Giantess World
The next day, in the school cafeteria, Malkav was sitting at a table with Siarra and three of her female friends. He hadn’t said a word since lunch started (and it was almost over), but Siarra and the girls had been chatting away a storm, leaving him as isolated as always. But he wasn’t completely alone. A bunch of guys from the football team—this hulking linebacker named Brad, an almost bald-headed clown named Butthead and his cohort ‘the Ram’, along with a few others—busied themselves by shooting spitwads at Malkav’s head. It was a little game they had invented during freshmen year; the object was to hit Malkav’s glasses head-on, causing the spitwad to stick to the lens. Bonus points if they landed one in his mouth.
“Are we going to slay Terragolem tonight?” one of Siarra’s friends, a girl by the name of Raven whose hair was as dark as her name, asked.
“I call the leggings he drops!” Joan cried.
“He drops…leggings?” Malkav asked, dodging an incoming spitwad.
“He drops newbs like you more often,” Siarra said, not bothering to look at her friend as she bit into her sandwich.
The last of Siarra’s friends to round out her usual ‘posse’ was a russet-haired, outspoken girl named Gena. “Is there even a reason the newb is sitting with us?” She glared at Malkav and he shrunk down into his seat. He never liked Gena.
“In fact, I think he should sit under the table,” Gena added.
The feeling was obviously mutual.
“Yeah,” Joan piped up, “nobody wants to be seen with a newb. Get under the table, dog.”
Siarra came to Malkav’s rescue, hugging his scrawny arm and sliding her head into the nock of his shoulder. “Aw, but he’s my little newbie! I want him here with me.”
“You’re embarrassing me,” Malkav tried to say, shaking his arm. But it was too late. The jocks had already seen him. Laughing, Butthead laid his head in Ram’s arms and made coo-coo baby sounds. The rest of the table mocked him.
“Damn it, Siarra!” Malkav said, his face as blood red as whatever was on his plate. “I’m trying to work on my cool factor.”
She lifted her head slightly off his shoulder and whispered sweetly into his ear, “Cuss at me one more time and I will make you sit under the table. How do you think that’ll affect your ‘cool factor’?”
“Fine,” he muttered, trying to convince himself that having Siarra as a girlfriend was the best thing that ever happened to him. But it wasn’t working very well. She could be so cute, with her round face and hair so perfectly colorful that it looked natural, and yet so demanding at the same time. Her words were sweet, and yet there was always a challenge, a sort of teasing mockery in her voice, like a child always determined to have her way. She smiled up at him and he knew she had him.
“So this is love,” Malkav thought. “Terrific.”
“If you ask me,” Raven said through her straw, “all men should sit under the table. They’re all dogs.” A stray spitwad sailed past her head and she looked over her shoulder at the boorish jocks, who were roaring in laughter. “…But I need not speak. Let the dogs bark for themselves and call each other by name.”
“I love men!” Joan chirped. “Oh…and I love dogs too! Ruff, ruff.”
“Men…” Gena scoffed, making imaginary scissors out of her first two fingers. “I’d like to fix them in more than one way.”
“…Can I go sit with my friends now?” Malkav asked Siarra, looking hopefully at a table across the cafeteria that was getting assailed by just as many spitwads as this one.
“No.”
“Sit, newb, sit!” Joan giggled.
Malkav shifted in his seat. “But I wanted to ask them if they wanted to play Neverquest with us…”
Raven choked on her pop.
Joan smiled. “Mm, more newbs… Yummy.” She sank her teeth into an apple.
“That’s a great idea!” Siarra said. “The more newbs, the merrier! I’ve been trying to teach my little brother to play. He’s not very good…”
“Isn’t he only, like, eight years old?” Joan asked.
Raven wiped her mouth. “Most people who play online games act like they are.”
There was an awkward moment of silence as they all nodded—all except Malkav who was trying to scoot his chair away from Siarra.
Gena broke the silence, which wasn’t really at that silent since this was a high school cafeteria with over one hundred teenagers cramming food in their mouth as they tried to hold three thousand conversations at once. “Speaking of your brother, how is Frankie? Your parents still need a babysitter?”
Siarra fidgeted with her sandwich. “Um…Gena, I can take care of my brother now. I quit my job to play Neverquest, remember?”
“I know. I just thought you might need me for…”
Siarra shot her a nasty glance and Gena shut up.
Malkav shifted his eyes from one to the other, trying to figure out why the air suddenly got colder. He looked to Raven for help, but her face was as still and emotionless as always, and when he looked at Joan…well, her face was hidden behind the apple she was trying to shove in her mouth all at once. He guessed Siarra was feeling the same way about Gena as he always had, but maybe something had happened over the summer that he didn’t know about… After all, he hadn’t seen Siarra since spring. She had just asked him out a week ago, on the first day of school.
This silence was longer than the first one, but this time it was Joan who broke the silence, suddenly lowering the juicy apple from her lips. “Hey, what if men-dogs did exist? Do you think they’d walk on two feet or all four? Would they wear clothes? Would they—”
Raven slapped her hand into the apple, shoving it back into Joan’s mouth. Her words were now muffled, but still she continued to talk, even after the bell rang and lunches were packed up and (mostly) thrown away.
“Tonight then?” Siarra asked.
“I’ll be on,” Raven said.
Joan nodded in agreement.
But Gena didn’t say anything. She swung her knapsack over her shoulder and stormed off, her short brown hair grazing her shoulders as she disappeared down the hallway.
Siarra watched her with a frown and then turned to Malkav, running her fingers through his greasy hair. “See you then, newb!”
She skipped off, leaving Malkav alone. His eyes widened. He was a sitting duck. Slowly, he turned his head to the side to see the table of jocks, all lined up with spitwads, grinning at him. There was nowhere to run. There were no teachers to save him. He would have to take it like a man.
Shrieking and flailing his arms, he dove out of his chair.
Too late. He was battered with enough spitwads to cover him from head to toe and quickly collapsed to the floor, moaning.