“But what’s this?” Blue questioned with singsong lucidity, projecting her normally-whispered voice out into the school theater’s sparsely populated auditorium. The wispy young actress took a few deliberate steps across the blank blue stage, advancing on her five-inch costar, who stood with his chest puffed up upon a prop table in the corner of the expansive space. She brandished a ruffled script in her hand, leaning the dog-eared page nearer to the light for better viewing. “What’s your name, little one?”
“Tom Thumb!” Peter bellowed, knowing his lines weren’t going to carry far for now without a microphone, but shrugged it off. He bowed gracefully, waving his hand with a royal flourish like Mrs. Parks had instructed, then snuck another glance at the note sheet on which he’d printed his own cues. “At your service.”
“Tom Thumb,” the girl playing Rapunzel repeated back. She stooped down above his platform, running her fingers along her bony cheek as she studied Peter with mock fascination. “Tell me something, sir. Did you receive that name before or after you were born at such low stature?”
“Low stature?” he scoffed, following the script. “I tell you, madam, that few have a stature quite as high as mine. I’ll have you know I’ve made a very profitable living selling toadstool tables and other useful products to woodland creatures for a number of years now, and have acquired the funds necessary to build my very own mansion.”
“Well, I can’t imagine it cost so much to construct even a palace for one of your size,” she responded, cocking her head. The stage lights blared brighter above, but she kept focus upon Peter. “Now, suppose you tell me how you managed to reach the top of my tower here? It must’ve been quite a voyage.”
“Aye, that it was,” he admitted loudly. “Luckily, I had one of your immaculate yellow hairs, like gold and silk in one, draped from the window to the ground. So it was merely a matter of making the clamber.”
“My hair?” Blue gasped, placing her hands to her cheeks. “What peril you must’ve been in! And I wasn’t even standing by the window. Are you certain it was my hair you climbed?”
“I think hair as long as yours would be quite difficult to miss, madam,” Peter said. “I presume it came detached from your head, and sort of drifted there, by happy coincidence.”
“That does make sense,” she said, stroking at the invisible golden-locks that would eventually adorn her ordinarily short-and-brunette do with a wig. She strolled around the table, gazing wistfully into the darkness above the seats and then back down to the tabletop that stood at waist height with her scene partner. “Goodness knows I do all I can, but as I’ve been trapped up here all my life, I’ve had precious few opportunities for grooming. Some shedding is bound to happen.”
“And that is precisely what I’ve come here to discuss with you!” Peter bellowed with the gusto of a seasoned salesman, hardly letting her finish the line. The off-duty student actors out in the front pews of the theater chortled quietly, not wanting to disturb the proceedings; in particular, Calvin’s distinctively goofy snicker carried above the rest. This time the miniscule freshman heard his own words rebound off the nearest wall, creating a pittance of an echo, which was better than he’d fared before. Confidence swelled inside.
“What is it?” Blue questioned. “My hair?”
“Yes, your hair!” Peter said, waving an arm. “Now, if you would be so kind as to… give me one more boost?”
“Oh. Yes, of course!” she sighed, kneeling toward the table. Her fingers slid onto the surface, hand upturned and held steady, as they’d practiced. For a moment the illusion of comedic fantasy was broken as Blue caught her costar’s eye, raising her eyebrow and blinking from his tiny shoes to the creases in her palm, letting him know she was securely poised to take on passengers. The boy could see the anxiety in her eyes at finally having to rehearse this moment, the first of several in the play where an opportunity arose to hold him, and her thin lips seemed to quiver slightly, but Peter knew already how focused she’d become.
Confident in his footing, the miniature teen stepped forward, clambering with some over-acting to embark on her hand. The other actors witnessing the scene chortled again, well-aware after several rehearsals that Peter was more than capable of getting into a hand without tripping for real. For a moment, Blue’s eyes flashed with worry, until the boy slumped into the center of her palm and gave a broadly dramatized thumbs up and a wink that only she could see.
“Now, what is it about my hair that’s caused you to risk life and limb just to remind me I’m in need of a beauty salon?” Blue boomed outward. “I’ve no need for those toadstools you say you’ve made such good fortune in selling, as I’ve unfortunately outgrown mushrooms as stools since… birth, I suppose?”
Another snicker from the audience ensued. Blue lifted her hand, leveling it off at roughly chin level, plenty close now to accurately read the miniscule freshman’s lips. Peter noticed the barely perceptible shift in her pupils, training onto his millimeters-wide mouth, and ensured now to declare his lines with special overemphasis on every hard consonant. The skin of her hand was hot beneath his legs given the flood of stage light.
“Fair enough. But you see, madam, in addition to those toadstools, I also pride myself on my cleansing wares!”
“Are you suggesting I need a bath, good sir?” Blue scoffed, planting the script over her heart for effect before glancing at it again. Peter felt a slight wobble in her wrist that was immediately corrected, giving her a fresh shot of faith with a bob of his head as he steadied himself on the cushy curvature in the heel of her hand.
“Well…” Peter continued, inhaling deeply for humorous effect and choking back a false wheeze that earned another laugh from beyond. “No, no, not at all! However, perhaps, if, as you say, you’ve been trapped in this tower all your life, that marvelous hair of yours is due for a rinse? If you think it shines now, wait until I’m through with it. It will gleam like the midmorning sun during the pitch-black of night!”
“Perhaps…” Blue said. “I do occasionally find need to rise during the night and can’t for the life of me see where I’m walking. And often I do trip on my hair.”
“Perhaps, indeed!” the boy said. He clasped a hand to the girl’s steadily rising thumb. “I could demonstrate my wares to you, if you only give me the time to bring them up here and show you.”
“I’ve got nothing but time, good sir. However, I don’t imagine you’ll get your wares up here without great expense and bodily cost, unless they’re so small they may not even be capable of cleansing my hair anyway. Though if you can manage it, I’d be very interested indeed.”
“Never underestimate the ingenuity of someone in my line of work, madam!” Peter said, wagging a finger at her and marking the upcoming business transaction by shaking her thumb with the other. She obliged in kind, hitting a gentle rise-and-fall rhythm with her digit that also managed to provide balance for the boy as he stood up on the squishy terrain of her tender palm flesh.
“You mean you’re going to hire one of your fairies to carry the products up to me?” Blue queried with delight. She brushed a finger along her cheek with mock-fainting joy, though Peter couldn’t help but notice she seemed to have blushed a deeper shade of rose as well. Their director clearly had a knack for casting.
“Actually, I was just going to use a catapult…” the boy playing Tom Thumb admitted sheepishly.
“And scene!” Mrs. Parks sounded with a clap from the front row, beaming proudly at her thespians.
“That was fricking great,” Calvin cackled in the bustling aftermath of play practice. He leaned his back against the front of the waist-high auditorium stage, his neck lolled over the rubber-lined precipice as he gazed up to the distant welled light fixtures so far above on the ceiling. “Seriously, I thought I was gonna die at that part when Britney did that super-fast bacon-joke part with the three pigs.”
“I know, I was about to crack in about two seconds,” Peter snickered as he stood a matter of inches away from his wiry blonde classmate’s reclining head. His belly still ached a little from laughter when he was off-stage and watching his fellow performers block out the scenes in sequence.
“Your stuff was good, too, dude. Seriously.”
“Thanks,” Peter muttered.
“No, really. I could hear you real well!”
“Good. Now people will hear me loud and clear when I drop a line on opening night,” the much-smaller boy chuckled.
“Hey, don’t jinx yourself!” Calvin fired back with a smirk. He tilted his face toward Peter on the stage floor, eyeing the puny actor with a shake of his head. “I made a joke like that once in a middle school play and it, like, happened! I walked out and forgot my first line! I’m too scared to say that ever again now.”
“Aren’t you supposed to jinx stuff in theater, though?” Peter snickered. “Like, say break a leg before you go on?”
“Yeah…” Calvin sighed, pressing a fist to his forehead and smiling. “I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t want to blame myself.”
“I know how that feels,” the shorter freshman joshed.
“Hey, Peter,” Blue said as she approached the boys between muttering queues of departing theater kids, passing the last row of crimson-lined seats. She pinched her thumbs and index fingers together, twiddling them in a soft cycle. “I just thought I’d ask real quick before I head out, was everything… cool, today? When I picked you up?”
“You were great!” Peter said.
“I felt a little shaky there for a minute. You could probably tell. That’s my bad. But I had it under control. Honest.”
“You sure figured it out way faster than my little sister ever did when we were younger.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. High bar. But you did good today. Obviously,” Blue giggled, crossing her arms and ceasing the nervous grinding of her fingertips. She raised an eyebrow, looking down to Calvin where he had plopped wearily against the stage to speak to Peter on a more even level. “You too.”
“Thanks,” the boy mumbled bashfully, waving a hand at the lanky Rapunzel. “You… were good, too. You can sit with us if you want, or…”
“We’re all just so sweet, aren’t we?” Blue jabbed, joining the miniature circle of outcasts. “Mrs. Parks would be really proud of us, making friends.” She lowered herself onto her haunches in one swift motion with perfect symmetry, pretzeling her narrow legs together as the cotton fibers of her pink-and-green rabbit-patterned socks stretched higher up her calves.
“Were you guys practicing for that or something, Peter?” Calvin asked. He scratched the bridge of his nose with a thumb. “Her picking you up?”
“Yeah, backstage before we’ve gone on for scenes, just the last few days,” Peter said.
“He’s training me well,” Blue smarmed, squinting slightly to make out the movement of the boy’s lips. She inched inward, bracing against her palms, until she could more directly face the five-inch boy standing before her on the low platform.
“Did that take… much practice?” Calvin asked with some evident concern. “That must freak you out. Just a little. Doesn’t it?”
“It used to. It still does when people don’t ask me first. But, you know… you get used to it. Like getting on a boat.”
“A boat made of person that could sneeze on you,” Blue said. She wrinkled her nose cutely, raising a hand as if to catch an oncoming mucus spray, but only batted at a few misplaced locks of her short brown hair. “Only kidding. No allergies.”
“That’s comforting,” Peter laughed, turning back to Calvin. By now most of the other students had stumbled with their overloaded backpacks out of the auditorium, either making their way to the parking lot, or awaiting rides at the curb if without a driver’s license. “Do you want to try?”
“Me?” the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk star gulped, his brow furrowing. “You sure?”
“Yeah. I mean, might as well. You know, in case of, um…”
“Mandy,” Calvin said knowingly, nodding his head. He shifted, pressing off the ground on his knuckles and turning to face Peter like Blue already was. The narrow-shouldered boy shrugged. “I guess it’s tough to have your back if I can’t… y’know, catch it too.”
“That’s one way of putting it.” Peter padded a few inches nearer to the edge of the stage in the direction of Calvin’s nervously looming face. “Seriously, give it a try. Blue will have your back in case you don’t have mine as fast as you think you did.”
“Oh, great…” Calvin groaned, though he obediently brought his hand to bear up over the edge of the stage, nudging Peter in the knees as he deposited his fingers onto the blue plain. “Sorry…”
“Just keep your hand steady,” Blue said, extending a guiding finger in Calvin’s direction. “Try not to breathe out for a second. Just while he steps in. It’s like firing a gun.”
Simultaneously bewildered and fascinated, Peter shot her a goggle-eyed glance. Calvin did the same, his fingers curling back into a careful fist for a moment before unfolding again near Peter’s miniscule shoes.
“What?” the girl gawked. “Never hear of shooting ranges?”
“Imagine, Rapunzel coming out on stage, guns blazing,” Peter remarked. “Now that’s something I’d pay to see.”
He stepped forward, boarding the plush terrain of Calvin’s fingers. The young man seemed to have softer skin than Blue, who wore just a couple more calluses, indicating to the five-inch boy that his apparently resourceful female costar lived life a little more in the rough-and-tumble than he would’ve predicted by her zany socks.
“This is… weird,” Calvin gulped, though the corner of his lip upturned into a beleaguered grin as he watched the toy-sized life in his hand pay forward a necessary confidence boost. “Not… you, Peter. You know. But, it just feels…”
“Different,” Peter said for him, finding his sea legs quickly as the teen lifted him several inches off the stage floor, and was soon able to stand up steadily, along with the support of Blue’s thumb held out for him like a roller coaster bar, which the diminutive lad gratefully accepted. Despite the new experience, he was able to relax at last.
It had been a long day, to be sure. The memory of Ms. Watson’s briny bare feet and their accompanying walloping odor stinging his nostrils was still plastered in his senses, but more so was the troublesome exchange wherein he now realized she’d coerced him into it on fear of withdrawal from the school.
All his fears, whether she fully understood them or not, taken advantage of so she could get a foot rub from a five-inch boy. The thought of it made him just a little sicker than did the multiple hand-washings he had to go through to completely remove the sticky residue of her sweat from his palms after such a thorough rubdown.
But at least it was over now. At least he could exhale, knowing he’d secured his place in this school for just a little longer.
In this particular moment, though, now, it was relaxing as little else Peter could’ve imagined to stand here, in the hands of trusted new friends up on a stage that dwarfed him so hilariously, like a lake with a cork floating on its waves, and still feel that maybe, just maybe, he could fit in just as well as anyone else.
Even if all the other actors were much easier to see.