It was never clear how, exactly, Fulda thought of me.  The frequent threats to murder me ruled out any sort of relationship, but her tendency to bring me along when she went out was unlike anything she would do for a toy, either.  The best I could think of was a pet, or maybe a favorite shrink: every so often, she would use me to lure newly-shrunken people into a false sense of security to gain their trust before bringing her foot down.  That was how I spent the next several months; the dear, manipulative pet of my own favorite creation.

Fortunately, Fulda’s odd protectiveness of me kept me out of Gina’s clutches.  With Fulda keeping a close watch on me, Gina never had an opportunity to make good on her promise to blackmail me.  I could tell she wanted to.  Frequently, her gaze lingered on me whenever Fulda turned her back, and often her conversation seemed intended to frustrate her into just leaving.  There were even a few times when she asked to see me just for a few minutes.  Whatever she wanted from me, she would have to be craftier.

By the spring, they had all reached their canonical heights, so to say.  Fulda remained her titanic 6’8” and Jessica stopped just a bit short of her at 6’6”.  Gina, to everyone’s concern including mine, rocketed past both of them and settled at the actually Amazonian 7’6” and was not shy about throwing her height around.  She mercilessly teased her sisters, calling them “little sis” and “shorty,” and made a big show of having to duck underneath even Fulda’s doorway.

Aside from Fulda’s frequent executions of shrunken people, everything was rather uneventful until late April.  Jessica was unusually happy when she got in the car home and was practically beaming when we arrived.  Finally, once we were gathered around the table, Fulda asked her what was up.

“Oh, nothing,” Jessica replied, giggling.  “I just got asked to prom today.”

“That’s great!” Fulda shouted, and I flinched from the sound of her voice while she went to wrap her sister in a hug.  “Who’s the lucky guy?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t know him.”  Jessica demurred, looking away from her sister and brushing a lock of blond hair behind her ear.  “Short little guy, pretty quiet, real nerdy.  He’s actually on the academic team.  Cute, though!”

“Yeah, maybe we can ride there together,” Gina butted in.  Fulda let go of Jessica and turned to face Gina, placing a hand on her hip to appear more stand-offish.

“It’s the junior-senior prom, you can’t be going.”

“I can if I’m invited.”  Gina’s smug expression fully carried through to her voice as she looked down at her older sisters.  Her sense of superiority was unbearable, even if somewhat warranted.  “Which I am.  I got some puny, five-foot-nothing senior to invite me.  It’s amazing how agreeable people are when you’ve got them pinned in a corner and you’re looming over them.  Why, don’t you have a date, little sis?”

Fulda opened her mouth to reply, but the words seemed to get stuck in her throat for a moment.  “I… someone’s going to ask me any day now!  Lots of guys are interested in me!”  While she was right, most of those guys had been mashed under her shoes or swallowed whole.  Anyone else who was interested in Fulda by now was too shy or hesitant to make their feelings known.

“When?” Gina replied, laughing.  “It’s in two weeks!  You’ll still have to get a dress, rent a limo, do all that stuff.  They’re not going to let you in dressed like you’re going to the gym.”

“Why don’t you just go stag?” Jessica offered.  “Or ask a guy yourself!  It’s not 1950 anymore, you can totally do that.”

“Yeah, you should go stag!” Gina giddily repeated.  “Announce to everyone that we’re both prettier and more popular than you!  We’d even let you be our fifth wheel, right Jess?”

“I’m not going stag,” Fulda insisted, and the table shook so hard I fell when she slammed her palm down on it.  “And I don’t need to.  I’m sure once people find out that no one’s asked me yet, I’ll have to fight pipsqueaks off with a bat.”

“More like a pencil,” Gina teased.  “Probably the real reason no one’s asked you is that you’re too short.  I know it’s hard for me to see you all the way down there!”

“What are –“ Fulda angrily sputtered, much to Gina’s amusement.  “I’m not short!  I’m taller than Jessica!”

“Are you?” Gina asked, placing her hands on her hips and peering down condescendingly.  “It’s hard for me to distinguish just how short people are compared to each other.  Even if that’s true, and I’m not saying it is, it might not be much longer.  Jess could still grow; she might hit 7 feet!  And you just might keep shrinking.  I know how you love shrinking.”

“Gina, we’ve been over this a dozen times.”  Fulda sighed in exasperation, blowing me a few inches over the smooth table’s surface.  “I wasn’t shrinking.  You were growing.  People don’t shrink.”

“You sound pretty confident in that for someone who loves shrinking so much.”  With how hard she had been pressing on this for months, I was shocked Gina had not let Fulda’s secret accidentally slip.  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll start again.  Every day you’ll wake up smaller, smaller, smaller.”  With each “smaller” her voice got higher and she drew her fingers closer together, grinning even wider.  “Then I’ll be able to pick you up and put you in my pocket.  Oh!  Then you could go to prom with your little boy-toy!  I’ll even wear white shoes, and you can use them as the background for just the cutest pictures!”

Feeling the need to break the tension, Jessica interjected.  “That might not be such a terrible idea.  I mean, think about it: aside from being not quite an inch tall, he’s just like any other student, and a pretty good one, I hear.  Plus, I know a lot of girls who say that they think the little guy’s cute.  He’s popular!  And if the height difference is an issue, well, Gina and I are both going with someone a lot shorter than us.  If more people ever shrink, they’ll need dates.  You’ll be a trailblazer!”

Fulda seemed mollified by the suggestion, or at least less inclined to take a swing at Gina, and rested her face in her hand.  “I just… it’s a little humiliating, isn’t it?  Like, I’m basically admitting the only guy who’ll spend time with me is smaller than my thumb and needs my constant protection so someone doesn’t squish him, aren’t I?”

Fortunately, Jessica was able to get a word in before Gina.  “If you want to look at it from the absolute worst angle, sure!  But I know there’s someone who doesn’t agree with that at all.”  She reached a hand toward me, thumb and forefinger primed to pinch, and set it down behind me.  Not wanting to be her prop I tried to scoot away, but the tips of her digits clamped down on my collar, holding me in place.  Jessica lifted me off the table easily, and my legs swung outward when she pulled me up.  As I dangled in front of her face, she looked down and grinned.

“What about it, little guy?” she asked, and batted my legs with the index finger on her other hand.  “Do you think it’d be humiliating if Fulda went to prom with you?”  She began shaking me back and forth by the collar and speaking out of the corner of her mouth like she was voicing a puppet.  “No, Jessica, I don’t think that at all!  I think she’d be glad to have someone to go with!”  She switched back to her normal voice to continue, “Oh, then why don’t you ask her?  Don’t you want to?”  Then she went back to the puppet voice.  “I do, but there’s no reason she couldn’t ask me, too!”  I would have been more upset about her putting words in my mouth had they not been my actual words.

Fulda held out her hand, palm upraised.  “Could you just give him here, please?  I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“And what if he wants to hang out with us, pipsqueak?” Gina asked.  “Maybe he wants to be with the pretty, tall popular girls instead of you?”

Luckily, Jessica did not heed Gina’s protests and promptly lowered me into Fulda’s waiting palm.  She let go of my collar and removed her hand, then Fulda quickly wrapped her fingers loosely around me.  Fulda took a step back then turned, and I was pushed against the warm, soft walls of her fingers.  Though she tried to keep me steady I was still bounced around.  I felt the tremors of every step she took travel through her body and wash over me.

Once we were back in her room, Fulda walked over to her desk and deposited me on top before slumping down in her chair.  I gazed up at her, and her glossy pink lips were cycling between quivering and an angry grimace.  Further up, though they were narrowed in fury, I saw more moisture than usual in Fulda’s cold blue eyes.  It seemed like she was on the verge of tears, but I could not tell whether it was from frustration, rage, sadness, or something else entirely.

I had no idea what to do.  I could not recall Fulda ever being sad in one of my stories, much less crying because of it, though I knew that, as a person and not just a character anymore, she was capable of it.  Not wanting to see her cry, I walked toward her and placed a hand on her fingertip, pressing gently into the warm, supple flesh.

Fulda’s finger recoiled from my touch and reflexively cocked back behind her thumb, and a heavy column of air hit me from above when she exhaled sharply.  I looked up, and her face had tightened into angry determination while she held her finger back at the ready.  After a few seconds, however, she relaxed, and let her finger unfurl.

“Oh, I know you’re just trying to help,” Fulda said.  She lifted her finger and gently stroked my chest with the tip of her finger.  “You can’t help it if you’re too small to really do anything, that’s my fault.”  She sighed and the blast of air caught me, knocking me off my feet and pushing me away from her.  Watching me get pushed back by her breath, Fulda smiled and let out a short roar of a giggle.  “Hey, that was funny!  It’s funny how small you are!”

Fulda swung her finger to the side, sliding me across her desk until I contacted the index finger on her other hand.  She let me rest there for a second before winding up and pushing me with her finger again, winging my feet so I spun around while sliding.  The world turned around me until I ran back into the first finger, where she flicked my legs with the tip of her fingernail, making me spin and go back the other way.  By now I was getting dizzy, but as long as I was on my back that would not be too much of a problem.

“I could do this all day,” she boomed, batting me from one hand to the other again.  “I don’t think I’ve played with you like this in months!  It’s so fun to play with such a tiny, helpless man.”  It was difficult to tell while she pushed me between her fingers and spun me, but I’m pretty sure she smiled.

When she finally stopped me by setting the tip of her right index finger down on my chest, she spent a moment gazing down at me.  Fulda rested her chin on her other hand and held me still until the world stopped spinning of its own volition.  “So.  Do you want to go to prom?”

“With you?”  I was a little disoriented from her batting me around still.

“That’s not what I asked, twerp,” Fulda replied, and gave me a light tap on the chest.  “Obviously if you’re going to prom, it’s with me.  I own you, remember?  And I can take you whether you want to go or not.”

“Yeah, I want to go.”  I knew it was important that someone did, otherwise some events later might have trouble.

“Okay then.”  Fulda gave me another tap covering my whole body and smirked.  “I just wanted to be sure whether I should call it a punishment for being disobedient, or a reward for being such a good toy.  And I want to do all the dorky prom shit, you know.  Limos, corsages, pictures, slow dances, all that stuff.  And I’m going to dress you up like a doll to go with my dress.”

“That’s… all fine.”

“I’m not asking you if it’s okay, I’m telling you it’s going to happen.”  She gave me another tap, then flicked me toward the center of the table so she could look straight down at me.  “And you better make sure I have a good time!  If you don’t…”  Fulda raised her hand and slapped the table, making the whole thing shake.  I flinched from the bang of impact, making her laugh again.

Fulda lowered her face to my level and leaned in close, puckering her lips.  “You know,” she purred, “if we’re going to prom together, I guess that kind of means we’re dating, doesn’t it?”  She inched closer, but just before her lips touched me she shot back up straight and laughed.  “Unless you suck, then I’ll have to break my favorite toy,” she added, pouting with a false whine.

Fulda reached over me and grabbed my collar, then plucked me off the table.  She held me in front of her face, letting me dangle from her fingers, then batted me so I swung like a pendulum.  “Since I might have to smash you soon, I should play with you while I can.”  Her finger batted me again, and her eyes followed my movements while she smiled.

“But, sadly, I can’t.”  Fulda lowered me back to the table and set me down, then let go of my collar.  “I’ve got so much to do now, and finding something that’ll go with my dress in your size is going to be quite an ask.  Maybe I’ll wear you in my jewelry.  We’ll see.”  With that, she got up and went over to her bed to get to work picking things out, leaving me to entertain myself on the table.