“What?” Peter gagged as he remained clenched in Stella’s fist, a little too out of it now to fully process this absurd invasion of his personal bubble that was quickly turning into something much, much worse and probably significantly smellier. “I’m… I’m not g- you don’t seriously think you can-”
“It’s called a double dare. Ever heard of it?” Stella queried with a simpering grin as she leveled off her hand even nearer to her face, allowing her tiny capture to get his bearings once again at close enough range to bop her in the nose. He sincerely wished he had the nerve.
“Yes. Of course I have. But that’s not how they work!” Peter said, trying his best to keep cool but steadily losing his capacity to do so as the urgency rose in his voice. At least she wasn’t squeezing on him unlike some of his older cohorts had. She could still, clearly, be talked to. “They’re just supposed to up the stakes of a dare. You still don’t have to do it.”
“Maybe around here that’s how they play it, but not where I come from,” Stella murmured, exhaling a warm puff of air into his watering eyes. “How would it even be a fair game if people weren’t punished for failing their turn? That’s a pretty important part of any game.”
“I don’t really… think that’s true,” Peter said. He heard the wavering picking up in his voice, knowing it would be even more of a dead-giveaway for how scared he was beginning to feel of his self-assured thirteen-year-old dancing queen. Surely she could already feel the tremors, given how snugly her fingers were wrapped around his body.
“Take my word for it,” Stella commanded in a low whisper, offering a final half-smile and a sly wink before her digits released their fleshy coil. Too surprised to yelp, the air was instead sucked from Peter’s throat as he descended the thankfully short plunge toward the ground that, while it wouldn’t hurt, was surely destined to be unpleasant, as he realized he was now inside the dark, silver tunnel of frayed strings and fluffy cotton that comprised Stella’s well-worn sock. At least the gut-twisting anticipation of the inevitable was helping to distract him from being literally suffused within the potent sanctum of the brackish smells he’d been forced to sample just a minute before.
God. She was really going to do it.
Any lingering doubts Peter foolishly clung too were quickly jolted out of him with literally concussive force as Stella’s slender appendage wound its way back into the shoe, the ball of her foot colliding with him and dragging him deeper into the cottony tube under its weight until he felt his body pressing into the buoyant dead end of the toe section. She had him pinned right where she wanted, and a moment later had the geometry of his body arranged to her tastes, with his squirming form stretched out beneath each of her five bouncing piggies.
While unrelenting in their blithe contact with his body and especially his face, smearing their bulbous undersides against his cheeks and hair and dancing all around, Stella’s toes at least weren’t inflicting pain. The loamy scent of them and lumps of putrid toejam tucked into seemingly every crevice weren’t exactly welcome company as the snug fabric kept Peter molded into her skin, but it still could’ve been much worse.
“I think you’re taking this a little too far,” the freshman protested with the understatement of the decade. He was shocked that he hadn’t devolved into stuttering squeaks now, and felt grateful he’d been battle-hardened by high school social life to a certain extent in order to withstand this kind of inhumane treatment. Plus, if he really couldn’t fix this himself, Jessica would be back at any moment to sort things out, though he couldn’t imagine it would go smoothly. He wrestled with the girl’s toes, fighting to part them and allow him to peek through the crevice and up toward the filtered light. However, she was making it difficult, clenching his arms and legs whenever she could get a grip on them with the dexterous digits and refusing to let go for at least a few seconds.
“C’mon. You’re a big high school boy, after all. I thought you’d understand how games work by this point in your life,” Stella taunted, at last spreading her toes far apart enough that Peter could make out the vague shape of her lips flapping through the taut layer of gray sock fabric separating him from the outside world. “Just relax and take your lumps. You failed the dare, so now you get the double dare. Trust me, you’ll be a lot happier if you just go with this one and avoid the triple dare which, by the way, I already have a really good one thought up. So I wouldn’t try it if I was you.”
“B-But...” Peter muttered, cringing as a doughy toepad bounced against his head again. Though panic still hadn’t yet set in, given that he was still in the relative safety of his house with his siblings and mother just a few rooms over, his confidence was rapidly draining as Stella launched into this self-righteous speechifying. “Y-You…”
“Not that you’d probably be able to get away from this one, anyway,” Stella continued calmly, wrapping her prize up a few more times in her scrunching digits that again wrapped him up in the odorous and increasingly damp sock fabric. She listened to him sputter for another moment, enjoying the feeling of his surreal little limbs batting uselessly against the ball of her powerful foot, and smiled in spite of herself. “Now calm down and quit moping like a little boy. It’s thirty measly minutes. Only thirty times more than the few seconds you just did. How bad could it possibly be?”
Peter reflected on that rhetorical question as he endured a ridged toeprint grind against his face with especially determined aplomb, actually managing to force apart his lips and rake its wretched-flavored grimy flesh against his teeth and tongue, all while her foul skin continued pumping against his nose, ensuring his senses were flooded with only the essence of her foot and the energetic dancer’s grit that came with it. He concluded with bitter abandon, after some thought and the feeling of another toe squashing into his gut and cleansing him completely of clean air, that “it” could, possibly, be quite bad indeed. This suspicion was further confirmed as he felt a drop of her lukewarm sweat trickling between his dry lips and pooling saltily below his tongue, stinging his cheeks in the process.
“How about we go give your sis a hand and check on those cookies, then?” Stella sighed flightily, and though Peter realized it was probably stupid to be surprised by anything the girl decided to do against his will at this point, he could feel his heart quickening. Maybe this was an appropriate time to start mildly panicking as he was suddenly pancaking into the far-harder surface of the carpeted living room floor as the teen’s toes squashed him down below their squirming heft. More shuffling beyond his fabric prison and a shift in weight from the ball of her foot and down to the heel revealed Stella was standing up.
“Stella, p-please… don’t,” Peter gaped, finding it hard to squeeze out the words as the mounting emotional duress of being literally walked on began to take hold before Stella had even taken a single step. Plus, he had an awful lot of poundage bearing down on him through the heated pad of Stella’s sole and lengthy toes, so chit-chat was made even less feasible.
“Hey. The other part of the double-dare is no complaining,” the girl scolded, rocking her foot back along her instep and braying Peter’s skull back along the carpet beneath the crushing might of her toes, effectively cutting off his meager rebellion. “I told you, you lost the challenge fair and square. This is what you get.”
“Just… don’t… d-don’t w-walk on m-”
“D-D-Don’t w-w-walk o-o-on m-m-me!” Stella mocked back with a robotic chant of Peter’s stuttering. Snickering piteously, she lifted her foot off the ground, briefly sending her captive game partner into vertigo as he felt the chilly pull of gravity beneath him and, even worse, the sinking promise of falling into its grasp with a titanic girl’s massive foot to quickly follow onto his fragile frame, dog-pile style. “You gripe a freaking lot of the time, big high school boy. It must really get on your sister’s and mom’s nerves. Seriously.”
“DON’T! STOP!” Peter cried, humiliated as he heard his voice crack into a squeal with melodramatic horror in far greater proportion than he’d convinced himself he was actually experiencing. Still, the way his limbs were shaking now, vibrating his entire body against the unwashed flesh of Stella’s sensitive foot, he knew he was afraid, and she knew it, too. What did he care at this point?
He was about to be stepped on, after all. The concept was just beginning to take poisonous hold. He’d been grabbed up by strangers, drooled on, nearly had objects dropped on him, even been shoved into a couple of mouths, but never been at the utter mercy of someone’s entire body weight.
Another chuckle rumbled from above as the girl flexed her sole again, studying Peter’s quaking reaction to her simple threat. His mewling was evidently even more of a positive for her.
“I told you no complaining,” Stella informed curtly. Her foot hovered down a little closer to the ground. “Now you might have to deal with a triple dare. I warned you…”
“Stella? The food’s ready. Where’s Peter?” a voice called out with concern from somewhere above, which even through the haze of his terror, the entrapped freshman recognized as his sister’s. Unfortunately for all parties present, what was already in motion couldn’t be stopped with even the tightest of superhuman reflexes. Stella’s foot was going down, and with it, her prisoner. “Peter?”
“Jessie!” Peter squeaked, so quietly the decibels became instantly lost in the tangle of gray fabric.
For a second the freshman considered trying to cry out again but his throat was bone-dry, devoid of any further defense as he felt himself plummeting toward the ground. The sheer hemisphere-tremoring clout of Stella’s foot stomped him back into the carpet so hard he almost felt his ears pop, blurring all his senses into a pulpy mishmash of scratching sock fibers, a bruising sky of foot flesh, and what he was pretty sure was a blood-curdling scream from Jessica.
“What are you DOING?”
The next few moments were all too much of a jumbled neurological mayhem to even hope to distinguish the individual layers of happenstance. Peter was vaguely aware that the world was being flipped vertically, or at least Stella’s sock. A crack of skin-on-skin had sounded a moment earlier from on high, a slap maybe, as the dancer was sent toppling backward, her leg kicked into the air. It echoed in his tiny ear drums so distantly it may as well have come from the next subdivision over. Ruffling fabric and spilling luminescence quickly rolled Peter along the girl’s imprisoning sole until he was peeled out of the fusty cocoon of sock cotton and landing in Jessica’s waiting hand.
All he could be sure of for the next several minutes as he numbly attempted to reacquaint himself with sensory perception was Jessica’s golden hair brushing around him, her fingers babying his battered body into her trembling palm, and tears pouring down her reddening cheeks as she choked out an anguished sob.