Shrunken Last Summer Shrunken First Semester chapter 2 by maximally

Suddenly, Max woke up. Again.

 

This time, his cheek was mashed against something soft, warm, and faintly sour with last night’s sweat. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like the inside of a battery. For a few seconds, he didn’t move at all. He just lay there and waited for the cold wood grain, the toppled pencils and the towering Red Bull can.

 

None of them showed up.

 

The surface under his face gave when he pressed into it. Cotton. A fitted sheet: the navy one with the busted elastic in one corner that Victoria kept threatening to throw out. And the air sliding over his bare skin wasn’t stale dorm air. It was the wheezy old central AC of the house in Sunnyvale, the same unit that had rattled in the hall closet every summer since he was a kid.

 

Max cracked one eye open.

 

“Wait… what the…”

 

As before, three things hit him all at once. First, he wasn’t at Ventus. Second, he was naked. Third, and still most critically, he was tiny.

 

“…fuck?”

 

He sat up on his own pillow, and the whole bedroom did the same sick, sliding tilt he remembered. The pillow was a hill. The rumpled navy sheet rolled away from him like farmland, every thread standing up in little ridges, a couple of chip crumbs from some long-forgotten midnight snack sitting out there like boulders. His phone lay face-down near the far edge of the mattress, about the size of a garage door. The PS5 controller beside it could have passed for a wrecked car. Past the foot of the bed, his desk rose up like a cliff face: monitor dark, tower humming, and a half-empty water bottle that would’ve come up past his ribs.

 

Then there was the wall. His wall. The faded Attack on Titan poster with the torn corner. The Smash invitational print he’d bought with birthday money sophomore year. The corkboard above the desk, with his Ventus acceptance letter still pinned dead center like a trophy. Morning light sliced through the blinds in fat, dusty bars and laid them across a carpet where every fiber stood up like a blade of overgrown grass.

 

He was home. And when he tried to work out the date, it wasn’t Saturday, September 30th.

 

It was the middle of July.

 

Max pressed both palms flat against the sheet until the weave bit into his skin. The hangover was real. The nakedness was real. The size was definitely real. Everything else—Zeke in the doorway with a party invite, the pregame, the blackout, waking up on a stranger’s coffee table a month into freshman year, the House System, the four-to-one ratio he’d been banking on—sat in his head with the weird, sticky, overly detailed feel of a dream he’d only just figured out was a dream.

 

None of that had happened. Not yet, anyway. Move-in wasn’t until the end of August.

 

“This can’t be happening,” he whispered. The room didn’t answer.

 

He looked down at himself: same scrawny body, same everything, just shrunk down into something you could lose between the couch cushions. His actual clothes were piled on the desk chair in a mountain, every T-shirt big enough to camp under. The bedroom door on the far wall looked like the entrance to a cathedral. The brass knob was basically a moon.

 

From downstairs came the sounds of the house waking up. A cabinet. Water in the pipes. The gurgle of the coffee maker. Through the wall to his left, one of Izzy’s playlists was leaking out at low volume, all minor keys and some guy mumbling about dying in a parking lot. The air coming through the vents smelled like last night’s carne asada, Victoria’s perfume, and the dust that had lived in those ducts since before he was born.

 

Max tried working backward, the same way he had in the dream, and came up short even faster. He’d stayed up way too late in this room. Some game. Some video. Then nothing. Then college, which apparently hadn’t even happened. Then this.

 

Whatever had done this to him, he didn’t have a clue what it was.

 

What he did know was that every possible way this morning could get worse was on the other side of that door. So, before he could start screaming, he started making a list.

 

Victoria came first, because Victoria always came first: his 6’1”, 250-pound helicopter of a stepmom, currently deep in the planning stages of a move-in Costco run and a goodbye dinner that would probably need its own seating chart. At full size, he couldn’t leave the house without her checking whether he’d packed socks. At three inches, she’d probably keep him in her jewelry box until graduation.

 

Then there was Izzy: 5’3”, 180 pounds, and the single worst person on the planet to catch him like this. His stepsister had spent most of the summer vaping behind the Valero with her latest weed plug, and the rest of it finding new ways to make his life miserable. If she saw him like this, the group chat would see him thirty seconds later.

 

Abuela Lupe wasn’t even supposed to be here. Then again, the 5’11”, 310-pound queen of the Vasquez family had a habit of turning up whenever Victoria decided the house needed “reinforcements.” If she found him, he’d be living out his days tucked in her bosom with a plate of conchas.

 

Tía Fanny lived in LA, which should’ve been a comfort. It wasn’t. The 5’3”, 350-pound hurricane of six divorces and pan dulce had once sat on him by accident when he was full-sized, laughed until she cried, and then bought him ice cream. He had zero interest in learning what “by accident” looked like at three inches.

 

And then there was Artemis: 6’4”, 240 pounds, purple bangs, and a sketchbook she never put down. His step-cousin was home from art school for the summer and crashing in the guest room. If anyone in the family was going to be cool about this, it was her. Then again, she was still a Vasquez.

 

Max swallowed hard. Downstairs, the coffee maker hissed through its last cycle. Then Izzy’s music cut out mid-song, which was somehow worse than the music, because it meant somebody was up and moving. A floorboard in the hallway popped under someone’s weight. Someone heavy enough to be Victoria. Or Lupe. Or Fanny, if she’d let herself in with the spare key she was never supposed to have. Or Artemis. Or Izzy.

 

He looked at the door.

 

He thought about hiding. Under the pillow was a cave. The controller was a bunker. The laundry mountain on the chair would swallow him whole and maybe keep him there until whoever this was left to run errands. He got as far as his hands and knees on the navy sheet before the brass knob turned.

 

 

The door swung inward on the old hinge that always squealed in the summer heat. Hallway light poured across the carpet in a widening slab, and a giant shadow filled the frame from floor to ceiling.

 

Max froze.

 

Whoever it was took one step into his room.