Peter blearily cupped his hand over his eyes to shade from the dusty kitchen light above. Laid against Mandy’s cold fingers, he drank in the last details of the meager kitchen space, then looked into those chemically imbalanced hazel eyes above.

                “Uhh… could we maybe go back the way we came?”

                “I don’t think so.”

                “You sure?”

                “I’m sure,” Mandy snickered almost playfully, which was more than a little unsettling to hear, but to Peter’s ears, it was infinitely preferable to that darkly stern tone she occasionally snapped in and out of like a light switch. “Happy” wasn’t necessarily “good” when it came to Mandy, but it was tenfold times better than “angry.” Yes, angry was a thing to avoid.

                “Um…”

                “I’m still waiting for suggestions. Good ones, not stupid ones like you just said. And don’t try and say you want to meet my mom or something sneaky, cuz she doesn’t get home from work ‘til like two in the morning. And I wouldn’t let you meet her anyway.”

                Great. That little tidbit wasn’t inspiring much confidence in his odds of enduring the night.

                “Suggestions…” Peter breathed. “…for…”
                Mandy beamed as broadly as possible; her grin reminded Peter of a small child trying to ruin a family portrait with the most literal interpretation of a big smile. Each of her index fingers took turns bopping the top of Peter’s head, not hard enough to jar, but plenty present to remind him that he was currently laid between her two hands with no witnesses around.

                “It’s just that I’d been thinking super-hard after they suspended me yesterday. After the stuff you said about me. Maybe we… you know, kinda got off on the wrong foot as friends.”

                Peter raised an eyebrow. Unexpected. He could work with this.

                “Okay.”

                “Don’t try to say you didn’t call me crazy again, or I’ll be unhappy with you,” Mandy said, her voice a momentary hiss before she replaced it with another cheery smirk. “You did some things to me, I did some things to you… but that doesn’t matter right now, because we’re starting over.”

                “I see.”

                “I mean, it must be super weird for you, being the only teeny-tiny boy in a giant school full of giant people,” Mandy continued. “I get that maybe you think you’re special enough to be mean to people just cuz you can get away with it, cuz no one wants to hurt the precious little teeny-tiny boy.”

                “I… I don’t think that-”

                “Don’t interrupt me, please,” Mandy coughed. Her thumb nudged Peter upside the head, compressing his Adam’s apple a little rougher than was comfortable. He couldn’t quite complain, though, as it was maybe the first time he’d heard her say please; it sounded unnatural.

                “Anyway,” she sighed, “I’m kinda like you in a lot of ways. I can see that now. That was sort of what the school counselor lady was telling me yesterday. She wants me to think of us as... being in the same boat, I think she said. See, you’ve got your super tiny-ness, and I’ve got my medicine and… well, my own stuff. But it makes it harder for us to make friends sometimes.”

                Peter made a mental note to send that school counselor a fruit basket, assuming he got out of this alive.

                “So I figured, since you’re too small to take yourself anywhere to try and make new friends again, I’d just take care of it for you. And now we can!” Mandy cocked her head like an expectant animal, awaiting a treat to drop. Her tangled auburn knots fell over her cheek.

                “That was… nice of you,” Peter said. For the first time ever with this girl, he wasn’t quite 100% lying. Close to it, but not quite. Enough of his psyche was impacted by the girl’s utter turnaround thanks to the miraculous healing power of high school guidance counseling. Somewhere deep down, he felt some pity for this girl who was clearly going through a real trip this semester, absurd as it was to feel bad for her.

                “I know!” Mandy stood back up without warning, keeping Peter pinned by his wrists into her palm. His legs were flung awkwardly upward on the ascent, but she kept him in place. The legs of her kitchen chair grated like nails on a chalkboard. “And just to show you that there’s no… what’s the words? Hard feelings. To show you there’s no hard feelings, and that I really wanna start over, you’re gonna pick our first thing we do together. Cuz that’s what I’d want to do. You know, the gold rule, like the counselor lady was talking about.”

                Peter gnawed the inside of his cheek. He’d been in more than a few situations in his life where a seemingly well-meaning but ultimately self-serving giant had offered him a false choice only to reveal there was, in fact, a correct answer to a rather selfish question. Despite all Mandy’s explanation of turning a new leaf, she was still a fickle leaf who could probably blow right back over at the slightest breeze. And either way, he had no real reason to believe she wasn’t faking anyway, just to pull a rug out from under him. Picking a kosher activity would be vital.

                Something to give his hopeful rescuers time to track him down.

                “I’m waiting, Peter Rabbit.”

                “Uh… how about… that movie you… wanted to watch?” Peter offered awkwardly. “The scary ones.” Scary or not, anything that got Mandy to sit still and refocus her attention on a screen instead of his body sounded like the optimal choice.

                “Ooohhh…” she murmured, emphatically bobbing her head. Her locks whipped up and down past Peter’s cheeks as her fingers continued idly prodding at his head. “You mean the ScreamSight movies.”

                “Y-Yeah. That’s it.”

                “So now you wanna see them, huh?”

                “Well, uh… we’re here, after all. Might as well.”

                “You’re right,” Mandy confirmed brightly. “We are here.”

                As his eyes wandered nonchalantly from side to side, anywhere but centered on his captor’s waiting catlike irises, Peter spied something in the corner, past the threshold of the cramped kitchen. A dimly lit, tightly angled offshoot more akin to a broom closet, though just along the edge of the door jamb, surrounded by littered shoes, he could make out the skeletal frame of something. A cage, made of cheap black-painted metal, and probably tall enough to reach Mandy’s stomach. Dog cage? A dog was definitely going to complicate things.

                Not that things weren’t already so hopelessly complicated that even throwing a Bengal tiger into the mix wasn’t necessarily going to make things any better or worse.

                They were, indeed, here.

                “I hope you don’t get scared easy,” Mandy said with a shrug. “They’re pretty freaky.”

                “I’ll bet,” Peter said. “But I’ll be all right.”
                “I hope so,” she snickered, leaning back against the grimy kitchen counter. She rested the fist containing her five-inch classmate against her stomach, staring down at him along the length of her abdomen. “Lucky you got me here to protect you if it gets too rough, ya know?”

                “Better than being alone, any day.”
                “I’m glad to hear you say that, little guy,” Mandy slurred. Her fist coiled ever so slightly more firmly around Peter’s ribcage, clenching his chest against the broad plain of her gelid palm. “Obviously, we’re gonna need snacks if we’re gonna watch a movie.”

                “That’s… um, true.”

                “What d’you think you’d want to eat, huh?” Relievingly, Mandy’s fist arose from its perch on her slanted stomach and came around overtop of the countertop. An inch from its surface, the girl’s fingers parted at last, and Peter was released onto the gritty surface, speckled with soap scum and old food grease. It looked like something out of an abandoned army barracks mess hall. Stacks of only half-cleaned plates were lined behind where he stood.

                Peter shuffled his shoes against the cheaply tiled ground, reminding himself of just how limited his range of motion was, given that he was still entrapped in his theater costume. He could stretch his legs most of the way, but the tunic wasn’t especially forgiving. If an opportunity to run presented itself, unlikely a chance though it was, his full sprint speed wasn’t going to be available to him, not unless he found a way to lose the costume.

                The wall of Peter’s stomach was becoming so lined with knots he could hardly process new ones anymore. Odds were, even if his clothes came off somehow or other in Mandy’s vicinity, he was likely to have much bigger problems then. At most, he could begin to stealthily form tears in the cloth to give him a better range of motion for escape, but that would be a tricky order with Mandy so near.

                “Well?” Mandy piped from over by one of the cabinets where she’d moved. Her hands shoved roughly through near-empty boxes of oatmeal and crackers. Just as a secondhand reaction to gaining geographic distance from her, Peter’s heartrate settled down by a few beats per minute. “I’m waiting. What do little fairy boys like you eat, anyway?”

                “Uh… any… anything you’ve got,” Peter said. He shoved his hands in his pockets, busying himself with exploring the possibility of amending the stitching of his tunic with some silent plucking. As precise a seamstress as his mother had become over the years, even her needlework was only as fine as her fingertips could allow, and Peter could feel the delicate stitching with his fingernails. With some work, they might be severed. But he needed time.

                “Here.”

                Peter flinched as Mandy came barreling back toward him from the opposite counter, her hand extended, fingers pinched around something tiny and fire-engine red, the size of a small pill.

                “What?” Peter almost gasped. He winced, taking a step back to reclaim the same spot on the counter as the girl’s enormous cupped hand lowered toward him, with a veritable heap of the tiny red pods piled in her palm.

                Mandy giggled. “You gotta start relaxing if we’re gonna be friends, little guy. If I was gonna hurt you, I coulda done it super easy when I first got you at the school, you know?”

                “That’s true,” Peter almost choked, deciding to keep to himself the fact that this little tidbit meant almost nothing when it came to someone as emotionally changeable as Mandy. “What is this?”

                “It’s our snack, since you took so long to vote. I just picked it myself. It’s good.” As if to demonstrate she wasn’t trying to force-feed him rat poison, the girl scooped up a few of the evidently sticky crimson spheres in her fingertips and drew them into her lips with a satisfied crunch. She wiped her mouth. “Go on. Eat one.”

                “Oh… r-”

                “Now.”

                That was enough of a rhetorical argument for Peter. He leaned forward, careful to only put minimal balancing weight on the ends of Mandy’s long fingers as he grasped for the smallest red ball he could reach in the pile. The shell of it felt spongy in his palm as he held it like an apple and pressed it against his teeth, ever-watchful of Mandy’s instantly imperious eyes above.

                Peter coughed, feeling as if someone had poured a combination of cinnamon and chili powder directly down his throat via intubation. The insides of his cheeks burned, only subtly at first, in the way of over-spiced food, but after a few seconds it turned to outright stinging. He felt his shoes involuntarily dancing, the discomfort rising by the instant as whatever variety of spicy candy the girl had just insisted on wracked his jaws.

                Mandy was reduced to fits of cackling laughter. With a single scoop, she tossed the remaining pile of hot sweets over her teeth, crunching hard on them with her back molars as she leaned back on the counter for support. She nearly crumpled to the ground on her knees with sheer eye-watering mirth at the joke, though Peter suspected at least part of the reaction came from all the candy in one bite.

                “What…” he hacked meekly. “What is that?”

                “Hot Heads. Spiciest candy you can get in this stupid town. I don’t think they’re hot enough, though, so sometimes I put in some extra with the little needle in the cabinet when I get bored,” Mandy explained between remaining peals of giggling. She rose back to her feet, slapping a red-stained palm hard on the counter a few inches from Peter. “How do you like it?”

                “It kind of hurts,” Peter mumbled, massaging his lymph nodes.

                “Don’t be such a baby,” Mandy insisted. “You barely ate half the one I gave you. You better finish it by the time we get downstairs, or I’ll put even more stuff in them and then you’ll wish you’d tried them when they weren’t so bad.”

                Glumly, Peter nibbled on the rind of the candy, feeling his lips resisting anew to the unnatural sensations. His smaller and thus more sensitive olfactory nerves were not taking the girl’s mandate especially well.

                He felt the shakes returning as Mandy’s sugar-and-spice streaked palm opened back up. She snatched him roughly back between cool fingers and smeared the sticky crimson remains into his costume, treating him to an ensconcing aroma of the stuff as she scooped up the full bag of candy and made for the narrow hallway.

                Peter shook his head, trying and failing to work through the brunt of the spice as Mandy swung the creaky basement door open in the shadow-shrouded hallway, too deep and narrow for him to see the end. He knew he should count himself lucky if high Scoville scales were the most painful treats awaiting him this night, but that just seemed like foolishly wishful thinking.

                Mandy clomped down the wooden stairs in pitch black, knowledgeable of the steps’ locations beneath the soles of her shoes by heart without sight, but leaving Peter to wonder if, at any instant, she’d go tumbling down the winding case with him still in hand. That feeling still lingered in his beleaguered throat as she reached ground floor again and flicked on the lights.