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…”