Read the Fine Print Shrunken First Semester chapter 5 by maximally

Victoria’s hand stayed where it was.

 

It wasn’t really a hand from down here. It was a place, a warm brown cradle of palm with four fingers curled up around the edges like the sides of a boat, bangles banked against the wrist like sandbags. He knew exactly what was waiting in it. He’d been in it plenty of times without ever touching it: the goodbye dinner with its own seating chart, the Costco run, the speech. Did you pack socks, mijo. Mama’s just asking. At five-foot-eight, he could leave the room. At three inches, he’d never leave her hand again. She’d keep him in her apron pocket while she cooked and her jewelry box while she slept, and she’d love him so hard there wouldn’t be anything left over.

 

On the far side of the salsa bowl, Izzy was watching over the rim of her Monster. Izzy was Izzy. That was the whole list.

 

And on his other side, a few inches away, Artemis’s hand was just lying there, paint-stained and palm-down on the wood, not taking anything.

 

Upstairs, she’d asked him what he wanted. Nobody in this house had ever asked him that, not about dinner or curfew or college, and definitely not about his own body. She’d grabbed him once, panicked, and then apologized for it like she’d broken something. She’d asked before she moved him into her pocket. That was the whole reason he’d let her carry him down here.

 

Maybe, if he was lucky, she’d keep asking. Maybe someone in this house would keep treating him like a person, even now that he fit next to a tortilla chip.

 

That was enough to go on. It had to be.

 

“I want to stay with Artie,” Max said.

 

The kitchen went quiet. Even the rooster clock seemed to hold its breath.

 

Victoria’s fingers didn’t close. They just stayed open for a second longer than they needed to, like she was giving him a chance to fix a typo. Then, slowly, her hand drew back across the table and folded itself against her apron, right over her heart.

 

“With Artemis,” she repeated.

 

“Just for now. Just until—” He didn’t know until what. “She asks first. Before she does stuff. I just need that right now.”

 

“Mama asks,” said Victoria.

 

Nobody in the room, including Victoria, believed that.

 

Artemis didn’t say anything. She didn’t gloat. She turned her hand over on the table, palm-up, and left it there, and when he walked into it, poncho flapping around his knees, she closed her fingers so slowly that he could have walked back out at any point. She lifted him to her collarbone and held him there, warm and careful, and he felt the breath go out of her in one long, shaky rush against the top of his head.

 

“Okay,” she murmured. “Okay. I got you.”

 

“Aww,” said Izzy. “That’s actually kind of cute.”

 

Artemis’s chest went stiff under him.

 

When Max twisted around to look up at her, Artemis wasn’t looking at him. She was looking at the phone lying screen-down beside the salsa, and she had that squint again, the painting squint, the one that meant something didn’t fit and she wanted to know whether the problem was the picture or her.

 

“Iz,” she said. “You said that was the tamest one.”

 

Izzy shrugged. “I mean. Yeah.”

 

“So show me the rest.”

 

“Artemis,” said Victoria.

 

“No, I’m serious, Tía. He just asked me to keep him. I’m not doing that blind.” Artemis looked down at Max. Her voice dropped. “Is that okay? If I read it? It’s your stuff. If you don’t want me to see it, I won’t look.”

 

“It’s not my stuff,” said Max. “Read all of it. Please. You’ll see.”

 

“Okay.” She looked back at her cousin. “Show me.”

 

*

 

Izzy didn’t have to go looking for it. That was the first thing Max noticed, and he noticed it the same way he’d noticed her eyes going straight to the pocket earlier, a little itch at the back of his brain that he couldn’t scratch yet.

 

She just picked her phone back up, thumbed past the lock screen, and opened a photo album without scrolling for it, like it was pinned right at the top. It was titled max receipts, with a skull emoji.

 

“Why,” said Artemis, very evenly, “do you have an album?”

 

“Because I found his account in, like, June, and I was gonna use it.” Izzy said it the way other people said I was gonna recycle that. “He snitched to Mom about my bong. Remember, Mom? In May? So I was saving it. Leverage.” She slid the phone across the table to Artemis. “And then this happened, and it stopped being funny. So. You’re welcome, I guess.”

 

Victoria pressed two fingers to her temple. “Isabella. Leverage.”

 

“I didn’t use it.”

 

Artemis let out a long breath through her nose and set Max down on the table in front of her, right beside the phone, so he could see the screen too. Then she pulled out the chair next to Victoria’s, turned it around backward, and sat down on it hard, the way she always sat when she was about to read something she knew she wouldn’t like.

 

The chair took her weight with a long wooden groan. Then the chair wasn’t the only one complaining.

 

 

It tore out of her into the vinyl seat and rattled the rungs, a hot, humid ripple that Max felt through the tabletop before he heard the end of it. A second later the cloud found him: sour black beans, scorched oat milk and the sweet, rubbery ghost of last night’s joint. His eyes flooded. He ducked his face into the neck of his napkin poncho, which turned out to be about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

 

“Sorry. Sorry.” Artemis flapped her flannel at him without looking up. “Beans. Round two.”

 

“Ay, Dios,” Victoria said faintly, waving a dish towel. “The vegan stuff, mija. I keep telling you.”

 

“Not now, Tía.”

 

Izzy just grinned into her Monster.

 

Artemis started to scroll.

 

The screenshots were all from the same forum: gray background, tiny avatar, TinyMax_Sunnyvale in blue at the top of every post. Every timestamp was between one and three in the morning. Every one was dated weeks ago.

 

 

 

 

Max’s mouth went dry.

 

He had said I didn’t write that. Out loud. Ten minutes ago. He’d said I want to be normal loud enough to rattle a salsa bowl. And here was the same thing written down weeks before he’d said it, with a lol at the end, like the guy who wrote it was sitting right here at the table laughing at him.

 

“I didn’t write any of these,” he said.

 

Izzy made a small sound into her can. She didn’t even look up from it.

 

Artemis didn’t laugh. She didn’t make any sound at all. She swiped to the next screenshot.

 

*

 

Then, out of nowhere, he remembered.

 

It came back in a single sliding piece, the way the garage door came down: the hum of the old fridge, the cold concrete under his socks, midnight-ish. He’d gone out to the garage freezer for a burrito. And Izzy had been standing at the garage fridge already, in her gray hoodie, holding one of his dad’s beers by the neck. The cap was already off. You look like you need this, loser. Don’t tell Mom. She’d never once handed him anything in four years. He’d been so surprised he’d just taken it.

 

“Wait,” he said. “Wait. Artie. It was Izzy.”

 

Every head in the kitchen turned to him.

 

“The beer. Last night. She gave it to me. In the garage. It was already open, she handed it to me, she said don’t tell Mom—” The words were tripping over each other. “She watched me drink it. Artie, she did this. She put something in it. That’s why she has all this ready. That’s why she had the screenshot up before you even—”

 

“Oh my God,” said Izzy, and put her can down. “Seriously?”

 

“Max,” Victoria said, in the voice she used on telemarketers. “Mijo. Your sister can’t keep a succulent alive.”

 

But Artemis was still looking at him. She looked at him for a long time, and he could see her actually thinking about it, really thinking, which was the worst part. She wasn’t stupid. She was the smartest person in this kitchen and she was taking him seriously.

 

Then she reached over and swiped once more without looking down, like she already knew roughly where it would be.

 

 

Max stared at it.

 

“That’s not—” he said. “I didn’t—”

 

“Okay.” Artemis rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand. Her labret stud tilted. “Okay. I’m not saying I believe that. I’m just—Max, babe. Twenty minutes ago, Tía asked you what you took. And you said you got half a beer out of the garage fridge yourself. And it was already open.” She said it gently, like she was walking him back through a bad dream. “You didn’t say Izzy. You didn’t say anybody.”

 

“I didn’t remember yet!”

 

“I know. I believe that you think that.” She winced. “That came out wrong. I just mean—”

 

“If I shrank him,” Izzy said, flat and bored, “why would I literally hand you all the evidence that he wanted it? That’s, like, the dumbest crime of all time.”

 

Nobody had an answer to that. Max didn’t either, and he was the one who knew she’d done it.

 

He looked up at Artemis, and he watched the logic close over her like water. It wasn’t stupidity. It was worse than that. Every door he could have walked her through, somebody had already been there first and hung a sign on it.

 

*

 

The next one was worse, because it was true.

 

 

Artemis went very still.

 

Max read it twice. His stomach turned over slowly, like something sinking. It wasn’t just that he hadn’t written it. It was that he’d thought it. Almost word for word. Five minutes ago, staring at Victoria’s open hand. Someone had taken the one real thing he’d had to hold on to this morning and typed it into a forum at two in the morning, weeks before he’d even had to think it.

 

“Huh,” Artemis said quietly. Her ears were going pink. “That’s—okay.”

 

“Artie, I didn’t—”

 

“You just said it, though.” She wasn’t accusing him. That was the terrible part. She sounded almost soft. “Like, out loud. Five minutes ago. ‘She asks first.’”

 

He opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.

 

Artemis swiped again. Then she made a sound like she’d swallowed a piercing.

 

 

“Ay,” said Victoria.

 

Izzy turned toward the window, shoulders shaking.

 

Artemis’s arm clamped down against her side so fast that the flannel squeaked. Pink climbed from her ears down her neck and spread across the freckles on her chest until the whole landscape of her looked sunburned. For a second, through the open front of the flannel, Max caught the purple tuft he’d seen upstairs, and the warm onion-and-deodorant ghost of it drifted down to the table on the breeze from Victoria’s dish towel.

 

He’d been wedged under there all morning. He’d smelled it from three directions. And his body, which had made a series of extremely bad decisions this morning, chose this moment to make one more under the napkin.

 

He crossed his legs. He crossed them hard.

 

Artemis’s eyes flicked down, then back up to the ceiling. She’d seen. She’d seen in her bra, too, and he knew she was putting those two things next to each other and looking at them the way she looked at everything: proportions, angles, light.

 

“Okay,” she said to the light fixture. “That’s—noted. Moving on.”

 

*

 

There was one more thing in the album. It wasn’t a forum post. It was a screenshot of a note from somebody’s phone, typed in the same no-caps, no-apostrophes style, with a title at the top in bold.

 

 

 

 

 

Artemis’s thumb came down over the rest of the line before Max could read it.

 

He saw her read it, though. He saw her eyes stop and go back to the start, and her lips move once around a word without making any sound. Then she read the whole note top to bottom again, slower, and something in her face shifted. It didn’t harden. It went the opposite way, like a knot coming loose.

 

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. That makes sense.”

 

“What makes sense?” said Max. “What’s the word? Artie, what does it say?”

 

She looked down at him, and her thumb didn’t move.

 

“I’m not gonna say it out loud,” Artemis said. “If everybody at the table hears it, it’s not a safeword anymore. It’s just a password.” She swallowed. “That’s, like, the whole point of one.”

 

“I don’t have a safeword! I didn’t write that! I don’t know what it says!”

 

“I know, babe,” she said, very gently. “It said you’d say that, too.”

 

He looked from her face to Izzy’s. Izzy was sucking on her lip ring and looking at the rooster clock, the picture of total boredom.

 

Artemis kept her thumb where it was for another long second. Then she set the phone screen-down, exactly where Victoria had left it.

 

He watched her do it, and he understood something with a sinking clarity. She hadn’t stopped listening to him. She was going to keep asking. She was going to keep checking in, the way she’d done upstairs, and that was exactly what scared him now. Because now, whatever he said, she had a word to listen for instead.