Oni on Duty Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

 

Max hadn’t realized how much the common room stank until the fresh air hit it. A cool gust rolled across the carpet carrying pine needles, sun-baked dirt and somebody’s sunscreen. Then the door banged all the way open against the doorstop, and the second thing through it was a pair of trail shoes so big and so caked with mud that, for one confused second, he thought someone had driven two small cars into the dorm.

 

Then he looked up. And kept looking up.

 

 

At 6’5” and 290 pounds, the former House Diana powerhouse had never fit through a normal-sized door in her life, and from three inches tall she wasn’t so much a woman as a mountain range with a lanyard. She was built like a pear somebody had blown up to parade-balloon proportions: a narrow waist and a modest chest up top, wrapped in a soaked gray sports bra and an open flannel tied at the sleeves, and then, below that, everything just kept going. Her hips flared out wide enough to block the hallway behind her. Her thighs, each one thicker than the coffee table was long, strained a pair of black compression shorts to the edge of what spandex was physically designed to survive. And behind it all, swaying with every step, rode the most enormous, disproportionate ass Max had ever seen on a human being: two round, tight, sweat-darkened moons that made the rest of her look like an afterthought.

 

Her waist-length black ponytail swung behind her like a pendulum. And sticking straight up from the crown of her head, as stubborn as ever, was the infamous cowlick: the stiff, antenna-like spike of hair that, combined with everything else, had earned her a nickname nobody said to her face.

 

 

She was drenched. Sweat glistened on her collarbones, ran down the inside of her elbows, and dripped off the end of her ponytail onto the carpet in drops the size of water balloons. A wave of body heat rolled across the room ahead of her, and the smell came with it: fresh, salty sweat with something heavier and muskier underneath, the earthy funk of somebody who had just climbed a very large hill very fast. Under her arm she carried a box of contractor trash bags and a pair of yellow rubber gloves.

 

“Every Saturday,” Casey said to the room. Her voice was low and flat, like a coach reading a scoreboard. “Every Saturday.”

 

Max’s mouth went dry.

 

He’d seen her almost every day since move-in. In this exact common room, alone on the green couch with some action movie where things exploded every eleven seconds. Leaving for the trailhead before most of the dorm was awake. Helping a lost freshman find the laundry room, while the freshman tried very hard not to make eye contact with her knees. He’d never once managed to say more than “hey” to her, and even that had come out as a cough.

 

Now she was all that stood between him and a four-story drop off a coffee table. And she hadn’t seen him.

 

She snapped a trash bag open with a crack like a gunshot and got to work. Takeout containers went first, scooped off the couch three at a time by a hand as broad as a tractor tire. A pizza box. A tangle of phone chargers she inspected, frowned at, and set aside on the arm of the couch in a neat little pile, because, Max realized, she was going to return them. Each of her steps put a tremor through the floor and up the table legs, and the Red Bull can beside him rattled like a nervous neighbor.

 

Then she turned toward the table.

 

“Hey!” Max shouted. “Casey! Down here!”

 

What came out was a squeak. A small, high, pathetic squeak.

 

Casey stopped dead.

 

Her head turned slowly toward the table. Her dark eyes narrowed. And then her whole face did something Max had never seen it do, and had never wanted to see it do, which was go perfectly, murderously calm.

 

“No,” she said quietly. “Not again.”

 

“Wait—”

 

“I told them. I told the whole second floor. You leave orange chicken on the table, you get mice.” Her hand was already closing on the nearest takeout container. “Okay, little guy. Nobody’s getting hurt. You’re going outside.”

 

“I’m not a mouse—”

 

The sky came down.

 

A white Styrofoam clamshell, upside down and as big as a planetarium, slammed onto the table around him with a hollow THOCK. The edges hit the wood a foot away on either side. Light went soft and white and dim. And the smell hit him all at once: cold orange chicken, the sticky, syrupy, garlicky ghost of it, soaked into the foam walls of his brand-new prison.

 

Max pounded on the wall. It squeaked under his fists like a balloon.

 

“Casey! CASEY! It’s Max! From 214!”

 

“Shh, shh,” Casey murmured outside, in the gentle voice of someone talking to a very small, very stupid animal. “I know. It’s scary. Two seconds.”

 

Something slid under the edge of the container and scraped along the table toward him: a glossy flyer, bright pink, for some Fortuna event. The edge caught his ankles and swept him off his feet, and he landed on his butt on the face of a smiling, airbrushed sorority girl. Casey was going to slide him out. Carry him to the door. Dump him in the bushes. He was about to become a three-inch man living permanently in the shrubbery outside the Unaffiliated Students Dorm.

 

He rolled over onto his hands and knees. Up through the foam, he could see a huge, blurry shadow leaning down over the table to get the angle right.

 

Not her face. The other end.

 

Casey had bent at the waist to line up the flyer, and her ass had come around with her, the way a cargo ship’s stern swings when it turns. From inside the container it was just a dark, enormous, rounded shape, blotting out the window light behind it. Max heard the compression shorts creak. Then he heard something else: a deep, gravelly rumble from somewhere inside her, like a semi downshifting on the Grapevine.

 

“Ugh,” Casey grunted. “Morning shake.”

 

 

It didn’t sound like a fart. It sounded like weather. The Styrofoam walls hummed with it. And the clamshell, Max discovered in that moment, had not been designed to be airtight. The gap where the lid didn’t quite meet the table was about an inch tall, and through that gap, slowly, patiently, the cloud came crawling in.

 

Peanuts first, roasted and oddly specific. Then the sour, heavy burn of a protein bar that had clearly been mostly chemicals. Then, underneath both, rising from the deep, the thick, damp, full-bodied funk of six miles of uphill sweat soaked into black spandex. It mixed with the orange chicken. It improved nothing. Max’s eyes watered. He doubled over on the flyer, coughing, and somewhere in the middle of the coughing fit, he screamed the most honest thing he’d said all semester.

 

“CASEY, I’M A PERSON!”

 

Outside the container, everything went quiet.

 

The flyer stopped moving. The shadow straightened. For a long moment nothing happened at all, and Max heard nothing but his own wheezing and the faint tick of the dorm’s ancient wall clock.

 

Then the clamshell lifted.

 

Light poured in. So did air, sort of. And two dark eyes, each one the size of a dinner plate, descended until they filled every inch of his vision. Her ponytail slid over her shoulder and hit the table beside him with a slap like a wet rope. The cowlick bobbed overhead.

 

Casey looked at him for a very long time.

 

“…Max Calhoun,” she said at last. “Room 214.”

 

“H-hi.”

 

“You’re naked.”

 

“I noticed.”

 

“You’re very small.”

 

“I noticed that too.”

 

Her face didn’t change. It didn’t need to. Max had seen grown men flinch at that face. But up close, and from below, he caught something in it he’d never caught across the common room: a little crease between her eyebrows, and the corner of her mouth pulling tight. It wasn’t anger. It was the face of somebody doing the math on how badly she’d almost screwed up.

 

“I almost put you in the bushes,” she said.

 

“Yeah.”

 

“I’m sorry.” She said it plainly, with no drama, like a fact she was writing down. Then her eyes flicked to the clamshell in her hand, then back to him, still coughing on a pink flyer in a thinning haze of trail mix, and her ears went faintly red. “And about the… that’s on me, too.”

 

“It’s fine,” Max wheezed. “I’m used to it.”

 

Which wasn’t true at all. But it was the first thing he’d ever said to Casey Ono that didn’t come out as a cough, and something about the way her mouth twitched made it feel worth it.

 

She set the clamshell down, very carefully, well away from him. Then she laid her hand flat on the table beside the flyer, palm up. Up close it was a field, broad and calloused, with chalk ground into the creases from whatever she’d climbed that morning, and it radiated heat like a parked car in August.

 

“Okay,” she said. “One question at a time. Are you hurt?”

 

“I—no. I don’t think so.”

 

“Can you breathe okay?”

 

“Now? Kind of.”

 

The ears went redder. “Can you get in my hand?”

 

He hesitated. She waited. She didn’t reach for him, didn’t scoop, didn’t grab. She just held her hand there like it had all the time in the world, and it hit Max that she was doing on purpose what every other person in his life had never once bothered with: she was letting him choose.

 

He climbed in.

 

She lifted him slowly, at elevator speed, to eye level, and held him there. Her breath rolled over him, cool and minty, with a ghost of electrolyte drink.

 

“Last night,” Casey said. “Big party?”

 

“Y-yeah. How did you—”

 

“I’m your RA.” She said it simply, like it was obvious. “Did you drink?”

 

“…A lot.”

 

“Did you eat or drink anything someone handed you?”

 

“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything after the pregame.”

 

She nodded slowly, like that was the answer she’d expected and not the one she’d wanted. “People do stupid things to each other at parties around here,” she said. “Things they think are funny.” Her jaw tightened. “This isn’t funny.”

 

“Do you know what it is?”

 

“No.” Flat. Honest. “Not yet.”

 

Somewhere down the hall a door banged. A girl laughed. Somebody’s music started up through the wall. The dorm was waking up, and every one of those sounds was a person who might walk through that door and see the RA holding a naked, three-inch freshman like a baby bird.

 

Casey heard it too. She closed her fingers loosely around him. It wasn’t a grab. It was a shelter: a wall of warm, chalky skin curling up on every side until just his head stuck out over the top, like a kid peeking over a fence.

 

“Here’s the thing,” she said quietly. “There’s a binder. RA protocol. Medical emergency, I call it in. Res Life, campus health, the dean, probably your parents.” She paused. “Some of those people are good. Some of them are going to want to know why before they care about you.”

 

Max swallowed. “What do you think we should do?”

 

Casey looked at him for a long, steady moment. Then, for the first time since she’d walked in, the Oni smiled. It was small and crooked, and it changed her whole face.

 

“What I want,” she said, “is a shower. What I’m going to do is whatever keeps you in one piece.” She tucked a fallen strand of ponytail behind her ear with her free hand, and her phone buzzed in the waistband of her shorts, once, twice. She ignored it. “So you tell me, Max. I’m listening.”