“Ms. Margaret Stevens.” The chairwoman spoke up again, reading from her script. “If you’re willing, would you stand please for commentary?”

            Scott’s sister rose to her feet with greater ease than their brother. She smoothed a hand down the folds of her dress hugging her athletic curves, obviously aware that all in the room could see her now. Her blonde hair, longer and better maintained than any of her previous teenage years, flowed evenly between her fingers as she combed absentmindedly. Those crystal-blue eyes, though, found a home squarely on Scott’s back as she nodded to the panel.

            “As I said to your brother, we have a written statement… a very thorough one, I might add… which remains private for the time being,” the woman repeated again. “However, for the benefit of those gathered here and those involved in this particular case, we’d like to hear any thoughts you have in summation after today’s proceeding. Again, this does not account for official testimony, and is just an opportunity for those associated with Scott Stevens to make themselves heard.”

            “Okay,” the girl said brightly.

            Scott could feel her eyes on the back of his head now. This time, he didn’t quite have the energy to look back.

            “Answer at whatever length you wish, or not at all. Do you understand?”

            “Yep,” Maggie answered. The room fell to a hush once again.

            “Do you believe that your brother, Scott Stevens, is best suited to remain in house arrest custody at the current time?”

            “Yes.”

            The question was hardly out before the seventeen-year-old responded.

            Scott shrugged. Frankly, he was pretty sure he could give Maggie’s answers for her and land with about ninety-eight-percent accuracy.

            “Do you believe that your brother, Scott Stevens, is being treated fairly under regulation of Reduction and Rehabilitation?”

            “Yes.”

            A pause this time, but still without the stammers Kyle had suffered. Scott wasn’t surprised in the least. While his sister certainly had more than a couple of good reasons to have her doubts about his treatment in the Stevens household, namely the occasion more than a year ago when she’d found him out in the poolhouse, the specificity of the question protected her.

            Regardless of her mercifully softened treatment of her pint-sized brother after this bizarrely traumatizing encounter, Scott was positive her faith in R&R therapy itself had only been strengthened in the intervening months.

            “Based on your personal experience and witnessing of Reduction and Rehabilitation custody in your own home…” the chairwoman continued. “…and only on your personal experience and witnessing, do you believe it to be a viable method by which to correct wrongful behavior?” the woman pressed.

            “Of course,” Maggie said.

            Scott could hear her lips curve into a self-righteous smile at this final testament.

            With his fists around the room-freshening spritzer he specifically designated for his sister’s room, Scott slid silently between the crack in the door. The longer he worked without interruption, the better his chance of leaving the girl’s room unmolested. So, careful to not let the pads of his feet land on the cushioned terrain too loudly, he set about aerating the ground upon which his little titan of a sister so often trod.

            The melon-scented aerosol was a temporary solution, Scott noted, because inevitably the hapless fibers of the bedroom carpet would once again be damp with dried sweat and trampled beneath Maggie’s oily post-game soles. The routine was now to mist her floor once a week with the citrusy solution, and as the boy was discovering now, failing to follow that strict calendar meant the odor was a little sharper today than usual. It was pungent work, but someone had to do it, or at least that was the explanation Scott was given the first time he was handed the perfuming device and instructed to sling it over his back.

            He was fairly certain he was the only one who was able to detect the remnants of his sister’s BO since his face was just a matter of inches away from the carpet. But arguing with Judy tended to prove unwise, so Scott had resolved to just hold his breath and roll with it. If all he had to do was allow his sibling’s hard-working and spicy musk to infiltrate his lungs rather than sample it directly with his face ground against her skin, he was in no position to complain. Literally.

            Luck seemed to be on Scott’s side today. Maggie was certainly present, the five-foot-four soccer star and once-virtual bane of her tiny brother’s existence sprawled out on her stomach in the center of the floor. A rare occasion of rest for the over-active teen.

            However, her back was to the door as she fiddled with her touch screen tablet, which was dispensing what sounded like elevator music and clinical dialogue that Scott couldn’t quite make out, nor did he care to.

            No, as usual, his attention was inevitably and utterly stolen away by his sister’s bare feet as they rested against the carpet, flexed soles squared to the ceiling.

            Those toes writhed in their usual slow rhythm, grasping contentedly at fabric fibers and then allowing them to release like stretched spaghetti from between her stubby digits. As her appendages clenched and then splayed out again on the floor, the contours of her insteps continually changed their geometry, reflecting those rippling wrinkles and the oscillating color of her flesh between white and healthy pink. Her exposed calves tightened and relaxed in steady fifteen-second cycles as she savored the relaxation of her usually overworked limbs.

            Scott gulped, reminding himself that the girl had the heavenly grace not to entrap him beneath the weight of her peds for a whole year.

            No, at most, he’d just be ordered to massage them while she entertained herself on the tablet, barely noticing his presence until she hooked his neck between her toes to the chorus of a soft and creepily titillated giggle.

            He pressed onward, sticking to the walls as he applied the odor-eater spray with a delicate hand, in case the mechanism became caught and made too loud of a noise on one of its spritzes.

            It was hard not to want to pinch his nostrils shut. The aroma of Maggie’s used scrimmage wear and barefoot efforts wafted from the carpet, released from their dormant state with each of Scott’s footsteps.

            By the time he’d made it about six feet into the room, though, he hardly noticed it. The smell of his sister’s exercise-drenched feet was one he once swore he would never allow himself to grow accustomed to, probably at a time when he was between squeezed between sweat-soaked sock cotton and his sister’s muscular toes. What a joke that was to believe such a thing.

            Occasionally Maggie’s hand would move away from the touch screen of her device, and for a moment Scott would freeze solid in place, hoping to be mistaken for a conspicuously placed doll in her peripheral vision. Serendipitously, though, her fingers would just find their way back into her silky tresses, tucking them back behind her ear and out of the way. The girl was a stickler for having any and all distractions out of sight, both on the soccer field and in her most private of moments, often in times past with her shrunken brother in her fist and at her mercy.

            By the time he was roughly aligned with Maggie’s hips at the corner of the room, Scott was beginning to contemplate whether he could get away with only spritzing this first half of the room, allowing him to avoid crossing into his sister’s line of sight. However, before he could think about sneaking back the way he’d come, the low volume on the girl’s tablet was finally clear enough to be processed in his ears.

            “…though you may find it difficult to display confidence at first,” a woman’s voice said onscreen. “It is vital for all Reduction and Rehabilitation therapists to project a tone of self-certainty for the entirety of the corrective procedure. A reduced subject put physically into place to learn a lesson is only half of the experience. Therefore, you as a therapist-in-training must learn to present yourself in such a way as to become an absolute authority figure in the eyes of your assigned shrunken individual.”

            Scott felt an uneasy sensation snaking itself into his intestines as he leaned against the wall, under the hopefully-safe shadow of Maggie’s dresser.

            It was a training video for his sister’s upcoming internship at the Adams R&R clinic. He’d heard snippets of this type of instructional tape before, usually coming from his mother’s office in the wee hours of the night as of late when she thought he was asleep. But never at such close range and, fortunately, never before for his younger sister’s educative benefit. Frankly, he’d been much happier remaining ignorant of the program’s exact contents.

            “The key is to be consistently professional and resolute,” the woman’s voice continued. “Conduct yourself calmly at all times, but never be afraid to let your assigned individual know when they have made a mistake and disrespected your position. Whether in rewarding or rehabilitating, always make clear that you are in charge during the corrective procedure. Repeat that to yourself with me, if you will. You are in charge.”

            “I am in charge,” Maggie uttered under her breath.

            Unable to help himself, Scott tiptoed nearer to the resting island of his sister. Just over the crest of Maggie’s tanned forearm, he could make out the colorful image of the woman standing in an all-white room, infomercial-style.

            “Let’s try out a couple of sample situations, shall we?” The instructor took a few steps to the right as the camera panned after her, a few digital animations surrounding her as the view zoomed in toward her hand, where a computer-generated shrunken individual stood.

            She stooped toward the ground, and as her fingers touched down to the white floor, the little CGI man stepped robotically out of her palm and onto the ground by her left foot.

            “For purposes of example, let us say that your subject currently stands at four inches in height. He or she displays no signs of prior injury and is placed beside your shoe, one that is low enough to the ground that he or she could enter without problem. You ask your subject to enter the shoe, place themselves at the very end, and await further instruction. However, your subject tells you in no uncertain terms that they do not intend to heed you. You have already asked him or her once to cooperate and they have refused. What do you do?”

            A series of blue ovular bubbles appeared onscreen for Maggie’s interaction.

            “Do you, A: try again to convince your subject to enter your shoe. B: place the subject into your shoe yourself and inform them that their actions have now increased the punishment period. C: select a different punishment. Or D: kick the subject into your shoe and follow through with the punishment as planned.

            Scott felt pins and needles forming beneath his skin, prodding at the anxiously numbed muscle, and he wasn’t even the one being quizzed. He watched his sister’s finger hover over the screen for a moment before she jabbed at her chosen answer.

            “Congratulations, you’ve selected B, the correct answer!” the woman said happily. “For review, A is never the correct answer. As we’ve already gone over, you are the authority figure to your subject, and failure on their part to comply with instructions is also a failure on your part to project a confident handler. C would also not be correct unless the circumstances were different, but as stated in the question, the subject is not injured, and should have no problem complying with your instructions to enter the shoe. To alter the task after a refusal would demonstrate a weakness to the subject, and make you a less effective therapist. Finally, D should not be chosen, as it could injure a previously uninjured subject, and not only impede their improvement, but make them less capable of performing instructions afterward.”

            Once the answers were all explained, the woman’s fingers reappeared on the screen, pinched around the sides of the shrunken man, and dropped him into her shoe. The visual effects weren’t quite convincing, but they got the job done.

            “Your punishment period has been increased,” the woman scolded coolly to her now-invisible prisoner as she slid her socked foot into the dark mouth of the shoe and wriggled it into place, feigning the usual dance.

            “Hi, Scott.”

            Maggie’s voice was amiable and inviting, without the slightest note of surprise, which told Scott she’d known he was present the entire time but hadn’t been moved to address him yet or, indeed, pause her video education/entertainment. It was hard to say whether that was good or bad.

            “Hi, Maggie,” he said at last. Scott tongued at the roof of his mouth, his eyes stinging from dryness as he realized he hadn’t blinked in over a minute as he’d watched the lesson quiz.

            She turned her head to face him, still without sitting up, and at last jabbed the pause button on her tablet. Her lips broadened into a smile.

            “Whatcha doing?”

            “Uh, cleaning the upstairs.”

            “Wanna take a break from that and come rub my poor little toesies?” Maggie wheedled. She cocked her head as those blue eyes darted to her upturned feet.

            Her soles arched and scrunched playfully as she tilted them in Scott’s direction. Her toes, advertising themselves, and still testing the carpet fibers, thumped and clamped together. They were probably imagining his hands already tucked into the velvety crevices between. Even when his body was longer than his sibling’s relatively petite peds, it wasn’t an especially comforting sensation for Scott to come face-to-sole with the undersides of those devious, soccer-worn peds.

            He blinked, momentarily transfixed again out of painful habit to watch Maggie’s pink skin, but managed to compose after only a moment of the much-taller teen observing him with apparent amusement.

            “I… I, uh… um, actually, Mom’s-”

            “I’m just kidding, little boy,” she giggled, pressing a soft fist to her lips as her eyes glowed with light from the open window. Her toes clenched closed again. “I know Mom’s got her meeting thingy with the people.”

            “Right. Yeah. The meeting thingy with the people.”

            “If you’re not too tired after playing on a bunch of gross old lady feet down there, though, you know where to find me,” Maggie said casually, as if such a thing should be considered a reward after his tribulations.

            “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said.

            “Pleeease? I’ll make you into your boring biggest size again if you rub them for a little while afterward,” she promised and, to her credit, Scott at least couldn’t say his once-duplicitous sibling had actually swindled him with other such offers in the past year since their silent truce in the poolhouse. He’d have to work for it, but she would at least give him a hand.

            Scott shrugged. There were certainly worse deals he could make, and he had a suspicion he was about to be robbed of even what little height he had now once he was back at his mother’s feet downstairs.

            Plus, there were greater things at stake. He had a date with Ella tonight, after all: the first occasion alone out of the house since his sentence began, now with his newly extended premise-exiting privileges. His entire body had been pre-emptively aching for this evening for the last month. If he had to buy back a little dignity courtesy of Maggie’s needy toes before some desperately necessary alone time with his girlfriend, it was worth it.

            “Sure,” he said at last, spying the digital clock across the room and realizing he’d need a few minutes to get back to the patio. “See ya.”

            Scott had only just reached the crack in the door and begun sidling through it when he heard one final reply from beyond, and it wasn’t the video being unpaused.

            “Your punishment period has been increased,” Maggie repeated in a mocking whisper under her breath that copied the instructional woman’s strange tone. Though this joking response warmed Scott’s fluttering heart only slightly, the triumphant giggle that followed couldn’t help but quicken his pulse again as he headed for the stairs.