Sole Searching Shrunken First Semester chapter 7 by maximally

Artemis carried him up the stairs in both hands, cupped together like she was bringing water to somebody in the desert and couldn’t spill a drop.

It was a lot better than the pocket. The pocket had the list in it now. Max could see the corner of the yellow paper poking up under the flap, right above his head, and every time she took a step it bobbed into view like a little flag. He decided not to look at it.

Behind them, in the kitchen, Selena got noticeably louder. Somebody had reached over and turned the radio up. Max knew exactly what that meant. Victoria did that when she was mad and wanted the whole house to know she was choosing not to say so. Bidi Bidi Bom Bom came up the stairwell after them like a pointed remark.

“She’s fine,” Artemis said, mostly to herself. “She’s gonna make, like, nine pounds of chilaquiles and be fine.”

Fourteen steps. Max counted them this time. On the eleventh, her stomach made a long, low sound under his palms, like somebody moving furniture two floors down, and she said “nope” to it, very firmly, and kept walking.

The guest room door was still open from when she’d come looking for him at dawn. Max had been in this room maybe five times in four years. It was where Victoria kept the treadmill she didn’t use and the headshots she couldn’t throw away, and Artemis had moved in on top of all of it like a hermit crab taking over a very beige shell. The bed was unmade, the comforter kicked down into a heap at the bottom. A box fan sat in the window, pushing warm air around without improving it. Her duffel gaped open on the floor, flannels spilling out, next to a canvas tote that said OAKLAND FOOD CO-OP · SHARE THE HARVEST and held mostly paperbacks and a bag of nutritional yeast.

Her sketchbook lay face-down in the middle of the mattress, right where she’d left it.

And the room smelled like her. That was the part he hadn’t been ready for. Down in the kitchen, there’d been bacon and smoke and Victoria’s perfume and Izzy’s mango vape to hide behind. Up here, it was all Artemis: slept-in sheets, the onion of her pits, the sweet, nutty ghost of oat milk, and under all of it, something warmer and earthier that he couldn’t place yet. He’d place it soon enough.

She shut the door behind her with her hip, then locked it.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here.”

She set him down on the pillow, which gave under him like a waterbed, and then she sat down too, all the way at the other end, where the bed was pushed up against the wall, and the whole mattress tilted toward her. Max slid a good six inches down the pillowcase before he caught himself on a fold of cotton. She tugged the comforter flat, very carefully, the way you’d smooth a tablecloth with a glass of wine on it. Then she sat cross-legged against the wall and pulled the list out of her pocket.

“Artie,” Max said. “Please don’t.”

“I’m just looking.”

She unfolded it on her knee. From the pillow, he could see the purple lines, the green highlighter, the skulls. Twenty-one numbers in a neat column, like a grocery list for the end of the world.

“Okay. So.” Artemis cleared her throat. She had the voice she used when she was trying to explain something reasonable to someone who was being unreasonable, which, Max realized with a slow sinking feeling, was him. “Ground rules. I’m gonna ask you before I do anything. Every time. I’m not gonna surprise you. And you can stop whenever you want.”

“Great. I want to stop.”

“We haven’t started.”

“I want to stop before we start. That’s allowed. That’s, like, the most allowed kind of stopping.”

She looked at him, then down at the paper. Her thumb rubbed slowly over the top of the page, right where it said he WILL say they’re mine. He watched it move through her face like weather.

“I know you’re scared,” she said finally.

“I’m not scared. I’m three inches tall and my stepsister wrote a kink list for me in gel pen. Those are different things.”

“Okay. Okay, that’s fair.” She tugged at her septum ring, then seemed to realize she was doing it and stopped. “Can I just tell you what I’m thinking? And you can tell me I’m wrong?”

He didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no. She took it as a yes.

“Here’s the thing,” she said. “Somebody in this house is gonna do this list. You heard Tía. You saw her. She was already reading ahead.” Artemis shuddered, a full-body, all-the-way-down thing that made the mattress ripple under him. “And if it’s not her, it’s gonna be Izzy ‘helping,’ and I don’t even want to think about what Izzy thinks gentle means. So if somebody has to, I want it to be me, and I want to go really, really slow, and I want to actually check in. So I’m not gonna start with anything big.” She ran her finger down the list and stopped at the top. “One.”

“Artie.”

“‘Her feet. Foot rubs. Like normal ones. Starter pack.’” She looked up. “Starter pack, Max. It literally says starter pack.”

“Izzy wrote starter pack!”

“Right, but.” She pointed at him with the corner of the paper. “Okay, but think about it. Two is—” She stopped and made a face. “Two is... no. Tía already called dibs on two, basically, in front of everybody, and I’m not, like, ready to sit on you. Three already happened. Four I’m just not—” Her arm drifted in against her side, all on its own, and the flannel squeaked again. “Not yet. Five is, like, a lifestyle. But one is just feet. And the thing about one is, you’d be doing it. Not me. You’re the one rubbing. So you’re in charge the whole time. If you stop, it stops. If you walk away, I don’t move. That’s it.”

Max opened his mouth to argue and found, to his horror, that he didn’t have a good argument. He had I don’t want to, which she’d heard. What he didn’t have was a version of no that didn’t already exist on a screenshot in Izzy’s phone.

“I don’t want to,” he said anyway.

“Okay,” said Artemis. “I hear you.” And then, kindly, as if that settled it: “Do you want to try for, like, two minutes, and then if you hate it we stop?”

Downstairs, Selena finished one song and started another.

He didn’t answer. She waited, long enough that the silence started to feel like something he was doing, a thing with his name on it, and he knew what the forum would’ve said about a silence like that.

“Two minutes,” Artemis said gently. “And you can walk away.”

*

The Docs came off first.

She scooted to the edge of the bed to do it, one leg crossed over the other, and from the pillow it was like watching a construction crew decommission something. The laces were already undone; they’d been undone all morning. She hooked two fingers into the back of the heel and pulled, and the boot came off in a long, slow, sucking drag of leather that Max felt in his teeth. It dropped to the carpet and lay there on its side like a car somebody had rolled into a ditch.

Then the smell hit him.

It rolled across the comforter the way fog comes in off the bay. Warm first, then sharp, then something deep and cheesy and sour underneath, like the rind on the fancy cheese Victoria bought for parties and never ate. Leather and rubber and two days of trapped heat. Max’s eyes watered instantly. He put the corner of his napkin poncho over his nose, which did nothing.

“Oh my God.” Artemis had smelled it too. She clapped a hand over her own face. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I drove down in these. Yesterday. After a double. And then I fell asleep in them like a raccoon, and then I put them right back on this morning because I heard you—” She waved her hand at the general concept of this morning. “I’m so sorry. I can go wash my feet first. I should go wash my feet first.”

“Yes,” said Max. “Please.”

She was already halfway up. She stopped, half-standing, one boot on, one boot off, and looked down at him. He could see her doing the math. He could see her remembering five and the post about pits and the post about how gross was the point. the sweatier the better. He could see her decide that she didn’t believe him and also that she didn’t want to be the kind of person who didn’t believe him, and then decide that the list counted as believing him, which was worse.

“You said ‘please’ really fast,” she said slowly.

“Because I meant it!”

“Okay.” She sat back down. “Okay. Tell me again after the two minutes. If you still want me to wash them then, I will. Promise.”

The second boot came off. This one landed upright, which somehow made it worse, a black leather tower on the carpet with the tongue hanging out.

Her socks didn’t match. The left one was black, with a pattern of tiny smiling avocados all over it, worn thin and shiny at the heel. The right one was plain gray, the athletic kind, and it had a hole at the big toe that let one chipped black toenail peek through like somebody looking out a window. Both of them were dark and damp along the soles. When she peeled the gray one off, it came away from her skin with a sort of reluctance, inside-out, and she held it up between two fingers and looked at it like it had personally betrayed her before dropping it on top of the boot.

Then she swung around, scooted back against the wall at the foot of the bed and stretched one long leg up the mattress toward him, until her bare foot came to rest on the comforter just past the edge of his pillow. Max forgot about the smell for almost two whole seconds.

He’d seen her feet before, at the pool, and at Thanksgiving, when she’d walked around barefoot and Victoria kept saying mija, the floors. They’d seemed big then in a normal, person way. She was six-four. He’d never thought about it any more than that.

Now it was the size of a parked car.

From where he stood on the pillow, the sole rose up in front of him like a wall, heel planted in the comforter, toes curled up and over at the top like the lip of a wave. It was long and narrow and a lot paler underneath than on top, and the skin of the sole had gone soft and pink and finely wrinkled from being trapped in a wet sock all night, the way fingertips get in a bath. There was a seam of gray lint caught in the crease under her toes. There was a callus at the ball of her foot as wide as his chest, and a Band-Aid on the back of her heel, half peeled up, where the Docs had chewed through her skin. Her toes were long, the second one longer than the big one, and the big one had a fleck of cadmium yellow paint on the nail, right on top of the chipped black polish, like she’d stepped in a palette.

The smell came off it in waves. It was the cheese smell, stronger, and under it the earthy, warm thing he hadn’t been able to place earlier, and now he could. It was this. It was her feet. The whole room had smelled faintly like her feet this entire time.

“Twelve and a half,” Artemis said apologetically. She was looking at him looking at it. “Women’s. Men’s eleven. If you were wondering. Nobody ever has my size at Ross.”

“I wasn’t wondering.”

“Okay.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Okay, babe.” She wiggled her toes, and the whole top of the wall rippled, five huge knuckles flexing in sequence. Max took a step back without meaning to. “Sorry. Sorry. I won’t move. You do whatever you want. You can just look at it, if you want. Looking counts.”

“Looking does not count.”

“Then you can stand there.” She leaned back against the wall, slowly, her arms folded behind her head, which put her face a very long way off, at the far end of a mountain range of leg. A dark, unshaved tuft of purple appeared at each armpit, and Max decided, firmly, to keep his eyes on the foot, which was a sentence he’d never expected to think. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He stood there.

His bare feet sank into the pillow. The box fan hummed. The foot didn’t move. It was the patience that got him. If she’d pushed, he could’ve pushed back. If she’d grabbed him, he could’ve yelled. But she just waited, and every second he didn’t walk away was a second he’d chosen not to.

Finally, mostly to make the waiting stop, he stepped off the edge of the pillow, down onto the comforter, walked the six steps to her heel, put both hands flat against the arch of her foot and pushed.

It was hot. That was his first thought. It was like putting his hands on a car hood that had been sitting in the sun. The skin was damp and gave under his palms, soft on the surface with something dense and strong just underneath, and when he pushed harder, it didn’t move at all. It was like trying to massage a sofa.

Above him, Artemis made a small noise.

“Is that okay?” she said immediately. “Are you okay? Is it too gross?”

“It’s extremely gross,” Max said into her arch.

“Do you want to stop?”

He should have said yes. He opened his mouth to say yes. And that was when her phone buzzed against the comforter, right next to her hip, loud as a garbage disposal at his size, and the screen lit up where he could read it.

izzy: did u start w 1 like a coward lol

Artemis grabbed for the phone. It buzzed again in her hand before she could flip it.

izzy: green means gentle artie 🫶

izzy: ok dont send pics. actually maybe send pics. for science

Artemis turned the phone face-down so hard that the mattress jumped. Max staggered, caught himself against the side of her heel, and stood there with both arms wrapped around it while the bed settled.

“I’m gonna kill her,” Artemis said to the ceiling. “Like, not in a figurative way.”

“Get in line,” said Max.

It came out before he could stop it. She laughed, a surprised snort through her nose, and the whole leg shook with it, and Max felt the laugh run all the way down through her calf and her ankle and into the heel he was hugging. Neither of them said anything after that. He realized he was still hugging it. He let go.

“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry. That was—sorry. You were saying.”

He had been about to say yes, stop. He knew he had. But Izzy had already said it for him, in a way: like a coward. And if he said stop now, it would sound like the thing the folder said he’d say, and if he didn’t, it would sound like the other thing the folder said. There wasn’t a square left on the board that Izzy hadn’t already painted.

So he didn’t say anything. He just put his hands back on her arch.

“Okay,” Artemis said softly. “Okay.”

*

There turned out to be a technique to it, which was the most humiliating discovery of Max Calhoun’s life so far.

You couldn’t just push. The foot was too big and too strong to notice pushing. You had to lean. You had to plant your feet in the comforter and put your whole body into it, shoulder first, the way you’d shove a stuck car out of a ditch, and then roll your weight along the skin. He found out that the arch was the softest place, the skin thin there and almost silky under the damp, and that the ball of her foot was like pressing on the side of a gym mat. He found out that if he worked his way up toward the toes, she made a different noise.

“Oh,” said Artemis, from somewhere very far up. “Oh, okay. That’s—yeah.”

“Don’t,” said Max.

“Sorry. I’m not saying anything.”

He kept working. He didn’t know why. Some of it was spite. He wasn’t going to be a coward, not according to Izzy. The skin warmed under his palms, the damp drying into a faint tackiness that stuck to his fingers and pulled when he lifted them. The smell was so total that he’d stopped really noticing it, the way you stop noticing the hum of a fridge. It was just the air now. He was breathing it in and out.

At one point she shifted her hips on the mattress, very slightly, and the bed tilted, and Max heard it before he understood it.

ffft

“That’s,” Artemis said, mortified, before he could even look up. “That’s not—I’m not doing eleven. That doesn’t count. Please don’t let Izzy tick that.”

“I’m not ticking anything! I didn’t make the list!”

“I know. I know you didn’t.” And then, more quietly, like she was apologizing to someone else in the room: “Sorry.”

He didn’t know who she was apologizing to. He tried not to think about it.

From downstairs came the bang of a pan going into the sink, and then Victoria’s voice, pitched to climb exactly one flight of stairs and not one inch further.

“Mija! Is he eating? There’s chilaquiles!”

Artemis lifted her head off the wall. “We’re good, Tía!”

A pause. Max could picture Victoria at the bottom of the stairs, one hand on the banister, bangles very still, deciding whether good was a word she believed.

“I’m putting a plate in the oven for him!” she called. “A small plate!”

“Thank you, Tía!”

Selena got louder again.

Artemis dropped her head back against the wall and stared at the ceiling. “A small plate,” she said. “Oh my God.”

Max laughed. It came out of him the same way the get in line had, all at once and before he could stop it, and it shook him so hard he had to lean into her arch to stay up. Then he couldn’t stop. He laughed into the side of her foot until his eyes ran, at the small plate and the oat milk and the avocado sock lying on the boot like a little dead animal, and mostly at the fact that this was his life now. He laughed until he was too tired to stand and slid down to sit in the comforter with his back against the warm wall of her sole.

When he looked up, she was watching him. She was propped up on one elbow, and her face was soft.

“Hey,” she said.

“Don’t.”

“Okay.”

He meant to get up. He meant to get up and walk back to the pillow and tell her that was two minutes, way more than two minutes, and they were done. But the sole behind his back was warm in a way the rest of the room wasn’t, and big enough to lean on, and his legs were shaking from the stairs and the kitchen and the whole morning. He sat there instead. He told himself it was for a second.

Without asking, very slowly, so slowly that he could’ve stood up and walked away three times over, she curled her toes down over the top of him.

It wasn’t heavy. It should have been terrifying, five enormous toes closing down over his head, but she did it so carefully that all he felt at first was shade. Then warmth, and the faint damp pad of her big toe resting against the top of his head and shoulder, the way you’d rest your hand on somebody’s head at a funeral. The cadmium fleck was right above his eye. He could see the grain of the paint.

Then he caught himself, and something in his chest clenched.

“You didn’t ask,” he said.

The toes lifted instantly. All five of them, straight up, like a hand that had touched a stove.

“Oh my God. You’re right. I’m sorry.” Artemis was sitting all the way up now, horrified. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t ask. Are you okay? Do you want me to stop? Do you want to—”

And then, just for a second, something else crossed her face. Her eyes went to the phone lying face-down beside her hip. Max saw her lips part, just slightly, around the shape of a word she didn’t say. It was there and gone so fast that he almost missed it. She was listening. Not to what he’d said. To what he hadn’t. She had a word to listen for, and he hadn’t said it, because he didn’t know what it was.

She looked back at him. She didn’t say the word. She didn’t test it. She just asked, very carefully, “Stop like stop? Or stop like ‘you didn’t ask’?”

He opened his mouth.

The honest answer was the second one. That was the problem. He hadn’t wanted the toes to stop. He’d wanted her to have asked first. And he knew how that sounded. He knew exactly how it sounded, because some version of it was probably in Izzy’s folder too, word for word, posted by somebody pretending to be him. if i whine that she didnt ask first thats just me being shy lol. Gray forum font. Two in the morning.

“I don’t…” he started.

Then he stopped. Anything he said next was going to sound like the script. I don’t want this sounded like the script. I don’t hate it sounded like the script, too, just from the other side. There wasn’t a version of the truth left that Izzy hadn’t already written down in advance and handed to Artemis to read.

So Max shut his mouth and said nothing at all.

Artemis looked at him for a long, long moment. Then she lay back down, slowly, and put her foot back exactly where it had been, sole up, heel in the comforter, and left it there.

“You don’t have to say anything,” she said. “I’m not gonna write it down. I’m not gonna tell Izzy. I’m not gonna tick anything.” She paused. “I’m just gonna be here. And next time I’ll ask first. Okay?”

That was kind. It was the kindest thing anyone in this house had said to him in four years, and he hated how much it helped.

He sat back down against her sole. He didn’t decide to. It just happened, the way his body kept doing things this morning without consulting him. The heel was warm against his shoulder blades. The arch curved up over him like the inside of a wave that would never break. Somewhere downstairs, Victoria was banging a small plate into the oven, and somewhere down the hall, Izzy was probably refreshing her phone and waiting for pictures that weren’t coming, and Max sat on a comforter in the guest room, breathing the smell of his step-cousin’s two-day socks, and let his head tip back against her skin.

She didn’t move. She didn’t say anything. The two minutes were long over. She’d promised to go wash her feet if he still wanted her to, and all he had to do was say so. He didn’t.

He couldn’t tell if he hated it. He tried, for a while, to decide. He sat there in the warm and tried really hard.

That was the part that scared him most: how long it was taking.