“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.