“I’m sorry to have to cut your time short out there,” Ms. Watson apologized as she shouldered open the door to the locker rooms where her office was located.  Peter perched in her broad palm, eyeing an especially pink callus on his teacher’s thick thumb that definitely hadn’t been there the day before.  “But now that we’re a week into school, I’ve got to get some of these forms sent off during office hours or the folks dealing with the filing system will have my hide.”

                “It’s fine,” Peter said.

                In truth, he’d have preferred to be outside watching his class play kickball.  Even if he couldn’t participate, it would still beat hanging out with his gym teacher in her office.  Plus, it would’ve given him a chance to offer moral support to Lisa.  The trio had made no more attempts to legally beat down his friend in the midst of the games after Amy’s spike the previous week, but all the same, he sorely wished he could be present.

                “Believe me, I’d leave you out there with your friends if I could,” the woman continued, practically reading his mind.  “It’s just the whole to-do the school board had over making sure you’re safe, especially during this class, when we’ve got balls bouncing all around the gymnasium.”  Ms. Watson re-entered the tiled little space of her office, the omnipresent blue brick of the locker room comprising her walls as well.  It felt to Peter like a particularly colorful jail cell.

                “Really, I… understand,” he repeated.

                “Glad to hear it, Peter,” the woman said, forcing an unnervingly cheesy smile as she took a seat at her desk and set her hand down on the surface for her student to step off.  Twitching as he did so, the five-inch pupil realized that, for the first time, the gym teacher hadn’t called one of her students by their last name.

                There was no denying Ms. Watson’s gruff no-nonsense demeanor had been steadily transitioning into one of earnest friendliness over the past week, and Peter wasn’t sure he was a fan.  A change like this in his acquaintances ordinarily gave the freshman cause to feel relief, because it meant someone was beginning to comfortably view him as a normal person.  Somehow, though, he couldn’t feel much more than awkwardness around Ms. Watson, as if she had suddenly started wearing a bright red clown nose and refused to acknowledge its existence.

                Still, he supposed he owed his teacher the benefit of the doubt, as she did seem to be trying to make the effort to treat him kindly, or at least her own somewhat eerie version of kindly.

                He gazed up at the powerful woman and watched her tweak the bangs of her short hairdo with a meaty thumb, her exposed bicep bulging rhythmically as she pinched her fingers together.  Once she was satisfied, her hand fell back to the desk and snatched up the computer mouse in pale enough knuckles that Peter felt fairly certain she could crack the plastic with a good enough squeeze.  Her eyes remained glued to the flashing screen as she set about filling in her forms, but Peter’s eyes couldn’t help but stay on her, a mix of respect and fear intermingling in his stomach.

It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen plenty of muscular people in his life; after all, anyone above the age of two would handily beat him in most any physical contest.  Rather, it was the way the towering woman performed every act with such aggression in a hundred subtle ways that might go invisible to all but someone like Peter, and perhaps that was part of what made him so uncomfortable.  She was trying to be something she wasn’t, or at least trying to hide the real side.  He watched her firm fingers pounding on the side of the mouse, her shoulders stiffening at regular intervals when she’d send off a new email, and heard her teeth clacking together out of habit.

Peter didn’t know Ms. Watson well, but at his size, the average human body was a veritable canvas of the psyche, and as sure as he breathed, the freshman could sense something was off in the tanned, toughened specimen that sat before him.

“I’m glad to have those out of the way,” the gym teacher sighed, leaning back in her chair and digging her fingers against her temple before standing from the seat and ascending to her full statuesque height above her student.  “There’s only a few minutes left of class, so everyone will be heading in to change soon.”

“All right,” Peter said, folding his hands behind his back.

“Why don’t you go ahead and get changed?” she said.  The phrase came more as a suggestion than the barked order it had been on his first couple of days, but it didn’t make Peter feel any better about the fact that Ms. Watson was legally obligated to watch him strip down to his underwear twice a day.

Admittedly, it was a menially small price to pay for the appeasement of the school board that had allowed him this chance at normalcy in his existence.  He still didn’t have to like it, though.

“Um, sure,” Peter said dryly, pulling his t-shirt and jeans out of his tiny backpack, stored in its normal spot next to Ms. Watson’s black coffee mug containing freshly sharpened pencils.

“I’m giving the blinds another pull to make sure you’ve got privacy,” Ms. Watson said, twisting the plastic wand that controlled the small shades of the window separating her office from the gym locker room.  Already Peter could hear the girls running around, slamming metal doors open and throwing sweaty uniforms into backpacks.

He gulped and tugged his own tiny gray shirt up his torso.  The sooner he learned to not make this weird, the faster this semester would go by.

“Had a long day?” Ms. Watson asked, and it took Peter a flinching second to realize she was directly addressing him.  Though she’d been standing close guard over him during the previous six classes of his young high school career, the woman hadn’t actually tried to engage him in conversation while he was changing, and he infinitely preferred that arrangement.  Still, her voice was too expectant of reciprocation to ignore without coming off as rude, however awkward the circumstances.  Peter bit his lip.

“It wasn’t so bad,” he answered neutrally, keeping his eyes locked to the surface of the desk.  Maybe if he displayed the minimum amount of engagement, she’d take the hint.

“You’re lucky.  Mine was an absolute bear,” Ms. Watson said, taking a heavy seat in her swivel chair, this time tilting herself so that she faced Peter where he stood.  She leaned toward the floor next and began fumbling with her shoelaces.

“Oh.  Well, it’s over now, I guess,” Peter said.  He tried to sound simultaneously optimistic and disengaged.

“Not quite.  I’ve still got more paperwork to go over before I head home.  It just goes on and on,” she said wearily, obviously at least partially convinced that all this would be interesting to her student.  A soft breeze brushed Peter’s face as she suddenly lifted her right leg up toward the desk, pressing the heel of her tennis shoe against the edge.  Digging her fingers into the mouth of the footwear, she tugged, releasing her socked appendage onto the surface.  She quickly followed suit with the other until both cotton-clad feet were propped up on the desk in front of the keyboard, close enough that she could’ve leaned her right foot down onto its side and touched her toe to Peter’s leg.

                At such close proximity, the freshman’s lungs filled immediately with the sour aroma of his gym teacher’s tired feet, still encased in the tight socks that were darkened under her heel and the ball of her foot with sweat.  He took a few steps back and covered his mouth, but it did little to stifle the pungent cloud forming around the desk.  Peter, often more aware of people’s bodily functions than they themselves, had long ago decided to be the ironically bigger person and courteously ignore as much as he was capable of doing without impeding his good health.  This situation, however, was beginning to bend the rule.

                “That’s… too bad,” Peter commented at last in answer to his teacher, who, apparently blissfully unaware of the effect the stench of her socks was having on her miniscule student, was intently picking at something under her thumbnail.

                “I’m sure it must sound petty for a physical education teacher to complain about having to move too much, but sometimes I just really feel the need to wind down, you know?” Ms. Watson continued with a shake of her head.  She ran her hands through her hair, clearly exasperated.

                “Uh-huh.”  Peter, seeing the opportunity as his teacher closed her eyes to relax, threw his t-shirt on, having discarded the gym uniform, and set about yanking the shorts down around his ankles.

                “Getting too tightly wound isn’t good for anybody.  And that’s just common sense,” Ms. Watson said, and Peter’s stomach lurched as he watched her arms reaching forward again with fingers outstretched toward her feet.  Pinching the ribbed lip of her sock between her fingers, she stretched it down over her heel, peeling it away from the skin in a trail of glistening cotton fibers.  Her toes wriggled as they were liberated at last from the fabric prison, her heel bouncing twice on the desktop with enough force that Peter nearly lost his balance.

                “Common sense,” the freshman repeated under his breath, or what little remained of it.

                “What was that, hon?” Ms. Watson asked sweetly as she finished removing the second sock, until at last both bare feet, tanned and sticky from a day of standing and jogging, took up potent residence on the desk.  With no buffer zone any longer between Peter and the massive peds, the rancid odor was able to pervade fully this time.

                Certainly, Peter was well-acquainted with the foul whiff of overworked feet, given the amount of time he spent on the floor at home, but almost never at this vicinity.  This woman, however, had put herself into another category.  Nausea began to rise in the young man’s gut.

                “I just… said I agree.  Common sense,” Peter said, fighting back a cough in his throat.

                “I thought we’d see eye to eye,” she said.  She pressed the big toe of her right foot against the left, massaging up and down the instep and sighing deeply.  Every wrinkle of her forty-year-old sole gave off a different fleshy glow reflected from the light above off her salty, lubricated flesh.  “You’ve got to know when to take it easy.”

                What the hell was she even talking about?  Was this how normal adults handled small talk?

                Peter knew he didn’t have a great deal of experience with a broad range of people, so his socializing skills were more limited than most his age, but he was almost positive the majority of people didn’t communicate in this way, and certainly not those who so obviously were faking an attitude for reasons unknown.

                “Y-Yeah,” he said, finally unable to keep back the coughing.  Ms. Watson, as he expected she might, completely ignored it.

                “I’m sure your mom does the same thing after a long day.  She’s a real estate agent, isn’t she?”

                “That’s right.”

                “And a pretty good one, from what I’ve seen in the papers a couple times.  It must really wear her out.”

                “Sometimes,” Peter said with a shrug, finally forcing himself again to affix his eyes to the surface of the desk, rather than getting lost in disgusted reverence for the tanned, sweat-gleaming appendages rubbing up against each other like greased animals.

                “You know, my mom worked for a living too.   All day on her feet.  At the end, she’d come back and just lay down on the couch, and I’d try to make it easier on her if I could.  Just a little rub here or there to help pull my weight,” Ms. Watson rambled nostalgically.  “You ever do that for your mom?”

                “What?” Peter said, looking up at her face again.

                “You know, hon.  Just give her a little foot rub after a long day slaving for you?”

                At this point, Peter realized he’d been standing in his underwear for several minutes without having put on his jeans, and was keenly aware that his teacher had been quite calmly observing him almost the entire time without moving her gaze.  He kicked the shorts away as though they’d unexpectedly caught fire and leapt into his denim pants, nearly tripping himself in the process.

Ms. Watson chuckled throatily at him as she began jamming the toes of her opposite feet together, the digits squirming over one another with the same quiet violence Peter had observed in nearly every other movement the woman had made so far.  He shivered, and not just from the cold of the office.

“Not really, no,” Peter answered, looking down and pretending to rummage for something through his backpack once he was dressed again.

“Hmm.  Pity,” Ms. Watson said, sounding genuinely disappointed, to the extent that it caught Peter’s attention even amongst her already alien digressing.  “I’m sure she’d appreciate you giving it a try someday.  Your hands would just… well, I’ll bet you’d have a talent for it.”

Peter nodded neutrally, holding back another hacking storm as the oxygen pumping through his body was composed of about 90% dank, feminine effluvium leaked from the acrid pores of his gym teacher’s naked soles.

Miraculously, the woman leaned back in her chair again and folded her knees, removing her feet from the desk and plopping them to the tile with a wet slap.  She sighed.

“Well, I suppose your sister will be here any minute to pick you up, hmm?” Ms. Watson said, and then batted one eyelid in the creepiest attempt at a wink Peter had yet witnessed.  “And if you take my advice about your mom, let me know how it goes.  I’ll bet it makes you the favorite for a while.”

“I’ll bet,” Peter mouthed to himself with uncommon hollowness.  He hugged his backpack to his chest and tried to ignore the chill that still nipped at his skin, despite being back in clothes.