I stare at the wet tip of her gigantic tongue poking between her teeth.  Daring me to continue on talking like this as I dangle upside before her moist lips and gleaming teeth.  So I take the dare.

                “You wouldn’t do it.  I know you wouldn’t.”

                For a moment I see genuine shock on her face, then she composes herself once again into sadism.  She takes a deep breath, then exhales onto me.  Heat wave.  Maybe my last one I’ll ever feel.  Her eyes roll and she tilts her head back, letting her hair fall out of her face, then whips it back into place.

                “And why wouldn’t I, Jack?”

                “Because you can’t.”

                Silence again.  I can’t believe I’ve actually lived this long.  It’s coming to a head soon.  I can feel it.

                “Yes, I can, Jack.  I CAN.  I can do WHATEVER I want.  To ALL of you.  You’re mine.  You belong to me.  Your life… belongs to ME,” she says forcefully, clearly running out of clear options to take in reprimanding me.  “You’ve ALWAYS belonged to me.  Before you even moved here, into my house.  Before you got here.  Always.  When I found all of you, I knew you were mine.  So I took you.  I didn’t steal you.  It wasn’t wrong.  It was right.  Because you ALL belong to ME,” she says, grunting with rage, repeating herself in an effort to convince us.  Her volume is rising.

                “It wouldn’t take much, Jack.  You wouldn’t take much.  All I’d have to do would be to get… one… little… taste of you, and the next thing you know, you’d going down… my… throat,” she says, but the last few words begin to muffle because of what’s going on.  As she speaks the next few sentences, her tongue emerges from her lips fully, snaking toward me.  Widening as she flexes it.  And then it’s on me, all over my face. 

                All over my body.

                Heat instantly begins radiating into my skin by sheer brute force as waves upon waves of rippling, hot saliva are slaked over my entire body as Julia drags me from the slick, cold tip of her tongue and down the relatively short length of it to her lips.  My head slams against her lips, and then I suddenly feel my abdomen being pressed down as she drills me down against the flattest, warmest section of her tongue.  My breathing quickens, almost causing me to hyperventilate, as I find myself blowing a bubble directly into a streaming river of spit in an effort to breathe, settling like mud or glue onto her titanic tongue.  The bubble balloons disgustingly around my head as I struggle desperately in the tiny air pocket I have for life, then pops, sopping into my hair and shirt and causing me to gag as my mouth fills with Julia’s gooey, steaming mouth juices.  Slowly, as her spit clogs my throat and inside of my cheeks and my coughing becomes more and more useless, I press down as hard as I can, hoping to gain some leverage, but I feel like I’m pressing down on a punching bag that’s just been doused in syrup.  Not only is it physically rock-hard and refusing to budge, the surface is so slippery and uneven, I can’t possibly hope to get a good enough grip on her taste buds to make a new air pocket for myself.

                Julia’s fingers tilt on my leg and drag me back in the other direction, pulling my face around her tongue in a lap before sliding me back along her tongue, to the wider, thicker section again.  Flecks of spit from the motion rain down on my soaking pant legs, my arms twisted uncomfortably under my body as Julia presses down again, dunking my head as deep as it can go into the scalding, mucky valley of her dark red tongue.

                My breathing slows.

                I’m about to be killed by a tongue.  I’m literally about to die because I’m buried in someone’s tongue.  The tongue of an adorable, smart sixteen-year-old-girl.  A gigantic, monstrous tongue longer than me end to end, but a tongue nonetheless. 

                I had often thought about this.  The ways I could go.  The thousands of ways.

She could have balled me into a fist and squeezed until my intestines started leaking out from the bottom of her fist.  She could have grabbed onto my feet with one thumb and my head with the other, then yanked hard and ripped me in half.  She could have pinned me down with just her pinky finger, pressed hard, and crushed my heart inside my chest using my own ribcage.  She could have dug her fingernails into me so hard that it broke my skin and punctured a lung.  And that’s just what she could have done with her hand.  She could have smashed me under her heel.  Ground me into her shoe with her sole.  Put me between two of her toes and pinched together until I was paralyzed.  Tucked me in the space between her toes and the ball of her foot and scrunched me up inside it.  She could have eaten my limbs off.  She could have chewed me up and swallowed me, only to shit me out a few hours later.  Hell, she could have jammed me right up her anus and let me die of oxygen deprivation inside.  And it would have been less weird than this is.  Seriously.  I’m about to be killed from being helplessly smothered into a teenage girl’s fucking tongue because I dared to stand up for my friend.  What kind of world is this, anyway?

                And finally, it’s over.  With a quick sweep she’s swung my body away from the massive thing.  I open my eyes and see her tongue retracting into her mouth, at least three saliva strands connected to me in a direct line back to her lips.  Her tongue sweeps across her lips once more and cuts them all, leaving two of them still hanging on me, dangling in front of my face.  She giggles loudly, dangerously close to a cackle.

                “THAT’S why you should be, Jack.  So I’m going to say it one more time before I put you all the way in and add you to my lunch.  Are you SURE you’re not afraid?”

                I flail around for a moment, readjusting my sense of direction, as if drunk, and manage to find my face.   With my damp hands, I wipe across and remove the thick layer of saliva still coating me all over so I can get a better view.  Then, I reach up and grab at the strand hanging from my chest, right in front of my face and rip it off. 

                “NO, I’M NOT,” I yell out as loud as I can at her, leaning forward against gravity.  She rears back. 

                Almost afraid. 

                Of me.

                “You’re not going to do it.  I know you’re not.  And so I’m not afraid.  You’re not going to do it.  You’re not going to eat me, Julia,” I say, lowering my voice.  Her eyes break contact with mine, looking to the side.  She tilts the hand holding me at a diagonal angle so I can fall in, and she quickly adjusts it to a horizontal angle so I can sit there.  “You’re not, are you Julia?” I say confidently.

                “No,” she whispers finally.  Her hands lower me and Gina to the ground and I roll off to the ground with a nasty slop as the saliva dribbles onto the ground.  The others dash to both of us, pulling us to our feet.  We all stare up at Julia, afraid to make the wrong face and piss her off in her moment of weakness.

                “Class is… cancelled for today…” she says, and without another word covers the house roof up and pushes us back into the closet.  We’re all silent for a moment.  Gina bum rushes me and almost knocks my wind out in a hug.

                “Oh my G…” she starts, but her voice chokes off.  She still seems to be getting over the fear she felt for herself earlier.

                “Jack, how did you…” says Brian, dumbfounded.

                “I… don’t really know…” I say, feeling the adrenaline hitting my brain again.

                “That proves it!  That shows that you CAN do it, Jack!  I know you can now!”

                “Yeah, yeah, that’s right, umm…” I say, feeling my stomach starting to object to the high I’m getting.  I pull away from Gina, who is now sticky with Julia’s saliva as well after hugging me, and rush to the little bathroom to upchuck, my nervousness finally caught up with me.  All things considered, it’s not as bad as I was expecting the last five minutes to turn out.