Jessica cleared her throat, her blue eyes bulging in surprise at Stella’s challenge to expose Peter to the whiffiest corner of her dance-toned figure, but no rebuttal was offered.

                “Oh,” Peter managed, mulling the dare over and liking it less and less with each passing second.  “That’s… well, I… it’s just that that’s…”

                “Unless… you’re too much of a little chicken?” Stella proffered sweetly.

                Peter’s face flushed a deeper pink.  He blinked, looking up from Stella’s eagerly worming fabric-entrapped toes and to her giddily grinning face, then next to the hesitant grimace Jessica was wearing as she chewed pensively on her fingernail.  While he knew his sister wouldn’t make him participate in anything he didn’t want to, he could also see the desire in her eyes to establish a friendship with this girl she apparently happened to find very, very cool.  The boy frankly couldn’t quite condone such a thing judging by the decorum Stella had exhibited so far tonight, but he knew it wasn’t his life to run, and after all she’d done to try and ensure he had as normal a social life as possible, he decided it wasn’t his place to endanger a new relationship of hers, even through the tiniest of gestures.

                “Hey,” he shrugged at last.  “Like I said.  I’m not afraid of anything.”

                “That’s the spirit,” Stella congratulated happily, stretching her leg out just a little further such that the sole of her car-sized sock was shoved into Peter’s personal bubble, close enough that he could reach out and touch its worn-out fabric and darkened rings of sweat beneath the toes.  The motion and subsequent rush of wind caused him to cringe with the same instinct that protected normal-sized people from oncoming traffic, and he hadn’t even touched his face into its rancid underside.  “So do it.”

                “Yeah…” Peter muttered more to himself than anyone else as he briefly studied the broad wall of fuzzy gray cotton containing what he estimated to be at least a size-eight ped, obviously encased in those purple shoes for the majority of the day and marinating in vinegary discharge leaked from her pubescent pores.  A stiff cloud of pestilential flavors was already wafting smugly off Stella’s foot.  Thank God he at least had the taut sock as a buffer.

                “C’mon,” the girl encouraged warmly, her voice actually becoming friendlier as the vision of what he was about to do preemptively danced through her unfortunately creative mind.  “Let’s see what you’re made of.”

                Gulping up clean air and holding his breath in what he was fairly certain would be a useless defense, Peter gave one last glance up to his hopeful sister above and plunged his face into the folds of dingy fabric over Stella’s sole.  As predicted, the proximity to the girl’s appendage plugged his sinuses with an unbearably pungent aroma.

                “Big, big smell or the dare doesn’t count,” Stella commented.  “Like, at least for a minute.  Don’t worry, I’ll count.”

                “A minute?” Peter hacked, already feeling what little usable oxygen he had on reserve being tainted with the rank zest of Stella’s squalid skin and spongy toejam.

                “Longer if you want,” the girl commented nonchalantly.  She flexed her foot, bunching the damp cotton tighter around Peter’s cheeks.  “I don’t care.”

                Too revolted to even bother trying to puzzle out the illogic of that suggestion, the boy tried to calculate how many seconds he’d already endured this repugnant sacrifice for his sister’s social life as the salty air continued to seep into his poor respiratory system.  Surely the counter was in the upper forties by now.  It had to be close.  Whatever it was, Peter was having an increasingly difficult time keeping the revelation of his disgust from becoming known to either party.  He didn’t want to worry Jessica, and he most certainly didn’t want to give Stella the satisfaction she clearly sought so quasi-sadistically.

                It had to be in the fifties now.  Close enough.  He attempted to edge his nose away from being quite so completely buried in the moisture of Stella’s footwear, when he felt the ridged pad of a thumb tapping at the back of his skull, lightly bouncing his face once again into the squishy surface.

                “Ah-ah-ah!  No cheating, big high school boy,” Stella chastised in a sing-song voice as she effectively pressed Peter’s now-squirming head back into the underside of her disgusting foot.  “You’re just at twenty-six seconds now.”

                Twenty-six?!  Maybe in some warped wormhole of the space-time continuum where reality crawled to a tenth of its normal speed.  Though, given how positively repulsively Stella’s sole reeked, Peter didn’t want to completely discount the possibility of some chemical reaction taking place between her balmy skin and the mealy fabric that allowed for such a phenomenon.  Science was a funky thing.

                “He… didn’t really look like he was cheating,” Jessica said, frowning and holding out a hand as if to reach in and pluck Peter out of the briny miasma of the dancer’s secreted effort.  If he’d been struggling, of course, she would’ve had him out from under Stella’s insistent finger in a heartbeat, but the boy was determined not to make a scene.

                “Sure he was.  I know how to count,” Stella promised, giving Peter’s head another light mashing that flushed his nose with a fresh dose of the sticky excretions infecting her innocuous sock.  Again, he refused to fight.  “We’re at… forty-one now.  Almost there.”

                “This seems like a pretty big dare,” Jessica commented as she scratched the back of her head with the hand that was considering rescuing her brother.  “Kinda gross.  Did you even shower after dance?”

                “Was gonna, but didn’t have time if I was going to make it here on time,” Stella announced to no one’s surprise, especially Peter’s.

                “Do you… play like this with other people too?” Jessica posed.

                “Oh, all the time.  It’s always more fun.  Trust me,” Stella giggled.

                “Oh… okay,” Peter’s sister relented, apparently adequately convinced.

                “I think that’s it, actually,” the miniscule freshman wheezed.  He’d managed to slip out from under the girl’s braced fingertip during the conversation and, trying not to crumble down to his hands and knees in weakness after having his system cleansed from gut to brainstem in vile teenage musk.

                “Hey, you’re not done!” Stella barked a little more harshly than she probably intended, because her voice softened immediately after witnessing how startled Jessica was by her abrasiveness.  “I mean… I only counted fifty-two seconds.  You have eight more to go.”

                “Thanks but… no thanks.”

                “It won’t count if you give up, you know. You’ll lose this turn.”

                “I can live with that,” Peter breathed.  He stuttered his breaths, hopelessly trying to heave away the stink that now clung to his hair and clothes like the scent of wet paint.

                Christ, that girl must’ve put her entire heart and soul into dancing.

                “Are you… okay, Peter?” Jessica questioned naively.  She wrinkled her nose.  “That looked pretty smelly.”

                “Yep!  Amazing!” he answered with a victorious thumbs-up, still dumbly dogged not to allow this invading girl to degrade him emotionally as well as physically.

                “I’m gonna go check on the pizza in the oven, then, okay?  It should be almost done, and then we can all have dinner,” Jessica said, raising an eyebrow at her brother as he readjusted woozily to potable air.  She rose to her feet, carefully enough to give Peter a wide berth as she braced her wriggling toes against the fibers of the carpet for support and pushed up to her feet.  “You two can just watch TV for a minute ‘til I get back if you want.  I’ll be quick.  Promise.”

                “Sure thing,” Stella said as Jessica swiped up the remote from the nearby coffee table and pounded the right buttons to give life to the bright LCD screen, along with its soft infomercial roar.

                Once the entertainment was provided, Peter watched his sister bound happily around the corner toward the light of the kitchen, blissfully unaware of the risk of leaving her brother and new friend alone in the same room. He opened his mouth to meekly request his sibling take him along for her trip, but his throat still burned with the lingering ghostly flavors of Stella’s sock, and he was marooned in the living room instead.  Immediately Peter felt a tingle run up his vertebrae as if through divine warning.  He almost didn’t hear her incoming over the sound of the TV, but he’d been helplessly victimized enough times in his life that his inner ear had long-ago trained itself to pick up on threats, however innocently quiet.

                “Finally,” Stella breathed with annoyance as soon as her friend had disappeared, and an instant later her slender fingers crimped around Peter’s legs, coiling him into her commanding fist.

                “Hey!” Peter gasped as he was launched into the air, too shocked yet still stricken with the inescapable sensation that this little rendezvous with Stella’s grabby mitts was inevitable.  “Please!  Please, put me d-”

                “Yeah, yeah, I know.  Put me down!  Wah-wah-wah!  Please.  You’re like a foot off the ground right now.  It wouldn’t even hurt if I let you go,” Stella taunted somewhat callously as she eyed the carpet just below Peter’s feet.  Indeed, she was still seated on the floor and holding him fairly level with her chest, so it wasn’t exactly a death plunge.  At worst, he’d bruise his ankle if he was dropped at the wrong angle.  But that wasn’t really the point here as the girl’s fingers finished snaking completely around the five-inch body in her hand.  Somehow, this was even less desirable than having his face pressed into the plush moisture of her dance-seasoned foot.

                “I’m… okay with you picking me up, all right?” Peter lied, deciding to just cut his losses and reinforce in his memory that this girl was simply inexperienced around him.  It just had to be spelled out for her, in calm and civil English.  “But please.  I really don’t like being picked up, or… held like this.  It doesn’t feel good.  Please, put me down, and if you want, I’ll step into your hand.”

                “Yeah, I don’t think so.  It’s easier to look at you like this,” Stella said, somewhat irrationally as her fingers rippled around Peter, alternately compressing into his chest, stomach, and crotch, which earned a grimace and a hollowing cringe from the freshman as though he’d been kicked in the family stones, though he decided not to broach the subject of what she’d just done, considering how forward he already understood her to be.

                He gripped the curled edges of the girl’s soft fingers, prying lightly at them with the hope of encouraging her with a little physical motion to lower him back to terra firma, but it was evidently in vain.  She had no intentions of letting go, at least not yet as she brushed away a few fluttering strands of that unwieldly long hair of hers with her free hand.  Those eyes flashed with a curious hunger he’d witnessed in too many faces in his life for it to be comfortable, with many of them taking place within the past couple of weeks at his new school.  He was used to getting it from kids younger than him, however.

                This could still be salvaged.  Admittedly, Peter was seriously starting to question Jessica’s talent at selecting new friends considering this one had no qualms with forcing him to breathe in her sweat and then imprisoning him in her fist, but nevertheless he remained determined to show his sibling the same love she’d always shown him and keep the peace here by any means necessary.

                “Okay, well… you’ve looked.  You can look at me fine on the ground, too, I’m sure,” Peter suggested amiably, though it was getting tougher to remain cheery as the girl’s pinky finger was tapping rather casually at his jean-clad rear end, not quite spanking but still with enough pressure that it was obviously meant to be more a test of his strength than a mere reflex motion.  He struggled to shove his hand underneath her finger, hoping to discourage her with a barrier, but he couldn’t quite reach, and so Stella went right on patting the older boy’s butt with increasing rapidity.  She seemed to ignore his friendly idea for release and smiled again, noting his inability to halt her explorations.

                “I’m sure I can, yeah.  And I will look at you again down there.  Later.”

                “Could… we do it now, though?” Peter pleasantly requested through gritted teeth.

                “Nope,” Stella informed him softly.  “Not until I get what I want from you.”
                “And… what would that be?” he returned, entirely certain already he didn’t want to know the answer.

                “It’s pretty simple.  You failed the first dare I gave you, so now you have to try another one.  A bigger one,” Stella explained, then added with eerily sweet gentility: “So you’re going to go inside my sock.  Under my foot.  For half an hour.”