Artie Spills the Beans Shrunken First Semester chapter 4 by maximally

“Very funny.” Max shook his head. “Seriously, though, what are you thinking?”

 

“Well,” Artemis whispered. “Idea one’s maybe a three. Idea two is basically Izzy.”

 

“What’s idea two?”

 

“Doesn’t matter. We’re not doing idea two.” She glanced at the door, then back down into her own bra. “Idea one is we go downstairs, right now, and Tía hears all of it. Everything. Before she comes back up here with the key.”

 

Max’s whole body went cold, which was honestly impressive, considering he was pressed into the sweatiest square inch in Sunnyvale.

 

“Artie. I just told you. Not Victoria. Not Izzy.”

 

“I know. I heard you. I’m not ignoring you, I swear.” She chewed the inside of her lip until the labret stud tilted. “But there’s, like, a difference between getting found and getting told. If she opens that door in four minutes and finds you on the floor, it’s her story. She gets to decide what it means. If we walk down there first, it’s ours.”

 

“Ours?”

 

“Yours. Sorry. Yours.” Her ears went pink. “I’m just the one doing the talking.”

 

He hated it. But he made himself actually think about it, which was more than he could say for most of the decisions he’d made under this roof.

 

First, a friend of a friend of a girl in Artemis’s co-op had been three inches tall since April. Second, nobody in this bedroom was a chemist. Third, Victoria had a Costco card, a red Mercedes, and the cell number of every pediatrician, dermatologist and orthodontist in the South Bay, and when she decided something needed fixing, it got fixed, whether it wanted to be or not. And somewhere down the hall was the one person who could make all of this exponentially worse with a single post.

 

“If Izzy finds out first—”

 

“Then all of her group chats find out second,” Artemis finished. “Yeah. Which is why we go to Tía. Nobody gets past Tía in crisis mode. Not even Izzy.”

 

“True,” Max said finally. “Okay. Three conditions.”

 

“Name them.”

 

“One, you do the talking. Two, you don’t hand me over. Like, to anybody. At all.”

 

“Done and done. Three?”

 

“No Izzy.”

 

Artemis winced. “I can do one and two. Three is above my pay grade. Izzy’s, like, a natural disaster. You don’t control it. You just get under a table and wait.”

 

That was the best offer he was going to get, and they both knew it.

 

“Can I move you?” She held two fingers up over the cup, very carefully not touching him yet. “The pocket. It’s got a flap. You’ll be able to see.”

 

This time, at least, she asked. Max nodded.

 

Her fingers came down like a pair of padded cranes. The breast he’d spent the last ten minutes wedged under settled back into the cup with a slow, sweaty peel, and then he was swinging through open air and dropping into the chest pocket of her flannel. It was a sleeping bag of soft, paint-stiffened cotton that smelled like turpentine, old weed and the onion ghost of her armpit a few inches to the left. He hooked his elbows over the top seam and looked out. The carpet was very, very far away.

 

Artemis took one deep breath, the kind that lifted him a full inch and set him back down. Then she unlocked the door.

 

*

 

The staircase in the Sunnyvale house had fourteen steps, and Max had never once in his life thought about any of them. Now he felt every one. Artemis took them the way someone would carry a bowl of soup filled to the brim, knees soft, one hand hovering under the pocket like a net, and every step dropped him a little and caught him again.

 

With every step, the house got louder. Oil popping in a pan. A Selena song on the little radio over the sink. Victoria humming along a half-beat behind. The smells came up the stairwell to meet them: fried tortilla, salsa verde, scorched cheese, and over it all that berry perfume, thick enough to chew.

 

On the ninth step, Artemis’s stomach gurgled under him like a clogged drain.

 

“No,” she whispered to it. “Not now. Absolutely not now.”

 

Her stomach disagreed.

 

 

It was small. More of a long, apologetic squeak against the inside of her waistband than anything else. But a stairwell in July held the hottest, stillest air in the house, and anything released into it could only travel one direction: up. Three seconds later it found the pocket: black beans gone sour, a bitter green note of cabbage, and that sweet, wrong undertone of oat milk, rising through the open flannel like smoke up a chimney.

 

Max pulled his head down into the pocket. It didn’t help. The pocket was in it, too.

 

“Sorry,” Artemis breathed. “Beans.”

 

“Beans,” Max repeated faintly.

 

“It’s a thing. It’s a real thing. I’m gonna stop talking.”

 

*

 

The kitchen hadn’t changed since Max was fourteen: the same speckled granite, the same fridge buried under magnets and Izzy’s old report cards, the same wall clock shaped like a rooster that ran four minutes fast. The view, though, was brand new.

 

Victoria was at the stove with her back to them. From Artemis’s chest pocket, Max was level with the back of her head, maybe an inch or two above it, close enough that it felt like standing behind her in line.

 

For four years, his stepmom had been the tallest thing in every room he’d shared with her: six-foot-one in her sandals, two hundred and fifty pounds of Vasquez curves. This morning they were practically eye to eye. He could see the little whorl where her part started under the claw clip, and he could follow the long brown slope of her back down to where her apron strings disappeared, swallowed whole into the small of it, right above the most aggressive pair of green booty shorts in Santa Clara County. Her ass filled them like two beach balls fighting over one seat, and every time she shook the pan, the whole situation rippled. Her bangles slid and chimed. Her sandals slapped the tile. She smelled like berries, fried corn and a Macy’s perfume counter at closing time.

 

Then there was the other one.

 

Izzy was perched on a stool at the island, one socked foot hooked over the rung, phone in one hand, a sweating Monster in her other fist. Max’s stepsister had gotten every inch of her mother’s figure and about ten fewer inches to fit it into, a hundred and eighty pounds packed onto a five-foot-three frame, and as usual, she was hiding all of it under somebody else’s hoodie. Black fringe. Slept-in eyeliner. Silver ring in her lip. Bare brown thighs spilling out from under the hem where her cut-offs should have been. Even from across the kitchen, he caught her signature: mango vape, mint gum and a faint funk of dirty socks.

 

She didn’t look up.

 

“Finally,” she told her phone. “Is the baby awake?”

 

“Tía,” said Artemis. “Can you turn the stove off?”

 

“Not unless you want cold chilaquiles.” Victoria didn’t turn around either. “Where’s Max? I said five minutes.”

 

“That’s kind of the thing. Can you, like… turn around? And maybe sit?”

 

The spatula paused.

 

Victoria turned. She did it the way she did everything, in one big swing that set every bangle ringing, and her eyes went straight to Artemis’s face, then past her shoulder to the empty stairs, looking for a five-foot-eight boy who wasn’t there.

 

“Artemis,” she said. “Where is your cousin?”

 

“He’s not technically my cousin. He’s my step—”

 

“Artemis.”

 

“He’s in my pocket.”

 

For a second, Victoria just looked at her. Then she laughed, a short bright bark that said she didn’t have time for art-school humor at eight in the morning.

 

At the island, Izzy finally looked up.

 

It was a small thing, and later Max wouldn’t be able to say exactly what bothered him about it. Anybody else would have looked at Artemis’s face first, waiting for the punchline. Izzy didn’t. Her eyes went straight to the flannel pocket and found him in less than a second, the way somebody checks on a pot they’d left simmering. Something flickered across her face, quick and pleased. Then, a full beat late, her mouth fell open in shock.

 

“Oh my God,” Izzy said. “Is that—?”

 

Artemis lifted him out. She did it slowly, with both hands cupped together under him, and lowered him onto the middle of the kitchen table between the salsa bowl and Victoria’s mug.

 

The spatula hit the tile.

 

Victoria didn’t scream. That was the scary part. She went perfectly, completely still, the way he’d only seen her go once before, when a cop knocked on the door at two in the morning with Izzy in the back of his cruiser.

 

“…Mijo?” she said in a very small voice.

 

“Hi, Victoria,” said Max.

 

Then she lunged.

 

Artemis got there first. Her hand slapped down flat on the table and curled around him like a fence, long paint-stained fingers on three sides and her wrist on the fourth, and Victoria’s reaching hand stopped six inches above it.

 

“Tía. Please sit. He asked me to hang onto him for now.”

 

Victoria’s eyes went sharp. “He asked you.”

 

For a long moment, the two giantesses stared each other down across the top of him. Victoria in her apron, her chest heaving, berry lips pressed thin. Artemis in her open flannel and sports bra, three inches taller and visibly regretting every life choice that had brought her to this kitchen. Max sat between them in the shadow of his step-cousin’s knuckles, naked, next to a bowl of salsa big enough to drown in, and waited to find out who he belonged to.

 

Then the smoke alarm went off.

 

“I got it, I got it,” said Izzy, sliding off her stool with zero urgency. She grabbed a dish towel and started flapping it at the ceiling while black smoke curled out of the forgotten pan.

 

The shriek seemed to knock something loose in Victoria. She pressed a hand to her chest, took a step back, and sat down hard in the nearest kitchen chair.

 

The chair made a noise. Then Victoria made a much louder one.

 

 

It ripped through the vinyl seat cushion like a motorcycle starting in a garage. The table didn’t just carry it. The table hummed. The salsa bowl shivered. A tortilla chip slid off the edge of a plate and landed beside Max like a fallen surfboard. Then, a few seconds later, the cloud crested the table’s edge like fog coming in off the bay: last night’s carne asada, refried pinto beans, and a sweet, curdled undertone of French vanilla creamer, all of it sitting under the berry perfume like a body under a rug.

 

Max made the noise of a pool float losing its plug. His eyes ran. He clapped both hands over his face, which did exactly nothing.

 

“Ay,” Victoria said weakly, fanning the seat of her shorts. “Excuse Mama. That’s the shock.”

 

“Taco Butt at the breakfast table, Mom?” Izzy called from under the smoke alarm. “In front of the baby?”

 

“Isabella.”

 

The alarm finally choked off. In the ringing quiet afterward, Artemis lifted her hand off the table, one finger at a time, like she was letting go of a kite. Then she plucked a paper napkin from the holder, folded it twice, tore a tiny hole in the middle with her thumbnail, and dropped it over Max’s head like a poncho. It hung to his knees. Honestly, it was a pretty good poncho.

 

“Okay,” said Artemis. “So. Here’s everything.”

 

*

 

She told it fast and she told it badly, but she told all of it. The pillow. The bra. The locked door. The co-op girl’s friend of a friend and his weird chemicals from China. Supposed to be five-ten again by Monday. Three inches since April.

 

Victoria listened with her hand pressed flat over her heart, bangles stacked at the wrist, and her eyes never once left Max.

 

“What did you take?” she asked him when Artemis finally ran out of breath. “Mijo. Look at me. What did you take?”

 

“Nothing! I swear to God. I had, like, half of one of Dad’s beers from the garage fridge. It was already open. I was gaming, I went to bed. That’s it.”

 

“That’s what he told me, too,” said Artemis.

 

Victoria shook her head slowly. “I’ve seen this before,” she murmured, half to herself. “When I first started modeling, there were these little bottles. Everybody had one in her purse. One drop took a couple inches off. Two, and you lost feet. And there was another kind, in the dark bottles—” A shiver went through her whole body, from her shoulders to her sandals, and she clamped it down hard. “Nobody came back from that kind.”

 

“So we call somebody,” said Artemis. “Right? Urgent care, or—”

 

“No.”

 

“Tía—”

 

“No. No doctors. No hospitals.” Victoria’s voice snapped into the register she saved for airline counters. “You know what happens to these boys when the wrong people find them? They don’t give them back, Artemis. They put them in a jar and write a paper about them, and Mama never sees him again.” She leaned in over the table, so close that Max could see his own reflection in her pupils, and the next part came out soft. “He stays here. Home. With Mama, where nothing can get him.”

 

“Ventus starts in six weeks,” Max said.

 

Victoria’s face did something complicated.

 

“Mijo,” she said gently, “you can’t even reach the light switch.”

 

“That’s not your call,” said Artemis.

 

“In this house, it is.”

 

“Okay, can I just—” Izzy had wandered back to the island and was leaning on her elbows, Monster dangling from two fingers. Her voice had gone soft and careful, like a guidance counselor’s. It didn’t fit her at all. “Sorry. Has anybody actually asked Max what he wants?”

 

Artemis turned and stared at her. Max could practically see the words get stolen right out of her mouth.

 

“Like, isn’t that your whole thing, Artie?” Izzy went on. “Consent? Bodily autonomy? You literally have it tattooed on you somewhere, right?”

 

Artemis’s hand drifted to her side and pressed flat against the flannel, right over the spot where the ink climbed her ribs, like Izzy had reached across the kitchen and poked her there. Her mouth opened. Nothing came out of it.

 

“I want to be normal,” said Max. It came out louder than anything he’d said all morning, which was to say, about as loud as a mosquito with a grudge. “That’s what I want. I want to be normal size and go to college.”

 

“Sure,” Izzy said. “Out loud.”

 

Victoria’s brows drew together. “What does that mean, Izzy?”

 

Izzy sighed. It was a long, theatrical, put-upon sigh, the sigh of a girl who’d been carrying a terrible weight all on her own and was only now, reluctantly, setting it down.

 

“Okay,” she said. “I really, really didn’t want to be the one to do this.”

 

She unlocked her phone, tapped twice, and slid it across the table. It came to a stop a few inches from Max’s napkin poncho, the screen glowing up at all three of them like a sheet of lit ice. It was already open to a screenshot. Like she’d had it ready.

 

It was a forum post. Gray background, tiny avatar, timestamp 2:14 a.m., dated three weeks ago. The username was TinyMax_Sunnyvale.

 

 

Max read it twice. It didn’t get any better the second time.

 

“I didn’t write that.”

 

“Dude. It literally says you’d say that.” Izzy tilted her head. “So who did? It’s your name. Tiny. Max. Sunnyvale. Who else is it gonna be?” She shrugged. “And that’s, like, the tamest one. There’s a whole folder. There’s a list. I wasn’t gonna show anybody.”

 

“I’ve never seen that in my life!”

 

Victoria picked up the phone with two fingers, like it might be hot. She read it once. Then she looked up from the screen, and she didn’t look at Max.

 

She looked at Artemis.

 

“You told me he was in the bathroom,” Victoria said quietly.

 

“I— Okay, yeah, but—”

 

“You told me he was hungover. You told me he asked you to lock the door.” Every word came out softer than the last, which was so much worse than yelling. “Did he ask you to lock it, Artemis? So Mama wouldn’t see?”

 

“No! I made that up, I panicked, I just—”

 

“So you lied to me.”

 

Artemis opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

 

“Mm,” said Izzy, and took a long sip of her Monster.

 

Max looked up at his step-cousin. She wasn’t looking at Victoria anymore. She was looking at the phone in her aunt’s hand, at the screenshot, with her eyes narrowed and her head tipped a few degrees to the side. It was the squint she gave a painting when she couldn’t tell yet whether it was wrong or just something she’d never seen before.

 

Before she could say anything, Victoria set the phone screen-down beside the salsa. Then she laid her hand beside him, palm up, bangles settling against the wood with a soft gold clink. The fingers lifted at his sides, warm and patient, a bowl waiting to be filled.

 

“Mijo,” she said. “Come to Mama.”

 

Beside him, Artemis’s hand was still on the table. It lay there palm down, a few inches away, close enough that he could feel the heat coming off it. She didn’t reach for him. She was waiting for him to say something.