad just stared at her, his arm dangling in the air. He blinked. Somebody on the team coughed.

“He wants a high-five,” Andy whispered.

“Oh.” Cordelia stepped closer to Brad, so their chests were touching, but she still couldn’t reach the top of his hand. She began hopping in place, much to the awkward stares she received from everybody around her.

“You okay, man?” Brad said, raising an eyebrow under his helmet. “And why is your skin so…white and smooth? Did you shave?”

“He asked me to speak,” Cordelia hissed into her helmet.

“Then speak!” Andy yelled back.

Cordelia cleared her throat and glanced nervously around. “Okay, I can do this… Think manly. Think stupid. Think ignorant and rude.” Then she stepped back and pounded her chest, letting out a deep lion roar. “Me no shave! Me a man! We play football now!”

“Oh, that was great,” Andy sighed. “I’m moving to Canada.”

But the rest of the team seemed to like it. They cheered, which got rid of some of the discomfort Cordelia was feeling, but Brad and Keith were still staring at her.

“Your voice is different,” Brad murmured.

“New tradition!” Cordelia howled in another guttural voice. “Talk like apes, fight like apes, smash other team like apes!”

“But we’re the Wolves…” Keith started to say, but Cordelia just snarled at him and snapped her teeth. She never liked Keith anyway. He was the epitome of everything she hated, all rolled into one horrible person. How she wished he was the one shrunk and instead of Andy… She flashed her teeth again, at the idea of that, and Keith backed away.

“He’s crazy,” he said.

“Damn crazy!” Brad laughed, smacking Cordelia on the back. She lurched forward and hit the ground. The team laughed, thinking ‘Andy’ was just joking around, like the jester they knew he was, even if the prancing-through-a-flowery-meadow act was a little much for them.

Keith just glared at the body on the ground and began walking away. “Yes, laugh, you simpleminded fools. In time, you’ll all see. I will be quarterback and you’ll all bow before me, your new king. I will carry this team. And during halftime, it will be my name the cheerleaders are spelling in their ecstatic cries. And Cordelia—sweet, sexy Cordelia—the one I could never get, will be forever mine. I will set my behind upon Andy’s throne yet! By the stars, I swear on it.”

The coach blew his whistle into Keith’s eardrum. “I will not have sinister soliloquies interfering with practice time! Give me six laps!”

The team laughed.

“That goes for all of you!”

They weren’t laughing anymore.

“Did you hear what Keith was saying?” Cordelia whispered to Andy, who she luckily hadn’t crushed when she fell.

“He always talks to himself like that.”

“Some people are so strange.”

“Who are you talking to, man?” Brad asked, reaching out a hand to help ‘Andy’ up.

“One more year,” the coach said under his breath as he cupped his hands over his face. “Just one more year before my pension and I never have to see another stupid teenage kid for the rest of my life.” He slowly brought his hands down, stretching the skin of his face. “I need a drink.”

The waterboy quickly appeared at his side with a tray in his hands. “Fresh, bottled, flavored, or sparkling?”

“Why do I have the feeling you’ve been trying to humiliate me ever since you left the locker room?” Andy sighed.

Cordelia smiled innocently. “What are you talking about?”

“Rolling around on the ground, prancing around on an imaginary pony, impersonating an Indian, talking like a drunken barbarian—it’s like you turned into an idiot!”

“Must be the jersey.”

“That’s a low blow, Cori.”

“If you’re wondering how low I can go, it’s probably not as low as you, short stuff.”

Andy sighed again, looking ahead into the dark cavern of Cordelia’s ear. There wasn’t a lot of wax—at least, not more than the average person—in there, but at his size every clump of wax looked like the goop clinging to the side of a murky cave. His body still secured by the duct tape, he turned his head to the side and could just make out the soft flesh of Cordelia’s cheek and crevices of light through the visor of the helmet.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I get the feeling you’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“Humiliating me!”

“Oh, you’re so paranoid,” Cordelia said. But it was true. The running laps part wasn’t too bad; Cordelia was used to jogging for cheerleading practice, but when the football coach called for push-ups, she did the only thing she knew how to do. She dropped down on hands and knees, rather than hands and toes, and push-upped away.

“This year is our year, men,” the coach was saying, pacing back and forth in front of the players, who were too busy counting their push-ups and grunting to pay any attention to his Braveheart speeches. “We may have been the worst team in the division for twenty-three years straight, we may have had more injuries than the Battle of Little Bighorn, we may have been mocked and ridiculed by every sportswriter within a three hundred mile radius, but this… Men, this is our year!”

“Wolves!” they all chanted in unison, except Cordelia, who bellowed it soon afterwards.

“Men,” the coach continued, pounding a fist into his open hand, “we have the other teams right where they want them. They expect us to lose. They expect to strut out onto the field this year, every one of them, and score touchdowns as if they were taking cookies from an old lady. We won’t be the old lady this year! We won’t be baking them any more cookies!”

“Wolves!” they all chanted again. Cordelia was still a bit behind in her delivery.

“This year, we will take out that ‘u’ in chumps and put the ‘a’ back where it belongs!” the coach roared, his voice booming with excitement.  “For you see, men, we have something no other team has!”

“Disability checks?” a stocky senior nicknamed Dan ‘the Ram’ guessed.

“Our own hate-mail column?” his friend Butthead chimed in.

“Freeeeedom!” Brad cried out and then saw the coach glare at him. “Sorry, I was feeling the mood.” He quickly fell back into doing push-ups.

“No, this year we have something new!”

“Talent?” the Ram spoke up again.

“Unavailable school funds can’t buy that, but it can buy you the next best thing!” The coach waved his hand to something out of sight of the rest of the team. “Everybody, I’d like you to meet our new team mascot!”

The water boy, standing behind the coach, made a ghetto drum roll with his tray of drinks as a costumed skunk cartwheeled its way onto the field. It was a small costume, so obviously the person inside was small as well, but it also wasn’t very well-tailored. The skunk’s fur was bare in some spots, as if it had been run over by a semi twenty or thirty times, the eyes were goggley like something a preschooler would glue onto a piece of paper and call it a creature, and the tail was so long and fluffy that when the mascot spun around to face the team, it knocked the water boy over.

“Well, at least it’s an animal this year,” the Ram muttered.

Butthead laughed. “Better than the hot dog from last year!”

“That was a hot dog?”

So that was mustard…” Brad stopped doing push-ups for a moment. “Andy, you owe me ten bucks.”

“What’s going on out there?” Andy whispered into Cordelia’s ear. “I hear my name. Are you humiliating me again?”

“They’re just showing off the new mascot,” Cordelia murmured, struggling through her fifth push-up.

“Please say it’s not a hot dog again.”

“It’s not a hot dog. Now be quiet before the coach realizes we shouldn’t be doing push-ups with our helmets on.”

“He hasn’t noticed that in the past four years…”

“Are you men quite through?” the coach said impatiently.

“Quite,” they all said, except the Ram, who always felt the need to get out the last word.

“I wonder what dork they got to be the mascot this year,” he joked.

The skunk reached off and pulled its head—or rather, her head—off and the face of the raven-haired Ruby appeared underneath.

Brad jumped up and kicked the Ram’s arms out from under him so he did a face-plant into the grass. “Don’t be calling my girl a dork, spud!” He then wrapped his arms around the skunk. “Hey, dollface. I didn’t know you were the skunk.”

“Ugh, neither did I…” the Ram sputtered, spitting out grass.

Ruby beamed. “I wanted to find a way we could be together all the time. I thought this would be perfect.”

“It is perfect,” Brad laughed, picking her up in his arms. “You’re my little pussycat!”

“Rawr,” she giggled, pawing his helmet.

The rest of the football team made puckering sounds with their lips and then laughed when the Ram and Butthead began reenacting a little boy and a little girl who had just fallen in love. Perhaps they did it a little too well.

“What’s going on?” Andy whispered to Cordelia again, leaning further into her ear. It was beginning to get hot in the helmet and Cordelia’s sweat wasn’t helping to cool him down.

“Brad and Ruby are making out,” she said in a hushed voice. “So are Dan and Butthead.”

“Suddenly, I’m glad I’m in here.”

“Want to clean out my ear while you’re there?” Cordelia teased.

“Uh, I think I’ll pass, Cori.”

“Okay, but if you start screaming for help and I can’t hear you because my ear is blocked up, then I guess you’re going to have to just keep on screaming.”

“I have to go,” Ruby said shyly in Brad’s arms. “There’s still a lot more adjustments to be made to the costume. Do you like it?”

“Did you make it yourself?”

“Yes!”

“Then I love it,” he grinned, taking off his helmet and kissing her before setting her back on the ground. She smiled and waved as she walked away.

“I’ve seen toilet-paper Halloween costumes better than that,” the Ram said. Butthead laughed.

The coach spun Brad around and pointed a finger in his glazed eye. “You! You stay away from that pet skunk dame. Women weaken legs!”

“Yeah, but I really like this girl,” he said distantly with a small shrug of his shoulders.

“Then let her train you!”

“Okay, okay,” Brad muttered. “No more fooling around.” He dropped back down in between the Ram and ‘Andy’ and went back to push-ups. “Women weaken legs, huh?”

Cordelia blinked. “That was oddly familiar.”

“ANDY!” the coach suddenly hollered, suddenly appearing in front of Cordelia. “What the hell? I know girly push-ups when I see them! You think you can pull one over me!?”

“You’re the idiot thinking I’m a guy,” Cordelia uttered under her breath, but coughed in order to get the guttural feeling back into her throat. “No, sir!”

 “Then why are your knees touching the ground!?”

“You taught us to find the path of least resistance and go with it,” Cordelia said in that same deep voice, and then added, for effect, “sir!”

The coach stopped and rubbed his gray beard. “I…did teach you guys that, didn’t I? …Alright, good jorb, Andy. I’m glad somebody around here pays attention to what I say.”

Ram snickered. “He said ‘jorb’.”

“Coach Z,” Butthead scoffed. “Hehehe.”

The coach blew his whistle. “Alright, men, that’s enough practice for today! Hit the showers!”

Cordelia stopped in the middle of doing a sit-up, staring through the sea of legs as the other football players rose and grumbled their way towards the locker room. “That’s it? We spent the whole practice session running around and doing warm-up exercises?”

“Yup,” Andy said, drenched in Cordelia’s sweat so much that the duct tape was beginning to give way.

“But we didn’t even throw around a ball once!”

“I know.”

“I smell like an ape.”

“I know.”

“And for what!? We didn’t do anything!”

“Welcome to the wonderful world of sports.”

Cordelia dropped her arms to her side. “Football sucks.”

“Cori.”

“Yeah?”

“Get me the hell out of here!” Andy screamed. “I’ve been stuck smelling your sweat for the past three hours and have had nothing to look at but the inside of your ear, which might I add is not a pleasant sight when it looks like it can suck you up at any second! Have you ever heard of a q-tip!?”

“And to think, I thought a man was supposed to love his woman for every part of her body,” Cordelia grumble, rising onto feeble legs. She slowly started limping towards the locker room while trying to ignore Andy’s endless list of complaints.

“…can’t believe… I don’t… this to me! …sometimes… …if you… Never! Not…again… like…smell your underwear!”

“What?”

“You weren’t even listening to me, were you!?”

“I’m kind of glad I wasn’t. You should be too.”

Andy sighed. “Look, I just want out. This day hasn’t exactly been easy on me.”

“Just wait for tonight,” Cordelia gritted her teeth. She walked past the locker room doors, figuring the football team might figure out she wasn’t Andy if she took off her clothes and showered with them, and instead headed for a public payphone on the side of the building. Quickly glancing around and seeing only the coach and the water boy on the field, with their backs to her, she gripped her hands around her helmet and tugged. It slid off slowly, despite the sweat working as a lubricant, and whichever strands of damp hair didn’t cling to the skin of her neck rained down her back. The cool air brushed against her warm face and she sighed deeply, holding the clammy helmet out in front of her like a bucket as she reached in, peeling away the loose tape and picking up Andy by the collar of his shirt. She set him on the metal base of the payphone and dropped the helmet unceremoniously to the trash-ridden ground.

“Sweet mercy!” Andy cried, falling to his knees and kissing the metal floor he stood upon. “Oh, fresh air, fresh earth!”

Cordelia ignored him and searched the ground for loose change. There were pennies galore, but it took kicking over a plastic cup and shooing a swarm of ants to find a quarter, which she quickly plucked up between her fingernails and deposited it into the phone slot.

“Who are you calling?” Andy asked, looking up at her.

“Your parents. I’m going to tell them you’re staying over at my house tonight.”

“They’re never going to say okay.”

“I know,” she said, holding the receiver on her shoulder as she dialed Andy’s home phone number.

“Why don’t you let me talk to them then?”

“They like me more.”

“Fine,” Andy grumbled, trying to put on his sorriest pout face. Cordelia wasn’t buying it. Feeling bored, he decided to explore by climbing the phone cord, as that seemed to be the most intelligent thing to do in his tiny mind.

She watched him as the phone rang once in her ear. “Be careful, idiot.”

“Please, I know what I’m doing,” Andy said, now about thirty feet (size proportionally) up the cord. Cordelia twirled and untwirled the cord around her finger, and though it was a small movement by her, that force caused the cord to rock back and forth. Throwing his weight in movement with her swings, Andy was able to get the cord swaying pretty high, and then leaped off at just the right height in order to land on the coin return lever. Its metal surface caused him to slide, almost off, before he managed to grab hold of the edge and dangle there with his feet wildly thrashing.

“Nevermind, I hope you fall,” Cordelia muttered, listening to the second ring on the phone. She pivoted on her heel, leaning against the payphone so that her shadow covered up Andy.

He managed to pry himself on top of the lever and was hoping Cordelia would congratulate him, but all he could see were the big double zeros of the back of her jersey and her wet hair dangling in front of him.

“Cooori!” he whined, pulling on one of her hair strands.

“Be quiet, I’m on the phone.” The phone clicked on the other end. “Hello, Mr. Andy’s dad?”

“He has a name, you know…”

“Yeah, but I don’t feel like giving you a last name in this story.”

“Fine!” Andy said, yanking on her hair strand. She responded simply by shaking her head, causing Andy to fly towards the jersey, stop, and then sail back and slam into the payphone like Tarzan into a tree. Then he found himself recoiling back towards the jersey, but this time he hurled his body to one side, causing the hair strand to swing around and just brush him past the payphone. He stuck out his legs, like wheels on a landing plane, and scuttled across the flat surface of the face of the phone until suddenly his foot got caught in a hole in the ground (or rather, the wall, since he was on the side of the phone). He was jerked back and slammed against the backside of the hole, losing balance and falling into it—the coin deposit.

Cordelia continued to chat away, but as soon as the words “stay over” left her mouth, there was suddenly a lot of screaming on the other end that made Andy’s shouts for help impossible to hear. How he wished he had cleaned out her ears now.

“I know, Mr. Andy’s dad,” she was trying to say, “but… Yes, I know he’s irresponsible… Yes, I know… Yes… Hello, Mrs. Andy’s mom… Yes, I know…”

“Cooooooooordelia!” Andy shouted from inside the coin deposit. That little sliver of light had just disappeared from above and he was left flailing his arms in darkness.

“Hello, Mrs. Andy’s grandma… Yes, I know he can’t cook. Believe me, I do… Yes, I know he’s not good enough for me…”

“Thanks, grandma,” Andy muttered. At least he could hear Cordelia.

“Hello, Mr. Andy’s grandpa… I thought you were dead… Oh, you came back to tell me that? …Yes, I know. I don’t mind washing the sheets…”

“Okay, now you’re just rubbing it in.”

“Hello again, Mr. Andy’s dad… Yes, you’re welcome… No, I’m sorry. I don’t think he can stay over at my house forever… No, I don’t want to be adopted… Okay, sir… Yes, I know… Have a good day.” Cordelia turned around and hung around the phone. “Well, that was easy.”

She looked around. “Andy?” For a moment, her eyes were wide, fearing he might be lost, but her eyes narrowed into slits when she spotted the coin deposit hole. Sighing, she pressed down on the coin return lever and heard something land in the return slot, followed by a ‘plink!’, and then an, ‘Ow!’ as she pushed the door open with her index finger.

“Got your quarter back!” Andy said, popping his head through the hole with the coin in hand.

Cordelia stared at him, pinched the quarter between her fingers, and let the door slam shut on Andy’s waist. He grunted and wriggled his body the rest of the way through, landing hard on the metal base of the payphone.

The rest of the day went by without much trouble or mischief. Cordelia went straight from the football field to cheerleading practice without so much as a shower, giving herself only time to change into her uniform and hide Andy in his locker where he would be safe. But her legs were so sore from the running, her throat so hoarse from the push-ups, that she felt like a zombie during the cheers, barely able to keep her hands raised. The other girls noticed her lack of spirit and they too fell into a dull and numb routine until the trainer gave up and sent them home early.

Cordelia didn’t care. She limped home, her bag with Andy inside thrown over one shoulder. She really didn’t care that he was screaming the whole way there either, that he was trapped in there with only the sickening aroma of her damp uniform to please his nostrils. It was all she could do not to collapse on the sidewalk.

When she got home, she walked right past her dad and they barely exchanged two words before she was in her room, taking Andy out of the bag, dumping her clothes on the floor, and collapsing headfirst into her cool pillowcase. Andy slid out of her hands, but he found the mattress almost impossible to stand on, so he just lay down next to Cordelia’s chest so he could hear her heart beating. Then when he realized all it would take is a simple flinch for her to roll over and crush him, he crawled to the edge of the bed and laid his head down, although sleep was still hours to come. Part of him was perturbed that he was two inches tall, part of him was disgusted that he smelled like his girlfriend’s sweat, and still another part was disturbed that she hadn’t even bothered to shut the lights off before going to bed. So he lay there, lost in his thoughts, as little as those may be at times, and let himself drift away into a quiet slumber. His last conscious thoughts were something along the lines of, “I wonder if every guy’s first night in bed with a girl is like this.”

The morning startled them both. Cordelia’s alarm clock went off sure enough at 8 AM, but she slept through it. Andy heard it, blaring through his ears, the painful screech of pop music that he swore Cordelia hated with all her soul. Then he remembered her telling him once that she woke up to the music on purpose, so that she’d want to get up, so that she’d want to smash the radio; but instead she just laid there, limp and aching and exhausted and dead.

When she did wake up, though, the clock blinking 9:17, everything became a blur. All in the same moment, he heard her yelp, like a puppy with its tail stepped on, spring out of the bed, and run towards her wardrobe, catching her foot on the cord of the radio to unplug it, all while lifting her sweater over her head. Andy didn’t have time to see her change, though, as she tossed the sweater onto the bed and he could only see the world turning black as the gray fabric sea washed over him. Now he could only hear her, scampering about, slamming doors and cussing as if it would do any good. He finally heard the rushing of water and was glad that she was finally taking a shower. Now if only he could get one…

His wish wasn’t granted. Cordelia soon burst back into her room, searching the ruffled sheets for Andy. She found him under her sweater and scooped him up with one hand, busy combing her wet hair with the other, and dropped him on her mirrored dresser.

“So much for English class,” she said with half a smirk, her voice unusually calm when her heart had just been pounding so fast.

Andy shrugged. “Never understood why we have to take a class in a language we already know.”

“Some of us abuse that knowledge.”

“Cori, you think I can take a shower?”

“Sure,” Cordelia shrugged, putting down the comb. Then she reached behind her head, pulling together her strands of strawberry-blonde hair, and held them over his small body. With a twist, she began to wring her hair out, drenching Andy in a torrent of soapy water. Squeezing out the last drops, Cordelia reached over to a bin of scrunchies on the desk and picked out a blue one, tying her hair back into a ponytail.

“That wasn’t what I had in mind,” Andy said dryly, which was ironic, because he wasn’t very dry at all.

Cordelia, now in a light green tee-shirt with short pink sleeves and faded jeans, dropped Andy into her handbag along with a packet of Crystal Light and the list of ingredients in Andy’s ‘power shake’ before she walked out the door. She walked to school, rather briskly, enjoying the breeze of yet another windy day. She arrived at school just in time for second period—science class—and took a seat in the back to keep attention away from her while she conversed with Andy and to scan the other students in the classroom.

Cordelia unzipped her handbag just enough to see Andy down through the hole. “Should I call your name for you during roll call?”

“Very funny.”

“Sorry,” she grinned, her eyes glancing around to make sure nobody was watching her. All eyes were glued to the teacher, though. She wasn’t a typical science teacher. She was fresh out of college, blonde hair, a petite body and gentle face, and most of all, her name was Miss Kray. Miss. That meant she wasn’t married. That meant every guy was drooling over her, not listening to a word she was saying, too occupied into watching what her body was saying instead.

“Who should we ask for help?” Cordelia whispered into the bag. “We need somebody who knows something about science. Maybe with an IQ of about 160.”

“Why don’t you ask the guy next to you?” Andy whispered back.

Cordelia looked at the person next to her. Butthead. He was called that because he had shaved all his hair off except a small strip in the middle that people jokingly called a crack and thereby earned him the name ‘Butthead’. Right now, he had just about as much drool around his chin as a baby during din-din and wasn’t trying to hide it like the rest of the guys, as his tongue was sticking clean out.

Cordelia turned back to her handbag. “I don’t think he’s going to know why you ended up shrinking.”

“The front row,” Andy said. “The smart kids always sit in the front row.”

Looking up, Cordelia scanned the front aisle and her eyes came to rest on Zeith. He wasn’t a science geek—at least, not in the sense that he wore glasses, because he didn’t, or dressed funny, because he didn’t, or even talked funny, because he didn’t. But he was the only senior in East Shores High to still eat Elmer’s glue and he did have a bug collection the size of Delaware. He was also very weird. He talked a lot, which scared people, especially because nobody really understood what he was talking about. They weren’t even sure if his name was really Zeith. Everybody called him that, sure, but Cordelia remembered that his real name was Zach or Zech or something back in preschool and he just had people call him ‘Zeith’ because it sounded like an alien species from Star Trek or Star Wars or any of those stupid space series that Cordelia hated so. In fact, she could make out the word ‘Star’ printed on the back of his black shirt and it made her cringe at the thought of asking him for help about anything.

“I’ll ask Zeith,” Cordelia sighed.

Andy burst out laughing, which caused a few people to turn around and stare at Cordelia. She just flashed a smile and they turned back to Miss Kray, who was busy blabbing about some chemical compounds that nobody was bothering to take notes on.

“I know what he’ll tell you,” Andy joked, raising his arms as if to be some kind of monster. “He’ll say, ‘Aliiiens did it! Oooooh… They’re coming to take me aboard their mothership and give me an anal probe!’ Haha!”

“You’re awful,” Cordelia sighed, zipping her handbag as Andy continued to pretend to be an alien.

“Okay, students!” Miss Kray said, clapping her hands together. “I want you all to, like, grab a partner and a station in the back of the room. There, you’ll find many of the chemicals on the periodic table lined up. Now I’m going to, like, leave you all unsupervised for the remainder of the class period while I go take this very important cell phone call outside with my beautician. Mix any chemicals you wish together and, like, record your findings in your notebooks.”

Half of the class waited for her to walk out the door, gabbing on her cell phone, and then got up and walked out too. The rest of the class chatted noisily, grabbing friends or lovers and finding a lab in the back of the classroom. Cordelia was the only one who stayed in her seat, waiting for Zeith to walk on by. He did and took a seat, as always, by himself away from the rest of the class at one of the work stations. There, he spread out his many multi-colored notebooks, pulled out a tiny pencil sharpener, and began sharpening a box full of number 2 pencils while looking over the lethal chemical elements the teacher had supplied.

“This can’t be good,” he said to himself, holding up a piece of rock labeled ‘uranium’.

Cordelia tucked her handbag into her lap and took a deep breath. “Okay, Cori, you can do this…” She rose from her seat and quietly stepped over to Zeith’s lab. He didn’t notice her at first, too occupied in his work, until she at last cleared her throat and he slowly gazed up. He nearly stumbled out of his chair.

“A g-girl!” he stammered. “You’re either a demon or an angel!”

“No…” Cordelia said slowly, afraid any sudden movements would cause him to have a heart attack. “I’m the girl who sits in the back of the class.”

“G-golly, I know who you are! You’re C-C-Cordelia, captain of the cheerleading squad! I love you girls. I come to all your games! I sit in the bleachers and stare at you and wish I could have you, every one of you!”

“Freakish, but forgivable… Anyway, I—”

“Can I have your autograph!?”

“What?”

“M-make it out ‘To my favorite Martian, Zeith. Love, Cordelia of Venus Quadrant Squared’!” he cried, sliding his notebook across the desk. “Do you need a pencil? You can have one of mine! You can even keep it!”

“That’s okay, I don’t need a pencil…” Cordelia said, scribbling her name quickly on the page of Zeith’s homework.

“You can never have too many pencils! I collect them!”

“Right… Anyway, I wanted to talk to you about a problem.”

“A problem? Ha, no problem for me! What is it? Math? Science? Art? History?”

“It’s—”

“Social studies? Anthropology? How about astronomy?”

“Zeith—”

“Oh, no, it’s one of those ‘girl’ problems, isn’t it? About bleeding? I don’t know anything about that!” He turned red and quickly tried to hide behind the safe cover of his notebooks.

“No, it’s a…um…small problem.”

Zeith looked up. “Small?”

“Yeah, a teensy weensy, itty bitty, little wittle, small problem,” Cordelia said, holding her thumb and index finger about two inches apart.

“Oh…my…God… I’m getting so turned on.”

Cordelia stepped back. “What!?”

“You want to shrink me, don’t you? You want to tease me and torment me and make me be your sex slave!”

Cordelia stared at him.

“I didn’t think girls shared in my fantasy!” he exclaimed, loud enough for the rest of the class to hear. “Look, look!” He flipped through his notebook, showing Cordelia pictures of giant girls towering over cities or little guys sitting in the hands of a girl or getting crushed underfoot. She just continued to stare, mouth wide open, eyes never blinking, as Zeith all but orgasmed over the science lab in his ecstasy.

“This…was unexpected…and so very unnecessary,” Cordelia whispered to herself.

Zeith jumped up from his seat, wrapped his arm around Cordelia’s hips, and dropped to his knees so he could look up at her. “Put me in your shoe, my goddess!”

“Get away from me!” she screamed.

“Please! I promise to be naughty! And you can torture me however you want!”

Cordelia broke away from him and began running around the table as Zeith chased after her, crawling around on all fours like a mouse, begging to be her tiny sex toy. This continued for another couple of minutes until somebody stuck a needle into Zeith’s back and, with one last mad orgasmic look, he collapsed to the tiled floor.

Cordelia bent down and took Zeith’s scrawny wrist in her hand to feel for a pulse. “He’s unconscious.” She looked up at the mysterious figure who was still holding the needle in hand. “Why, pray tell, are you carrying a tranquilizer around school?”

“…Protection,” the figure said flatly and turned around.

“Against what?”

The lights in the room dimmed, darkening the figure’s already dark face. “…Them.”

“Butthead, stop playing with the lights!” the Ram yelled. “I need help mixing these two compounds together!”

“Them?” Cordelia echoed, plopping down on a wooden stool and setting her handbag on the desk next to her among Zeith’s many notebooks.

The figure didn’t move. “They’re always watching, even when they’re not.”

“That makes about as much sense as everything else that’s happened in the last two days.”

“Expect the unexpected, pretty lady. Do not be so surprised when strange days do come your way.”

Cordelia raised an eyebrow. “You talk as if you know me.”

“The most popular girl in school. Of course I know you. It’s you who do not see me. None of them see me. Look now, before your very eyes, the way they see right through me.” He waved his shady hand to the rest of the classroom, who, sure enough were absorbed in their own activities. Butthead had slipped a pair of goggles over his buttocks for reasons unknown to the rational mind and was amusing himself by shaking his cheeks over the open flame of a Bunsen burner that the Ram was feeding with various mixed chemicals. Brad and Ruby, who were coincidentally in the same classroom as it works out nice for the plot of this story, were making out on their lab table, knocking off beakers and chemicals alike. Cordelia kept looking. Her eyes finally landed on her best friend Liz and her arch nemesis (and Liz’s boyfriend) Happy sitting together at a station in the far corner.

Liz looked up from her test tube and waved. “Cori! What are you doing over there all alone? Come over here and join us!”

“You see?” the mysterious figure said, stepping between Cordelia and Liz, but Liz only continued to wave and converse with Cordelia as if he was both transparent and invisible. “She sees nothing. We are the unseen, the unwanted, the unneeded. Popular girls like you neither see nor hear us.”

Cordelia blinked. “I’m sorry, have you been speaking all this time?”

“How very droll,” the figure muttered. “But remember, as a wise man once said, ‘Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Cordelia, 'cause we're the people.’ Know what I means?”

“I haven’t the faintest.”

“That is for certain. Perhaps it’s time you saw my face for the first time…” He stepped into the light, revealing dark eyes like shadows and a mullet, just as dark, that streamed down his neck. His skin was as smooth as a glass desert with a sad attempt at growing a moustache, most likely penciled in, and an obvious Mexican facade that made his whole body—eyes, shoulders, even stature and stance—slump. His white t-shirt and silver chained necklace lined with shrunken skulls and black beads only made his skin appear all the darker, all the more ominous.

Cordelia looked him up and down. “What are you? Sixteen?”

“…I will be seventeen next month.”

“Why are you in a senior class?”

“I skipped fifth grade and all of middle school.”

“You’re been in our class since we were freshmen?”

“…Yes. I made that clear by the whole ‘you don’t see me, but I see you’ episode, remember? I belong to an elite group of inconspicuous loners that you princesses of the hallways are too high and mighty to deal with. You trod upon us as if you are goddesses and we must submit to your superiority. Is it any wonder we fantasize the way we do? Zeith—the one laying at your precious feet—was one of us before he…came out of the closet. Once you reveal yourself to the light, there is no going back. That is why I choose to stay in the darkness. I am my own.”

“Why are you talking to this coat rack that I’m too shallow to regard as a real person?” Liz asked, walking over to Cordelia.

“He’s helping me to see the light,” Cordelia answered.

Liz looked over at the ‘coat rack’. “The light is right above us in the ceiling! God put it there. You don’t need to be a rock psychiatrist to figure that one out.”

The figure glared at her. “That’s ‘rocket scientist’, you twit.”

“How come I’ve never seen you before?”

“I’ve sat next to you in almost every class since 9th grade!” he simmered.

“Empty desk seat? …It is you! Empty desk seat! How are you?”

“Fine. Dealing with some overpowering urges to bludgeon someone with a rusty shovel, but other than that, I'm just fine.”

Liz squealed. “That’s fabulous, empty desk seat! Hope that works out for you.”

“…Damn you people. I wish I liked guys so I wouldn’t grow a circus tent in my pants whenever I’m around members of the opposite sex.”

“Does he have a name?” Cordelia asked Liz.

“Empty desk seat?”

“Yes, I have a name!” he shouted, and then straightened himself out. “Ahem. My friends call me Alex… You can call me Freak Boy. That’s all you see me as anyway.”

“Got that right,” Liz snapped.

“Yeah, he does,” Cordelia agreed.

“Last time I cameo with rich people,” Alex muttered. “I'll take peasants any day.”

Liz looked up. “What was that, empty desk seat?”

“Nothing. Just a fourth wall breach, that's all. Where was I? …Oh, right, you see nothing but a freak in me, where you should see a fellow human being. Your group ‘posses’ divide this world. Your high school niches will leave you a poor tramp in the real world, rotting on the streets of hell, too thick in the head to earn yourself a decent and successful living and too thin in your views to accept those of another kind. We are all humans. It is time that you—”

“You’re boring.”

“…And you, ma’am, are a troglodyte. Your very presence here lowers the intelligence in this room by an amount greater than you could ever hope to summarize.”

“How do I make you disappear again?” Liz asked, licking her lip as she tried waving her hands in hope of making Alex ‘the Freak Boy’ become an empty desk seat again.

“I don’t have time for this,” Cordelia sighed, opening her handbag. “Both of you have a seat. I have something very…strange to show you.”

“Stranger than him?” Liz asked.

“Stranger than her?” Alex asked at the same time.

“Stranger than you both, I’m afraid,” Cordelia said as she pushed Zeith’s notebooks off the table. Then she pulled out a list of ingredients, a packet of Crystal Light, and finally, with a deep breath, Andy, and set them side by side on the table.

“Oh, my God!” Liz exclaimed. “You brought lemonade! I love Crystal Light.”

Cordelia shook her head. “No, Liz. Look again. Which of these three does not belong?”

Liz looked again, from the Crystal Light pack, to the list of ingredients scribbled on a sticky note, to tiny Andy, and then back to the Crystal Light.

Muttering something incomprehensible, Alex decided to step in. “…Before our dense, yet excruciatingly attractive, friend loses what little intelligence her vacant head still yet clings onto for any hope of a dying breed of species known as brain cells, allow me to enlighten. What you seem to be so oblivious to is that there is a man there, shrunken down to an approximate two inches in height, which…is indeed an odd occurrence and only makes me loathe this world more, knowing full well that to be diminutive has always been my fantasy and yet the only satisfaction to ever grace me has been to remain unseen in the eyes of those succulent females who think me to small, too insignificant, to so much as bat an eye towards. I feel so walked upon.”

“Why does he get all the big lines?” Liz whispered into Cordelia’s ear.

Cordelia shrugged.

But Alex, who had overheard them, only seethed. “I, Miss Lackbrain, speak my mind and so doth you. Is it any wonder, then, why I speak so much and you so very little?”

“Hello?” Andy waved at the three colossal humans around him. “I’m right here, you know. Pay attention to me at any time.”

“A tiny man!” Liz shrieked and if it wasn’t for the fact that she was always perky and loud, the rest of the class might have bothered to look. But they didn’t. So she leaned in closer, putting her nose about an inch away from Andy, and squinted at him. “…Andy?”

“Hi, Elizabeth,” he answered dryly. He was never fond of her. It was bad enough that Cordelia and Liz were best friends, it was worse still that he always found himself in between them, but it was more awful than he ever imagined being in between them when he stood no more than two inches tall. Liz’s minty breath, flavored by the tic-tacs she always carried in her pocket, washed over him like the breath of a dragon. He stumbled back. If anything, at least Liz wouldn’t make him feel smaller than he already was. She wasn’t that shallow…

Suddenly squashing that false hope, Liz burst into laughter. “You have all the luck, Cori! If Happy was two inches…well, wait, he is.” She laughed again. “I guess I need a new boyfriend.”

Feeling a disturbance in the force, Happy looked up from his lab at Liz and cocked his head to the side.

 “That was a sentence full of unnecessary information,” Alex said. “But then again, your dialogue is the kind that any sensible reader would see no harm in skipping over entirely.”

Liz lifted her head. “Why do you bother speaking, Freak Boy? It’s not like we care.”

“Fine,” he spun around. “I will become one with the shadows again. And you may return to the ignorant darkness that you call your thoughts.”

But Cordelia seized his arm and held him back. “No, you have to stay… You’re a science geek, right?”

“Have you completely disregarded everything I explained to you about the evils of high school niches?”

“You’re a science geek, right?” she repeated.

Alex’s eyes narrowed. “…Yes.”

“Okay, good,” Cordelia said, yanking Alex down onto a stool next to her. “I have a pretty wild story to tell you.”

“Your friend made some sort of disgusting concoction, drank it like the idiot he has proven to be, and shrunk down to two inches?”

“…You’re good,” Cordelia said.

Liz pondered her thoughts. “No wonder I got an A+ every time I cheated off empty desk seat’s paper…”

“It’s not that hard,” Alex continued, picking up the sticky note in one hand and the Crystal Light packet in the other. “The ingredients on this sheet of paper are what your friend put in his drink, right?”

Cordelia nodded.

“And I see ‘Crystal Light’ on the list, yet it’s the only one of the ingredients you brought for me to examine.”

“Well, we think it’s the one that caused him to shrink,” she answered. “You see, Andy has this obsession over mixing various kinds of foods together as a sort of ‘power drink’ for football…”

“And this list surely shows the feeble signs of a football player’s brainpower behind it.”

“Yes, but… Usually he puts lemons into his drink. I was out of lemons, so I gave him a packet of Crystal Light, like that one there… It’s the only thing he’s never had before. I don’t know, maybe he has some kind of allergic reaction to it or something.”

“I have an allergic reaction to camels,” Liz said.

All three of them stared at her before turning back to the problem at hand.

“Well,” Alex said slowly, “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anybody shrinking because of an allergic reaction, but it could perhaps be a chemical reaction. …For the simpler minds around us, that means that any two or more of these ingredients could have fused together to form a sort of radioactive bondage that has not yet been discovered by mankind, as no scientist would be stupid enough to blend foods like this together and consume it orally in a large dose.”

“We thought of that too,” Cordelia stated.

“So there is room for something in a cheerleader’s head other than mindless dance steps and a hundred different ways to take off your clothes.”

Liz’s dazed eyes came back into focus. “Did he just tell you to get naked?”

“I’m not sure,” Cordelia said. “I’m still trying to keep him in sight. Every time I forget he’s talking to me, he starts to fade away into the background.”

“Would somebody hurry up and return me back to normal size!?” Andy huffed, leaning against Cordelia’s elbow which sat on the desk. Meanwhile, the rest of the class was in panic mode as Butthead’s buttocks had gotten a little too close to the fire dosed in unstable chemicals and, with a small gas leak seeping through his underwear, had caught his pants on fire. The Ram grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall, but, unable to figure out how to make it work, ended up tackling Butthead and trying to smother the flames by pounding the fire rapidly with the blunt end of the extinguisher. Butthead howled in pain.

Alex carefully tore open the tiny packet of Crystal Light and poured its contents into a beaker. “Liz, would you mind stepping out of character for a moment and making yourself useful by filling this with a cup of water?”

“Should I use my bra to measure it?”

Alex snatched the beaker back. “…Cordelia, would you please fill this with a cup of water?”

“No, I want to do it!” Liz cried, grabbing the beaker. She glowered over her shoulder at Alex as she stepped over to the gas sink, turned the knob on the left, and held the beaker under the gassy faucet. “…Nothing’s coming out.” She turned the knob more. Still nothing. Finally, frustrated, she set the beaker aside and stuck her face underneath the faucet and then collapsed from inhaling the fumes.

“…Stephen King asked me to be in his story, you know,” Alex said to Cordelia. “I could’ve been surrounded by people are on par with my intellect. I didn’t have to be here.”

She stared at him and then at her friend, unconscious on the floor.

Alex sat behind a microscope, studying samples of the Crystal Light while Cordelia and Liz sat on either side of him. Andy sat down next to Cordelia’s white handbag, resting his head against it and staring up at the cracks in the ceiling like he always did in science class.

“There is something strange here…” Alex mumbled, half to himself. “Tiny blue crystals. Have a look.” He pulled his stool away from the desk and Cordelia put her eye over the lens.

“They look like crystals,” she said. “but they’re so small.”

“And getting smaller,” Alex remarked.

Cordelia looked again. Sure enough, the tiny crystals were breaking apart in the water; one crystal became two, each of those became two more, and so on until they were all but gone, save for the occasional glimmer in the water like dying stars in the night sky.

“Does that mean I’m going to keep getting smaller until I disappear!?” Andy exclaimed.

Alex scratched his mullet. “Only if we’re lucky.”

Cordelia slapped him upside the head.

“Ow. Sorry, I get the urge to put down idiots whenever I can. Now…uh…where was I? Oh, yes. Andy, the shrinking happened instantly, correct?”

“Well, yeah… I was big and then I instantly started shrinking.”

“I mean, did you instantly go from being normal size to tiny?”

Andy started to speak, but Cordelia put her hand over his mouth and cut him off. “Enough. We’ve been wasting way too many pages bantering back and forth like this.”

“You mean minutes, right?” Alex asked.

“What?”

“We’ve been wasting too many minutes. You said ‘pages’.”

“Oh, right,” Cordelia muttered. “…Anyway, Alex, here’s the story. I was with Andy in the kitchen when he was normal size, helping him to concoct his horrible drink. But I had to get changed, so I left him for two minutes, and when I came back he was the size of a bug.”

Alex nodded, deep in thought.

“Which…he still is…”

Alex nodded again.

“I…almost stepped on him.”

Another nod.

“…That’s it…”

She stared at Alex. He was still only nodding, slightly licking his upper lip.

“So...” he finally said, swallowing hard. “How close did you get to crushing him?  Has this happened more than once? Third time's the charm.”

Andy glared at him. “Are you getting off on this!? Let me at him, Cordelia! I’ll pound his geeky face in!”

Andy started running for the edge of the table, but Cordelia just pressed her index finger into his face and restrained him, pinning him against her handbag. She put her other index finger to her lips, signaling him to hush, even though he couldn’t see her with her finger jammed up his eye sockets.

“Can you make an antidote?” Cordelia asked, turning towards Alex but keeping her finger against Andy.

“I’d have to take this stuff home and look at it in my private lab, but… Yes, I think I can.”

Andy finally managed to squirm out of Cordelia’s wall of flesh. “You do this, nerd, and I’ll never throw you in your locker and hurl it off the roof of the school again!”

“Actually,” Alex grinned, “I was hoping to get a little satisfaction from the lady.”

Wrapping her arms around him, Liz swayed her hips. “I’ll give you a chocolatey kiss.”

“…I meant the other lady.” He looked to Cordelia.

She stared back. “…What? I’m not touching you.”

“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t dream of that,” he scoffed. “My satisfaction rests on a different level. I want you to admit that I'm right about the unchanging state of mind of the bourgeoisie oppressors. Admit that you do nothing but demand work from the lower classes and expect to have to do nothing in return. You're just as bad as Liz is in your own way, you know. You capitalists are all alike. Admit me that and I may consider helping you.”

“Hell no.”

“…Fine, if you will not denounce your capitalist ways, then I shall require the following. First off, I demand hot pockets—chicken fajita, if possible. I will require red bull, Star Trek DVDs, and furthermore, you must take back all the things you have said about us brainy kids over the years—for, while you may decide our fate in these hallowed halls, it is us who shall be running the world in about…” He looked at his watch. “Oh, about ten years.”

“Your watch tells time in years?” Liz asked.

Alex raised his finger, ready to say something, but stopped. “…One moment.” Then he stood up and nodded to Cordelia. “This afternoon then. At my place?”

“Yes, okay. How do I get there?”

“From the cafeteria, head down the hall, take a left at the bathroom, and you'll reach a broom closet. Address number 183. Knock three times, hoot like an owl, and I shall appear. …Come alone.”

“Can I come?” Liz asked.

“I’m not even going to give her the benefit of answering that,” Alex continued. “Now, Cordelia, be there sometime this afternoon, for I must be somewhere in the evening.”

Liz giggled. “Got a big date with your sister?”

“With your mother, actually.”

“Moooooommy!” Liz screamed, running out the door.

“This afternoon then?” Cordelia asked, scribbling the address, directions, and time down on the back of the sticky note.

Alex nodded once. “Yes. …Now, I must retire.”

“But class isn’t over for another twenty minutes.”

“Yes, and within that time, ‘Butthead’ and ‘the Ram’ will have blown this place sky high. And I, being the one with crimes of arson on my wrap-sheet, will be blamed. Andy, avoid the shrimp in the cafeteria today; I hear it's rather bitter. Be thankful I'm helping you and not smashing you. Cordelia, thou havest heart, but lackest moral fiber. With any luck, this experience shall change that. Liz...you may be gone from the room, but you're still a bitch. Until later, ladies and gentle-shrimp, I bed you adieu.”

With that, he was gone.

“I’m still pounding in his face when I return to normal size,” Andy said bitterly.

Cordelia sighed. “I guess we better get out of here too. Want a ride on my shoulder?”

“Hell yeah!”

Cordelia grinned, picking up Andy and dropping him back into her handbag. The sticky note followed and she zipped up the bag, slinging the strap over her shoulder. “I prefer to go with the indirect approach.”

She strolled out the doorway, bumping into Miss Kray on the way. Miss Kray stopped. She looked back at Cordelia, ambling down the empty hallway, and then into her classroom, which was almost all empty except for Zeith passed out on the floor and Butthead and the Ram rubbing various flammable chemicals over their clothing while placing lit matches through various holes on their body.

An explosion shortly followed suit.

Not really in the mood to attend her other classes, Cordelia stepped outside the school and walked around the building. The air was colder now and she shuddered, wishing she had brought her jacket. She tried to tug down on her bright pink sleeves, but they wouldn’t stretch any further, so she gave up and leaned against the side of the school where she would be safe from the harsh chill of the wind.

“Andy,” she called out, unzipping her handbag. She saw him curled up in there, between a used tissue and her cell phone. He wasn’t sleeping, just laying there, staring up at her with his hands tucked behind his head. “…Just wanted to make sure you were alright.”

“Yeah,” he said after a moment, “I’m alright.”

“You sure?”

“…Well, I’ve had better days.”

The corner of her lip curled slightly. “Like yesterday?”

“Okay, better weeks.”

Cordelia’s lip didn’t stay up for long. It soon lowered and she shuddered again, her hair scratching at her face in the wind. She brushed it back tenderly with her fingertips. “You know, Andy… This is all so surreal. We’ve been so busy running all over the place that I haven’t had time to stop and think what it must be like for you… You must be so scared.”

“Never, babe. You know me better than that.”

She cocked her head to the side. “It’s okay, Andy… I’m scared. What if something happens to you before this afternoon? What if Alex can’t find an antidote? I can’t go on pretending there is nothing wrong forever …There is something wrong.”

“If there’s one thing you can trust about nerds, it’s that they always come through.”

She looked at him, trying to laugh. “…Yeah, Alex won’t let us down.”

“Then…would you please not cry?”

“I’m not crying. The wind’s in my eyes.”

The wind had stopped a minute ago, but Andy pretended not to notice. “Look, Cori, I may be small right now, but that doesn’t mean we have to sad. We could even have some fun with this. I still know how to have a good time.”

“What did you have in mind?” Cordelia smirked.

Andy spread his empty palms to show he had nothing. “That’s your call, girl. You’ve done everything you could do for me in the past twenty-four hours. My life is now in your hands.”

“Literally,” she laughed into another gust of wind, using the opportunity of brushing back her dancing strands of hair again to also wipe her eyes with her forearm. “Okay, so your life is in my hands. Do you trust me?”

“Girl, you know I do. I’d throw my life in your arms any day if it meant you’d have me.”

Her eyes widened, taken back first by his abrupt answer, without a shred of doubt in his mind, and secondly by his utter honesty, the kind she didn’t know he possessed. She stared at him, as if waiting for something else—an inapt joke, a laugh, a typical jock grin, but his face was the mask of sincerity.

“That’s so…unlike you,” she finally spoke.

“Well, this isn’t exactly like me either,” he said, presenting his shrunken body as if she hadn’t noticed. “But we’re not different people. I’m still Andy and you’re still the sexiest girl in East Shores High. Nothing’s going to change that and nothing’s going to change how damn much I love you.”

“That’s actually kind of sweet.”

 “What? You’re not going to confess your love for me as well?”

“Unlike you, I don’t have a reason to. You have nobody else to go to, no choice of your own. You’re mine whether you like it or not, but…I am glad to see you like it, Andy.”

“There’s that cold shoulder again.”

“The coldest.”

He smiled, knowing she couldn’t keep her wall up forever. “You love me.”

“No more than reason.”

“Ha. Before this is over, you’ll want me. I see it in your eyes.”

“I do believe your own eyes deceive you.”

“We’ll see, girl. We’ll see.”

Cordelia slid her fingers into her handbag and pulled Andy out, setting him down on her shoulder. “How about a first class ride?”

This was a bit of a shock for Andy. He was fine at first—that is, until Cordelia gradually moved her fingers away from him. Then his stomach lurched forward and he was sure he’d fall, down past Cordelia’s breasts which were like grassy mounds under her emerald shirt, and onto the pavement below. This was no carnival ride; there were no seat belts, no red tape or glass windows to keep him from becoming a stain on the ground. There was only Cordelia.

But she wasn’t going to let him fall. She walked slowly at first, pulling the strap of her handbag around her other shoulder so as to keep it out of Andy’s way. She also made sure not to swing her arms too much on her strides, which, though short and deliberately slow, caused her shoulder to tremble with every step. It was only a small twitch to her, barely noticeable because it came so natural, but to Andy it was like sitting on an active fault line. He was jostled around like a loose leaf that her arm was trying to brush away. Eventually, when he noticed that Cordelia was accelerating into her normal walking speed, he spun around, grabbing a handful of the soft pink fabric of her sleeve in each hand and leaving his feet to dangle helplessly in motion with her steps.

“How is it?” she laughed.

“Remember when we went rock climbing over the summer?”

“Yeah.”

“Like that,” he said, scrambling for higher ground as his feet were now rocking under the crook of her arm, “but the mountain’s alive.” And sexy as hell, he added to himself.

“Mount Cordelia… Well, I always did want a mountain named after myself.”

She had reached normal walking speed by now and every time she took a step with her left foot, Andy’s lower body would swing upwards. But then her right foot would come down, and so would his flailing body, and his face would be smothered in the cool silk of her sleeve. It was terrifying, at first, the way roller coasters and horror movies and fast cars and first sex are terrifying—the adrenaline surging through the veins, the heart like a jackhammer pummeling away at the chest, the brain crying out for mercy and the soul screaming, louder than ever, for this to never end.

Andy erupted in laughter and made his swings all the more wild by kicking off Cordelia’s arm on the uplifts and burying his face in her sleeve when he was thrown back down.

“You know,” he said between times of getting his face smushed against her shirt. “I could get used to this. No more school, no more parents, no more parents who expect you to go to school. Just you and me, Cori. That’s the way it should be.”

“It is pretty cool,” she admitted, though her enthusiasm wasn’t as great. “I just kind of wish…no, that’s selfish of me.”

“What?”

Cordelia stopped walking for a second, giving Andy the chance to grab hold of her hair and pull himself onto her shoulder. He struggled for a bit, trying to find a good foothold in the crinkled shirt fabric, but he eventually made it the top and stood on her shoulder.

“What is it, Cori?” he asked again.

She blushed slightly. “I kind of wish…not that you would stay this way forever, but that Alex could find a way to make you little again. You know, after he gives you the antidote. In case…you wanted to have fun.”

“I like fun.”

“But do you like being little?”

Andy pondered her question for a minute. “I don’t know yet. We haven’t had the chance to do anything.”

“We can change that.”

Alex sat on an upturned wash bucket in the janitor’s closet, leaning over a stolen microscope as he examined the Crystal Light sample a bit more up-close without the distractions of a normal classroom. How exactly he found it easier to concentrate in a cramped closet with cleaning acids and mops, nobody was really sure—but then again, nobody was really sure about Alex. The janitor just sort of let him live there, figuring he was the hobo of the school.

Alex humored him most of the time by putting on a trench coat over tattered rags, sliding on a pair of oversized shoes and slapping fake mud over his clothes. That’s what he was wearing now, just one of his many guises that he kept hidden in the storeroom next door. Because nobody ever noticed him, he liked to filch old costumes from the high school’s play productions and add them to his dress-up collection, passionately referring to himself as ‘the master of disguise’.

“This can’t be right,” he muttered to himself, leaning back on his bucket. He spotted his makeshift bookcase on the wall, filled with textbooks that he had managed to pilfer from various classrooms, and grabbed the chemistry book from the top shelf. He flipped to the index and scanned his finger down the ‘C’ column. “Crystallites, crystallites… There we are. Page 2,431.”

There was only a small blue box, barely big enough to fill a quarter of the page, labeled ‘Crystallites’. He read it aloud. “Crystallites are crystals—wouldn’t have guessed that—with at least one microscopic or submicroscopic dimension.” He peered back into the microscope. “Well, they certainly have at least one microscopic dimension…but that dimension seems to change, to alter reality and structure, when mixed with water. Then they shrink down to a fraction of their size and remain that way, just like Andy… Somehow, the crystallites must’ve fused with his molecular structure and transferred their properties unto his DNA. My God that I don’t believe in, that means...wait, shit, do you have to drink the crap for that to happen or could a simple touch be just as effective? What if the condition itself is contagious? The new leprosy! We could all…” He slapped his hands over his face. “No, no, don’t panic, Alex. There’s nothing so wrong that we can’t fix it.”

Suddenly, there was the sound of keys jingling and the janitor door flew open, revealing Liz in all her unwanted glory. “Hiii, Alex!”

“…I must stop speaking so soon,” Alex muttered.

“You must stop speaking to yourself, if you ask me. I could hear you from the hallway!”

“Damn it, Liz,” Alex slid around on his bucket to face her. “Can’t you let me go back to being invisible?”

Liz stepped inside and shut the door behind her, staring in awe at all the cleaning supplies. She stopped a dusty hammock tied up in the back of the closet and a cracked lava lamp, still bubbling with a faint orange, on a crate next to it. Then there was Alex, sitting at his desk between a microwave blinking 12:00 and an antique iMac computer. “Wow, so this is the stuff the poor surround themselves with… If I knew you were so bad off, I wouldn’t have laughed at the nuns collecting for charity.”

“To hell with the Catholic church! They raise money for charity, giving pennies away to Ethiopia, and where does the Pope live? He surrounds his old wrinkly ass with golden crosses and a marble fuckin' throne!”

“Oh! Speaking of that, did I ever show you this?” Liz reached into the front of her shirt, but before Alex could stab his thigh for the bulge he was feeling between his legs, she pulled out a silver necklace with a cross and leaned in closer so he could see.

Alex stared at the cross and then up at her. “The irony of the situation at hand is too good to pass up. Here you pull down your shirt, letting me see more of you than I would wish to see in a lifetime, and you pull out a cross. A cross! The very symbol of abstinence and good charity, and you—a covetous whore—wear it around your neck? Why!? Do you even know what it stands for? Do you even have a shred of faith? I respect Christians with faith, for it means they believe in something, but I find it hard to believe that you, lady of self-denial, believe in anything at all. No, your head is far too vacuous to hold thoughts of higher beings and utopian societies. You just care about the here and now. And yet you wear it—why!? Do you think it'll serve some purpose for you in the next life or attract a sexy man in this one?” He stared harder. “What am I even saying? Fuck it. I guess the point I'm trying to get across is that a cross is hardly becoming, or fitting, of your utter inanity, milady.”

“Why do you talk like that?”

“What? Mean? Spiteful? Bitter? Cynical?”

“In big words.”

“…I’m sorry. I’ll refrain from using words greater than three syllables next time I speak down to you.”

“Oh, what’s that?” Liz asked, pointing to the microscope. “Are you still looking at the Crystal Light?”

“Actually, the crystallites within the Crystal Light, though the parallels of their names are too flagrant to pass up. I smell a government conspiracy behind all this.”

“Well, I agree it has a wonderful fragrance, but I don’t think the government is behind it.” She sat down on the crate next to the lava lamp, despite Alex’s subtle clues that he didn’t want her around, like his finger wildly pointing towards the door. “Why would they put shrinking crystals in Crystal Light?”

“To try to assassinate me.”

“Then why put the crystals in a drink that only girls buy? Why not in a burrito or something you Mexicans like to eat that make you smell worse than this room?”

“For your information, not all Mexicans eat burritos.” He glanced at the computer and the half-eaten breakfast burrito by the keyboard. His breakfast consisted of the other half of the burrito, his lunch was two tacos, and for dinner he was going to have an enchilada plate at a nearby diner. But he couldn't let Liz know that and he was sure she wouldn’t notice or remember this conversation in two minutes anyway.

“Well, still,” Liz argued, “I’ve never seen a guy drink Crystal Light. Somebody would have to trick you into drinking that stuff.”

“That’s true…”

Alex was too busy musing his own thoughts to see the slow grin creep across Liz’s face like a conniving spider.

“Liz,” he said after a moment, “do you drink Crystal Light?”

“All the time.”

“And nothing besides your brain has shrunk lately, has it?”

“Well, my breasts look a little smaller. What do you think?” She shoved them in his face.

He pushed her back onto the crate. “This may be a closet, but it’s not the kind you’re used to making out in. Here, we have some decency. Besides, even if you weren’t dating that fool Happy, who is about as straight as his name, I’d still find you a revolting and hideous slime of a woman who has no boobs to speak of.”

“Tetters and Totters are sad to hear you say that. You should say you’re sorry to them.”

“…You named your breasts?”

“Yeah, didn’t you?”

“…It’s at times like this I’m glad my conversations with fools like you aren’t being recorded for everybody on the worldwide web to hear.”

“Why did you ask me if I drank Crystal Light?”

Alex flipped through the pages of the chemistry book. “Well, I have a suspicion.”

“Does it itch?”

“…Confucius say, ‘It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.’”

Liz stared at him for a few seconds.

“No, it doesn't itch,” he finally said. “But it does bring up an interesting possibility. These crystallites definitely have some unearthly properties to them that I’d like to study more in detail, but there’s a chance that they only affect males.”

“Like boners?”

“Your ability to form an almost coherent analogy astounds me.”

“Thanks, sexy,” Liz winked. “I like the form of your anatomy too.”

Sighing, Alex closed the chemistry book. “Though I hate to say this, you’re the only person who seems to see me at the moment. I…need your help, Liz. If we don’t work together on this, and if my suspicions prove correct, then this world is in grave danger. We’re the only ones who can save it.”

“Yeah, teen superheroes!” Liz cheered. “Do we get our own costumes?”

“…I’m wearing mine.”

“What should I wear?”

“Your cheerleading uniform.”

“Okay, I got it on under this!” Liz started to pull her shirt over her head.

“No, you don’t.”

“Aww…you got me.”

“Can you be serious about this?” Alex said impatiently. “It’s time to repay your country for all the horror your birth has brought upon it.”

“Okay, what do you need me to do?”

Alex grabbed a telephone book from the shelf, brushed the dust off the cover, and skimmed through the pages before ripping one of them out. “There’s a local Crystal Light plant about twenty miles north of here. I want you to go there and call me. Do not go inside the building, do not converse with anybody, and do not pretend to know anything—which shouldn’t be too hard for you. We don’t want to arouse suspicion. If I’m right, the people working at the plant are well aware of the crystallites within their vats…”

Alex looked at the broken clock on the wall. “Ah, 2:39, like always. Time to check up on Liz. She should’ve been there by now…” He picked up his bulky phone, the kind that were made and left for dead in the 80’s, and dialed her number. “I don’t know what I was thinking sending her as a stooge to do field work…”

There was a click and Liz’s undeniable shriek of a voice blared through the phone. “Agent Liz here! What’s the sitch?”

“…I think you’re taking this ‘cheerleader saving the world thing’ a bit too seriously.”

“Shut up, Wade. What do you do? Sit behind a computer in your mommy’s bedroom and bark orders at me. I’m on the field, I’m taking the risks, and we’ll do things my way or the highway!”

Alex rubbed his forehead in frustration. “Oh, for the love of… Do you even remember what you were supposed to do?”

“Of course I remember! I’m the teenage supermodel, remember?”

“Superhero. You’re the teenager superhero.” Then he added, under his breath, “You stupid twit.”

“Well, a superhero needs to look her best. I bought a couple of extra cheerleading uniforms at the mall… There’s this really pretty blue one with white stripes, but I think I look better in red. Should I come back there and show you? Maybe you could help me decide.”

“You went shopping at the fuckin’ mall!?” Alex roared into the receiver. “You retard! That’s about ten miles out of your way!”

“Oh, Alex, the mall is never out of my way.”

“Please say you’re kidding… Please tell to me that you’re not really that stupid…”

Liz sighed playfully. “Of course not, Alex. I’m on my way to the plant right now in my Lamborghini. Got the top down, wind in my face, and—oops! Almost hit a squirrel. They should learn to stay on their own side of the sidewalk. You know, it’s such a beautiful day outside! Are you sure you don’t want me to drive to the Crystal Light plant in Florida? I don’t mind the gas money. My daddy’s rich, you know. Well, not that you’d know anything about rich, or having a dad, but I guess you’ve heard what it’s like. I wouldn’t know what it’s like being poor, though. I guess I’d have to walk to get the mail in the morning. That’d be awful. My driveway is like a mile long. Did I ever tell you…”

Alex had stopped listening a long time ago. “You brought the Lamborghini… Good job being inconspicuous, Liz.”

“You don’t need to be so sarcastic, Alex. I’m not that suspicious. See, I decided to drive the blue one because the red one stands out too much—oh, and because blue complements my hair. Don’t you think?”

“…Wait. Liz, it’s illegal to talk on a cell phone while driving.”

Suddenly, sirens were heard in the background.

“Uh, oh!” Liz cried. “Captain, I got a boogie on my behind!”

“…That’s ‘bogey’, nimrod.”

“No, it’s not bogus, Alex! I have to run. I’ll call you when I get to the plant! This is Agent Liz, signing off. Over!”

The phone clicked.

Alex stared at it. “…Well… Look at the time. 2:39. Time to give Cordelia a call and make sure she’s okay. And Andy too, I guess.” He dialed her number and listened to the phone ring once, twice, three times.

Around the twenty-sixth ring, she picked up.

“Cordelia, it’s me, Alex. I was just calling to see if you could make it to our meeting a littler earlier. Like now. I think we might have stumbled upon… Uh… … Is this a bad time? ... What are you two doing? … … … … … … Good God that I still don’t believe in, that's disgusting. And yet strangely arousing. … … I don't care... … No, don't put him on, don't put him—hi, Andy... … … Yes, I realize how stressful this must be on you... …. … … Uh-huh… … … Look, just shut up and tell Cordelia to bring you over here before I serve you in cocktail sauce. … … She already did? … … …  This is awkward. … Yes, okay. … … Just come over here. … … Sorry, bad choice of words. Just get over here.”

He hung up the phone. “…I’m going to go wash my hands. I suddenly feel very dirty.”

He stood up, walking over to the janitor’s sink, and turned on the brown water, rubbing his hands under the cool stream that trickled out. Then he splashed his face and let the water run down. “How ironic is this? Here I am, in possession of something I’ve been trying to create all my life—a substance with the power to shrink a human being. Why, then, am I seeking to destroy it?” Staring at himself in the busted mirror on the wall, twisted reflections in the serrated shards, he watched the drops of water skitter down his skin, lingering at his chin for a moment before they splashed into the grimy sink below.

“A fantasy can become so deadly if brought into a world it wasn’t meant for,” he tried to tell himself. “Some things should only exist in the subconscious… Our world cannot take these idealistic fancies, a fairy utopia in a world of rationality. What kind of nightmare would we unleash? Break the gates to hell, open Pandora’s box, and watch the darkness fall upon us. These crystallites could be our untimely end. They must be destroyed.”

It was then that Alex noticed his phone ringing. He wasn’t sure for how long, so he quickly dried his face off with a brown paper towel and picked up the receiver, pressing it to his ear. “Yeah?”

“It’s Agent Cheer,” the voice on the other end said.

“Hi, Liz.”

“Aw, how did you know it was me?”

“Maybe because you’re one of the only two girls in the world that actually asked for my phone number; the other which I just got done talking to and she was quite out of breath—whereas you, Miss, are as obnoxiously bubbly as ever. …Oh, and your whiny, stuck-up, nasally voice was a subtle clue.”

“Alex, can you believe I got another ticket? I just finished making room in the glove compartment too! Don’t they realize I’m too rich to pay for their silly rules?”

“So, you're going to continue blatantly disregarding the law and doing exactly what you did to get that ticket in the first place?”

“Pretty much… What’s ‘blatantly’ mean?”

“…It means to be rich,” he said. “Are you at the plant yet?”

“Aye-aye, captain! What do you need me to do?”

“Tell me what you see.”

“A bird, and there’s a car, and another bird…and another one… You should see this! Oh, and there’s some clouds and a tree, which I didn’t know grew in this city… Oh! And there’s me in the rear view mirror! Hi, me!”

“Liz!”

“What?”

“At the plant. What do you see at the plant?”

“Oh, um… I can’t see anything. There’s a bunch of yellow tape around it and cops walking around. And…they’re carrying out huge barrels of Crystal Light. I guess they’re really thirsty.”

Alex fell down onto his bucket seat. “Cops…? And they have the place barricaded off?” He thought for a moment, scratching his mullet. “Okay, change of plans. Liz, I want you to find the chief and pry him for all the information he has. You’re rich, so they won’t try to arrest you. And if they think you know too much…well, they won’t. Trust me.”

“But there are no Indians here… Just cops.”

“Do you see a cop with a beer gut and a huge mustache?”

“Three of them.”

“Which one has the shiniest badge?”

“That one.”

“Yeah, like I can see them… Okay, Liz, is he wearing mirror-lensed tear drop sunglasses?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s the one you want.”

“That’s a 1-4-1, good buddy!” she said.

“Over and out,” he replied, waiting for the click. “…Well, my IQ has dropped about 40 points.”

Liz tossed her cell phone onto the passenger seat of her Lamborghini, turned off the ignition, and hopped out. Then, remembering her disguise, she reached for a pair of dark sunglasses off the dashboard and slid them over her eyes with a sly grin. The ‘chief’ was up ahead, no more than a good ten yards away with his back to her, talking to a couple of his lackeys, who were just nodding and pretending to care.

“Can’t let Alex down!” she told herself, straightening her mini-skirt so that it was almost finger-length. “Have to look my best.” She strutted over to the officers, but her eyes were elsewhere, watching blue-uniform cops wheeling out barrel after barrel of lemon-flavored Crystal Light and loading it into the back of an armored semi.

Noticing his lackeys gawking at something other than his ugly mug, the chief suddenly turned around and saw a girl dressed in a cheerleader uniform, rimmed sunglasses like him, and a skirt barely long enough to make it as a belt.

He looked her up and down (more down than up) and then lowered his shades. “Excuse me, young lady, we’re conducting very important business here. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the premises.”

“I’m sorry, sir, even if I knew what those words meant, I’m not moving until you answer some questions for me.”

“That’s fine by me,” one of lackeys whispered to the other.

The chief glared at the girl, trying to focus on her eyes. “Who do you think you are?”

“No, who do you think you are?” she retorted.

“I’m Captain Jimbo Crow of the State City County Police. See my badge? It means I’m important!”

“Yeah, I used to get gold stars on my spelling tests all the time in kindergarten. I’m important too.”

“Well, my car makes noises and lights up when I flick a switch.”

“I drive a Lamborghini.”

“Well, I—” the chief started to say, but one of his lackeys interrupted him.

“Sir, isn’t that the daughter of Thurston Howell III?”

Captain Jimbo’s glasses almost fell off his nose as he reeled his head back around. “B-by Heaven’s name! It is! Miss Elizabeth, you must forgive me. I did not recognize you in that…attire.”

“But I’ve had those tires on my Lamborghini for years.”

“Please, you must forgive me,” the captain bowed again. “I had no idea it was your Highness. If I could have your hand, I would kiss it.”

“Sorry, I already have a boyfriend. Plus, I’m on a top secret mission.”

“Right, you came wanting questions. I am an open book.”

Liz raised an eyebrow behind her sunglasses. “Okay…?”

“Ask away.”

“What?”

“Your questions.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. “Uh… Do you… … Tell me everything you know.”

“That’s…not really in question format, sweet Elizabeth. I was told by my boss to only answer yes or no questions asked by citizens, so as to not expose my ‘imbecilic hillbilly cop nature to the general public’. Or something like that.”

“Okay, ummm…” Liz chewed on her upper lip. “Tell me everything you know or else you’ll be earning your paycheck through waxing my car?”

“You wouldn’t really do that to ol’ Jimbo, would you?”

She tapped her foot. “Gee, I do believe that’s not in answer format. I didn’t hear a yes or no, did you? Perhaps your boss knows the answer. Shall we ask him?”

“Okay, okay,” the jovial cop responded, shooing his lackeys away with a wave of the doughnut in his hand. “Follow me and we’ll talk.”

“That’s more like it,” Liz replied, walking beside Jimbo as they headed towards the front doors of the Crystal Light plant. “Now, what are all these cops doing here? If this is some kind of party and I wasn’t invited, I’ll have your badge hanging on my trophy wall.”

“No party, I’m afraid, or else you know you’d be the first one with an invite.” Reaching the doors and finding them shut, though not locked, the chief whistled to a pair of guards who were busy loading barrels onto the semi. The guards quickly dropped their work (quite literally) and scuttled towards the doors, throwing them open for Jimbo and Liz and bowing their heads as the two walked inside. Liz felt right at home.

“Aw, look, a sunroof!” she exclaimed, pointing to a very gaping and very jagged hole in the ceiling. “This really is just like my house.”

“No, actually, that’s where the meteor struck the building.”

“A meteor? The kind that live in space?”

“Most of them do live in space, but every now and then they come to visit Earth. A few nights ago, one of those hit this very building in that very spot. Left no survivors.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Not really. Nobody was around to see it.” Jimbo took off his sunglasses and clipped them to his gray shirt pocket. “They say it must’ve happened some time over the weekend. When the manager came the other day, he found that the meteor had landed and broken apart in one of the vats of lemon-flavored Crystal Light powder. There have been a few automated delivers since then, but we’ve managed to recall most of the stuff from the shelves of the city.”

“That’s good.”

“They don’t call us ‘super cops’ for no reason! That’s why the Crystal Light people had the brains to call us in. ‘Course, we didn’t see anything wrong at first. Just a big rock had fallen from the sky; happens all the time back home. But I guess one of our city-slicker scientists noticed strange little crystallites mixed among the lemon powder. You want to see?”

“Sure,” Liz shrugged.

Jimbo pulled a small plastic bag from his pocket and held it up. “Look how it sparkles.”

“Very pretty,” Liz smiled. These crystallites were bigger than the ones she had seen in Alex’s sample. They weren’t changing sizes either, and with any luck, the police didn’t know the true power they possessed. But Liz knew. And she grinned all the harder because she knew. “Can I have it?”

“You mean the evidence!?” Jimbo exclaimed.

“I just want what’s in the bag. It’s such a teeny, weenie bit.”

“No way, Miss Elizabeth! You may be the daughter of the most powerful man in the state, but I can’t go handing over police evidence to you! This stuff could be dangerous. The crystallites could, like, get caught in somebody’s throat and cause them to choke or something. Ha, not on my watch, little lady! Not on my watch. I am ever vigilant. Eyes like a hawk.”

“Sir,” one of the guards said, peeking his head through the door, “the last barrel has been loaded into the truck and the vat’s been cleaned. Our work here is done.”

Jimbo waved him away. “Good, good. I’ll take the semi, dump the cargo in the ocean next to the water supply tank, and meet you all at Ducky’s.”

“Right on!” the guard cheered and disappeared, leaving Jimbo and Liz alone in the Crystal Light plant.

“Another meticulous and thorough police job done to perfection thanks to my expertise in the field,” Jimbo said, stretching his imaginary overalls with his thumbs. “And it only took the shutting down of a major corporation, many days of painstaking labor, forty-two coffee-and-doughnut breaks, four miles of yellow crossing tape, sixteen police cars, and an entire police force to load one average-sized semi trailer. Yes, siree, I smell a reward from your father in the near future.”

“I’ll make sure you’re condemned for your hard work,” Liz said, not realizing the irony of her mis-wording, like always.

“I’d appreciate that!”

Apparently he didn’t realize it either.

Liz smiled up at him and pulled out her checkbook. “…Two thousand dollars.”

“What?”

“I’ll give you two thousand dollars for that entire shipment of Crystal Light.”

“I don’t think you understand the gravity of this situation, Miss Elizabeth. If my boss knew that I had been bribed…” He ran his finger across his throat, trying to impersonate a knife cutting him.

“And if my father knew that you physically abused me…” She tied an invisible noose around her neck and pretended to hang herself, rolling her pupils upward so that only the white of her eyes showed through and stuck out her tongue limply.

“Abused!? I did no such thing!”

“Ow!” she cried out in pretend fun. “Stop it, Jimbo! No, I will not do that with you! What are you doing!? Put those handcuffs away! Sick!”

Jimbo placed his hands on her shoulder, trying to calm her down. “Not so loud,” he said in a hushed voice, glancing around. “…Make me a better offer.”

“Now you’re speaking my language. You want something greater than two thousand dollars?”

“Yeah.”

“You couldn’t handle something greater than two thousand dollars.”

“Yes, I can! I’m from Texas.”

“You don’t have what it takes,” Liz taunted.

“Show me the money, girl! Show me the money!”

“Okay, try this on for size.” She clicked her tongue, speaking the words slow, sexy, and deliberately, “One thousand…two hundred…ninety-four dollars…and sixty-one cents…”

“Deal!” Jimbo panted. “Girl, you’re going to make me one rich ass cop.”

“Well, I can certainly make you an ass,” she smiled, filling out a check and handing it to him.

He stared at it, drool forming on his lip and sticking to his hairy moustache. “So many numbers…”

“Yes, well… I’ll be taking the keys to the semi now.”

“Oh, right,” he dropped them in her palm, never taking his eyes off the check. “Wait… How am I going to get to Ducky’s?”

“Walk,” she said, patting his beer belly. “You could use the exercise.”

Alex sat on his bucket, petting a stray white cat sitting in his lap. He had changed out of his hobo outfit and donned that of a notorious villain, dressed in all black, with a hood over his eyes and a pirate hook for one hand. “2:39… They’re late, my precious…”

The cat meowed.

Suddenly, there came a knocking thrice on the door and then the cawing of some wannabe owl.

“The door’s unlocked.”

It slowly opened and Cordelia appeared in the doorway, obviously cautious about entering as she lingered back. “You…weren’t kidding about living in the janitor’s closet.”

“I never kid.”

Cordelia raised an eyebrow. Alex had his back to her and had no attempt to greet her with a handshake or friendly wave or even an exchange of glances. He just sat there, stroking the cat, his face darkened by the faint shadows on the wall. “Who are you supposed to be? The Claw?”

“Just one of the many guises I must conceal myself with in order to survive in this world of incessant conspiracies against humanity.” He stroked the cat again, but this time with the wrong hand. The cat felt Alex’s sharp hook dig into his back and, yellow eyes doubling in size, let out a terrible screech. Alex was too slow to respond. Recoiling, the cat burrowed his claws into Alex’s thigh and then quickly jumped down, scampering across the floor, diving between Cordelia’s legs, and flying out the open doorway.

Cordelia shut the door. “What did you find out?”

Alex stood up and lowered his hood. “I think the government is behind this.”

“You would.”

“No, really. Where’s Andy?”

“Right here, shit for eyes,” Andy waved from Cordelia’s shoulder.

“Good, they haven’t come for him yet.”

“What are you talking about?” Cordelia asked.

Alex stepped over to the door and pulled down the third layer of blinds over the glass window. “I sent your friend Liz on a mission to infiltrate the Crystal Light plant north of here. You know the one?”

“Yes.”

“Well, she went there and found the whole place barricaded off and swarming with police officers. If I’m right, those crystallites in your artificial lemonade belonged to some kind of government experiment that got mixed up. Crystal Light, crystallites—an honest mistake, really, and an easy one for the idiots running our government to make. Now they’re trying to cover up their trail by disposing of the evidence.”

Cordelia stared at him. “…You sent my best friend to spy on what you suspected was an underground government project? Are you insane!?” She stared at him, dressed up in his half-pirate, half-villain ensemble. “…Don’t bother answering that. I shouldn’t have bothered to ask.”

“I’m not the one carrying a two-inch tall jock on my shoulder,” Alex replied.

“Just tell me that Liz is alright…”

“She should be fine. Of course, I haven’t talked to her since 2:39…”

“Call her up.”

“No. You never call a field agent while she’s on duty. It could ruin her cover.”

“Whatever,” Cordelia said, reaching into her handbag. She pulled out her cell phone, flipped it open, and put it to her ear. “Call Liz.”

She waited. Andy stared at the bead bracelet jingling from her wrist.

“No, I don’t want to ‘call Ruby’!” She snapped the phone closed and opened it again. “Call…Liz.”

Andy reached for one of the beads.

“Yeah, because ‘Cassie’ sounds so much like ‘Liz’,” Cordelia sighed, closing the phone again. She tried one more time. “Call Liz, you damn voice-activated hunk of junk.” This time it worked.

Andy managed to grab hold of one of the beads and yanked down on it, stretching the fiber thread as he pulled it further and further away from her wrist.

The other line picked up. “Hi, this is Liz! I can’t come to the phone right now because I’m a top secret mission for my Alex! Leave your name and number and if you sound sexy enough, I just might call you back! …Oh, and if this is Daddy, you have the wrong number. ‘Kay, bye!”

“You know,” Cordelia said into the phone, “they have recording machines to do that for you, Liz.”

“They do?” said the voice on the other line.

“Yeah, you don’t need to answer your phone to tell the person calling that you’re busy.”

“Oh, God, give me that!” Alex cried, snatching the pink cell phone away from her. “Liz, you twit! What did you find out?”

Unfortunately for Andy, the jolt in Cordelia’s wrist from losing hold of the cell phone caused her arm to jerk upwards, tightening the thread of the bracelet a little too far for Andy to maintain balance. Like a rubber band fully stretched, the beads were flung back towards her arm at an alarming rate, carrying Andy with them, and slammed into her skin. She cried out at this sudden shock, rubbing her wrist. She had no idea Andy’s body was pinned against her by the constricting beads, but he sure did. And he would’ve let her know too, either by screaming or crying out from the massive pain he felt in his chest, if only the bracelet would have the mercy of letting go of his lungs. But it didn’t and he was left hanging there with the only thing keeping him from a two hundred foot fall was the thing cutting off his air supply. He wondered which would be the worse way to go.

“Alex!” Liz squealed over the phone, her voice deafeningly audible through the whole closet. “You were almost right about the chrysanthemums.”

“Crystallites.”

“Yeah, remember how you thought God put them in the Crystal Light?”

“I said our government, but I can see how you can mix the two up. They both are false facades who, through their hypocritical speeches and actions, run the masses of this country who are too blind to see the truth.”

“As a side note to the reader,” Cordelia whispered, “none of the rest of us support Alex’s opinions of the government and/or religion. His bitter, paranoid, and agnostic views are only part of his character and should not, and do not, reflect upon us or the author.”

“Who are you talking to?” Alex asked. “And Liz, what do you mean I was ‘almost’ right?”

“Well,” Liz said, “it turns out that aliens put the crystallites there!”

“That was my second guess!” he exclaimed. “Did you see the aliens, Liz? Did you communicate with them?”

“No… I only saw the hole they left in the roof of the Crystal Light plant.”

“Of course… Where their spacecraft landed!” He was ecstatic now, pacing around his bucket in circles. “Liz, did the cops tell you anything? Did you get any evidence?”

“I got better than that! I got proof.”

“Liz, you’re amazing! I’m sorry for ever questioning your very existence on this Earth!” He paused for a second to reflect on his excitement. “Aliens… First contact… And these crystallites are only the beginning… Liz! When can I see this proof?”

“You can see it now. I’m parked out back of the school.”

“Let’s go!” Alex claimed, grabbing Cordelia’s hand and rushing out the door. Neither of them knew Andy was still choking to death under Cordelia’s bracelet.

Cordelia and Alex burst out the metal back doors of the school, running down the steps. Alex still had a tight grip on Cordelia’s wrist, which really didn’t give her much of a choice but to trail behind him, though when he soon came to a halt, the two of them almost collided.

They were standing there, looking up at a giant semi with the words ‘Government Property’ painted on the side in letters as big as a house. Liz, behind the wheel of the semi, waved down at them as she continued to back up the semi, crushing a silver BMW under the back tire and knocking over about four large dumpsters.

“…We are so screwed,” is all that Alex could say.

Cordelia covered her mouth.

“Agent Cheer reporting!” Liz said, leaving the key in the ignition and jumping down about ten feet from the semi door to hard concrete. “Did somebody order forty thousand cases of Crystal Light?”

Alex stared at her, his jaw unable to close.

Liz cocked her head at him and looked to Cordelia for help. “What’s wrong with Freak Boy?”

But Cordelia was just as traumatized. “You…stole…a forty-ton semi…that’s government property…and drove it here…”

“Oh, psh! When you’re rich, you don’t steal anything; you sensibly acquire it. Or at least that’s what Daddy calls it.”

“You…stupid bitch…” Alex managed to sputter, holding his trembling hands on either side of Liz’s neck as if he was going to strangle her. “How did a retard like you ever make it to high school!? How is it your parents even keep you alive, knowing you’ll squelch your family’s whole fortune and reputation the very day you inherit it? You…you… I can’t even think of a name for you. Your very self-being deserves a whole new word in the dictionary because I don’t feel there is one apt to accurately describe you.”

Liz just blinked at him, squishing the watery eyes underneath her sunglasses.

“Look at this!” he exclaimed, waving his wild hands over to the semi. “Can your tiny brain not comprehend the meaning of those two words!? ‘Government Property!’ Prosecutors shall be executed. It’s bad enough the government already wants me dead, but now you have to go and give them a perfect reason to snipe me out on the spot! Somehow, you’ve managed to leave them the most obvious trail of breadcrumbs you possibly could. Tell me, Liz, because I marvel at your downright idiocy—how the hell could one person possibly contain all the stupidity that you so explicitly flaunt? If you had common sense, I’d bring it in for interrogation and sentence it to death.”

Liz took off her sunglasses, revealing tears streaming down her cheeks, but Alex either didn’t notice or care.

“I bet aliens didn’t even leave the crystallites in the powder! The cops probably told you it was caused by a meteor from outer space and you, with your D- average in science, think ‘meteors’ are a breed of extraterrestrials that zip around in spaceships. I don’t even want to know—no, I don’t even care how you possibly managed to ‘sensibly acquire’ this semi. I just want out. I’m going to have to move to another town and change my name once again. Thanks a lot, Liz.”

“I was just trying to help,” she whispered.

“There is no help you could possibly give or get. You are helpless beyond all reason and doubt. Let me guess—you probably killed all the cops and stuffed their bodies in the back of the semi. Am I right?”

Liz didn’t answer, so Alex sidestepped her, trotted over to the semi, snatched the keys out of the ignition, and unhitched the back of the semi. He pulled it down, crushing what remained of the silver BMW, and nearly collapsed in awe at the hundreds of barrels stacked one on top the other and the endless rows of boxes of Crystal Light that filled the inside of the trailer. The sweet, sugary aroma of lemons filled his nostrils, the intense color blinded him for a moment, and he found himself stumbling back into a fallen dumpster.

He swallowed hard. “Is this…everything?”

Liz nodded slowly.

“Do you have any idea what we have here?”

“…A semi full of shrinking powder?”

Tears flooded Alex’s eyes. “This would be such a beautiful day if I wasn’t going to die at the end of it.”

“I won’t let the government hurt you, Alex…”

“You!?” he exclaimed. “It’s you, Liz, who they are going to snipe out first! You’re the one who hijacked their semi! The ‘how’ of which will puzzle me to the end of time… But even so, this is something Daddy’s little fortune can’t save you from! At least there is some justice in this world.”

“You don’t have to be such an ass!” Cordelia snapped, suddenly shaking herself from her frozen state. “Liz did what you asked her to do, didn’t she? It’s your fault for not specifying whether or not she should steal the plant’s entire cargo of Crystal Light, load it into a private semi owned by the government, and drive it twenty miles to a public high school.”

“And to think,” Alex said bitterly, “I was under the impression that was a given. But I guess to our mindless friend there, everything is fair game in love and stupidity.”

“That’s it!” Liz stomped her foot. “You…you’re such a jerk, Alex! I’m sorry for ever loving you!”

“I’m sorry you did too.”

She glared at him, clenching her fists next to the vibrant red of her mini-skirt. “If the government doesn’t kill you, I will! I’m going to make you pay for all the tears I’ve cried because of you. You’re going to regret the very moment we met four hours ago. I’ll see to it!”

“I already do,” Alex muttered as she turned her back to him and stormed towards the back doors of the school, slamming into them because she thought they were push, not pull.

“You didn’t have to be so mean,” Cordelia sighed as Alex climbed into the back of the semi.

“She’s going to get us all killed. If I were you, I’d take your little—and I mean that in the most literal sense—boyfriend and get out of here before the feds show up.”

Cordelia blinked, patting her empty shoulder. “Andy… Where’s Andy!?”

“I don’t know,” Alex said. “I don’t keep tabs on your boyfriend.”

Cordelia slowly lifted up her sneakers, checking the bottoms of them for any signs of Andy. There was none. Sighing in a sort of momentary relief, she slapped her shoes back onto the concrete and sifted through her handbag. Then she noticed something brushing against her wrist. She turned her arm over and saw Andy caught between her bracelet and her skin, his mouth open, trying to speak.

“Hi, Andy.”

He waved at her.

“That looks painful.”

He nodded fiercely.

“You’re almost as blue as the beads.”

He thrashed his arms about in an attempt to pry his body free.

“Hold still,” Cordelia told him as she stretched the bracelet, pulling Andy out, and held him in front of her face. “You okay, blue boy? You need a fiddle to play?”

“That,” Andy said, rubbing his red neck (no relationship to the country folk), “is going to leave a nasty rope burn.”

“At least we found a safer place to carry you instead of my shoulder.” She started to stretch the bracelet again.

“You can’t be serious,” Andy whined.

But she was. She pushed him under, gradually lowering the thread of the bracelet around his waist so that it would hold him in place like a seat belt. “Comfy?”

“No.”

“I could put it around your neck.”

“Suddenly, this feels like a cotton bed.” He put his arms behind his head. “Ah, snug pillow! I doth love thee…thou… Which is it?”

“You’re no Shakespeare.”

“That’s forsooth!”

“…Yeah.” Cordelia lowered her arm and turned back to Alex, who was busy hurling barrel after barrel of Crystal Light down the semi’s ramp. “Alex, what are you doing?”

“Trying to burn all the evidence before the feds show up. You want to go catch Liz and we can tie her up and burn her too?”

“You should really go apologize to her. She’s been known to hold very long grudges…”

“Ha! That girl couldn’t hold a single thought, let alone a grudge, in that head of hers for two seconds.”

“Still…”

“Look,” Alex poked his head out from the back of the semi, “if you’re going to stick around here and nag me, would you at least help me unload? We’ll hide this stuff in the basement of the school for now.”

“Your summer home, I take it?”

“Shut up. It’s dark and cool down there. It’s a great place to live.” Heaving another barrel off the ramp, he stood back and wiped his brow. “It’s always a great place to store things that you don’t want other people to find. If the government knew the things I kept hidden in there, I’d be dead already. We’ll burn the stuff tonight when nobody is around.”

“What about the semi? We can’t leave that here.”

“I don’t have my license.”

“I can’t drive a semi,” Cordelia frowned, flipping her wrist over so she could see Andy. “Do you know how?”

Andy wondered if she noticed he was still the size of her thumb.

“It doesn’t matter,” Alex said. “Judging by the blood splattered over the front of the semi, I’d say Liz doesn’t know how to drive one either. …Oh, and her Limburger…car…whatever it’s called is parked in here. You want to move that too?”

“I’ll take care of it,” Cordelia sighed. She climbed into the back of the semi with Alex and backed the Lamborghini off the ramp, parking it next to the crushed BMW. Then she proceeded to help Alex unload box after box of Crystal Light until the trailer was as naked as Paris Hilton in the dark and their bodies smelled like lemon shampoo in the shower. Towers of boxes and barrels of Crystal Light made a miniature city behind them.

“School will be letting out any minute now,” Alex said, closing the back of the semi. “I’ll haul this stuff into the basement while you find a good place to stash the semi. …If we’re lucky, we might live to see another day.”

Cordelia locked the trailer door and pulled out the keys. “Okay, I’ll meet you back here after football and cheerleading practice.”

She started walking towards the front of the semi, but Alex felt the need to ask something. “Um…Cordelia?”

She stopped. “Yeah?”

“Just…uh…what was it you and Andy were doing over the phone when I called?”

A grin appeared on her face.

“Come on!”

“Bye, Alex!”

He ran after her, but she had already scampered up to the door of the semi and dove in through the window. “Come on, Cordelia! I have to know!”

“Cheerleading practice ends at eight!” she called down. “I’ll see you then.” It took her some time to figure out how to move the semi, which resulted in an accidental reversal, knocking over one of the biggest towers of Crystal Light. But she eventually got it right, the tires rolling past Alex as he stepped back, watching her pull out of the school parking lot just as the buses were coming in.

His arms dangled loosely at his side. “Fine… But don’t expect to be getting your precious antidote any time soon!”

Alex stepped out of the door to the basement’s school, shutting it and bolting the chains behind him. He did so quietly, not because he was afraid of somebody hearing him, but because it felt right—natural almost—to leave the silence undisturbed. The sky was darker now and the parking lot was empty, save for a cold breeze scattering trash across its vast black sea. Alex walked up the steps, because the basement door was situated in a small alcove dug into the ground, and leaned against the top railing.

“Must be getting close to the end of practice,” he thought to himself, noting the silhouettes of the cheerleaders breaking apart in the distant field. It had taken him almost four hours to carry every box and barrel of Crystal Light into the basement and he had the sweat sticking to his shirt to prove it. Luckily, nobody had apparently seen him and the breeze tingling through his skin was enough to cool him off. So he stood there, arms folded across his chest, waiting for Cordelia. He let out a deep sigh. It was the first time he ever found himself waiting for a girl.

“You look exhausted,” came a voice out of nowhere.

Alex looked around. He spotted a figure by the corner of the school, traces of shady blonde hair dancing in the wind. For a moment, he thought it was Cordelia and almost called out to her. But his eyes adjusted to the fading sun, he realized it was only Liz, alone in the shadows. She stood in her red and white cheerleading uniform, the mini-skirt at her thighs fluttering like a loose flag in the wind. She held a water bottle in one hand.

“What do you want, Liz?” Alex grumbled.

She stepped closer, blotting out the crimson sun with her head. “I came to help…”

“It’s too late. The Crystal Light is safely secured in the basement of the school and Cordelia’s wasted the semi.” He glared at her, though it became more of a squint now because the rays of the sun had peeked around her shoulder and blinded him. “I’m just waiting for her to show up. So go now. Go on with your meaningless life. There’s your car, your keys are in the ignition, nobody is stopping you. Just go.”

“But Alex—”

“It’s over, Liz. You almost cost me my life today. But rest easy, for I have saved both of our lives, so you can wake up tomorrow and go back to never seeing me again. And I’ll slip back into the shadows and you can continue being the rich, popular, the-world-revolves-around-me snob you’ve always been. Don’t bother thanking me. I just want you to go.”

Liz finally stepped out of the shadows and her face was damp with tears. “…Cordelia never showed up practice.”

“What?”

“I’ve been calling her cell phone for an hour. She’s not answering.” Liz was crying now and standing so close to Alex that he couldn’t turn away. “What did you do to her!?”

“I-I just told her to find a safe place to hide the semi,” he stammered, but it was obvious from the doleful expression bleeding down her face that those words were of no comfort.

“I never asked to be a part of this,” she cried, clutching the collar of his shirt. “You made me do it! You made me steal the semi and get my best friend killed!”

“Whoa, calm down! Liz, I’m sure Cordelia’s not dead. This is rated PG-13.”

She spun him around and pinned him against the brick wall of the school, whispering cold and sexy into his ear, “It’s not fair. You’re the one who deserves to be dead. For all you’ve put us through when we only wanted help. Agent Cheer is not a happy girl.”

“Liz, stop. I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Oh, but you have,” she hissed, unspinning the cap of the water bottle. “No more tears, Alex.” She grabbed his chin, prying open his mouth, and dumped the contents of the bottle over his lips. He choked on the water, most of it missing his mouth completely, and seized Liz’s wrists. She cried out. Falling backwards, they wrestled to the ground.

“Liz!” Alex screamed, trying to hold her down. “Liz, stop it! Listen to me!” He couldn’t restrain her. She was too angry, too hostile. At least, that’s what Alex thought at first. But as he kept her pinned down, wild strands of her sticking to both their foreheads, he realized she was hysterical with laughter.

“What’s so damn funny!?” Alex demanded, spinning her over onto her back. Then he noticed a strange, but sweet, taste on his lips. He puckered them, licking the crusty sides with the tip of his tongue. The water she had doused him with, it tasted like…

His heart stopped. Lemons.

“No, Liz…” he whispered, pushing off her and staring down at his hands.

She continued to laugh while on the ground. “Yeah, I saved a little Crystal Light to drink at practice today. I figured you wanted to finish it for me.”

“But…what about Cordelia!? She might be in trouble!”

Liz sat up. “Whatever kind of trouble Cori is in, I’m sure she’d be much better off without your help.”

Alex was feeling the shrinking kick in now. He started to run across the parking lot, but the road was a mile away and he could feel it getting further and further away with every step. He looked over her shoulder to see Liz walking towards him, slowly, her hair still blowing in the wind. Stumbling over a speed bump, Alex fell towards the hard concrete, cutting his cheek as he landed.

“Oh, shit…” was all he could mumble into the cement, knowing what was coming next. Liz’s sneakers landed on either side of him, which were both the size of trailers—the big kind, that rednecks live in—and her shoestrings dangled over him like thick ropes. He craned his neck upwards, past her tanned legs and her blowing mini-skirt, to her face that was staring down at him.

“I guess you were right about Crystal Light shrinking only guys,” she thundered from above. “I drank about as much as you and I feel taller than ever!”

Her voice was now more loud and annoying than ever. How Alex wished he could cover her ears, but she didn’t give him a chance as she scooped him up, locking her fingers around his tiny body, and dropped him into her water bottle. He hit the plastic bottom with a thud.

“This would be a great time to apologize to me,” she said, “but unfortunately, I don’t feel like hearing it.” With that, she screwed the top back on the bottle and began walking towards the blackened sunset.