Apparently having been impacted by the forcefulness of the curious words trailing from Mandy’s lips, Lisa swiveled carefully around to face the girl who’d once dunked Peter into a shallow cup in order to utilize him as an artistic utensil. His throat having dried out to an arid crisp now, the little freshman didn’t have nearly enough time to humbly suggest they just keep on walking toward the exit and escape whatever was about to transpire.
“Hi, Mandy,” Peter piped up neutrally, hoping to wrap this up as neatly as possible. He knew it would only drag out the affair and probably inspire some passive-aggressive ire not to acknowledge her courteously on the front end.
“Hello there, little guy,” she responded airily. “It’s good to see you again, out and about, like the big people.” The girl’s gaze rose up to Lisa’s face, instantly wrinkling with some barely disguised disdain like she’d inhaled a cloud of noxious eggs, but rapidly returned down to the boy sitting in the pale palm. Once again, her eyes flooded with that same playful luster the way a preschooler eyes a brand new toy, gleaming with promise for play. Her shoulder fidgeted, briefly causing Peter to wince at the assumption that she was about to reach out and snatch him away from his perch, but she was only shoving her hand into her pocket and grappling with its contents. All the same, he inched back in Lisa’s palm, which instantly withdrew closer to her stomach.
“Y-Yeah. Yep. Just having some fun,” Peter said.
“And who’s your friend here?” Mandy asked, demanding with a quicksilver succession. Her upper lip sneered a little at the mention of Lisa, while that stiffened finger continued busily swirling through her partially tangled locks.
“This is… Lisa,” Peter said hesitantly, not particularly keen on meshing these two social worlds of his, but supposing it wouldn’t hurt to have someone else aware of Mandy’s existence since he’d had to bold-facedly lie to his sister about her potential involvement in his musical misfortunes on day one. “Lisa, this is Mandy.”
“H-Hi there,” Lisa said. She frowned uncertainly, obviously picking up on the standoffish vibes her date was projecting from the minute this macabre juvenile’s greedy eyes had settled on his little body. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m sure it is,” Mandy said calmly, utterly unfazed by use of her bizarre manners. She continued ogling Peter, not even flashing away for a second to acknowledge his handler. “I saw you at the theater tryouts. So you’re going to be in a play?”
“Uhh… maybe, yeah, yeah,” Peter muttered.
“That’s crazy,” the girl responded without breaking contact, and from the sound of her reaction, it wasn’t so much a casually made hyperbole as a legitimate statement that the concept was, literally, psychologically insane to her. “You’re so small. How will anyone see you up there on the stage?”
“I… I guess I’ll just…” Peter said, sapped of explanations already from Mandy’s imperious stare. “Um…”
“They’ll see him in the spotlight,” Lisa said softly, offering feeble aid as her date stumbled through a response. “It’ll be like he was standing right in front of you.”
“If he was standing right in front of me, he’d still only look like one of my dolls,” the girl answered swiftly, allowing not even a half-smile to crack her lips to indicate she was kidding. “But that’s okay with me.”
“Good,” Peter swallowed.
“Since you’re here, you should come be with me for a while,” Mandy said, brushing away the previous defense as easily as a buzzing fly. “I’m going to go watch ScreamSight 6. It’s supposed to be way better than 5. Lots more blood.”
“Umm, thanks for the offer, but…” Peter muttered, inadvertently glancing to Lisa for support.
“…but we just saw a movie,” Lisa finished. She took a step back from their accosting fellow student and her ominously eccentric aura.
Hazel eyes seething in a way that it looked like her family name and entire ethics system had been insulted on a fundamental level, Mandy nodded curtly and turned around. Peeking back over her shoulder a final time, her lips again parted to speak.
“See you in school, tiny boy,” she swore quietly before fading once again easily as she’d come into the increasingly rowdy crowd of college kids.
“What… was that about?” Lisa wondered aloud as she at last broke free of the throngs and passed through the final glass barrier into the outdoors, where the sun had only recently sunk below the rosy horizon. “That seemed a little, um…”
“You really don’t want to know,” Peter murmured, running a hand across his scalp from the stress. Already he could feel a few drops of chilled sweat had beaded on his neck just from the extended proximity to that girl in a public space.
“Okay…” Lisa said. “If she’s being weird or anything to you, though, you know… you can let me know.”
“Okay.”
“Seriously. Like I said before. I’ve got your back.”
“I know. I will. Thank you,” Peter promised with as much truth as he could muster, and this seemed to satisfy her as they approached Suzanne’s minivan. The woman had, as predicted, been dutifully parked by the curb right where she’d promised for quite a while now. After buckling in and going through a few moments of idle chitchat about the quality of the movie and the serving size of the popcorn, Lisa and Peter were secured into the leather backseat and Suzanne was pulling out of the parking lot.
Relieved to be free of that encounter and back in the sanctity of the familiar, surrounded by two of the people he trusted most in the world, the tiny freshman decided he wasn’t going to let Mandy affect his mood in even the slightest measure. And as he looked back up to Lisa’s reassuringly grinning face, those soft hands folded politely in her lap as the car rolled gingerly over some speed bumps, he realized it wouldn’t be too hard.
There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation amongst the three on the way back. Peter and Lisa realized they weren’t quite sure how to operate in front of an adult when they were still struggling to piece things together for themselves, and so mostly kept it surface-level here, discussing some upcoming assignments, plus a rumor of a particularly humorous prank pulled by an upperclassman in a gym bathroom involving fake mice and rubber turds. Suzanne, after her initial questions about the night’s feature film, remained pretty silent, turning the radio up just high enough to distract herself with a few retro tunes from her own teen years, but stayed uninvolved in her child’s date or whatever-it-was at the risk of embarrassing him.
As over-the-moon as he’d been with this whole affair, Peter was still sizably grateful to his mother for her behavior in driving them to and from the theatre. He knew it had taken a herculean effort for the woman to watch the child she still often viewed as her baby boy, cradled in the hand of a teenage girl she’d only met on this one occasion, disappearing into the movie theatre without her supervision, where any number of catastrophic events could befall ranging from being snatched up by sticky-fingered kiddies in line for the newest animated comedy, to a slushie accidentally capsizing on him and inflicting hypothermia.
Peter had actually held his breath in bracing anticipation as Lisa clambered out of his mother’s back seat with him in tow before the movie started, expecting Suzanne to sound out a rambling final warning of cautionary measures for Lisa. They’d already gotten there later than expected because his mother drove so slowly whenever he was in the car, even while strapped securely into his specialized car seat consisting of a bundle of reinforced straps and buckles in a box. Perhaps it was Lisa’s obvious attention in keeping Peter level with her palm, though, or simply her caring and unprompted promise to Suzanne to keep him safe while inside, but evidently the tittering mother felt confident enough to hold her tongue just this one time.
Suzanne didn’t even make any further comment other than a final cheery note of gladness to have met the redhead as they arrived at Lisa’s house again. Slipping out the sliding door, the shy fifteen-year-old hesitated as she turned back to face Peter. The pair were equally self-conscious in the effort to think up a proper farewell that not only was compatible with their current depth of friendship or whatever-this-was, as well as one that wouldn’t be embarrassing for Peter’s mother to witness. At last, they seemingly settled on it, in remarkably synchronized time.
“Thanks so much for this, Peter,” Lisa crooned, leaning back into the car and hovering over the box containing her date. “I had a really good time.”
“Me too, Lisa,” Peter said back, feeling mildly emasculated to be looking up at her from inside his makeshift child seat that he’d probably require for the entirety of his miniature existence. Still, he noted there wasn’t the slightest hint of judgment in the girl’s expression. Her eyes were focused squarely on him, and only him, rather than the burgeoning world of unusual accommodations that surrounded him at all times.
After a second of hesitation whereupon the hearts of both bashful teens were arrested in their chests, Lisa’s fingertip, which had been tapping thoughtfully at her lip, descended into the opening of the car seat. Alighting again on Peter’s shoulder as it had in the movie theatre, albeit without the necessity and therefore defense of it as she’d had then, she soothingly stroked her fingertip along the tiny boy’s arm in a motion that stirred his synapses into a berserk overdrive. No longer afraid of how it was perceived, Peter placed his hand back on her velvety fingertip in the same manner he had back in the theatre, the pair of them just as silently and emotionally naked for it, more so than they’d been yet, despite how simple a gesture it was.
A smile crossed both of their lips: a silent promise that this night wouldn’t be the last of its kind, and Peter could easily see the color flushing into Lisa’s cheeks as she bid him a last goodbye and turned with a wave to himself and his mother, filing up the cobblestone walk to her front stoop.
“So,” Suzanne called back to her son in the backseat as they reversed out of Lisa’s driveway, unable to see him but compensating with eager volume. “Did you… have fun tonight, honey?”
“Oh, man!” he laughed, unable to hold back his jubilation now that he didn’t have to worry about utterly humiliating himself in Lisa’s presence any longer. However, he quickly put himself back in check, still with a goofy smirk on his mouth. “I mean. Yeah. Yeah I did.”