Peter gazed across the leafy expanse of the school courtyard, the plate glass before him acting as his only barrier to the lingering autumnal air. The roomy marbled window sill upon which he sat, drawing pad in his lap, was a useful tool for forgetting that he was still inside. It was cold beneath his jeans, but other than this mild discomfort, he could press his forehead up against the translucent wall and observe the insects flitting in between the branches.

                “Do you have a good view?” Alita asked from behind him. She’d taken a seat on a chair pulled from a nearby classroom. The winding interior hallway that wrapped around the central courtyard was finally devoid of students rushing late to classes, leaving the pair to carry out their vague “Draw the World” assignment from art class in peace.

                Their aging and mostly hard of hearing teacher Mr. Garrison was nothing if not encouraging of total freedom, especially when it meant he didn’t have to write too detailed of a project explanation.

                “Oh, yeah. This is great,” Peter said gratefully. “You can, um… you know, go outside and get some samples or something for your drawing if you want.”

                “No, no, I do not mind,” she insisted. Her curly dark hair bounced from emphasis of these words, along with her almost-too-bright smile. “I get enough of the outside on my walk home, you know?”

                “Hey, no complaints here,” Peter chuckled. “Thanks for the ride inside.”

                “You are very welcome.”

                Originally they, along with most of the rest of the class, had posted up on the benches outside the school to sketch a randomly selected chunk of the great outdoors.

                However, after about ten minutes of practically religious attention to detail with a drawing of a tree knot on his miniature pad, Peter’s work was ripped away by a strong gust of wind. After pulling himself up from his back on the splintered surface of the picnic table where Erica had placed him, though, and alerting Calvin to his lost art, his fellow thespian had darted off after it, only to return with bad news.

                “Sorry, man,” the boy drawled with some apparent guilt as he brandished the tiny slip of paper between his thumb and forefinger. It was sopping with rain water from the puddle it so ceremoniously landed in before Calvin could catch it. He smoothed it out into his hand, using a cuticle to remove the wrinkles, but this only caused the liquefied lead to smear on the grooves of his fingers.

                “I guess Mother Nature didn’t  want me to Draw that particular part of The World,” Peter said, which got Calvin to smirk again after his forlorn effort to salvage the smaller teen’s work.

                So instead, after Calvin had departed to follow after a bizarrely chromed caterpillar on a nearby sapling, Alita offered to bring Peter to a more serene location, with decidedly less wind, where he could still observe the scenic splendor. He agreed almost immediately, especially after setting his pencil tip down to the next page and having a quick breeze set his hand askew, which made for one untoward-looking bird.

                The diminutive freshman was impressed, considering this was Alita’s first effort in transporting a miniature human life from point A to B. She used both hands, a technique he hadn’t seen used too many times except in his most nervous carriers, and they were damp with anxious sweat by the time she’d made the perhaps fifty-foot journey back indoors.

                Still, she’d only shaken a little on the first few steps; she was easily better at holding him than some of the well-meaning but over-excited and maybe dangerously bubbly friends Jessica had brought home in times past. After receiving his express approval, his classmate had let him off at the window sill, where she’d volunteered to remain just in case, despite the surface offering several inches of additional clearance for safety.

                “What did you choose to draw?” Alita asked.

                “Um, I’m giving that stick right there a try.”

                “The stick with the sleeping moth attached?”

                “No, the- wait, there’s a moth?” Peter casually scribbled at his considerably more boring stick, wondering if he could convincingly re-render it into the one that housed an inverted creature, its brown paper wings folded neatly against its ribbed back. It was going to be a hard sell.

                “Ah, Peter?”

                “Yeah?”

                “Could- um, I feel bad to ask, but…”

                “What?”

                “I need to take a break to the restroom,” Alita admitted, with the same kind of unearned dejectedness that Calvin had used outside. It always made Peter laugh a little on the inside when people appeared to take deep personal responsibility for the obstacles imposed by his size. “Do you want me to take you back outside, to be nearer to the others? Like Calvin?”

                “Nah,” he shrugged. “Do you… think you’ll be gone long?”

                “I shouldn’t, no,” she promised. She rose from her chair and set her sketchpad down on the plastic seat, taking a step closer to the window. Her fingers curled a few inches to Peter’s right, her long nails clicking quietly on the sill. “Are you sure you’re all right alone?”

                “Sure. Take an early lunch break if you want, too,” Peter reassured with a casual snort. He patted one of her fingernails, then froze. At last he’d spied the correct branch to shade so he could re-shape the whole thing into the one with the moth napping beneath.

                “Good, good,” she answered as made her way down the carpeted tunnel at a power-walk speed, clearly eager to come back as soon as possible.

                Peter cocked his head to the side, not quite making out the angle of the stick under a patch of velvet-lined leaves. This was another major downfall of being his size, among a list of other points that could’ve stretched to his house and back. He clambered from one end of the window sill to the other, adding a new swipe of his pencil tip every few seconds, only to find his perception changing from each new angle through the glass. Typical.

                Still, the moth was easily rendered. It even had the good manners to remain still, so near to the window, the dark ovals edging its wings making an interesting challenge for the boy as he kept his hand steady, arcing across the page to perfect the curve of its back legs. It looked large enough to Peter that he imagined he could’ve petted it in a similar manner to the way children could pet housecats.

                Its antennae twitched.

                “You’ll never believe what I found.” The whisper steamed like boiling liquid against the back of Peter’s neck. His grip on the lead tip shuddered, scraping a line clear through the moth’s head. His subconscious recognized the owner of the voice before even he did.

                “Hi, Mandy,” he managed civilly, turning on his haunches to face the girl.

                She silently balked at him from above, clearly with no intention to lean over or sit to even the level of their eyes. As ever, her light brown hair was twisted back into a ponytail, just a little frizzier than normal. Those hazel eyes of hers were shading a little grayer today, though Peter couldn’t be sure if that wasn’t just the cluttered shadow of the window-high bush blotting the light on her face.

                “I asked you a question, little guy,” Mandy informed him. “Did you hear me ask it, in your little ears?”

                “I did,” he coughed. With Alita possibly still a few minutes away, it made much more sense to play nice. He placed his sketch pad at his size, folding his hands into his lap. “What did you find?”

                “You have to guess it first,” she said, the ends of her words wandering off as if she remembered half of a dream after finishing a sentence. Her gaze, though, stayed trained with mechanical precision on the boy.

                “Oh. Um, sure. I can guess. Uh… acorn?”

                “Why would I tell you you’ll never believe it if it’s an acorn?” Mandy drawled, raising an eyebrow. She twirled the ends of her hair in her fingers, while her opposite hand fumbled with a much more ragged sketch pad. Paper shreddings fluttered like snowflakes down to her well-worn sneakers below.

                “Good point,” he remarked calmly. “It could’ve been a… really weird acorn, though, I bet.”

                “No,” she said. “It couldn’t.”

                “Right. Uh, how about… a… deer?”

                “Deer don’t live around here. I’ve walked around a lot of the woods by the school and never saw one. And I don’t live far away,” she explained. “If I did, I would try to catch it.”

                Unsure whether or not the girl was kidding, as her tone remained unerringly rigid, Peter cleared his throat again and soldiered on. “Okay, okay, so it’s not a deer or a weird acorn. How about an owl?”

                “No. You must not have a super-big imagination. But I guess that makes sense,” Mandy offered. “Nothing else on you is super-big.”

                She thumbed at her chin in feigned preponderance while still continuing to play with her ponytail. Her eyes rolled stealthily toward the ceiling but almost instantly snapped back to the five-inch boy seated so helplessly on the window sill before her like a sacrificial offering, with precious little in the way of detour options.

                “Ha-ha, yeah. I guess it’s a-”

                “No more guessing, little guy. You only get three guesses.”

                “Oh. You just didn’t mention that it was only thr-”

                “Everyone knows it’s just three guesses you get,” she snapped again. She shuffled the sketchpad under her arm. “Or, at least, everyone I know who’s normal knows it’s just three.”

                “Ah.” Like usual in Mandy’s presence, he’d run dry on words. He hoped Alita hadn’t stopped to talk to any friends.

                “I’ll just show you what I found out there in the woods,” Mandy said. She turned a page in her book and propped it onto the edge of the sill, displaying the intricately penciled image in all its glory.

                Peter was dumbstruck.

                Dry on words, sure, but now dry on mental processing as well. He’d been thrown for plenty of loops in his life, of course, many of them during these first three weeks of school, and some of those under this creepy young woman’s watchful glare. But this thing he was staring at now on Mandy’s paper was special. It was in a class of its own. It truly did defy all description, except one.

                And that description was: a nude drawing of Peter.

                There was no mistaking it. Mandy was clearly talented at something besides making his blood run in clumps. Unfortunately, that talent was apparently life drawings. His features were all intact: the work of a master study. The face was fearful, even submissive. His bare arms, legs, hands, even his hair were all there like reality. And of course, there was the matter of his sketched penis, flopped against the penciled thigh. Eerily correct. In fact, the entire image appeared to be in practically one-to-one scale.

                It was like staring into a mirror. An incredibly unsettling mirror, wherein he was stripped naked, laid on a bed of leaves, and positively terrified of whatever he was looking at, but a mirror nonetheless.

                “Is that… is that…” Peter stammered, extending a pathetically trembling finger at the remarkably accurate picture. “Is that... m-m-”

                “Do you like it?” Mandy questioned under her breath. She grinned using every tooth in her skull, savoring the expression of utter loss on the tiny face before her. “I’ve been working on it for a couple weeks. I thought I could use it for my assignment. I’m really proud of it.”

                “I don’t t-think that’s a… n-nature picture,” Peter wheezed. The girl had left him empty of oxygen and she didn’t even need to lay a finger on him. Amy could take lessons. On second thought, hopefully not.

                “Yes it is, little guy,” she corrected with a chuckle, as though setting a foolish toddler straight on the finer points of human speech. “I saw him in the forest. It’s a fairy.”

                “I’m n-not sure Mr. G-Garrison will be… um, s-supportive of… I mean, he won’t t-think it’s real or…” Talking was getting harder for Peter by the second. Mandy still had the sketch pad propped up against the window sill, blocking the boy’s view of the hallway. He had to look at it. Even when he tilted his head away toward the glass, the reflection of the artistic horror met his gaze.

                “It doesn’t matter what the dumb teacher thinks,” Mandy said. “I know what I saw, and this is it.”

                “O-Oh.”

                She brought her thumb to her mouth and licked softly at the corner of her nail, then brought it down to the page. Her moistened fingertip widened a crisp line that formed sketch-Peter’s hairline, then remained, stroking back and forth along the top of the boy’s drawn head. Next it traced down, making a zigzag along his chest. Her finger paused over the stomach, then flicked at the paper directly over the pencil render of Peter’s crotch. Unable to help it, he flinched for real at this final move, and watched Mandy’s eyes light up at his reaction.

                “And I’ll tell you something else,” she said, letting a heavy sigh release from her lips. “I’m going to find this exact fairy again. I’m going to take him home. And then I’ll have a new pet.”

                Bile trickled in Peter’s throat.

                Why. Why him? Why her? Why ANY of it. Why was whoever-was-up-there so determined to make him scream at the silent heavens?

                “Hey, Peter!” Alita called from down the hallway as she dashed with the same stride back to the window. She narrowed her eyes at Mandy, who quickly dropped another fresh page over the visage of the stripped Peter, hiding it away. “How’s it going?”

                “Going… it’s going,” Peter sputtered. He was too weak now to get out the word “good.” Not that it would have been truthful.

                “Mandy?” Alita accused. “What are you doing over here?”

                “Nothing. I was just showing the little guy some drawings I did. Since we’re in art class.”

                “Uh-huh. Come on, you know the teacher says you guys shouldn’t be near each other after the things that happened. Go back outside, okay?”

                “I don’t have to do anything because you tell me to,” Mandy spat, letting loose a snarl on the final words that she instantly quelled again to her usual stone demeanor. She flipped her ponytail back over her shoulder and nibbled the corner of her thumbnail again. A glance was fired over to Peter. “But I am going back outside. There’s… things I need to look for.”

                Peter forced himself to look down at his lap as he listened to Mandy’s purposeful footfalls thump back down the hall toward the courtyard door. He plucked his sketchpad up and gripped it in powder-white knuckles.

                “What was that about?” Alita murmured as she took her seat again.

                “Nothing,” the tiny freshman said. He picked up his pencil tip again and made an effort to grant the picture of the moth its second wing, but he gave up within a few seconds, letting the leaden point roll away along the window sill.

                His hands were shaking too hard.