Peter sat with his legs crossed like a sage atop a mountainous stack of graded papers stored in Ms. Watson’s office, flanked on either side by the burly woman’s ancient desktop computer and a dirty gym uniform hamper just off the edge of the scholarly precipice. Alone only briefly in the space while the physical education instructor oversaw the mass clean-up of strewn dodgeballs out in the main gym, Peter felt incredibly at ease, and had wasted no time in changing out of his uniform and back to his jeans while the woman was out. He breathed in and out, repeating some of the yoga-lite activities gone over in the beginning of class today, and found it was easy to get himself into a startlingly relaxed state of mind, especially given how his day had gone overall.

                Sure, Mandy had been on the verge of confessing the scariest affection in the history of young love during art class, but thanks to Calvin’s intervention, he was feeling more secure than ever. Coupled with Lisa’s agreement to meet with him again and her suggestion to make his family more comfortable by having it at his own house, not to mention having Erica’s blessing for the whole thing, everything was looking up. His usual ride from math in Ms. Tritter’s hand was, of course, more than delightful. The first play practice for Grimm-a-Palooza and his debut as Tom Thumb taking place immediately after the final bell rang was just icing on the cake.

                Of course, the biggest win in Peter’s book for this day in particular was English class. Despite all the calming things Lisa and Erica had about his state of affairs, he’d spent at least the first twenty minutes with every muscle in his body tensed like a mouse trap just a whisker’s brush away from snapping in half. Sharon sat right behind him as usual, her cold aura permeating his skin even though she never poked him in the back with a fingertip or pencil. She’d held off on the interrogation about his dramatically arranged first date during history class, and he was certain the ball was going to drop now that they were totally alone without her cronies or Lisa to intervene.

                But, surprisingly, it never came. He’d even turned around at one point, shocked beyond belief that the girl wasn’t locking him into another quicksilver trance to ascertain every intimate detail of the evening. All he received in return was a sweep of her platinum locks, a militaristic flutter of fingers, and a muted “Hey shortstuff.” No breakdown, no demands, no icy threats to his personal safety. It almost seemed too good to be true.

                Maybe there was something to this yoga stuff after all, or maybe he was just inconceivably lucky. Either way. Inhaling heavily one final time for good measure, Peter filled his lungs for six solid seconds and closed his eyes, containing it for eight more pulses as he clasped his hands calmly to his knees. At last the air wisped back through his lips, more slowly than the intake, until his lungs were dry again at the end of ten seconds. Peter sighed quietly, blearily opening his eyes just in time to experience a rush of warm wind and the incoming backdrop of smoky-gray, blotting out all other known objects in the room until he was cocooned in what he now realized was a gym uniform, dampened by blotchy sweat and pungent with salty secretion.

                He thrashed briefly, too surprised to make more than a muffled peep, but soon felt fingers wrapping themselves around him through the soggy fabric and compressing him into it. Those slow breaths he’d been taking for granted mere seconds ago were suddenly squeezed from his lungs and replaced with toxically acrid oxygen, soiled by rampant body odor and only the faintest memory of that rubbery gym floor. What stilted gasps he was able to get in were quickly replaced with coughs. The entrapping digits groped around him, reshuffling the sweaty cotton at every angle to wedge it between his legs and against his neck. After turning over a full rotation, Peter realized he was no longer on the stack of papers and being lifted up from the desk, with only these alien fingers to support him.

                “HEY!” the imprisoned freshman shouted, knowing most of his volume was instantly absorbed into the layers of rumpled shirt anyway, ripe with this stranger’s excretion, but he knew he had to try. The Peter of two weeks ago most likely would’ve remained perfectly silent out of terror and shock, but no more. Even if he couldn’t even overpower the thumb that was hammering at his stomach through the fabric and utilizing him like a stress ball, he wasn’t going to just lie there and take it without protest. Unfortunately, calling out also carried with it the inevitability of having his momentarily opened jaw filled with a swampy mouthful of rancid cotton, its sour remnants poison against his tongue.

                He hacked weakly, spitting into the raging storm cloud of manhandled gym clothing but only meeting another splash of warm liquid against his teeth. Beyond repulsed, he braced himself, protecting his head with his arms and leaving his body vulnerable to more thumps from those pounding fingers. By now the pressure on the clothes into a concentrated point in the center where the boy just happened to be inhabiting had caused a great deal of the accumulated sweat painted across the school logo to drip down onto Peter, and his street attire was positively soaked.

                “HEY! STOP!” he ordered. The futility of the gesture was not at all lost on the freshmen, but if he could get the noise level up high enough, whatever was happening to him right now might be seen as more trouble than it was worth. Be it prank or worse.

                For once, he found himself wishing Ms. Watson was here to watch over him with that voyeuristic gleam in her eye and the unsettling curve on her lips, and he never dreamed he’d feel that way. At least she had the common decency to degrade him instead with thinly veiled insinuations about foot rubs rather than outright assault.

                Resistance was getting tougher as Peter wheezed for air, but still didn’t give up, punching every which way and occasionally actually finding success in preventing the fingers from meeting their mark through the padding of the shirt. He was so tightly tangled up in viscid material, his legs thrown over his head and his hands at any given time above or below his chin, he couldn’t even say which direction was up. Nevertheless, he carried on, throwing out a knee wherever he could, and rasping an embittered rebuttal in between uncooperative swallows of acidic sweat.

                “THAT’S ENOUGH!” Peter bellowed at the top of his lungs, louder than he would’ve thought himself capable given that he’d been tumbling weightlessly in the grasp of his attacker for more than a minute, and for an instant the fingers finally came to a stop, cupping him into a weight below that he assumed to be a palm. At last the fabric, no longer being squeezed every half-second, poofed back outward, giving the abused freshman some breathing room, rank though the limited and stale air was.

                Who was this? Who could think this was funny? It wasn’t like there weren’t several obvious candidates, but given the lack of direct contact, clearly thought through on the part of his detractor to avoid being identified, not to mention how dizzily disoriented he’d become on this whole discomforting trip, it was too tough a call to make with certainty.

                And just like that, he was falling. It took a moment to register as he realized the fingers were no longer keeping him aloft and suddenly he only had seemingly endless layers of balled-up fabric and dribbling sweat for support. But then there was nothing beneath, and Peter realized he was dropping. He shrieked but felt it quickly sucked back into his throat along with another sour drop, out of responses and out of options as the mysterious, or not-so-mysterious, girl allowed him to plop out of her claw not toward the desk where she’d found him but somewhere further below.

                The fall of course felt much longer than it was, and the impact was considerably softer than Peter would’ve assumed before he remembered his surroundings and decided, based on the lack of lateral motion in his blind and slimy encampment, that he’d been deposited rather unceremoniously into the dirty laundry hamper. Another flop from above followed, adding a little more pressure onto his sweaty cave, and Peter guessed the gym shorts had been added in. The sound of rubber soles smacking the tile floor sounded out and then quietly fell away as his anonymous detractor made her exit, leaving Peter alone.

                “HEY!” the boy called out after a meek few seconds of breathless waiting, just a little too nervous to try poking his head out from between the folds of fabric for aid in case the perpetrator returned to stifle his complaints more permanently. “S-Someone?”

                Seconds turned into minutes, or at least the boy thought so. His heartbeat had sped up enough that it was hard to judge the general passage of time. The basket was nearly filled to the brim even before Peter and his accompanying oversized uniform were thrown in, stacked high mostly with filthy rented attire, exchanging spiced odors and degrees of moisture amongst one another. Peter groaned, realizing this would probably make it hard to identify the owner of the uniform. There was a budge beneath the pile-up of discarded fabric, causing the freshman to sink just a little deeper into the sweaty vortex of gray and eye-stinging shadow, and then he heard another footstep, louder and more self-assured than what had come before.

                “HEY!” Peter repeated, feeling the brief weightlessness overtake the entire basket as Ms. Watson snatched it and her student up. “HELP!” Though he knew it was a stupid and impossible notion now that an authority figure had arrived, for just a fraction of a second, he couldn’t help but experience a rush of imagined sensations beginning with the clothes being flung violently into the rotund metal darkness of an industrial washer, followed by the slam of the ovular door and the cranking of a dial that would execute him once the tank was filled up with skin-broiling suds. “H-HELP ME!”

                There was a jolt. The mesh basket halted in midair, steadied by the hand of his powerful teacher, and then light began to flood into the wilting burial ground of soaking clothing, followed by those meaty fingers fishing through the . Too glad to be recognized here, Peter didn’t allow himself to feel even an ounce of shame as he practically threw himself into Ms. Watson’s curled digits and waited calmly as she folded him firmly into her leathery palm and drew him out of the sweaty purgatory.

                “Oh my God,” she croaked, the middle-aged woman’s tanned jaw hanging open and revealing her glistening uvula as she let the basket smack back down to the floor, spilling a few of its grimy contents onto the floor around her bleach-white tennis shoes. Steadily her soft fist unfurled, allowing Peter to roll back into the center, though her fingers remained closely caged around him. Groping in the air behind her with her free hand, not wanting to take her dinner plate-sized scleras off her miniature pupil for a single instant, Ms. Watson found her way into the chair and cupped Peter into both hands, idly stroking a thumb along his shoulders.

                “Uh, t-thanks,” he mumbled, not quite sure where to go from here, but above all enthused to be free of the basket.

                “Did… did you fall inside? I shouldn’t have left you in… oh Lord, I…”

                “No, no it wasn’t that. Not at all,” Peter explained hurriedly, waving his hands, and doing his best to ignore the woman’s finger doing its best to comfort him with long caresses along his arms and hips, just a little more tender than was probably required in this moment. “It was… someone. A... a person. I d-don’t know who.”

                “A student did this to you?” she gaped, pursing her lips so hard she practically swallowed them inside her maw. Peter watched her toned biceps flexing inherently at his meek declaration. She shook her head and released a steaming sigh through her nostrils, evidently less anxious than she’d been a moment before, though Peter couldn’t quite imagine why. He supposed there were some liability issues running through her mind at this moment, and frankly, he couldn’t blame her.

                “Y-Yes. Yes. Sorry, but I couldn’t tell who. She, um… she used the shirt you f-found me in and dropped me in there.”

                “God damn kids,” she growled, abruptly less so on the verge of an emotional break than she’d been a few seconds before. Already her words were sounding more like the artificial constructions Peter had been used to more recently. “Sorry. Language. I’m supposed to be setting a good example for everyone.”

                “It’s… fine.”

                “Especially you.”

                “T-Thanks,” Peter said uncertainly, at last placing a hand against Ms. Watson’s thumb, which was still stroking up and down the length of his entire body with slightly more firmness than he preferred. He brushed it away as casually as he could, and the teacher, seemingly noticing her pattern at the same time as the toy-sized boy, obliged instantly.

                “Well, listen, before you leave, then, we’ll need to go down to the office and talk to someone. The principal, at least. Maybe the superintendent! We’ll give your mother a call, too. We can’t be having things like this happening. Not in my school, and certainly not in my class,” the woman railed, rambling quickly through the next steps with a fiery tongue. Her fingers seemed to curve in even closer to her charge’s body.

                Peter’s stomach lurched, twisting into itself even harder than when he’d been flipped repeated upside down and had an unknown fifteen-year-old girl’s sweat strained through his lips.

                “W-Wait,” he muttered. “We, um… we h-have to do all that?”

                “Well, yes. Of course we do,” Ms. Watson said, sounding just a little too much like she was overacting for Peter’s tastes. However, in his state of mild and quickly mounting panic at his mother learning about this latest misfortune especially after his dangerous sleepover games with Jessica’s ex-friend, the boy was determined to focus on nothing else except stopping this course of action at any cost. He had no doubt his continued attendance at this school, and with it, his odds of ever maintaining some normalcy in his life would be extinguished.

                “Listen, I, uh… I don’t want to make a scene. It’s not necessary.”

                “Look, hon. I’m not just going to let someone get away with messing with you in here. This little ol’ heart of mine won’t be able to take it.”

                “Please. Please… don’t tell the principal. Or my mom.”

                “Why shouldn’t it? You’re my responsibility, and you’re clearly at risk here.”

                “I… I know. And maybe that just means I shouldn’t be in here by myself. Without you… keeping an eye on me,” Peter gulped, at some level unable to believe he was willing to say those words aloud to this woman, but at this drastic stage, he had to play all his cards. “Look, m-maybe I just fell into that basket myself. Nobody else. Just me, being dumb. I’m not even hurt. See?”

                Ms. Watson frowned, biting the corner of her lip, evidently considering these words, unreasonable though they probably should’ve seemed.

                “You know they might not let you stay, don’t you?” the woman breathed at last, having studied Peter silently for several seconds. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

                “Y-Yeah.”

                “And that upsets you.”

                “Yes.”

                The woman breathed out again, and somehow the pad of her thumb found its way back to Peter’s shoulders, massaging them vigorously and inching back down his arms. This time, he didn’t stop her, as something at an unconscious level told him he needed to be in her good graces to the fullest extent right now.

                “You really want to be here, don’t you? At this school. In this class.”

                “Yes,” he chirped quietly, feeling his voice crack but not particularly caring. Every emotion in his arsenal was fair game at this point. “I just need to learn like a regular person. Be around other people. That’s all I want. It’s… all I’ve ever wanted. Please.”

                Ms. Watson closed her eyes and scrunched up her cheeks, chewing over the request as her thumb wound its way down Peter’s leg, fiddling with his calves.

                “All right, all right. For… now. I’ll be keeping a closer eye on you, though. You can bet that much. Every second you’re in this gymnasium or locker room, you’re mine.”

                “Thank you,” the freshman breathed, regretting what that most likely meant almost as much as he was filled with elation to have this potential disaster for his blossoming ordinary existence averted.

                “Don’t mention it, hon,” Ms. Watson whispered, flashing him an especially deep wink, as her teeth nibbled again at the corner of her lip.