Gina
poured out some orange juice for herself only to find the carton
empty. She shook it with disgust, as if that would dislodge any
hidden remains, then shouted out the kitchen, “Ashley! We’re out
of juice!”
“What?”
Ashley’s faint voice shouted back from her room. Gina slammed the
empty carton into recycling and opened the fridge again.
“Don’t
just put empty cartons back in the fridge, you asshole!” It was a
futile scolding, but one she was obligated to give. For the principle
of the matter.
The
fridge was woefully devoid of drinks. Well, except for a small glass
bottle labeled “Ashley’s,” which meant it was off limits, but
really you could argue that Ashley owed her a drink and therefore, by
proxy,
this was hers. Grabbing the bottle and tearing off the saran wrap on
the top (Ashley must have thrown away the cap without even finishing
it), Gina chugged the dark blue liquid and started washing the bottle
before recycling it.
As
she washed it, the bottle kept threatening to slip out of her hands,
forcing her to shift her grip constantly. Gina frowned, carefully
swirling the water inside. The bottle hadn’t felt particularly
slick or anything and she wasn’t even using soap, but she could
still feel the glass sliding against her skin. Staring at it, it
almost looked like it was expanding. Which was weird, right? Wasn’t
it metal that expanded in hot water? And she wasn’t even using hot
water anyways —
Gina’s
elbows suddenly hit the sink counter and she dropped the bottle and
stepped back. And saw that there was something horribly wrong about
everything.
Her
sleeves drooped, swinging around as she recoiled; her jeans were
piling at her feet; under them, she could feel her socks sag and flop
when she stumbled, almost stepping straight out of them. Her
surroundings weren’t any more comforting, looking as oversized as
her clothes. And getting more oversized as she watched. The sink was
approaching chest height, passing it even, and there wasn’t any
sign of it slowing.
Gina
screamed.
Ashley
pounded into the kitchen, skidding to a stop at the entrance and
looking much too tall herself, making Gina scream again and skitter
backwards, step on her own pants, and fall straight on her butt, her
shirt ballooning over her.
Ashley,
looking panicked, said, “You drank
my potion?!”
“Potion?!”
Gina echoed as she pulled her shirt off her head. Her breath caught
for a moment as Ashley hastily stepped over her to check the fridge.
She tried standing up, juggling her baggy clothes in her hands,
though this only served to send her spiraling into further hysteria
as she stood just in time to see the sink counter rise past her
eyeline. “What’s happening? Oh god, am I dying?! Help me!”
Ashley
glanced down at her, chewing her lip. “Okay so don’t freak out,”
she said, looking twice as big as she should have been. Gina pressed
her back against a cabinet door and tried not to whimper as she
caught the handle passing by her head from the corner of her eye.
“So. Um. Remember when I said I was going to school for
pharmacology? That wasn’t, like, a complete lie or anything, but,
well…I mean, like if you really think about it, witchcraft is like
a type of pharmacology. Yeah? Yeah.” She paused. “Anyways, I’m
going to school for witchcraft.”
“Witches
aren’t a thing!” Gina shouted desperately. Her witch roommate,
whose (okay,
fine, she can’t deny it) shrinking
potion she had inadvertently drank, crossed her arms at her from
above. Gina self-consciously clutched her shirt to herself. The back
of her collar dipped down her back despite her efforts. “Please, I
need help!”
“You
need
help,” Ashley muttered, running a hand through her hair as she
strode back to her room. Gina yelped as the giant leg in front of her
whooshed by and landed (relatively) eight feet away. “I
don’t have the homework I need to turn in.”
“Homework?!”
Gina chased after Ashley as best as she could. Her shirt was now too
much of a burden, crumpled around her like a small camping tent, and
she tripped over a crease and rolled right out of her collar, fully
nude. Despite her current frantic situation, the sheer embarrassment
overturned her priorities enough for her to hesitate and consider how
to get her shirt to cover her again, before she remembered that she
didn’t have the time and sprinted to Ashley’s room instead.
Ashley
had already made it inside her room and was clanging about. “Yeah,
I didn’t make extras because I didn’t think that someone
would drink my homework! Do you know how long these — well, no, you
don’t, but they take an hour to brew!”
It
took a minute to cross a distance that Ashley had covered in seconds.
Gina paused to lean against Ashley’s doorway. At least she had the
consideration (or the absentmindedness) to leave it open. “But you
can’t leave me like this! I’m shrinking! What if it doesn’t
stop?!”
Ashley
waved a hand dismissively without looking at her. “Don’t be
dramatic, you’ve stopped already. It only shrinks you by a factor
of four.”
Gina
looked around. “Oh.” Still, she easily regained her bluster. “But
I have to get to work! You need to make, I dunno, a growth potion?”
“No,”
said Ashley, turning around and pointing a wooden spoon down at her.
Even if she wasn’t currently able to kick her across a room, the
look in her eyes would have been enough to make Gina retreat a few
steps. Confronted by both, she retreated six. “I need to remake the
shrink potion so I can turn it in to a professor that already hates
me.” Seeing Gina’s shivering form, Ashley’s expression
softened. “Look. It’s fine. Just call in sick for a — “
“Don’t
witches have spells? Just get a wand or something and,” Gina ended
her sentence with an incomprehensible gesture.
Her
roommate frowned. “You aren’t listening — “
“Ashley!”
At
first, when a dark look crossed Ashley’s face, Gina was afraid that
she was just going to ignore her. But then Ashley sighed and stomped
over to her, which was terrifying, but in a relieving sort of way.
With
a hand on her doorknob, Ashley glared down, muttered a phrase that
Gina couldn’t decipher, and pointed at her. Immediately, Gina grew
back to normal at a dizzying rate, the sudden burst of friction
burning her feet a little. After anxiously measuring herself against
the doorframe, Gina turned to Ashley to thank her, only for Ashley to
slam the door in her face.
“Thanks,”
she said anyways, before collecting her clothes from the kitchen and
running out the door.
It
took four hours for Gina to stop thinking about the morning’s
events, and that was mostly because of lunch break. Food had a way of
refreshing the mind. Thinking about it, she hadn’t managed to eat a
proper breakfast
before the, uh, accident, but now that she was full, her
mood improved significantly.
Of course, there was a lot to unpack about everything she had just
learned. And she would probably have to talk with Ashley about the
whole…witch thing. And hopefully Ashley wouldn’t have to kill her
to keep magic a secret or something. But all of that could wait until
work was over. She hadn’t made much progress in the coding errors
she was supposed to fix today what
with all those distracting thoughts
and needed
to make up for lost time.
Gina
cracked her knuckles and got typing. She made it for half an hour
before getting distracted again, though this time it was with her
typos. For whatever reason, she was starting to fumble. A lot. She
could excuse a mistype once in a while, but at this point it seemed
every key she pressed she was accidentally pressing another one. Her
fingers felt clumsy and swollen against the keys, and was it getting
hard to breathe?
Gina
pushed herself away from her desk with a sinking feeling. Now that
she was looking up from her work, she noticed that her head was
inching up over her cubicle’s walls.
“Something
the matter?” Simon asked her from the next cubicle. “You need to
go somewhere? If it’s an emergency, I can tell Daniel for you.”
He
thinks I’m standing up, Gina realized. As she unwedged herself from
her chair, she said, “Yeah, thanks,” and half-jogged to the
women’s room, slouching the entire way.
Nobody
was in there, which was great, though Gina wasn’t happy about how
easily she was able to tell, considering she could basically see
right into the stalls. Sitting against the door, she managed to slide
her phone out of her pocket. She could hear the seams of her shirt
straining against her expanding form as she made the call.
“Having
problems?” Ashley said casually as soon as she answered.
“Ashley,
there’s something — you already know what’s happening, don’t
you.”
“You
really should’ve listened to me.”
“Okay,
yes, excuse me for freaking out and making bad decisions the first
time I experience getting shrunk by my roommate!” Gina hissed. Or
tried to. It really was more like a wheeze. Her collar was really
choking her.
“Hey,
don’t pin that on me. You got shrunk by a potion. That you drank on
your own.”
“You
made
the potion! Ow, fuck!”
“What’s
wrong?”
“A
button just fucking shot itself in my eye. Hang on,” Gina said.
Cupping her increasingly smaller phone in one hand, she carefully
aimed her pinky and tapped it. “Okay, it’s getting hard to hold
this to my ear, so you’re on speakerphone. Look, can you just tell
me why this is happening?”
“What?
You haven’t figured it out?”
“Why
would I be able to figure it out?!” Gina gasped as, almost
simultaneously, all
her
clothes gave up around her, a symphony of rips that represented the
destruction of about eighty dollars. At least she could breathe
easily again. “I don’t know if you realize this, but magic rules
aren’t obvious to me!”
“The
potion wore off, dummy.”
“Huh?”
Gina cringed as she started feeling the cool floor tiles on her butt.
Ashley
sighed. “Potion effects are temporary because we digest them.
That’s why I told you it was fine, because you’d grow back
anyways. It’s
like drinking alcohol. You get sober eventually.”
That
did make a lot of sense.
“Okay.
Got it. Now I know,” Gina said, slouching lower as her head
approached the ceiling. Her legs were still able to fit in the space
between the stalls and the sinks, but that was changing very quickly.
She hugged her knees to her chest, careful to keep her
postage stamp of a phone in the center of her palm. “Can you please
come over and help me? I don’t want to outgrow the room!”
“Don’t
be dramatic. When you drank the potion, you lost...what, four and a
half feet? You’re just getting that back now. So you’re gonna be
ten feet six at the most.”
“That’s
not too bad,” she said,
nervously
hitching a leg over the toilets. “But
I’m definitely bigger than that. I can’t even fit my hand through
the door.”
“Oh.”
The phone went silent. “That’s
not a good sign.”
“Yeah,
no kidding!”
“I
don’t know how that could happen, that’s definitely more than
double what you lost,” Ashley mumbled to herself, not listening.
Gina sighed and let her talk, shifting onto her side. She
morosely picked at the tiny scraps of fabric stuck to her body and
flicked them off.
“How can you be growing that much just from a potion wearing off?
All that’s supposed to happen is the
effects being reversed, essentially – unless…”
“What?”
Gina said sullenly.
“...the
effect of the potion was reducing a person’s size by a factor of
four...normally, for you, that meant losing the four and a half feet,
but then you had me use a spell to make you six feet again before the
potion’s effect wore off!” There were vague sounds of clattering,
as if Ashley was throwing several things into a bag and running
outside. “Of course digesting it isn’t just undoing what it’s
done! It’s reversing what it’s done! It’s
just that usually means the same thing because nobody’s been stupid
enough to undo a potion’s effect with a spell! So of course when a
potion that shrinks you by a factor of four wears off, you grow by a
factor of four!”
“I’m
gonna be twenty-four feet tall?!” Gina shrieked, sitting up, only
to hit her head on the ceiling, causing plaster to dust her face. Her
foot kicked out reflexively as she suffered a coughing fit and
knocked a stall door off its hinges. When she finally managed to
clear her throat, her phone was missing from her hand. “Oh god,”
she moaned, trying to scan her body for a place that her phone could
have bounced off to, hopefully unbroken. She thought she heard some
sort of buzzing noise somewhere around the folds of her belly, but
then it abruptly stopped. At least it looked like she was done
growing. And Ashley sounded like she was coming. Though it was
ambiguous whether she was coming to actually help.
Half
an hour later, there was a knock. “It’s
me,” Ashley’s voice called out, and Gina dutifully tried to shift
herself and unblock the door. “I
mean, I don’t think anybody’s written a paper on this,” she
babbled as she squeezed in, gesturing wildly as
she crawled over Gina’s arm.
“This could – well, I wouldn’t say revolutionize anything, but
this opens up like
a whole
field
of study at the very least! I don’t think anybody’s done anything
with abusing, like, the temporary-ness of effects with permanent -- “
“Ashley.”
“Yes,
yes, okay.” Ashley
waved a hand at her in irritation, muttering a different phrase that
was similarly indecipherable,
and Gina almost cracked her head on the floor when the wall retreated
from her back.
Once
again, the spell worked faster than the potion, though this wasn’t
as fast as growing had been. Probably because she had a lot more
ground to cover than back then. She sat up, happy to not have to
duck, found her phone when it tumbled between her legs, remembered
that she was absolutely naked, and curled up to conceal herself,
blushing.
Ashley
laughed. “You didn’t seem that bothered when your tit was bigger
than my eye.”
“Shut
up,” Gina snapped, turning
towards her. “That’s – um.”
Ashley
smirked down at her, which was natural since she was still sitting
down. But Gina was pretty sure that she shouldn’t be smirking that
far down at her. Gina jumped to her feet, finding herself only
standing as tall as Ashley’s chest and
dwindling even more.
She was shedding plaster dust during her descent, but most of it was
still sticking to her skin and a lot of it was decidedly no longer
dust, more
like pebbles. There was a stray piece of toilet paper that must have
gotten caught on her when she was boxed up in the bathroom that was
now curling around her leg, engulfing it.
“Ashley,”
she said, mouth dry, “I think you overshot it.”
“Nah,
you still got a bit to go.” Looking satisfied with the trajectory
of her work, Ashley started collecting the shreds of Gina’s clothes
near the door and tossing them in a plastic bag that Gina only now
noticed she was carrying. “Otherwise,
you can’t fit in my purse.”
“You’re
kidnapping me!?”
Ashley
laughed and crouched down next to her. “It’s not kidnapping if
I’m taking you home. I mean, your other option is to go out with no
clothes -- “
“This
is better,” Gina said, battling the toilet paper off. She watched
the tiles under her grow to the size of cobblestones. “Uh. But,
aren’t I getting too small…?”
“Hey,
I don’t think I’d be able to hide you if you’re over a foot
tall.” Ashley’s hands scooped up Gina from under her shoulders
and she yelped, kicking instinctively. Not that her feet could reach
anything. Ashley didn’t even seem to notice, seamlessly shifting
her grip on Gina to one hand as she turned on a sink with the other.
It was disorienting to find herself go from being the size of an arm
to being the size of a phone in one second, almost as disorienting as
suddenly being thrust under a torrent of water and
then rolled up in a hand towel before being dumped into a bag.
“Anyways,
be quiet. We wouldn’t want anybody to search my bag because you
made a weird noise.”
Well,
thought Gina as she swung in Ashley’s purse,
at least it looks like she won’t have to kill me to keep magic a
secret.