Peter didn’t think he could feel any hollower today.

                After Mandy had revealed her nude drawing of him during art class and implied she wanted to own him, things seemed to have peerlessly peaked. It really, truly didn’t seem like the day could get worse from that point, nor he himself any emptier. That moment, after all, challenged his very grasp of himself as an autonomous entity and a living thing.

                Then there was this.

                The tiny teen crimped into himself in the cooled center of Lisa’s palm. He wanted to be smaller, so she couldn’t look at him. If only this particular size wasn’t his only party trick as a human being; if only he could shrink, too. Far tinier than this. The fact was, he’d spent most of his life silently hoping and praying to wake up at a normal height, even something still-below average. Four-foot-five. Four-foot-one. Below that, even, as long as it meant he could stand on his own.

                What a fool he’d been to feel that way. Heck, this was nothing. People could see his face when he stood in their hands. That was too much. Way too much. But if he could shrink down to an inch or even a half or a quarter inch, or maybe just to the size of a speck of grit, he could get lost beneath Lisa’s thumbnail and not have to share in the pitting embarrassment of this night.

                It was like having his every worst fear confirmed in a single shout from Lisa’s father, and yet simultaneously it made every kind of nauseous sense possible.

                Of course Lisa felt that way. Of course she was worried about the prospect of “dating” someone like him: a circus sideshow freak who’d drawn media attention and boggled eyes alike for his entire existence up to this point and, assuredly, the rest of it as well.

                Lisa still didn’t have the strength to look at him yet. Her jaw was squared to the ceiling, even while her quivering palm kept Peter secure in her fenced grasp. In seconds her entire body was quaking as well, buckling at the knees. It was a full-on internal meltdown, and Peter could feel it vibrating through his shoes. In one swoop his guardian descended toward the floor, letting her stockinged heels slide across the concrete, her head lolling against the wall.

                When at last the pair mustered the will to look one another in the eye, it was no surprise to Peter that his vision was blurred. Of course it wasn’t enough that he’d just heard that this girl he felt so many complex things for had some strong and entirely reasonable doubts about her relationship with him; no, no, he had to tear up like a pathetic petulant crybaby as well, and right in front of her, too.

                “Peter…” Lisa croaked. Those green irises were welled much deeper than those of the boy she held defensively in her hands. Her chin tilted upward in a last effort to keep the tears from toppling.

                “H-Hey, it’s… it’s okay,” Peter forced himself to say.

                “No, n-no. It’s not,” she insisted quietly, shaking her head from side to side with emphatic panic.

                “I mean it, it’s cool. I’m f-fine with it,” he said. He gulped down the incoming wave of emotional snot in his throat before it could start affecting his speech. “I mean, I’m not… I’m not totally fine, it kinda… I don’t know, I just mean… I understand.”

                “No, Peter. Please, just… just listen to me,” Lisa said. Her voice maintained a consistent hush, withholding a similar deluge. Her eyes glistened brighter with saltwater.

                “Right. Okay,” he gulped. He supposed he owed her that much, after all she’d done for him.

                “What they’re saying… what my dad just said…” she grumbled, clearly nursing a fresh grudge with her parents over their inability to argue with indoor voices. “…they don’t understand. There’s just a lot… happening now, with me and… me and you. Us.”

                “Y-Yeah.”

                “…but it doesn’t change how I feel about you. At all. Because I… I care so much about you, and…”

                “Thanks,” Peter swallowed. It was sweet of her, really, to patch things up so delicately. Almost everyone else he’d met in the past month might’ve so easily disregarded his fragile mindset, just as easily as they disregarded his right to stand where he wanted without being poked, prodded, or picked up. She had the kindness to treat him like a real person: she had from day one, and she still was, even as she tried to spare him the pain of rejection.

                She deserved no less than exactly the same treatment. No babbling or fussing, just a straight release. An opening to retreat.

                “Those things I said…” Lisa continued. “They were just when things were getting complicated at school, with those girls, and I’ve just never been really good at handling that kind of... of…”

                “I know-”

                “…but it’s different now. I know now, it’s worth it. To… be around you. It’s worth Sharon and Amy and all of them saying those things to me and… about me, in the hallways, and…”

                “Lisa, please,” Peter lurched. He laid his hand back upon the redhead’s quavering thumb, but didn’t linger there for long. “Just-”

                “What?” Her crystallizing tears were on the verge of rolling now.

                “I hate to see you having to do this. You… you don’t deserve to deal with all this crap,” Peter said. Speaking the words felt a lot like throwing up. “Maybe we should just… just not…”

                Lisa shook her head with greater speed, creating a gale force with the snap of her hair. She could read him before he even found the least painful way to get it out.

                “No,” she said. “D-Don’t. Don’t say that.”

                “Your dad’s… kind of right, though. I’m-”

                “No he’s not. None of them are.”

                “-I am different. A lot different. Being around me, being friends with me, even being... well, it changes everything,” Peter wretched. He wanted to pause, take a breath and possibly curl up and die, but he knew if he stopped speaking, he’d wouldn’t get it out, and then he’d never forgive himself. “My whole life, people have looked at me… held me… touched me, like I’m some kind of alien. Like I don’t deserve to be called a person. And maybe they’re right to. I don’t know. But I do know that it’s… it’s really hard, Lisa. I hate it sometimes… a lot of the time. And I…”

                “…what?”

                “…I don’t want that for you, too.”

                Lisa’s head-shaking slowed to a measured swivel. By now, the tears that flooded between her eyelids had trickled down her cheeks and dampened the strands of fiery hair still curtaining those mournful green eyes. Her index finger curved into her palm, stopping at Peter’s shoulder, and stroked along his cheek with such divine tenderness it rippled the goosebumps along the boy’s skin down to his toes.

                “Peter…” Lisa sobbed, her lips quivering as they bore nearer.

                Peter didn’t allow himself to think any longer. This had gone on long enough. He leaned forward, giving into the personal gravity of Lisa’s soft, warm hands, and fell face-first against the cushioned, pillowy surface of her mouth.

                Immediately the gentle flesh of the girl’s lips responded. She puckered against his face, laying at first just a quiet peck. Once he answered with his own harder kiss to ensure she could feel it, though, her lips swelled for another. Suction adhered him to the damp, strawberry-scented terrain of her mouth. They laid a halo of wetness around his jaw.

                The words and half-cracked excuses had gone out of both their throats. All that was left was the patter of lips and the sharp, surprised, faintly delighted intake of breath from Peter and Lisa. The girl’s hands cuddled in closer around the tiny legs, carrying him toward her lips like water drawn from a stream.

                As he propped himself higher in the pale palms, the boy wrapped his arms around both of Lisa’s thumbs and alternated laying smooches on her upper and lower lip, even daring to nibble softly at her skin. He heard the distant rumble of a moan from deep down inside his dream girl: a note of discovery. It was hard not to make a similar sound as he pressed his face and entire perception into the undulating center of Lisa’s lips again and opened his mouth. He felt the flick of a hot, pink tongue venture out, blessing his own lips with its careful grace.

                “Please,” Peter begged into Lisa’s now-tear-glazed cheek as he watched the red streams of her hair dance past her lips. He smudged away a tear that had rolled all the way to his neck. “I’m sorry, Lisa. Please don’t go.”

                “I won’t,” she swore in that lyrical whisper that made his heart hum along. “I’m sorry too. Peter, I…”

                “Yes?”

                Neither bothered to speak again as lips simultaneously dove for lips, Lisa seeking out the miniature pucker on the boy’s wet face, and Peter letting himself be wrapped into the warmth and safety of the girl’s hands, sure and strong beneath his weightless body.