Izzy Drops the Act Shrunken First Semester chapter 10 by maximally

It took Max nine days to get Izzy alone, and when it finally happened, it was Victoria's idea.

"Mama's getting her nails done," she announced Sunday morning, already in her sunglasses, already jingling her keys. "One hour. Maybe ninety minutes if Kim has the good gel. Isabella, you're in charge."

Izzy looked up from the couch, where she'd been lying upside down with her feet on the back cushion and her phone held over her face. "Of what?"

"Of your brother."

"Step—"

"Isabella." Victoria set Max down on the coffee table, on a folded washcloth she'd placed there for exactly this purpose, and kissed the top of his head so hard his knees buckled. "No list. Nothing new. You just watch him. If he needs anything, you call Mama."

"Totally," said Izzy. "Like, a hundred percent."

The front door shut. The red Mercedes backed out of the driveway with a crunch of gravel, and the purr of the engine faded down the street until there was nothing left but the hum of the fridge and the ceiling fan ticking over.

Izzy didn't move. She lay upside down on the couch with her socked heels propped on the back cushion and kept scrolling, the phone's glow lighting her chin from below. She didn't look at him once.

Max sat down on the washcloth and waited for his nerve.

It took its time. After ten minutes, Izzy grabbed the remote without looking and put on a true-crime show at a volume that made the coffee table hum under him. Something about a woman in Ohio and her husband's iced tea. Izzy watched like a hobbyist taking notes.

He ran the speech in his head. Two episodes in, she rolled onto her side and her shirt rode up, and a thick roll of belly spilled over the waistband of her pajama shorts, a red elastic dent pressed across it. She burped without apology, and the smell of Hot Cheetos drifted over to the coffee table.

The clock on the cable box said 11:42. Victoria had left at 10:50.

Twenty minutes, maybe less. If he didn't do it now, he might not get another empty house for a week.

Max stood up on the washcloth, folded his arms, and stared at his stepsister.

Izzy had drifted back to her phone over the TV. She didn't even look at him.

"I know it was you," Max said.

Nothing. Scroll, scroll. Her thumb was painted chipped black.

"The folder. The forum. TinyMax_Sunnyvale. I don't even use underscores, Izzy. I never have. And my laptop was under my bed, behind the Christmas box, and you told Mom it was open on my desk. You planted all of it."

Scroll.

"And this." He spread his arms, all three inches of him, naked on a washcloth. "This was you too. Wasn't it?"

Izzy lowered her phone.

For a second her face did nothing. Then it did a thing Max had never seen it do in nine days of huh and mm-hm and aw, he's nervous. The sleepy, harmless, wide-eyed look simply slid off, the way a sheet slides off furniture in a house nobody's lived in for a while. What was underneath was older and sharper, and it was grinning.

"Took you long enough," she said.

She swung her legs down off the back of the couch and sat up, and the whole sectional rocked under her weight. Five-three, one-eighty, all of it packed low and wide. She was in the same black pajama shorts she'd slept in, riding up into the fat crease where her thighs met her ass, and a stretched-out Paramore tee with no bra under it. Her tits swung loose and heavy when she leaned forward to put her elbows on her knees. Her nipples made two blunt points in the faded cotton, each one bigger than his head. From the coffee table, she was a building that had decided to sit down and look at him.

Max had been chewing on the night before for nine days, and in the drawer and under the couch cushions it had finally come back to him in pieces. Victoria in bed early with a face mask on. His dad's beers in the garage fridge. And Izzy, of all people, padding out to the garage behind him, popping the cap off a bottle with the edge of the workbench, and holding it out.

She'd been almost nice. That should have been the tell.

"Just take it, God, you're so dramatic about drinking." He said it in her voice, flat and bored. "You got me that beer. You never get me anything. And then you watched me drink the whole thing instead of looking at your phone."

"Yep," Izzy said. Just that. Yep. "Shrinking serum. Little vial. I dumped it in the bottle while you were digging around for the opener."

"Where do you even get shrinking serum?"

"Miguel."

"You got shrinking serum from your weed guy?"

"He's, like, kinda more than that now, actually." She examined her chipped black thumbnail. "And it was his cousin's thing. Parking lot behind the Valero. Cash."

Max's mouth fell open.

"You drugged me."

"I pranked you." She rolled her eyes. "Drugging is, like, a crime."

"So is this!"

"Is it, though? Like, what's the charge?" She tilted her head, genuinely curious. "Shrinking without a license? Who's gonna arrest me, Max? You gonna call the cops and squeak at them?"

He didn't have an answer for that. He'd spent nine days trying to think of one.

"Why?" he said instead. "Why would you even—"

"Because you're a loser, Max."

She didn't say it mean. That was what made it land. She said it the way Victoria said it's going to rain, a forecast, nothing personal.

"Like, genuinely. I'm not even being a bitch right now." She leaned her elbows on her knees, and her tits swung forward and hung there, heavy and loose under the Paramore tee. "Think about it. You get to Ventus. Six hours away. You don't know anybody. You don't talk to anybody. You eat in your room because the dining hall is scary. Your roommate's got a girlfriend by week two and you're doing the sock-on-the-door thing for him. Everybody at that school is gonna be hot and rich and loud, and you're gonna be the guy in the back of every lecture who still has his high school backpack." She ticked it off on her fingers, black nails clicking. "Miserable by October. Home for Thanksgiving with, like, fifteen pounds of ramen weight and no stories. A joke. And not even a joke anybody tells, because nobody'll know you well enough to make fun of you."

Max opened his mouth.

"And here?" She spread her hands at the living room. The recliner. The cream sectional. The legal pad on the counter. "Here, Mom carries you around in her tits all day. Abuela drives six hours to see you. You get fed. You get tucked in. Somebody literally sets an alarm so they don't miss touching you." Her voice went flat. "People want you here, Max. You know how many people at Ventus are gonna want you? Zero."

"That's not your call to make."

"Somebody had to make it." She sat back. For half a second she looked past him, at the front window, at the street, at nothing. "Not everybody gets to just leave, you know. Pack their little bins and drive off and become a whole new person. Some of us are still gonna be here in September." Then she blinked, and the smirk slid back into place like it had never left. "Anyway. You're welcome."

"You think I should thank you?"

"I think you already are." She leaned in closer. Her breath smelled like Monster and Hot Cheetos. "And Max? It is better. You know it is."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"It means you like it." She grinned.

The words hung there over the coffee table.

"I do not," Max said.

"Dude." Izzy laughed. It was a real laugh, low and delighted, from her gut. "I've watched you for a week. Foot rubs every morning. Seat warmer every afternoon. Riding around in her tits at Safeway. Two hours up her ass in those granny panties yesterday, and you didn't wiggle for, like, the whole second hour."

"Because I was exhausted!"

"Uh-huh. And because you were into it."

"I was not—"

"Max." She said it flat, almost gentle. "I made up a whole list. Twenty-one things, color-coded. And you never once said no. Not to Mom. Not to Abuela. You just said okay and went down it like a checklist."

"Because she wouldn't listen to me! Because you made her think—"

"I made her think what you were already thinking." Izzy grinned wider. "I just made it easier."

"That's insane. That's literally insane. I'm not into any of this."

Izzy studied him for a long second. Then she sighed, very theatrically, and stood up.

"Okay," she said. "Let's test it."

She did it faster than he could run.

He got maybe two steps across the washcloth before her hand swept down over the coffee table. She didn't grab him. She just herded him, the side of her palm pushing him off the edge of the table into empty air. He dropped. The carpet came up and hit him on the back, soft enough not to hurt and hard enough to knock the wind out of him. When he rolled over, gasping, the ceiling fan was spinning a long way above him, and in front of it, blocking out the light, was a sock.

It was black. It was a men's sock, actually, one of a pack of six Izzy had stolen out of his own drawer sometime in tenth grade and never given back. He recognized the faded gray toe. He'd been looking for them for three years.

It came down.

Not fast. Izzy wasn't trying to squash him; she wasn't stupid. She brought it down heel-first beside his hip. Then she rolled forward, letting the ball of her foot settle across his chest and the arch hang over his face, and leaned. Just a little. Just enough.

The weight hit him all at once. A hundred and eighty pounds, distributed over one foot, distributed over one tiny boy. Even with most of it resting in her heel on the carpet, the part that came down on him was crushing. His ribs creaked. The air went out of him in a squeak. The sock's cotton was damp and gritty against his skin, the weave so coarse at this size that each loop was a rope he could have put his fingers through.

And the smell.

Izzy's feet had always smelled. That was just known in the house, like how the third stair creaked or how the garbage disposal jammed if you put potato peels in it. Victoria nagged her about it constantly. Izzy wore the same socks two, three days in a row, in combat boots, in July, and never once in her life had used foot powder. Up close, at three inches, it hit him like a wall. It was sharp and sour and cheesy, a thick, sweaty funk, almost vinegary, with the rubber of her boots underneath it, like the inside of a locker that hadn't been opened all summer. It soaked through the black cotton straight into his nose and his mouth and the back of his throat. His eyes watered. He gagged, and gagging meant breathing in, and breathing in meant more of it.

"Oh my God," Izzy laughed from somewhere up in the sky. "Look at your face."

He couldn't look at anything. All he could see was black sock, and past the edge of her arch, a narrow strip of carpet and the bottom of the coffee table.

"Get—" he wheezed. "Get off—"

"Nope." She leaned a little harder. The ball of her foot ground down, rolling left and right across his chest like she was putting out a cigarette, and the damp sock dragged over his skin, smearing him with her sweat. "Not till you admit it."

"There's—nothing—to admit—"

"Mm. See, that's a lie." She wiggled her toes. They were right over his face, five fat lumps under the cotton, each one the size of his whole head. They flexed down and kneaded at his forehead and his cheeks, and a fresh wave of stink rolled off them. "'Cause I've been reading your forum posts."

"You wrote—"

"I know I wrote them. I wrote them about you. And you know what's funny? Every single one was true." She leaned her elbow on her knee, and he felt the weight shift forward onto him, heavier, hotter. "Like, 'every time she walks past my room, the floor shakes, and I just want to be under there.' You remember being fourteen? When Mom moved in? You used to stare at her, Max. Like, obviously. Her ass, her tits, her feet on the coffee table. Abuela too. Everybody saw it."

He tried to say something. Her toes squished down over his mouth, and he got a mouthful of salty, sweat-stiff cotton instead.

"And you know what you do now, when she sits on you at night? You sigh. Like, a little happy sigh, right when she settles. I've heard it from the other end of the couch, like, four times." She giggled. "That's not a hostage. That's a fan."

Max went hot all over.

"So I didn't make anything up. Not really. I just..." She twisted her heel on the carpet and ground down one more time, slow and deliberate, and the sock squelched faintly against his chest. "...took the lid off."

He lay under her foot, breathing her in, unable to move.

And somewhere underneath the panic and the stink and the burning in his lungs, something else was happening. Something he did not want to happen. Something he had been very carefully not letting happen for nine straight days, through every foot rub and every couch session and every hour inside Victoria's lavender briefs.

His dick was getting hard.

No, Max thought. No, no, no, absolutely not, not now, not under her*—*

It didn't care. It went right on getting hard, stiffening up against the underside of her sock, and there was nothing he could do about it, because he was pinned flat on his back on the carpet with a hundred and eighty pounds of stepsister grinding him into the floor.

Above him, the toes stopped wiggling.

There was a pause.

"Oh," said Izzy, and he could hear the grin spreading across her face. "Oh, dude."

"Shut up."

"Oh my God, Max."

"Shut up—"

"I didn't even say anything!" She was laughing so hard now that her whole leg was shaking, and the shaking came down through her foot and rattled him against the carpet. "I didn't say anything, and you—oh my God. That's so much better than a confession. That's, like, physical evidence."

"It's not—it's just—it's a reflex—"

"A reflex." She was wheezing. "Tell that to my sock."

Before Max could respond, the front door opened.

Neither of them had heard the Mercedes. Neither of them had heard anything but Izzy's laughter, and now Victoria's voice floated in from the entryway, bright and breezy, along with the jingle of her keys and the click of her sandals on the tile.

"Kim didn't have the good gel, so Mama just got a polish change! Isabella? Where's my baby?"

Izzy moved so fast it was almost magic.

Her foot shot up off his chest. Air rushed into his lungs so hard it hurt. Her whole face rearranged itself in half a second, the grin wiped clean and replaced with wide-eyed, slack-jawed horror. Her hands flew up to her mouth. Her shoulders went up around her ears. By the time Victoria came around the corner of the living room, Izzy looked like a girl who'd just backed over the family dog.

"Oh my God," Izzy gasped. "Oh my God, Mom, I'm so sorry—"

"What?" Victoria's sunglasses went up into her hair. "What happened? Where's—"

"He fell off the table!" Izzy pointed at the carpet with a shaking finger. "I was getting a Monster, and I came back, and I didn't see him, and I just, like, stepped back, and he was right there, and I stepped on him, Mom, I didn't mean to—"

The sandals thundered across the floor. Victoria dropped to her knees on the carpet so hard the coffee table jumped. Her face came down over Max, huge and stricken, berry lips parted, a fresh coat of red on every nail of the hands that reached for him.

Max did the only thing he could think of.

He rolled onto his stomach.

The carpet was rough and scratchy against him. It was mortifying, and it was the only thing in the world that was going to hide what was going on down there, because there was no way, no way, that Victoria Vasquez-Calhoun was going to see her stepson lying on her living room floor with a three-inch boner while her daughter sobbed fake tears over him.

"Mijo!" Victoria's fingertip touched his back. It was trembling. "Mijo, are you hurt? Can you hear Mama? Say something!"

"I'm okay," he croaked into the carpet. "I'm—okay. Just. Winded."

"He's okay," Izzy breathed, sinking down onto the couch. "Oh, thank God. Thank God. I was so scared."

Max turned his head on the carpet just enough to look past Victoria's knee at his stepsister. She had both hands clasped over her heart. Her eyes were shiny and wet. Her lower lip trembled.

Then, so fast that Victoria, bent over him, would never in a million years have caught it, Izzy flicked her eyes down at him and back up again. One corner of her mouth twitched.

Then she wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

"Mom," she sniffled, "I think I need a minute. I feel so bad."

"Oh, mija." Victoria's voice softened instantly. "It was an accident. Mama knows it was an accident."

"I just, like, I would never—"

"I know, baby. I know." Victoria scooped Max up off the carpet, belly-down in her palm. He kept his hips pressed flat to her skin so hard it hurt, and held his breath, and prayed. She cradled him against the swell of her tits without looking at anything below his shoulders. "Mama's got him. Go lie down."

Izzy went. She trudged toward the stairs, sniffling, shoulders hunched. At the bottom step, she paused, and looked back over her shoulder, and her eyes found Max in his stepmother's hand.

She mouthed two words.

Physical evidence.

Then she went upstairs, and a second later her door shut. Max lay face-down in Victoria's palm, breathing in cocoa butter and fresh nail polish and, still clinging to his skin, the sharp sour reek of his stepsister's sock, which he would be smelling for the rest of the day no matter what he did.

His dick still hadn't gone down.