Helicopter Mama Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

“Blue or black?”

 

Victoria’s voice hit the room a half-second before the rest of her did, which was the only warning anybody ever got. She came through the doorway with a duffel bag hanging from each fist like a pair of freshly caught fish, already talking, already halfway into the next thing on her list.

 

“Costco closes the good parking at ten, Max, so I need an answer. Blue is bigger. Black doesn’t show dirt. Don’t say ‘whatever,’ because ‘whatever’ is how you ended up with the Spider-Man sleeping bag at band camp.”

 

From flat on his stomach in the middle of the navy sheet, Max looked up. And up. And up.

 

At 6’1” and 250 pounds, his stepmother had always been a lot of woman. From three inches, she was a skyline. Bare brown feet the length of school buses planted themselves on the carpet, each toenail painted the same deep berry as her lips. Above them rose a pair of thunder thighs, thick and smooth and shining with expensive lotion, that disappeared into green booty shorts stretched so tight across her hips they looked like they’d been shrink-wrapped on at the factory. Her old Ventus tank top was knotted at the side and fighting a losing battle against a pair of breasts that could’ve had their own zip codes. Gold bangles clacked on both wrists. Wavy black hair, still damp from the shower, was clipped up in the messy bun she called “errand hair” and would have killed anyone else for photographing.

 

She was, Max had to concede in some distant, horrified corner of his brain, a former model for a reason. That was not a thought he had time for.

 

Then the smell reached the bed. Coconut lotion. Fresh coffee. And under both, faint but unmistakable, last night’s carne asada, already plotting its escape.

 

“Max?”

 

She’d stopped. Her eyes went from the bed to the closed bathroom door across the hall and back again, and her mouth flattened into the specific line it made when she was about to be disappointed in someone.

 

“Unbelievable. You’re in the shower now? I told you nine.” She dropped both duffels on the carpet with a pair of soft, enormous thumps that bounced Max an inch off the mattress. “Fine. I’ll do it myself. I’ll do everything myself, like always.”

 

“Victoria, wait—” Max shouted. It came out as a squeak. Somewhere downstairs, the coffee maker gurgled louder.

 

She didn’t hear him. She was already at the bed.

 

Strip the sheets, wash them, fold them, pack them. It was on the list. Max knew it was on the list because she’d read the list out loud at dinner three nights in a row. And now two hands the size of patio umbrellas came down on either side of him, grabbed the corners of the navy sheet, and yanked.

 

The world tilted ninety degrees.

 

Max tumbled down a cotton slope into the valley that formed as she gathered the fabric up. Daylight vanished. Navy folds closed over him on every side, warm from his own body heat and smelling like six days of him, which was its own kind of humiliating. He hit a pillowcase, bounced off a sock that had apparently lived in the bed since July, and came to rest in a tangled knot of cotton as the whole bundle swung through the air like a wrecking ball.

 

“Victoria!”

 

“—and Izzy wants the good towels, but she is not getting the good towels,” Victoria was saying to nobody, in the voice she used for talking to nobody. The bundle lurched. Max’s stomach stayed somewhere back on the mattress. “Mamá is bringing conchas, so of course now Fanny’s bringing a cake, because God forbid Fanny gets out-desserted—”

 

The bundle dropped. Max fell with it, through a gap in the sheets, into darkness that smelled like new nylon and the cardboard tag still zip-tied to the handle.

 

The duffel. She’d stuffed the dirty sheets straight into the black duffel, and he’d fallen through them like a coin through a couch cushion. He landed on the stiff bottom panel on his hands and knees, naked, staring up at a rectangle of light where the zipper hadn’t closed yet.

 

He scrambled to his feet. The walls were slick nylon and three times his height. He jumped, grabbed a fistful of sheet, started climbing.

 

Then the light went out.

 

Not because of the zipper. Something else had moved over the opening. Something enormous, round, and green, eclipsing the bedroom ceiling the way the moon eats the sun. Victoria had bent over the bag to cram one more pillowcase in, and her ass had come with her.

 

From inside the duffel, it wasn’t an ass. It was a weather front. Two colossal cheeks, each one bigger than the car he didn’t own, stretched the green shorts to translucence a foot above his head, the seam riding so deep between them it had practically gone missing. The fabric creaked. He heard her stomach make a long, low, ominous noise, like a ship’s hull settling.

 

“Ugh,” Victoria said, to nobody. “Those tacos.”

 

Max knew what came next. Every person in this house knew what came next. It even had a name in this house: Taco Butt.

 

“No—no no no—”

 

 

It hit the duffel like an air strike. The green shorts rippled. The nylon walls ballooned outward. The sheets around Max puffed up and settled back down, and then there was nowhere for the air to go, because the only way out of the bag was the same opening it had just come in through, and that opening was still full of Victoria.

 

Garlic and charred beef, first. Then onion, cooked down to something sweet and evil. Then the deep, warm, unmistakably human undertone that turned the whole thing from “smell” into “situation.” It soaked into the sheets. It soaked into him. His eyes streamed. He coughed so hard he lost his grip and slid back down to the bottom of the bag.

 

“Excuse me,” Victoria told the empty room, not sounding sorry at all, and straightened up.

 

Light came back. So did air, sort of. Max sucked in a lungful of it, gagged, and did the only thing left that made sense.

 

He screamed. “VICTORIA! IN THE BAG! I’M IN THE BAG!”

 

The bangles stopped clacking.

 

For a long second nothing happened. Then her face filled the opening, so close and so big he could see the fine lines her concealer hadn’t gotten to yet and the coffee on her breath. Big brown eyes searched the sheets. Searched lower. Found him.

 

The berry-red mouth dropped open.

 

“…Max?”

 

“Hi,” he croaked, and then, because his brain had stopped taking requests, “I would like to leave the bag now.”

 

She didn’t scream. She didn’t drop it, which he’d been fully braced for. She went very, very still, like a woman who’d just seen a snake in a sleeping bag and was calculating exactly how fast it could move. Then she reached in, slowly, with two fingers, and plucked him out by the waist.

 

The ride up was a high-speed elevator with no walls. She held him out in the air, level with her face, and turned him around once. He covered himself with both hands, which at this size achieved roughly nothing.

 

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” she whispered. “Okay. Okay. Don’t move.”

 

“Where would I go?”

 

“Don’t be smart.” She set him in her other palm, a warm, lotion-slick hollow with a lifeline that ran under him like a canyon, and lifted him closer to the window light. Her thumb nudged his arm out. Tipped his chin up. Pressed, very lightly, against his chest until she felt his heart doing whatever it was doing. “Does anything hurt? Can you breathe? Look at me. Follow my finger.”

 

He followed her finger. It was the size of a rolling pin, so it wasn’t hard.

 

“I’m fine. I mean, I’m not fine. But nothing hurts. This is how I woke up.”

 

“This is how you woke up.” She said it back to him the same way she said the dog ate it. Then she sniffed, frowned, and pulled him an inch closer to her nose. “And you smell like—” She stopped, because they both knew exactly what he smelled like and whose fault it was. “…Well. That part’s on me.”

 

“Yeah, it is.”

 

“Don’t get a tone.” But a little of the panic had gone out of her face, and the old skeptical mom was climbing back in to replace it. She narrowed her eyes. “Max. Honey. Where were you last night?”

 

“Here. Right here. In my room.”

 

“Doing what?”

 

“Playing Elden Ring!”

 

“Until when?”

 

“I don’t know! Late! Then I fell asleep, and then I woke up and the pillow was a mountain!”

 

“Mm.” She didn’t believe him. He could see her not believing him. “You didn’t sneak out? You didn’t go to some send-off party with those kids from your physics class? Because if somebody’s cousin had a pool and a keg, you can tell me. I won’t be mad.” She paused. “I’ll be a little mad.”

 

“I didn’t go anywhere. I don’t get invited anywhere. You know that.”

 

That landed. Her mouth opened, shut, and for once didn’t have a comeback, which was how he knew she believed at least that part.

 

She kept looking at him after that. Not the way she looked at a mess, or a bill, or Izzy’s report card. Something else moved behind her eyes, older and further away, like she was looking at him and also at a room he’d never been in.

 

“I’ve seen this before,” she said quietly.

 

Max’s stomach dropped all over again. “What? Where?”

 

“When I was modeling.” Her thumb moved across his back, slow, almost absent. “There was stuff going around back then. At the parties. After the shows. A couple drops in somebody’s drink and they’d lose a few inches. More and they’d lose a lot more. Girls thought it was funny.” She swallowed. “Mostly it was funny.”

 

“Mostly? Does it wear off? Victoria, does it wear off?”

 

“Sometimes.” Her voice stayed even. Her hand didn’t. A tremor ran through her fingers, then up her arm, so strong that her whole palm shivered under him like the floor of a bus. She caught it fast. She closed her fingers halfway around him, gentle as a cage, until the shaking stopped. “Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t.”

 

“What happened to the ones where it didn’t?”

 

“Not today, Max.”

 

It wasn’t the voice for Costco or the voice for nobody. It was the other one, the one she almost never used, the one that meant the door was closed and he was on the wrong side of it.

 

Then she breathed in, breathed out, and just like that she was Mama V again.

 

“Okay. Here’s what’s happening.” She raised him until they were nose to nose. “Nobody in this house hears about this until I know what I’m dealing with. Not your sister. Not Abuela. Especially not Fanny, because Fanny will put it on Facebook by lunch. No hospital, either. They’ll put you in a jar and send me a bill.”

 

“What about college? I’m supposed to move in in a week!”

 

“I know when you move in, I made the spreadsheet.” She glanced at the duffels, then the clock, then at the tiny naked stepson in her hand, and he could practically hear her redoing the spreadsheet in her head. “First things first. You’re not staying in this room by yourself. You fell into a duffel bag, Max. You’d drown in the sink.”

 

Downstairs, the coffee maker beeped three times, done. Her phone buzzed in the back pocket of her shorts. She didn’t look at it.

 

“So,” Victoria said, and a slow, terrifying gleam came into her eyes, the exact one she got in the Costco parking lot when she spotted a good space. “How do you feel about running errands with Mama?”