Sofia Drops By Shrunken First Semester chapter 4 by maximally

“Phee? Babe? I know you’re in there. You left your boots out here.”

 

It wasn’t Kali. Max could tell that much right away. Whoever it was, she sounded way too cheerful to be a member of House Juno, and she had the bright, slightly nasal lilt of somebody who’d spent a lot of time talking into a microphone.

 

Ophelia’s shoulders dropped about three inches in relief. “Oh, thank God,” she breathed. Then she seemed to remember Max was standing naked on her desk, and her shoulders went right back up again. “Okay. Okay. Don’t freak out. She’s… a friend.”

 

“A friend from Juno?” Max wasn’t sure that was any better.

 

“No. Proserpina. It’s a long story.” Ophelia was already shuffling toward the door. “Just—stay there. Don’t move. Unless, maybe, you wanna cover up? Or don’t. I’m not your mom. I… anyway…”

 

With nothing on hand but a stack of Gender Studies flashcards, Max wedged himself behind the nearest one labeled “SPOTTED HYENA” and did his best impression of a guy who wasn’t there. Through the narrow gap at its edge, he watched Ophelia undo the lock and crack the door open about four inches.

 

The second there was a gap, a pale, freckled arm snaked through it, followed by a pair of enormous boobs, followed by the rest of a very tall, very pale, very curvy young woman who apparently didn’t believe in waiting to be invited in.

 

“Oh my God, dude, you look like shit,” she said, delightedly, bumping the door closed with the toe of a beaten-up flip-flop. “I love that for you. Did you sleep in your eyeliner again? That’s so dark academia.”

 

“Hi, Sofia,” Ophelia mumbled.

 

Even through the gap behind the flashcard, Max could tell that “Sofia” was a lot of woman. She was easily six feet tall, with long, messy blonde hair piled into a claw clip and a pair of big, bright green eyes that seemed to take in every detail of Ophelia’s room in about half a second. She wore a tight white graphic tee knotted under her chest—no bra—with EVERYBODY POOPS in giant block letters across the front. Below that: a pair of impossibly skimpy pink-and-turquoise House Fortuna booty shorts, the house logo stretched and warped across an ass that was doing its very best to escape them. Even from across the room, Max could see that her butt was massive—a big, round, jiggling shelf of a thing that made Ophelia’s own ample rump look like a practice model—and that the shorts were leaving almost none of it to the imagination. Cheek spill. Cameltoe. No underwear. The fabric was well-worn and faintly stained, like she’d slept in it, or maybe just given up on laundry.

 

He also noticed, a few seconds later, that she smelled. Not in the fancy-perfume way that Ophelia usually did. It was more like a gym duffel full of old socks and used panties that had been left in a hot car with a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos.

 

“So you didn’t answer my texts,” Sofia said, flopping down on the edge of Ophelia’s four-poster bed like she owned it. One flip-flop dangled off her toes, and the other slapped onto the floorboards; her bare toes were painted a chipped, glittery pink and probably hadn’t seen soap since the flip-flops were new. “Like, at all. And last night you sent me, and I quote, ‘ok im gonna do it,’ ‘im so nervous,’ ‘what if he thinks my vag is weird,’ and then fourteen skull emojis. And then nothing. For nine hours. So I walked over here and had to talk my way past like eight of your ‘sisters’ who all looked at me like I was some kind of freak. You’re welcome, by the way.”

 

“Sorry,” said Ophelia. “I fell asleep.”

 

“Mm-hm.” Sofia narrowed her eyes. “And?”

 

“And what?”

 

“And did you do it?” Sofia leaned forward, grinning. “Did you punch your v-card? Do you have a sneaky link now? Is he under the bed?” She actually bent over to check under the bed, which gave Max a magnificent view of the Fortuna logo warping across her ass and the shorts disappearing into a cameltoe that had clearly given up the fight hours ago. “Because, babe, I meant what I said. If you get in there and you freak out, I’ll come over and walk you through it. Like, step by step. It’s not that hard. It’s like a group project but with more fluids.”

 

Ophelia went red under her foundation. “Sofia, oh my God.”

 

“What? I’m being supportive. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind, either.”

 

Behind his flashcard, Max bit back a noise. He was pretty sure that ‘helping your best friend lose her virginity’ was not a normal favor to offer, at least not in the casual, can-I-borrow-your-notes kind of way Sofia was offering it. Then again, he’d been at Ventus for less than a month, and he’d already woken up three inches tall on a coffee table. Maybe normal didn’t apply here.

 

“I didn’t, okay?” Ophelia sat down hard on her desk chair, which put her face about a foot away from Max’s hiding spot. “I got nervous.”

 

“Aw.” Sofia’s grin softened into something almost sweet. “Phee. That’s okay. Seriously. There’s always next party.”

 

“Well.” Ophelia’s eyes flicked, just for a second, toward the flashcard. “Kind of… no?”

 

That was all it took. Sofia followed her gaze, and her green eyes went wide. In one smooth, terrifying motion, she was off the bed and across the room, crouched down in front of the desk with her face so close to Max that he could see every pore on her nose.

 

“Ophelia,” she said, very slowly. “Why is there a tiny naked guy behind your flashcards?”

 

*

 

It took about five minutes for Ophelia to explain, and roughly four of those minutes were Sofia saying “wait, what?” at increasingly loud volumes.

 

“Okay, so, wait,” Sofia said finally, sitting cross-legged on the floor with her elbows on the desk and her chin in her hands. Max, now standing in the open with both hands clamped over his crotch, was trying not to stare at the way her boobs were resting on the desktop like two giant beanbags. From this height, the giant block letters of EVERYBODY POOPS filled his entire field of vision. “Isn’t the challenge just… talking a guy into coming back to your room and eating you out? Shrinking on the first date seems kinda aggro.”

 

“Yeah,” Ophelia muttered.

 

“And you skipped the first part.”

 

“…Yeah.”

 

“And then you skipped the second part and went straight to the end of the game, and you didn’t even get eaten out.” Sofia gaped at her—and then burst out laughing so hard she had to hold onto the desk. “Phee! Oh my God! You cheated and you overachieved! That’s the most you thing that has ever happened!”

 

“It’s not funny!”

 

“It’s so funny.” Sofia wiped her eyes. “Your mom is going to have an aneurysm.”

 

That shut Ophelia up instantly. Max watched all the color drain out of her face—which was impressive, considering how pale she’d been to start with.

 

“She can’t find out,” Ophelia said quietly. “Sofia. She can’t.”

 

For a second, Sofia’s smile wavered. And in that second, Max thought he saw something pass between them: something old, and a lot more serious than anything else either of them had said so far.

 

He didn’t know it, but they were both thinking about the same hotel suite in Beverly Hills, three summers ago. The press junket for The Pale Bride—Ophelia’s mom’s seventh bestseller, and Sofia’s mom’s biggest role in a decade. Bianca LaChance had spent two weeks dying beautifully of consumption on a soundstage in Prague, and she’d talked about almost nothing else since. Octavia Kidd had spent the whole junket sitting perfectly straight in a vantablack wrap dress and matching lipstick, correcting the interviewers’ pronunciation of her characters’ names. And their daughters had been parked in a side room with a fruit plate. One was a fifteen-year-old who still dressed like she was twelve and couldn’t look anybody in the eye. The other was a fifteen-year-old with two million followers, a ring light in her carry-on and a smile that had started to look a little bit painted on.

 

Before the fruit plate was gone, Sofia had gotten Ophelia to laugh so hard that Octavia had turned around in her chair on the other side of the door. It was the first time anybody had ever seen that happen. And for the next three hours, Sofia hadn’t needed to be “on” to her mother’s usual standards one bit.

 

“Okay,” said Sofia now, all the giggling gone from her voice. “Okay. She won’t find out. Not from me.”

 

“Thank you,” Ophelia whispered.

 

“But you know who will find out,” Sofia went on, glancing at the door, “is literally everybody else in this house. Like, Phee, I walked past your common room and there was a girl in there with a riding crop just sitting there. Nobody was even with her. She was just holding it.”

 

“That’s Kali,” said Ophelia and Max at the same time.

 

As if on cue, a door slammed somewhere down the hall—hard enough to rattle the brass knob on Ophelia’s. Heavy footsteps thudded past outside, along with a low, bored voice asking nobody in particular whether anyone had seen a missing vial of “the experimental serum.” The footsteps paused right outside the door.

 

Nobody in the room breathed.

 

Then the footsteps moved on.

 

“Yeah, so, that’s a no,” said Sofia, letting her breath out. “He can’t stay here.”

 

“He has to stay here,” said Ophelia. “Where else is he gonna go?”

 

Sofia smiled. It was the kind of smile Max associated with cartoon villains and girls about to do something deeply stupid at parties. “My place?”

 

“You’re out of your mind,” said Ophelia.

 

“Hear me out.” Sofia held up a finger. “Proserpina doesn’t have a lab. Proserpina doesn’t have rules. Half my house is asleep until two p.m. and the other half is too high to notice if I bring home a raccoon. Nobody over there is gonna try to break him, either.” She shot Max a wink. “No offense, little dude. You seem very unbroken.”

 

“Uh,” said Max. “Thanks?”

 

“And,” Sofia went on, “you can come over whenever you want. Like, whenever. We’ll share him. Custody. You get weekdays, I get weekends, we split holidays. Or, you know.” She shrugged, very casually, letting her eyes wander over Max until his whole body went hot. “We could just share him share him. I don’t mind. I’m a giver.”

 

“Sofia.”

 

“I’m just putting it out there!”

 

Max cleared his throat, as loudly as anyone his size could manage. “Um. How exactly would I get there? It’s, like, across campus.”

 

Sofia turned to him, beaming. Then she got to her feet, spun, and slapped her own butt with both hands. It rippled like a waterbed.

 

“First class, baby.”

 

There was a long silence.

 

“No,” said Max.

 

“Hear me out,” said Sofia. “It’s totally safe. Way safer than a pocket. Pockets get checked. Nobody checks a girl’s butt crack. That’s sexual harassment.”

 

“You just said half of Juno looked at you like a freak,” said Ophelia.

 

“Exactly!” Sofia hooked her thumbs in the waistband of her Fortuna booty shorts and gave them a little hike, which confirmed what the cameltoe had already advertised—no underwear—and that the top of her crack was already glistening with a fine, oily sheen of sweat. “You really think any of them are gonna wanna give me a pat-down on the way out?”

 

As if to prove her point, she arched her back slightly, and her whole face went serene.

 

 

It hit Max like a wet towel. First came old cheese, sharp and sour. Then came eggs—not just regular eggs, but the kind of deep, sulfurous, hard-boiled-in-a-swamp eggs that seemed to coat the back of his throat. And under all that was something sweet and fake and totally wrong, like a strawberry milkshake left out in the sun. His eyes watered. His knees buckled. He sat down hard on the desk, both hands still covering his crotch, and coughed until he saw spots.

 

“Sofia!” Ophelia had her shirt pulled up over her nose like a bandana. “Really?!”

 

“Better out than in.” Sofia giggled, fanning the air behind her with absolutely no urgency. “Sorry, Max. That was a demo. Honestly that’s, like, a four out of ten for me. It’s the dining hall quesadillas, they just sit there.”

 

“A four,” Max wheezed.

 

“You’d get used to it.” She said it so cheerfully, with such total conviction, that he was almost scared she was right. “Everybody does. Hazel says my butt is an ‘acquired taste.’”

 

Ophelia didn’t say anything for a while. She just sat in her desk chair, staring down at Max with her smudged eyeliner and her bitten lip, while Sofia hummed some song Max half-recognized from TikTok and picked at a hangnail.

 

“I don’t want to give him to you,” Ophelia said finally. Her voice was very small. “That’s the thing. I know it’s stupid. I shrank him. I screwed up his whole life. But he’s… I don’t know.” She glanced at Max, then away. “He’s mine. Kind of. I picked him.”

 

“I know, Phee,” said Sofia, and for once, she wasn’t smiling. “That’s why I’m offering. Not taking. Offering. Now are you gonna let me wingwoman you here or not?”

 

She crouched down again until her big green eyes were level with Max’s. Up close, they were almost unnervingly kind.

 

“Your call too, little dude,” she said. “It’s your life, right? I’m not gonna kidnap you. That’d be so Juno of me.” She tipped her head at the door, where somewhere down the hall, Kali’s low voice was asking someone else about the serum “But if I were you, I’d figure it out kinda soon.”

 

Max looked up at Ophelia. Ophelia looked down at Max. Neither of them said anything.

 

Out in the hall, the footsteps were coming back.