Shrunken Last Summer Shrunken First Semester chapter 2 by maximally

Suddenly, Max woke up. Again. 

This time, his face was mashed against something soft, familiar, and faintly sour with last night’s sweat. His head throbbed. His mouth tasted like the same vaguely chemical film that had been there the last time he opened his eyes. For a second he didn’t move. He just breathed, waiting for the coffee table grain and the Red Bull can and the pencils like fallen trees. None of that was here.

The surface under his cheek gave when he pressed into it. Cotton. A fitted sheet, the navy one with the popped elastic at the corner that Victoria kept threatening to throw out. The air moving over his bare skin wasn’t dorm-recycled and sharp. It was the old central AC of the Sunnyvale house, the unit that rattled in the hall closet and pushed a thin, dusty cool across his childhood bedroom every summer since he could remember.

Max forced his eyes open.

“Wait... what the…”

Three things hit him in the same ugly pile as before. First: this was not the Unaffiliated Students Dorm. Second: he was still completely naked. Third: he was still tiny. 

“...fuck?”

He sat up on his own pillow and the world did the same sick tilt it had done on polished wood. The pillow was a hill. The wrinkled navy sheet stretched away from him like a plowed field, every weave standing up in little ridges, a few crumbs from some forgotten late-night snack sitting on the fabric like boulders. His phone lay face-down near the far edge of the mattress and looked about the size of a garage door. The DualSense controller next to it could have been a wrecked car. Past the foot of the bed, his desk rose like a cliff face: monitor dark, tower humming faintly, a half-empty water bottle on the blotter that would have come up past his ribs if he’d been standing beside it.

Posters covered the wall. His posters. The faded Attack on Titan one with the torn corner. The Smash invitational print he’d bought with birthday money sophomore year. Morning light cut through the blinds in fat, dusty bars and laid them across the carpet, where every fiber stood up like badly planted grass.

He was home. Sunnyvale. His room. Midsummer heat already stacking up outside the glass. And the date that surfaced when he tried to count backward was not Saturday, September 30th.

It was the middle of July.

Max pressed both palms into the sheet until the cotton bit his skin. His heart was doing that same painful slam against his ribs. The hangover was real. The nakedness was real. The size was real. Everything else — Zeke in the doorway with an invite, the pregame, the blackout, waking up on a stranger’s coffee table one month into freshman year, the Houses, the four-to-one ratio he’d been counting on — sat in his head with the sticky, overdetailed texture of a dream you only recognize as a dream after you’ve already lived ten minutes of it. None of that had happened yet. Move-in wasn’t until August. 

He was still three inches tall in the bed he’d had since eighth grade.

“This can’t be happening,” he whispered, and the room swallowed the sound.

He looked down at himself. Same scrawny pale body, same short brown hair, same everything, just reduced to a figure you could lose in a couch cushion. No clothes in reach that would fit. His actual clothes were a mountain on the chair — jeans, a hoodie, the T-shirt he’d worn yesterday — each item big enough to use as a tent. The bedroom door at the far wall looked like the entrance to a cathedral. The brass knob was a planet.

From downstairs, faintly, came the house waking up. A cabinet. Water in a pipe. The pop of the coffee maker. Somewhere behind the wall to his left, a bass line leaked through at low volume: one of Izzy’s playlists, all minor keys and someone muttering about dying in a parking lot. The smell that rode the AC wasn’t Red Bull. It was last night’s carne asada from the kitchen, garlic and citrus and warm oil, layered over Victoria’s perfume and the old-house dust that lived in the vents year-round.

Max started working the night backward the way he had on the coffee table, and the track ran out even faster. He remembered, or thought he remembered, staying up too late in this exact room. Some game. Some video. Maybe a beer he’d stolen from the garage fridge because it was summer and his dad was out of town and Victoria had gone to bed early with a face mask on. Then nothing. Then the dream of college. Then this.

There wasn’t a drug on earth that did this. Not that he knew of, at least.

The only things that could make it worse were all on the other side of his door. He looked up again and started running the list, because if he didn’t think about who might open it he was going to scream.

Victoria first, because Victoria was always first. Six-foot-one, two hundred and fifty pounds of Mexican-American helicopter stepmom, former plus-size model, XL chest and an XXL ass she poured into whatever would show it off around the house on a Saturday. Wavy black hair, berry lipstick even to make coffee, the kind of face that made store clerks straighten up. She already micromanaged him at five-foot-eight. She picked at his posture and his laundry and whether he’d applied to enough “safety schools.” At three inches she wouldn’t let him out of her sight. He could see it with nauseating clarity: the pitying coo, the single fingertip stroking down his bare chest like he was a nervous pet, the decision that the safest place for him would probably be a jewelry box in her bedroom, or worse. 

Then Izzy, through the wall, still leaking that playlist. Eighteen, five-three and one hundred and eighty pounds of bottom-heavy mall goth with their mother’s hips and none of their mother’s manners. Choppy black fringe, piercings, black lipstick she slept in, the lazy smirk of a girl who’d been the golden child since the day she moved in. She already used him as a remote-control courier and a punchline. If she found him like this she’d laugh until she hiccuped. He could picture the rest too easily: tucked in the waistband of those ripped black shorts she lived in, parked under a socked foot while she queued another match, treated like a fidget toy that happened to have a pulse. Taco Bell bag on the nightstand. That particular grease-and-onion gas she never apologized for. Bratty narration the whole time, because Izzy never did anything quietly if it could humiliate him.

There was also Lupe. Abuela. Five-eleven, three hundred and ten pounds of Mexican GILF thickness in a housecoat, salt-and-pepper hair in a braid, F-cups and a shelf ass that made Victoria look like she’d only been practicing. She didn’t live here, but she materialized whenever Victoria decided the family needed “reinforcement,” and mid-July was exactly the kind of stretch when a surprise visit stopped being a surprise. Warm. Overwhelming. The kind of affection that didn’t leave room to breathe even when you were normal-sized. If Lupe opened that door he’d be in her palm before he finished saying her name, stroked with a thumb the width of his torso, parked in the valley of that bosom while she told him not to worry, mijo, Abuela would take very good care of him. 

Of course, there was Fanny, too. Victoria’s sister. Five-three and three hundred and fifty pounds of chaotic BBW hot mess, ashen-black hair in a collapsing bun, beach-ball chest, sleeping-bag ass, stretch marks, six divorces, and a laugh that filled whatever room she was overflowing. She lived in LA. That was supposed to be a comfort. It wasn’t. Fanny didn’t need a reason to blow through Sunnyvale on a Saturday with a bag of pan dulce and a story about her latest disaster. She’d call him baby nephew and mean it. She’d also offer him a ride in her cleavage like it was a joke and then do it anyway because her hands were full. The real Fanny had sat on him once by accident when he was still five-eight, laughed until she cried, and bought him ice cream. He did not want to find out what “accident” looked like at three inches.

And then, because his brain would not stop, Artemis.

Victoria’s niece. Izzy’s cousin. His step-cousin by marriage and nothing else. Nineteen, six foot four, two hundred and forty pounds of the same Vasquez blueprint in a taller, half-Scandinavian package: soft gut, wide hips, inherited shelf, purple bangs over black roots, green eyes, freckles, conspicuously unshaved pits, and more piercings and tattoos than the rest of the family combined. He was still getting used to the idea that she was in the area. Up until two years ago, she'd been in New York with her dad, Victoria's brother; now she was a rising sophomore at an art school in San Francisco, living in an Oakland “gays and theys” co-op that Izzy insisted was a polycule. Mid-July, she could easily be back here again, taking advantage of all the home cooking and free laundry access she could get—and if any member of his extended family was going to respond to this situation with anything like real empathy, it'd be her. Then again, she was still a Vasquez.

Max swallowed. The sheet under him had taken on his body heat. Downstairs the coffee maker hissed through its last cycle. Izzy’s bass bumped once, harder, then cut out, which was worse than the music because it meant she was awake and moving. A floorboard in the hallway popped. Someone’s weight. Heavy enough to be Victoria. Or Lupe. Or Fanny if she’d let herself in with the spare key she was never supposed to still 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 it was left for errands. He made it as far as his hands and knees on the navy field, three inches of bare skin and a hangover, before the brass knob turned.

The latch clacked. The door swung inward on the old hinge that always complained in summer, and the hallway light cut a widening slab across the carpet fibers, and a shadow filled the frame from the floor to the lintel.

Max froze on the sheet.

Whoever it was took one step into his room.