Her Biggest (and Smallest) Prank Yet Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

When Max turned around, he couldn't help whimpering. 

Isabella Vasquez-Calhoun filled the door. Not tall, still imposing—five-five and one hundred and eighty pounds of mall-goth stepsister in slouchy socks. As she stepped inside, the light caught the silver rings in her brow and lip. Her black fringe was sleep-smashed, and her usual oversized band shirt had ridden up one hip, revealing the tight, ugly line of yesterday’s black thong cutting into the heavy shelf of her ass. She held her phone and a dripping Monster Energy can, and the doorway immediately smelled like her: drugstore vanilla, unbrushed mouth, and the sour-sweet scent of a body that had slept unwashed.

"Yo. You up?" She stifled a yawn. "Mom said you need to..." 

When she saw him on the bed, she stopped so completely that the Monster slopped over her thumb and ran down to her wrist.

“Izzy,” Max said, and hated how small it sounded.

For one clean second her face was only blank. No joke. No sneer. The expression she used when a movie went somewhere she hadn’t predicted, or when Victoria found one of her vapes. Then her mouth did the other thing.

“Oh my god.”

It started as a whisper. It became a laugh so fast he felt it in the pillow, a warm wobble under his feet. She took one step, then two, and the mattress accepted her weight like a boat taking a passenger. The whole landscape lurched. Max sat down without meaning to. Heat came off her in a front. Sitting put the dark under her shirt into his world: the heavy undersides of her tits stretching cheap cotton, a shadow of nipple the size of his head, the soft pale swell of her stomach, the waistband of the thong sunk into flesh that had printed sheet-lines overnight. She smelled like a closed bedroom. She smelled like a crotch that had been in polyester until noon. She smelled like his house, concentrated and breathing.

“Oh my god,” she said again, delighted now, and the phone came up.

“Don’t—”

The shutter was a gunshot. She pinched the screen, zoomed, laughed harder. The laugh had weight. It moved her chest and her stomach and the thick shelf of her thighs and sent another wobble through the pillow so that Max had to put a hand down to stay sitting.

“No way. No way. Little bro. Little actual bro. Look at you. You’re— Max. Max, you’re like a— wait, stay there, I need lighting—”

“Izzy, stop. Something’s wrong with me.”

“Yeah, no shit.” She dropped onto one hip. The pillow-mountain became a slope. A hand came down out of the sky.

Max had been picked up by Izzy before. Shoves into doorframes. Noogies that had nothing affectionate in them. The fireman’s carry after she stole the remote, his face in the back of her hoodie, complaining about how she smelled like a Taco Bell bathroom. This was not that.

Her fingers were warm and faintly sticky with soda. The index and thumb closed around his torso with a carelessness that still somehow didn’t crush him. Something in him — serum, a useless little lab note — refused to break. His arms pinned to his sides. His legs kicked air. She lifted, and the bedroom fell away in a nauseous elevator rush, and then he was at her eye level, twelve inches from the stud in her nose and the smear of yesterday’s liner she had not washed off.

She looked huge.

She had always been the shorter one. That fact sat in his head like a piece of furniture nobody had moved out yet. He had a whole private catalog of being taller than Izzy and using it for nothing, and the catalog was trash now. Her eye was a dark glossy planet. A grain of sleep sat in the corner of it. When she blinked it was weather.

“Holy shit,” Izzy whispered, and some of the laugh was still in it. “What are you, three inches? Two and a half? I took a shit twice your size last night.”

“Put me down.”

“In a second.”

She turned him.

Inspection, the way she inspected a receipt she thought someone had cheated her on. The pad of her thumb brushed his ribs, then lower, lazy, checking he was real and not a very committed craft project. Heat soaked through what was left of the t-shirt. He could see sugar grains on her lip from the soda. He could see the pulse in her throat. He could see, when she shifted her weight on the mattress, the damp darker line along the front of the thong where morning had happened to her the way it happened to everybody. A curl of black hair had escaped the elastic. The cotton there was not fresh. It had the dull shine of something worn to bed and then worn to the doorway.

It was happening to him now. The pressure of her thumb on his ribs, the vanilla-and-sweat heat of her skin, the sheer proximity after a summer of nothing—it was too much. His body, which had never been brave about anything, decided this was the moment to stand up in the cage of her fingers, a traitor-stupid betrayal.

Izzy felt it.

She went still. Then she snorted so hard her chest jumped and bumped his hip and almost made him drop.

“Are you kidding me. You're getting hard from this? Oh my god.” She twisted him a little so she could look, shameless, the way she looked at everything that embarrassed him. “Mom was right. You are so easy it’s actually sad. Little dude is like, finally, a woman touched me, and the woman is your sister and you shrank.”

“I’m not— that’s not— put me down—”

“Uh-huh.”

She brought him in, cruel with curiosity, and rubbed the side of his whole body along the warm cotton over her sternum like she was wiping something off him. Her tits filled the shirt on either side of his world, sleep-damp, heavy, the cheap fabric going transparent where last night’s sweat had dried and this morning’s had replaced it. The vanilla-and-sweat smell got denser until he could taste it. Under the spray: skin. Under the skin: the sourer note of a summer girl who had not showered, who never showered first thing, who thought deodorant was a personality. When she laughed again the flesh around him moved like water.

“Oh my god,” she said. “Oh my god. I’m going to keep you. I’m going to put you in a jar. I’m going to make you a little leash. I’m going to—” She lifted him to her mouth. He had a nauseous second of thinking she was going to kiss him or bite him or both, and then she just exhaled, a test, a warm wet front of energy-drink breath and sleep-mouth that soaked his hair. “Say something. Say 'please, Big Sis Izzy, be gentle with me.'”

“Fuck you.”

“Close enough.” She grinned. The lip ring flashed. “Camera.”

The phone came up again. He turned his face into her shirt to ruin the shot and got a lungful of unwashed girl for his trouble, sour-sweet and intimate, the smell of someone who had not decided to be sorry yet. She made a disappointed noise and used her pinky — a limb as thick as his torso — to peel his face back out of the cotton.

“Stay still or I’m posting it to the group chat. Miguel already thinks you’re a virgin loser, this is just documentation.”

“Izzy.” He swallowed. His mouth tasted like metal and old sleep and something sweeter underneath, a ghost of last night’s drink clinging to the back of his tongue. The memory arrived in the wrong order, the way cheap video loaded. The glass on the coffee table. The way she had been almost nice. Just take it, God, you’re so dramatic about caffeine. The too-quick smile. The way she had watched him drink instead of looking at her phone, which should have been the tell, because Izzy looking at him on purpose was never free.

“What did you do.”

“Okay, not nothing. It was just supposed to be funny.” She snorted, trying to make it light, bouncing him once in her fingers. “A joke. You were being such a martyr about college, I figured… I don’t know. Humble you or something. A little character development before you left.”

“A couple days.”

“That’s what the guy said. Miguel’s cousin’s guy. Said it was a party thing, wears off fast. Shrink the freshman, take some pictures, he’s back to normal before anyone calls a parent. It was supposed to be easy. Not my problem by August.”

“It didn’t wear off.”

“I can see that.”

She shifted him to her left hand so her right could scroll. The new grip was sloppier. His hip pressed into the damp pad of her palm. He could see the screen past her thumb: a chat that had already been opened and closed and opened again, a gray This account doesn’t exist where a name should have been, a number with no delivery ticks.

She had done this before she opened the door. Or at 3 a.m. when the first ugly thought arrived. Or both.

Downstairs a cabinet closed. Both of them froze the way they had frozen as kids when Victoria’s sandals hit the tile. Morning sounds stacked themselves into a map of a woman getting ready to leave the house: the good coffee grinder, the jingle of keys, the particular sigh Victoria used when she was adding one more thing to a Costco list that was already a novel.

“Shit.” Izzy’s eyes cut to the door. “She’s gonna want to say bye. If she sees you I'm never gonna hear the end of this."

“So give me the other thing.” His voice cracked on it anyway. “The antidote. Whatever he sold you with it. The second vial. The pill. Izzy.”

Her thumb stopped moving.

For a long time the only sound in the room was the old HVAC and a lawnmower two yards over, huge and far away, and the tiny wet noise of the soda can sweating onto her thigh.

“There isn’t,” she said.

Max waited for the rest of the sentence. The there isn’t one in my room but I can text him. The there isn’t one on me. The version where this was still a prank with a back door.

Izzy’s eyes flicked past him to the corkboard. To the letter. To the backpack on the chair. To the hoodie in the closet that was going to look like a costume now. Then back to his face, which at this distance was the size of a thumbnail and still, somehow, readable to her, because she had been reading it to be cruel since they were fourteen.

Whatever she had been about to tack onto the end of the sentence died there.

“He said it fades,” she said, quieter. The laugh was still in the room but it had nowhere to sit. “Or I thought he said it fades. Or he said most of them fade, or I filled that part in because I wanted it to be funny and not—” She cut herself off. “I wasn’t taking notes, Max. It was a parking-lot transaction. I paid him and he laughed and I thought he was laughing at you. That’s the whole business model.”

“Text him again.”

“I did.” Too fast. “Account’s gone. Number’s dead. Miguel says he never heard of a cousin. Very reassuring customer service. Very maybe I got the guy who sells the permanent ones by accident.”

Permanent.

She hadn’t said the word until now. It landed in the pillow-soft air between her fingers and his chest and did not bounce.

Six weeks until move-in. A twin XL on a floor he had never seen. A roommate named something with a J who had already sent a playlist Max had listened to twice and pretended not to like. Victoria downstairs planning a goodbye dinner that would involve too much food and a speech about being proud. And Izzy’s pulse under his hip, huge, stupidly alive, the person who had poured this into a glass and handed it to him like a dare.

“You ruined it,” he said.

“Okay, dramatic—”

“I was leaving.” It came out thinner than he wanted and meaner than he meant and exactly as true as the size of his hands on her fingerprint. “That was the whole point. I was leaving this house and your bathroom and her checking if I packed socks. I was going to have a door that locked. You don’t get to laugh and then say dramatic like you put salt in my drink. You ended it.”

Izzy’s face did a complicated thing. For a second it went toward something that might have been guilt, or fear, or the beginning of crying, which he had seen from her maybe four times and never because of him. Then it landed on the old shape, because the old shape was safer and she had been using it on him since the wedding.

“People bounce back from dumber shit than this,” she said. “We’ll figure it out before Mom turns it into a situation. You’re not—” Her throat moved. “You’re not ended, Jesus. You’re just… portable.”

Victoria’s voice rolled up the stairs, cheerful and carrying, the public version of her that she took to Costco.

“Izzy? I’m leaving! If Max is still asleep tell him I got the extra duffel for winter clothes!"

“Yeah!” Izzy shouted.

The shout moved through her chest into Max like a drum. His teeth buzzed. Her tits jumped against his side. Downstairs the sandals paused, waiting to see if the answer had been enough.

“You’re going in,” Izzy said, lower, to him. “If you scream I will sit on you and I am not kidding, I will park this ass on the pillow and you will learn a lesson about volume.”

“Izzy— wait— just put me in a drawer—”

“Drawer’s the first place she looks when she thinks I’m hiding vapes.”

She didn’t wait for a better idea. She yanked the collar of the band shirt down.

The world became skin.

The valley between her tits opened on a wave of trapped heat. Lotion from two nights ago. Fresh sweat in the fold. A faint sour yeast of a summer body that had been in a cheap bra too many hours yesterday and then not been in one at all. The skin was damp and huge and faintly shiny. A mole the size of his fist sat to the left. She pushed him in the way she pushed a phone into a pocket, thumb on his back, and the soft walls closed.

Darkness with a seam of light down the shirt-front. His face mashed into warm damp flesh. When she stuffed the shirt back into place the cotton sealed over him and the smell went from strong to total: vanilla failure, sleep, the sweet-sour of cleavage that had been a climate all night. She bounced once on the edge of the bed, settling her weight, and the walls clapped around him with a wet little shluck of skin on skin. He made a sound. She flicked the outside of her own breast with a nail.

“Shut up. You’re fine. You’re touching boobs. Worse things have happened to virgins.”

Footsteps on the stairs. Not leaving — coming up. Victoria had not accepted the shout.

“Izzy, did he eat? I don’t want him sleeping till noon and then inhaling cereal, his stomach—”

“Mom. He’s fine.”

Izzy stood.

Gravity changed. The valley he was in became a swinging hot canyon. Each step rolled her body around him. He slid, caught on the underside of one breast, kicked, and felt her hand shove up from the hem to mash him back into place.

It wasn’t going to hold. She knew it the same second he did. Loose shirt, no bra, Victoria ten feet away and climbing. Izzy made a noise in her throat that was half laugh and half curse and changed plans the way she changed plans about everything: mid-motion, no discussion.

Her hand went under the hem again. Fingers found him, peeled him out of the cleavage with a wet little drag that left his t-shirt soaked to his skin, and fed him lower.

Past the underside of the breast. Over the soft rise of her stomach, the shirt riding up, a navel like a bowl. Into the stretched waistband of the thong.

“Better,” she muttered. “Hands free. Don’t you dare—”

The elastic snapped over his waist like a gate. She worked him with two fingers, careless and practiced in the way she was practiced at hiding snacks and vapes and the second phone Victoria didn’t know about, until he slid into the hot groove she had been sitting on all morning.

Flesh closed.

The thong’s damp front was a wall against his chest, sour cotton plastered to his face. Behind him, the heavy split of her ass swallowed the rest. Heat. Humidity. The smell was total now, thick enough to coat his tongue: unwashed crack, failing deodorant, the metallic tang of skin trapped in polyester. It was morning Izzy, the one from behind the bathroom door, but now it was a room. A climate. A prison he couldn’t leave.

She clenched once, adjusting how the thong sat under two hundred pounds, and the world clamped. His arms were pinned. His face was in cotton that had been between her legs since yesterday afternoon. His traitor body, crushed and steaming and furious, was still interested. She felt that too. Of course she did. She always felt the things he wished she wouldn’t.

“Gross,” Izzy whispered, and there was a shake in it that might have been laugh and might not. 

Victoria’s sandals hit the top step.

Izzy walked to the doorway with him hanging in the sweaty dark between her cheeks, each step a rolling squeeze, the thong’s thin strap a leash across his back. She leaned on the frame in her default slouch, one knee cocked, the picture of a girl who had just woken up and possessed no secrets except a vape and a bad attitude.

“He’s alive,” she told the hall. “He’s being weird. I offered him breakfast. He said later. Go to Costco.”

Victoria was a shape Max could not see and a smell he could: lotion, coffee, the clean version of the same house-warmth Izzy had turned filthy by sleeping in it. Her voice came from somewhere above Izzy’s shoulder, which meant she was close enough to touch her daughter, which meant she was close enough that if Izzy’s shirt rode up the way it liked to, the whole morning became a different story.

“Tell him I got the good tortillas. And if he wants the blue duffel instead of the black one he has to say so today, they’re going to sell out of the big ones.”

“I will tell him about the tortillas and the importance of duffel colors.”

“Don’t be like that. This is his last month being home. I want it to feel like—”

“Mom. Costco. The rotisserie chicken line.”

A pause. Max, mashed in the hot filthy dark, heard Victoria decide to let it go the way she always decided, which was not all the way.

“Text me if he wants anything from the snack aisle.”

“I- fine."

Sandals down the stairs. Keys. The front door. The particular expensive-sounding close of Victoria’s car. The garage, then the street, then the absence of her.

Izzy did not take him out.

She stood in his doorway after the house went quiet and breathed the way she breathed when a joke had gone somewhere she hadn’t budgeted for. Her body did what her body did when she was thinking too hard and trying not to: it let go of the thing it had been holding since she woke up.

Pppfffrrrrrraaaaaaaaappptttthhhhh.

It wasn’t a weapon. It was just Izzy in the morning. Long, warm, wet-edged. The blast poured down the channel, fogging his air in a sour-spice cloud. His eyes watered. His throat closed. Heat slapped his back, layering the ugly food note over her own personal musk. She grunted, a familiar sound of private satisfaction, the same one she made when she ruined a room.

“Eh,” she told nobody. "Not my best."

Then, to the lump in her underwear, after a second that went on too long:

“Hope you’re a fart guy now, little bro. You’re gonna be.”

She walked into his room instead of out of it. Each step kneaded him. She stopped under the corkboard. He couldn’t see the letter. He could feel her looking at it by the way she went still, by the way her stomach tightened and the world around him got briefly smaller.

“I was going to put it in your drink at the goodbye dinner,” she said, very quietly, as if the letter were the other person in the conversation. “That was the original joke. Make you tiny for pictures and then you’d wake up normal on the bus. I moved it up because you were being so fucking smug about packing.”

Max tried to say her name and got a mouthful of thong.

Izzy’s fingers hooked the waistband, peeled it back, and let daylight in like a cruelty. He blinked up the pale slope of her stomach at the underside of her tits and then her face, fringe and liner-smear and a mouth that had run out of joke.

“You’re not telling her,” she said. “Not today. I need a day. I need to find Miguel and make him remember which vial he sold me. You sit tight and you don’t do the martyr voice and I will fix it.”

“You can’t.”

“Watch me.”

She didn’t wait for him to watch. She pushed him back into the groove with two fingers, snapped the elastic, and clenched on purpose this time, a slow heavy hhhnk of ass-muscle that mashed him flat in the wet heat and held. Another little leak of gas followed it, not a performance, just plumbing —

pfffrrttt —

— and she started for the stairs again, sock-feet careful, carrying what was left of his summer in the crack of a dirty thong.