“Oh my God,” Alaina gasped with disgust and horror as her brother shrunk deeper into her fist.  She opened her fingers to observe the reduced boy sprawled in her palm.  Her wrist trembled, unable to handle it.  “Are you two not seeing this?  He’s out of control!”

            “I don’t know what you’re so surprised about,” Blake chuckled.  The eldest Baker’s usual policy was not to give two shits about the ideological conflict between his eldest sister and brother; he was only given pause now because of the humorous rage Alaina was descending into.

            “Hey, screw you,” she snarled at him, though most of her annoyance was just a by-product of the living humiliation resting unapologetically in her palm.  With her other hand, she plucked up Tom by his leg between a thumb and index finger, lifting him lithely from his perch and dangling him upside down above the sunbaked sidewalk so she could speak at eye level.  “Listen up, you little hellion.  I am not going to let you destroy my chance at making a real difference in our school.  Okay?  I am NOT.”

            “Okay,” Tom mumbled as all the blood began to rush to his head.  He did his best not to look at the ground practically spiraling so far below between his sister’s enormous tennis shoe clad-feet, and instead tried to focus on the rubbery clatter of her impatiently marching soles, but this wasn’t much more helpful.

            The four siblings arrived at the bus stop just as the great yellow vehicle lurched around the corner of the other block with a puff of charcoal smoke.

            “You know that sooner or later you’re going to learn,” Alaina threatened, her warm breath washing over Tom’s face as she dangled him closer to her glossed lips.  “One way or another, I’m going to make it clear to you what it costs to be a filthy little liar.  Do you understand that?”

            “Yep,” Tom said, an in an instant had gone from a comparatively prodigious four inches down to a measly one and a half.  His tiny leg was practically swallowed up by the pads of Alaina’s fingertips.

            Unable to come up with an adequate retort to express her fury, Alaina resorted to throwing her free hand over her mouth just in time to suppress a wild scream, with all the emotion as though she’d just stumbled upon a mangled dead body.

            “I can’t take any more. Not right now.  I have to think,” Alaina groaned, extending her arm all the way out and pinching Tom’s miniscule leg with even less pressure, clearly too grossed out by his lack of proper values to even want to touch him at this point.  “Can somebody please please please take this piece of lying garbage away from me?”

            “Sure!” Emma piped happily, cupping her palm under Alaina’s hand to catch Tom just as he was unceremoniously released from his older sister’s grip.  She’d obviously been waiting for this moment, clearly with the hope that Tom would dig himself a deep enough grave that his thumb-sized body could be inherited into her hands.  The bus screeched to a halt at the end of the sidewalk as the door was squeezed open for its three normal-sized occupants to climb aboard.

            “Thank God,” Alaina grumbled, hopping up the steps of the transport.  Under her breath she added: “Figures she’d be the one…”

            “Wooow, that was a big lie, huh?” Emma smarmed cheekily to her brother.  Her voice held none of the revulsion for the “l-word” that her sister’s did.  She gently pinned Tom into the center of her hand and rubbed her thumb up along his stomach and chest as though examining him.  At less than the height of her smallest finger, he was powerless to fight back.  “Tommy’s itty-bitty.  I don’t think you’ve been this small since… since…”

            Grinning to herself, Emma fondly recalled the previous occasion several weeks back that Tom’s lying had put him down to such a vulnerable size.  She’d certainly taken full, entertaining advantage of the situation to create several fun memories she didn’t soon intend to forget, all of them completely at Tom’s expense.  She climbed aboard the steps and closed her fingers over her miniature sibling, caging him against her cushy palm in almost total darkness.

            “Don’t make a mess this time, Em,” Blake mumbled with irritation as he followed last, recognizing the mischievous glint in his sister’s eye before she’d even done anything.  “Mom blamed me last time you put Tom in-”

            “Ughhh… yeah, yeah, I know,” Emma said with a casual shrug, fully intending to ignore this warning if a good enough idea should strike her.  She swirled her gum, a bright purple grape-flavor today, about the tip of her tongue and along her top row of teeth.

            “Seriously.  And make sure you don’t forget where you put him, either,” Tom called as he walked toward the back of the bus, leaving his youngest family member in her zone near the front.  The bus chugged back to life and rolled down the street toward the exit from the neighborhood.

            “Hey!  I never forget!” Emma defended indignantly, not particularly caring that the other teenage passengers could clearly overhear the inter-sibling drama.  “Alaina’s the one who forgot him in her gross gym shorts, and who found him before he went in the washing machine?  That’s right: me!”

            By this time, Blake was already too blended into the raucous roar of his football teammates in the back to listen or care about Emma’s objections.  In giddy defiance, the girl instead returned her attention to the little trinket of a boy contained in her palm.  Brushing her short locks away from her eyes, she flashed him an earnest smile.  She flattened the violet gum against her tongue and slowly expelled its rubbery mass between her lips, inflating it as a bubble that rapidly began to expand.

            Once the gum bubble had reached its full capacity, however, rather than sucking it back between her cheeks as she had been, the girl gave a final meaningful glance to her tiny brother still splayed in the center of her palm.  She plucked him up by the waist between her thumb and index finger, bringing him to the purple sugary orb.

            For a moment, Tom looked at his vaguely distorted reflection shiny face of the bubble.  His sister’s titanic fingers, still pinched around his sides, positively dwarfed him as he hung limply in her grip.  There would’ve been no resisting possible, even if such a silly fantasy had crossed his mind.

            Giggling so hard she could hardly keep her tiny target steady, Emma pressed Tom’s body face-first into the sticky surface of the gum until it forcibly popped.  The tiny teen was hardly recognizable then as the strewn strands of gum softly exploded outward and coated his features and clothes.  Coughing, he struggled to get a clean breath of air, though every gulp of oxygen still tasted like hot, wet grapes and artificial sugars.  The stretchy mess tangled itself across his face, greasing his skin with Emma’s gooey spit.

            “Still, it doesn’t hurt to be too careful, right, Tommy?” Emma snickered, giving her miniscule sibling a victorious wink as she swept her free hand back through her ponytail again.  “And believe me, there’s no way anyone’s going to lose you looking like this.”

            Tom spent the rest of the bus ride immobilized in the moist bundle of his sister’s fruity gum, twiddled playfully between her massive fingers, as the spit-slicked candy gelled through his face and hair.