Peter imagined he looked a little like a fetus, curled into himself at the glass circle base of the jar in which he was imprisoned.

                It was almost laughably ironic; as small a person as he was, he was just large enough that there was no conceivable way to lie comfortably within the repurposed jelly jar Mandy had stuffed him inside for the night. If only he was a little smaller, say two or three inches, then this would be a cinch. Not that sleep would’ve been possible, anyway. But after all the wearying activities of this incredibly long evening, a simple repose would have at least allowed Peter to decrease the pressure on his bruised ribs and limbs.

                Eventually he worked out a way to press his back against the curved, translucent wall of the jar and keep himself propped up by his feet. To Mandy’s credit, she’d at least given him an interesting view of the park from here. He was high enough up from the ground that there was no need to fear raccoon inquisitions. Fireflies occasionally flitted by his glass jail. Dimly glowing street lamps, too far away to illuminate his position to any passerby, made the grassy expanse and worn-down cobblestone paths visible to the tiny freshman.

                In a stroke of bizarre accidental kindness, the jar was still mildly scented of grape jelly. A sweet comfort, in a tangential way, even if it just meant Mandy was lazy while washing the thing out to eventually contain him like a firefly. It was a reminder to Peter that PB&Js, similar to the miniature ones his mother would make for him, still existed out there somewhere, which also meant other good things existed, including his mother, his sisters, his friends from theater and class, and of course Lisa.

                Regardless of the awkward spine bend, fleeting sleep did eventually find Peter, which he only realized when he was startled back awake by a flash of what he first mistook as fire. Darkness still colored the sky. After the boy rubbed his eyes, just to confirm that the bridge wasn’t in flames, he was relieved to find it had just been a trick of a light.

                The other discovery he made was Lisa: five inches tall, standing in the glass prison above where he’d crumpled. Though Peter kept enough lucidity to know instantly that this wasn’t real, such was his desperation for a glimmer of hope in this horror show evening, he practically melted with joy. Had his rational side tried to dominate his mind at this moment and remind him this was just a feverish daydream, he’d have told himself to shut up. He couldn’t even find the words to speak. There she was, right in front of him, radiant and smiling, a tiny reflection of her real petite self that was somehow fitted exactly to her doll-sized boyfriend’s scale.

                “Lisa,” he breathed. Peter tried not to move too much, for fear of making the comforting visage of the redhead vanish, like a dream he’d suddenly become aware of. It was a non-issue either way, as his muscles had turned to jelly at the mere sight of the girl.

                “Hey there,” she whispered. She took a step forward across the narrow diameter of the jar, and abruptly closed the distance. Gingerly as a passing moth, then, Lisa knelt down in front of Peter.

                “Y-You’re, um, not…” he started. “You’re not… here. Not real.”

                She nodded solemnly, though her calming smile remained. “That’s true.”

                “So I’m just dreaming?”

                “Maybe,” she shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Isn’t this better than just sitting here alone?”

                “Yes. God, yes.”

                “So, is it all right if I stay with you a minute?” she tenderly questioned. Lisa leaned forward on the perch of her knees, wringing her hands in that adorable way she had.

                “P-Please.”

                “Okay.” The tiny Lisa at last hunkered next to Peter, coming so near that the boy could’ve sworn he sensed her body heat radiating amongst the chill of the jar.

                For several minutes, neither said anything. Peter consciously avoided leaning too far next to Lisa. While he wanted to reach out and touch her more than anything, he was half-certain she’d disappear once he had a tactile reminder that it wasn’t real. Without warning, though, Lisa’s head lolled to the side and came to rest on Peter’s shoulder. Yet she didn’t fade; he felt her there. A jolt shot through his limbs. Receiving such a dramatic hint, fictional or not, that the world wasn’t over, the boy felt the urge in his throat to croak again. Determined, he muscled through that reflex, and held firm, instead leaning into the fiery cushioning of Lisa’s hair. After all, he supposed, this was likely his only opportunity in life to interact with another person in this precise way, so he might as well savor it.

                The illusion of his wonderful girlfriend, unnaturally small and scaled to fit in a jar too, may have been just that, an illusion, but she certainly came with many of the features of the real thing. Physically she was identical to her much-larger and genuine counterpart, though admittedly viewing her from such an altered perspective did make her look slightly different to Peter, the same way viewing a landscape from a plane was different than seeing it from the ground, albeit just as beautiful. She wasn’t just the same in appearance, though, but the smallest of expressions and tics as well, from the way she held her legs up to her chest to the idle pattern of her thumbs fidgeting against one another.

                “H-How long will you stay here?” Peter said, after spending a solid half hour just summoning up the courage to speak again. He felt the Lisa-facsimile’s shoulders rise briefly in a gentle shrug, then her head burrowing more firmly against his neck.

                “However long you want.”

                That was nice to hear, but Peter didn’t dare believe it too hard, because otherwise it would break his heart even worse whenever the mirage faded and he was left stranded alone in the glass cell again. Still, he couldn’t help but feel the goose bumps ticking up his spine. This night had been such a descent from his former high of the play and an upcoming date, that even deceiving himself by building up hopes and letting himself get deeper into the imagined scenario was worth the inevitable disappointment later, just for the temporary yet extreme comfort it offered him now.

                “Oh. T-Thanks.”

                “Of course.” She reached out and took hold of Peter’s hand, another life-affirming textural detail that he went with, despite knowing it wasn’t real. Their fingers laced together: an act that would’ve been impossible to achieve in anything but a delirious fantasy like this. He adored it.

                “Lisa?”

                “Yes, Peter?”

                “Why does this keep happening to me?”

                This time it was the dream-Lisa’s turn to pause. Peter could feel her heartbeat increase, pressed up against his side where she’d snuggled. It was disorienting, to say the least, for the freshman to cuddle up with someone who was just a little smaller than him.

                “You mean…”

                “This,” Peter sighed with the full resignation of his short but exhaustive years. He lifted one weary hand and touched the side of the imprisoning container, even rapping his knuckles on the curved surface until he heard the dull clink.

                “Some people, just a few of them, out of all the good ones, went wrong somewhere in their life,” Lisa said, though her tone suggested she was just as unsure as Peter. “And they think because they feel powerless in some ways, it’s okay to find other ways to feel powerful instead.”

                “I know,” he agreed. In fact, he’d reached that same conclusion and believed in it with sincere certainty sometime during this nightmare of an evening, if only because that was the only explanation for why someone like Mandy could exist, and be the way she was: a mess of obvious mental illnesses and prior ugly life experiences that, while they’d turned her into an agent of cruel chaos, were only partially her fault. “That’s not even… completely what I meant. I know there are people out there who are just trying help themselves feel better whatever way they can, and some just do it in ways that… well…”

                “What did you mean, then?”

                “Why does this keep happening to me?” Peter repeated in a more fragmented voice, his inflection conveying an entirely different meaning despite the words remaining almost unchanged. Though he was still technically taller than illusion-Lisa, he could practically feel himself shrinking under her supportive lean. “Why did I have to be me, like this, in this body? Why couldn’t I just be someone else?”

                Again an uncertain though still peaceful silence followed. At last, when Lisa next audibly inhaled, she began shifting away from Peter, removing her head from the crook of his neck and unlacing her fingers from his. She propped herself up, no longer cradled to Peter’s hip, and rose slowly to a kneel. Immediately the boy regretted having opened his mouth, let alone allowing it to dispense his pouty inner philosophies. Now the dream might be ending, because he’d made it too real, and then he’d be abandoned again, until a certain gigantic someone came back to claim him forever.

                “I’ll tell you why you had to be you in this body,” Lisa said.

                Her silken voice was as lilting and lullabied as ever, her tone in fact standing in sunny contrast to the bitter question she’d been asked. As if she hadn’t even heard him. The redhead turned herself around, now crouching in front of her equal-sized boyfriend. She reached out for him, just as she had so many times before, except not from a scale where her relatively-small hands could still wall him in like a peach canyon. Instead those soft palms cupped his cheeks alone, rather than his entire five-inch body, and refocused his attention exclusively to her countenance. With the smallest of smiles and twinkles in her eye, Lisa exuded such melting compassion that Peter almost forgot he was still trapped in a jar.

                “Because it’s yours. Everything about you is… yours,” she said. Her hands didn’t budge from around his face. “Your kindness, your smartness, the way you make jokes, your creativity for making the best of the world when that world was rude enough to not be built for someone as unique as you to use it very easily… all of that is part of you, and so are the things you think are wrong. The things you wish you could change. You can’t change yourself, Peter, not like that. Just from the inside. But I don’t think you need to change any of that, either, except maybe the way you sometimes forget the most important thing when you’re in a place like this.”

                “And w-what’s that?”

                “To not give up.”

                It was the same thing Peter’s elder sister had told him that afternoon seated by the water, only with less profanity now, but illusion-Lisa’s words landed at the same place in the back of his brain, lodging themselves there, pulsing and necessary. But was that really all he had to do? Just keep on blindly believing he could make it through an impossible situation like this with nothing but hope? Yes, similar faith had seen him through a few other jams during this new public stage of life, but nothing on this level yet. Nothing so grim. Surely belief alone that there would always be a light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t enough? If he was to become gratuitously realistic with himself, Peter knew the only light at the end of the tunnel he was absolutely guaranteed while in the clutches of this jar’s owner was the kind you saw just before the final rest, on account of giant fingers accidentally squeezing you too hard.

                “I don’t know if I can do it,” he admitted. Peter’s forlorn state was just barely superseded by his joyful shock that the redheaded mirage was still crouched in front of him, that her warm palms and fingers were still pressed to his cheeks and counteracting the chill of the jelly jar. That perception alone, however fictional, was almost enough of a miracle on its own to allow him to pretend he could believe in illusion-Lisa’s aphorism. But not quite.

                “That’s all right,” Lisa assured him, and mercifully had nothing to add to that thought. No “but” statement. Secretly ashamed of himself for it, Peter gushed with prickly relaxation, his former guilt assuaged.

                “Really?”

                “Yes. Everybody just has to do the best they can do. Just like how everybody you love, who loves you right back, is doing their best and working very hard right now to find you,” Lisa reminded him. “You know they are. They wouldn’t give up on you, so why should you? I know it’s hard. But just try, Peter. Try to hold on. That’s all it takes. Can you do that for me?”

                Her soothing hands uncupped from Peter’s face, a gesture which was almost as emotionally painful to him as the variety of physical torments he’d undergone in Mandy’s thrall. As Lisa’s hands moved away, so too did the girl. Instinct made the freshman wanted to leap out and throw his arms around Lisa, begging her through his own almost-inevitable tears to stay longer, to not withdraw, but he was too tired to try that, and fairly certain anyway that he couldn’t compel an illusion to stay. Even one this lovely and remedying.

                “Yes, I will,” Peter mumbled, too sorrowful at her lack of contact now to continue looking up. It wasn’t a lie, though. “Will I see you again? The… the real you, I mean. N-Not that you’re not real, but-”

                Lisa studied him, neither smirking nor frowning, with both arms folded behind her back.

                “Do you want to see me again?”

                “More than anything.”

                “Then you will.” She said it so easily, yet modestly, the way she brilliantly whipped out answers in class at a moment’s notice despite her shy disposition. Even knowing this wasn’t real, even knowing this illusion of a girl didn’t possess any more information than Peter’s own troubled mind did, her conviction was enough to bring him around. Then, before he even had to ask, when the boy had gathered just enough bravery to look up again and blink his way through a couple of crippling tears that water-logged his vision, he saw Lisa leaning in again.

                With pleasant force, showing much more aggression than she was usually self-confident enough to show in real life given their size disparity, Lisa’s visage bowed to Peter’s level again until their lips met. There was no need to be afraid of knocking him over with her mouth. They locked together, warm and wet, and the set-upon young man almost felt as though he was being rejuvenated from the outside in. The usual effect of her gentle pink lips, sticky and sweet-smelling and pillowy, was concentrated down to a perfect microcosm; the usual texture that blanketed his whole head was narrowed just to his own two lips. Was this what it was like to kiss someone your own size all the time, Peter wondered? Who even cared now. He kissed her with every ounce of energy he had left on this near-sleepless night, which wasn’t much, but he knew it might be now or never. Then again, it might be now or later, if her dreamy promise was to be believed, and Peter was inclined to believe her, though he didn’t know precisely why. Just like he was inclined to try to hope. Full-on hope was still a lofty pipe dream, but he could at least try. He’d made a vow, after all.

                Peter didn’t notice when the kiss ended, nor when Lisa’s imaginary image vanished from inside the jar, as he slumped back into a slumber more peaceful and contented than he might’ve dared think possible before this encounter. Then again that, he supposed, was just part of doing his best.