Gooners Gonna Goon Shrunken First Semester chapter 4 by maximally

Hazel did not take her hand out of her sweatpants.

 

That was the first fact Max filed, because it was the only fact that still had a handle. Everything else — the coffee-table desert, the Red Bull can, the posters of Loona and Lucario, the communal cabinets full of stained figurines — had already been reclassified as scenery. The scenery did not have him mashed face-first against a sophomore chemist’s unwashed pucker. Hazel Berry did.

 

“Common room’s for losers who like an audience,” she said, the sentence arriving with a wet little hitch because her middle finger had not stopped moving. “I like an audience, don’t get me wrong, Miniguy. I just like it on a webcam. C’mon. I need to crank one out. Then we talk shop.”

 

She scooped the McDonald’s bags off the couch with her free hand, the paper rustling like a tarp in a windstorm, and started walking. Max went with her, because there was no version of the next thirty seconds in which a three-inch naked freshman negotiated a dignified dismount from a six-foot crack. Her cheeks closed over him the way a gym bag closed over shoes. Heat. Slime. The greasy cling of polka-dot fleece that had given up on ever being washed sometime around midterms last year. Each step made the two mounds of her ass clap together around his ribs, and each clap painted him with another coat of whatever she had been sitting in all morning.

 

He tried to talk. What came out was a muffled, “W-wait—the food—your room—can we just—”

 

“HA! Listen to you, scheduling me,” Hazel said, delighted, as if he had asked for a calendar invite instead of air. “Trust me~. Two minutes of hallway. Then I get mine. Then you get your little PowerPoint about not dying. I can multitask. I invented multitasking. Well. I invented a better lube that doesn’t eat nitrile. Close enough.”

 

House Proserpina’s corridor did the rest of the introductions. The carpet was a theory. The actual floor was a sediment layer of chip dust, hair, and the sticky ghosts of spilled energy drinks. Doors hung open on rooms that smelled like separate climates. Somebody two rooms down was running a fan and a porno at the same volume. Daisy’s door — Max knew it by the way the air thickened as they passed, a humid wall of unwashed laundry and something sweet gone sour — stayed shut, which was the first mercy the morning had offered him. Mina’s jumpsuit was not in evidence. Lucky’s bass leaked through a wall and then got bored and quit. Hazel walked like a girl who had mapped every loose board and every roommate’s nap schedule, because she had, and because the bags in her hand were cooling and the hand in her pants was not.

 

The walk was brief. It was also a weather event.

 

FFFFRRRRT.

 

That one was dry, almost polite, a Cheeto-dust puff that rolled over Max’s back and left his eyes watering. Hazel giggled, a phlegmy little sound, and clenched on purpose.

 

“Hall tax,” she said. “You ride back there, you pay it. Fair’s fair.”

 

PHHHHHHRRRRTTTTTTTT.

 

Wetter. Longer. The kind of blast that had a temperature. Max’s ears popped. The fleece around him went damp in a new way, and the pucker he was kissing flexed like it was laughing. He tasted salt and corn and something eggy that had no business being airborne. To his shame — and the narrator was allowed to call it that, because Max was already calling it that — his body tried to catalog the heat as heat and not as a weapon.

 

“Y-you said you’d help,” he managed, when the wind died enough for speech.

 

“I am helping,” Hazel said. “I’m taking you somewhere with a lock and a fume hood. Well. A fume hood adjacent.”

 

BBBBBRRRRAAAAAAPPPPPPPTTTT.

 

Fifteen seconds, give or take the way time worked when a girl’s colon was doing the talking. The hallway behind them acquired a haze. A door somewhere clicked shut with the haste of a person who had smelled this particular genius before and had decided not to make it their problem. Hazel did not look back. She was already fishing her keycard out of a sweatpants pocket that should not have been able to hold a keycard, a phone, and the amount of lint it was holding.

 

The last one hit as she badge-swiped.

 

SLAUUURRRGGGHHHH-SHT.

 

Not a full accident. Not not one. A sloppy, greasy punctuation mark that glazed Max from hair to heels and made the inside of the waistband briefly adhesive. Hazel made a noise that was half apology and half moan, then shouldered the door.

 

“Goon cave, sweet goon cave,” she said, which would have been funnier if Max had been standing on the welcome mat instead of wearing it.

 

If Proserpina rooms were the worst rooms on a campus, Hazel’s was the worst room with a research budget. Two things governed the space, and Max saw both of them in the half-second before she kicked the door shut and the lock thunked. First: the desk. Twelve feet of particle board and stolen lab clamps, six monitors in a lazy horseshoe, a water-cooled tower that hummed like a small aircraft and had probably cost more than a semester of the Academic Recovery scholarship that kept her in the building. The screens were paused on six different tabs of the same basic idea. Tiny men. Huge women. Captions that used more tildes than grammar. Second: the mattress. Not a bed. A mattress. Stained. Thin blanket. A drift of toys and vinyl dolls and one sad body pillow with a face printed on it that had been loved past recognition. The peeling polka-dot wallpaper had been buried under porn the way a crime scene got buried under tarps — Princess Celestia shitting on a plate, Tracer reduced to a thong on a 600-pound Zarya, a third poster Max’s brain refused to finish reading because the composition involved a toilet and a graduation cap. Chair mats paved the concrete. The wall AC had been duct-taped to a nest of coils and filters that looked illegal and also, infuriatingly, like they worked.

 

The smell was the room’s third piece of furniture. Old sweat. Warm plastic. Fryer oil riding in on the bags. A low, lived-in ass funk that had soaked into the chair and then into the air and then into the idea of air. Max had thought the common room was bad. The common room had been a lobby.

 

Hazel dumped the McDonald’s on the desk without looking. Nugget boxes fanned out. Fries steamed. Sauce cups popped their lids from the impact. She still had not taken her hand out of her pants.

 

“Okay,” she said. “Clause one of the new relationship. I crank. You stay put. You can talk. Talking is hot. Begging is hotter. Do not bite. I need that pucker functional for science later.”

 

“Hazel—please—just take me out first, we can eat, we can—”

 

“Food’ll keep,” she said, and there was the Minerva twang again, the smart-girl cadence that made the next sentence worse. “Nuggets are a thermal mass. You’re a stimulus. Stimulus first. Trust me~.”

 

She hooked both thumbs in the sweatpants and shoved. The polka dots hit the chair mat with a wet slap. The striped blouse lost two more buttons on the way down, which left her beer-gut and the undersides of her B-cups doing the rest of the greeting. Olive skin. Acne along the jaw. Greasy side ponytail coming loose. Buck teeth catching her lower lip as she grinned at the nearest monitor, then at the crack she could not see, then at the idea of Max, which for Hazel was close enough to seeing him.

 

She sat.

 

The gaming chair accepted her the way a hammock accepted a falling couch. Max was driven deeper into the swamp, cheeks spreading around the seat, the pucker he had been kissing now grinding a slow circle against the mesh. Her unwashed heat became a climate. Sweat ran. Lube that had started the morning as a plan and become a habitat smeared him into the fold until peeling off would have required tools.

 

Hazel’s free hand found a remote. The six monitors woke up in a chorus of paused moans and bad compression. She tabbed to a folder labeled, with the organizational rigor of a girl who could titrate to three decimal places and still leave fries in a USB port, `NEW_TOY_REF`. Reference material bloomed. Tiny. Trapped. Captioned. She made a happy sound that had phlegm in it and put the remote on the desk next to a box of twenty.

 

Then she started in earnest.

 

It was not elegant. It was not supposed to be. Hazel Berry gooned the way she did chemistry: sloppy setup, precise fingers, no interest in looking respectable while the reaction ran. Two fingers on herself, then three, the wet click of it loud in the little sealed room. The other hand — the one that had carried lunch — found a nugget, considered it, and used it as a timer, tapping it against the arm of the chair in time with her wrist.

 

“Who shrunk you,” she said, not stopping. “For real. Party, yeah, I got that. Which house. Which batch. Juno girls buy clean. Street stuff is pickle-jar swill. If you took the jar, your mitochondria are having a different Tuesday than if you took mine.”

 

“I-I don’t know,” Max said, because he did not, and because the pucker against his mouth flexed on every syllable she liked. “I blacked out. Zeke took me. I woke up on the table. Please—Hazel—I can’t breathe—”

 

“You can,” she said, matter-of-fact, scientist-mask on. “Serum makes you durable. That’s the whole sales pitch. Roofies so you don’t seize when the mass dumps. Elasticity so you don’t pop when some goth sits on you for a lecture. You’re fine.”

 

PPPRRRRAAAAAPPPP.

 

Shorter than the hallway monsters. Meaner. A tight, spicy burst that had Hot Cheeto and this morning’s coffee in it and nowhere to go but into him. The chair ticked. The monitors rattled in their cheap arms. Max’s world went orange and wet and then, treacherously, warm in a way that was not only panic. He hated that. He filed the hatred next to the arousal so he could look at both later, if later was a thing he still got.

 

“Thirty formulas on the market,” Hazel went on, wrist working, nugget tapping. “Give or take the ones the Juno lab pretends they invented. Most of ’em are the same backbone with different perfume. Mine’s clean. Street’s a soup. Reversal isn’t a product, Miniguy. Reversal’s a research question. I can ask it. I like asking it. I like asking it more if the subject is currently making my clit buzz like a broken pager.”

 

“So there—there is a way—”

 

“There is a way if I feel like finding one,” she said, and the mask slipped on the word 'feel.' Drool hit her collarbone. Sauce from a fry she had stolen one-handed on the way to the chair glistened at the corner of her mouth and ruined the sultry thing she tried to do with her eyebrows. “Month, maybe. Less if I stay focused. I do not stay focused. That is a known variable. You are the intervention. Every time I get off with you in the stack, I log an hour. Every hour is a lab hour I would have spent on, I dunno, a tentacle sleeve that moans in Latin. Got it?”

 

Max saw how this was a hostage situation with a syllabus. He also saw, with the part of his brain that still thought in registrar forms, that she was the only person in this house who had used the words mitochondria and backbone in the same breath as clit. That was the bargain whether he liked the font or not.

 

“I will do anything,” he had already said, downstairs, like an idiot. She was collecting.

 

Hazel’s toes curled against the chair mat. The stained mattress watched. A doll with a cracked face watched. On the center monitor, a cartoon woman the size of a civic building sat on a city and the caption said something Hazel read out loud in a baby-talk register that made Max’s stomach turn.

 

“Say you’re my miniguy,” she whispered, not baby-talk now, just hoarse. “Say it and I’ll consider a fume hood that isn’t my ass.”

 

“I-I’m—I’m your—God, Hazel, just—”

 

“Close enough~.”

 

She came like a server rack dumping heat.

 

It was not one pulse. It was a run. Her thighs clamped the chair. Her gut jumped. The hand in her cunt stuttered and then dug in, and the cheeks that had been using Max as a weatherstrip seized so hard he saw white at the edges of the swamp. A noise came out of her that started as a laugh and ended as a groan with buck teeth in it. The monitors went on moaning without her. The nugget timer snapped in her fist and rained fried crumbs down the side of the chair and into the crack, a hot greasy hail that stuck to Max’s back like a second, stupider shirt.

 

BBBBBRRRRRAAAAAAPPPPP-FRTTT-SLAURGH.

 

The orgasm fart was the wettest thing the room had done all morning, which was a high bar. It left Max plastered to her pucker in a glaze that was half her and half lunch and all argument. He coughed. He did not die. The serum, whatever batch it had been, took the compliment.

 

Hazel slumped. The chair wheezed. Her glasses had fogged. The side ponytail had given up. She looked, for one unguarded second, like what she was: a brilliant, filthy nineteen-year-old who had just gotten what she wanted in a room that smelled like a crime and a drive-through.

 

“Hoo,” she said. “Okay. Yeah. That’s the stuff. You feel that, Miniguy? That’s peer review.”

 

Max peeled his face far enough off the ring to drag in a breath that was only mostly swamp. His voice came out raw.

 

“Y-you said after. You said we’d talk after.”

 

“We are talking,” Hazel said. She licked the nugget grease off her thumb, then, with no ceremony at all, reached back, hooked him by the torso, and peeled him out of the crack with a sound like tape coming off a game case. The air of the room — still terrible, merely less concentrated — hit him like a slap. She set him on the desk blotter between a sauce cup and a keyboard that had crumbs in every gap, a three-inch naked freshman shining with her. “See? Aftercare. I even gave you a view of the fries.”

 

He sat down hard on a grease spot. The fry she had thrown in some other life, in some other branch, was not here yet. A whole box of them was, steaming, a golden palisade at eye level. He could have hidden behind one. He thought about it. He did not, because she was looking at him with the expression of a girl who had finished the first experiment and already wanted the error bars.

 

“Cure,” he said. “Hours. Food. I need water. I need clothes. I need you to not put me back there the second I ask a question.”

 

“Mmm.” Hazel spun the chair, still naked from the waist down, blouse hanging open, and fished a large Sprite out of the bag like a magician finding the wrong animal. She cracked it, drank a third of it, and then, after a visible calculation about toy mortality, dipped a fingertip and held the drop over his head. “Hydration. Granted. Clothes are a maybe. I have doll stuff. I have a clean-ish sock. I have a 3D printer that can do a tiny hazmat if you’re cute about it. Putting you back there is not off the table. That’s premium real estate, Miniguy. You just made it more premium.”

 

A knock did not come. A roommate did not walk in. The house, for once, declined to be a sitcom. That left Max with the thing he was worst at, which was a pause in which he was expected to choose.

 

Hazel kicked the sweatpants off her ankle and used them to wipe her fingers, which improved nothing. She pointed the remote at the monitors and paused the civic-building woman mid-sit. Then she pointed the same remote at Max, as if he were a tab.

 

“Clock’s running,” she said, cheerful, horny, already thumbing the waistband of a thought. “I logged one hour. I can log another. I can eat first and be a good hostess. I can swab you and start guessing batches while the grease is still diagnostic. I can call Juno and ask which goth left a boy on my coffee table, which would be funny and also maybe get you murdered by ideology. Or you can start making demands like you’ve got leverage. HA! Leverage. You’re three inches and you smell like my colon. I like you. Don’t waste it.”

 

Max looked at the Sprite bead trembling on her fingertip. He looked at the six paused screens. He looked at the mattress, and the dolls, and the door that locked from the inside. He thought about Zeke, who had walked him into a party and had not walked him back out. He thought about Victoria calling. He thought about the fact that the smartest person at Ventus had just used him as a vibrator and was now offering him lab time priced in the same currency.

 

He wiped his mouth on his own shoulder, which only spread the problem, and tried to sound like a person who still had a registrar account.

 

Max paused, considering his options one last time before telling Hazel: