Abuela vs. Izzy Shrunken First Semester chapter 4 by maximally

“Pocket, gordito.”

 

Max didn’t get a vote. Two fingers closed around his middle, the bedroom swung past in one long smear of navy and pink, and then the front pocket of Lupe’s housecoat opened under him like a laundry chute and gulped him down.

 

He landed on his butt in the dark.

 

It was deeper than it looked from the outside. Much deeper. A warm terrycloth well, lint-lined and soft as a sock drawer, with one wall that was just fabric and one wall that was very much not. Through the back of the pocket he could feel the slow, enormous rise and fall of her belly, and under that, faintly, the gurgle of whatever the cumin was still up to. He shared it with a church bulletin the size of a beach towel and two bobby pins as long as his legs, and everything smelled like spearmint gum, a dryer sheet that had given up years ago, and her.

 

“Abuela, wait—”

 

A fingertip pressed down on the top of his head, gently.

 

“Shh. You stay. I talk.”

 

The world lurched as she stood. The pocket swung out from her hip like a hammock and slapped back, and Max grabbed a fistful of lint and held on.

 

Then he heard her voice, aimed down the hall and pitched to reach the back row.

 

“Isabella. Inside.”

 

“Oh! Hi, Abuela.” Izzy’s voice, still up in that high, breathy register, the one that made her sound like a girl in a cereal commercial. “I was just, like, worried—”

 

“Mamá?” That was Victoria, from the bottom of the stairs. Keys jingled. “I’m heading to Costco before it’s a zoo. You need anything?”

 

Max froze. Through the terrycloth, he felt Lupe’s whole body go still for one heartbeat. Then her hand came down, flat and casual, over the outside of the pocket. Over him.

 

“Tums,” Lupe called back. “The big bottle. And the good tortillas, not the ones that taste like a paper plate.”

 

“Is Max up?”

 

“He’s up. He’s eating. Go, mija, before the old men take all the carts.”

 

A pause, and the sigh of Victoria Vasquez-Calhoun losing an argument she’d never admit she was having.

 

“Two hours,” Victoria said. “Maybe two and a half. Izzy, baby, be nice to your grandma.”

 

“Totally,” said Izzy.

 

The front door shut. A second later, through the window, came the expensive purr of the red Mercedes backing out of the driveway, and then even that was gone.

 

The house went quiet.

 

“Inside,” Lupe said again, much softer, and this time it wasn’t a request.

 

*

 

Max couldn’t see the room. He could only feel it.

 

He felt the little draft of Izzy’s socks coming past, and the door click shut, and then the floor of the pocket fell away as she lowered herself into his desk chair, and the chair let out a groan like a fishing boat in a storm.

 

The pocket folded. He went with it. For a second he was pinned between terrycloth and the soft, heavy curve where her belly met her thigh, and then she shifted, and settled, and the space opened up again into a warm, dim little tent. A seam of light ran across the top where the pocket gaped.

 

He hooked his fingers over the edge and pulled himself up to look.

 

It was like peeking out of a foxhole. Below him was the vast pink slope of her lap. Past it, across the carpet, sat Izzy, perched on the very end of his bed.

 

His stepsister looked like she’d dressed for the role. Oversized black T-shirt, sleep shorts, slouchy gray socks pulled halfway up her calves. Her black fringe hung in her eyes. Last night’s black lipstick had worn down to a soft smudge, the silver rings in her eyebrow and lip caught the window light, and she had her hands tucked between her knees, shoulders up, like a girl waiting outside the principal’s office who very much wanted the principal to know she was sorry. Max had seen that posture for four years. It had never once meant sorry.

 

Above him, Lupe produced a pair of reading glasses from another pocket in the housecoat, unfolded them with a snap, and put them on. Then she laced her fingers together and rested both hands on top of her belly, right above Max's pocket, so that her wrist hung over the opening like a gate.

 

Max ducked back down.

 

“So,” Lupe said.

 

That was all. Just so. Then she waited.

 

Max knew this part. A whole career in a middle-school classroom had taught Guadalupe Vasquez that most kids would tell on themselves if you gave them enough quiet.

 

Izzy lasted about six seconds.

 

“So… huh?” she said. “Is everything okay? I heard you, like, scream.”

 

“I didn’t scream. I said ay, Dios mío. There’s a difference.” The chair creaked. “How fast did you come up those stairs, mija?”

 

“I don’t know. Normal?”

 

“Normal.” Lupe’s voice was very calm. “I said it one time. One. Then ten minutes of nothing, just Abuela talking soft. And then, after all that quiet, you come flying up those stairs in socks, on that runner your Mamá waxes like a bowling alley, like somebody rang a bell.” A pause. “You don’t move that fast for Taco Bell.”

 

“I was already coming up.”

 

“From where?”

 

“Downstairs?”

 

“Mm-hm. Your music was off. You weren’t in your room. Ten minutes after the yelling, you were on the stairs, and then you were on the landing. And then you stopped.”

 

Izzy didn’t say anything.

 

“In this house,” Lupe said, “nobody waits at a door. Your Mamá has never knocked on a door in her life. You have never knocked on a door in your life. Last summer you walked in on me on the toilet to ask about a phone charger.” The chair creaked again. “But today you stand on the landing. You call, and you wait. Very polite.”

 

“I was being polite?”

 

“You were being careful,” said Lupe. “That’s not the same thing.”

 

Max held his breath in the dark. Through the back of the pocket, Lupe’s heart beat slow and steady as a metronome.

 

“And this voice,” Lupe went on. “What is this voice?”

 

“What voice?”

 

“This one. This little-girl voice. Like a Disney princess who got hit in the head with a volleyball.”

 

“This is just my voice, Abuela.”

 

“No. Your voice sounds like a garbage disposal with a fork in it. I’ve been hearing it since you were nine.” Lupe let that sit. “You only talk like this when you want something from a grown-up. Or when you broke something.”

 

“Okay, rude,” Izzy said, but she said it in the cereal-commercial voice, high and wounded and sweet, and she didn’t drop it. If anything, she leaned into it, the way you might pull a borrowed coat tighter in the wind.

 

“And you said you wanted to help.”

 

“I did. I do.”

 

“In eighteen years,” Lupe said, “you have never once asked me if I need help. Not with groceries. Not with dishes.” Max heard the smile in her voice, and it wasn’t a nice one. “So I’m asking, mija, because I’m curious. Help with what?”

 

There was a pause just long enough for a girl to pick which story to tell.

 

“With Max,” Izzy said.

 

Max’s stomach dropped through the bottom of the pocket.

 

“What about Max?”

 

“I don’t know. I heard him yelling.” Izzy’s eyes, Max was sure, were going wide and wet right about now. “And then I heard you, and then it got really quiet, and I thought, like… what if something happened to him? So where is he?”

 

“Where do you think he is?”

 

“I don’t know, Abuela. That’s why I’m asking.”

 

It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. That was the problem. She said it too smoothly, and she didn’t look at the bed, or the closet, or the bathroom door. She didn’t look anywhere a normal-sized brother could be.

 

Max felt Lupe notice. He felt it in the way her laced fingers tightened over him.

 

“He’s right here,” Lupe said. “In my pocket.”

 

And she unlaced her fingers, peeled back the lip of the housecoat, and let the light pour in.

 

Izzy’s gasp was a work of art. A quick catch in the throat, then the hand over the mouth, then the eyes going enormous as she leaned so far forward she nearly tipped off the bed. Max, blinking up from the bottom of the pocket with lint in his hair, had a perfect view of all of it.

 

“Oh my God,” Izzy breathed. “Max? Oh my God. Is he—is that—how?”

 

“Mm-hm,” said Lupe.

 

“Is he okay?”

 

“He’s fine. He ate a whole concha.”

 

“Can I hold him?”

 

“No.”

 

Izzy’s hand had already come halfway off her knee. It went back down.

 

“Stay on the bed, mija. Hands where Abuela can see them.” Lupe’s palm hovered over the pocket, not quite closing it. A roof with a skylight. “You can see him from there.”

 

Izzy stayed on the bed. She stared down at Max. Max stared back up at her, three inches tall in the bottom of their grandmother’s bathrobe, and thought, very clearly and with his whole chest, you are so full of shit.

 

He just couldn’t prove it. He couldn’t remember anything after the third shot.

 

“Oh my God,” Izzy said again, softer, like she was getting used to it. “That’s so crazy. Like, this is so crazy.” Then her face went careful, and her voice went careful with it, and she tucked a strand of fringe behind her ear. “Okay. Um. Abuela? I wasn’t gonna say anything. Like, I really wasn’t, because it’s, like, his business. But…”

 

“But,” said Lupe.

 

“There’s kind of a thing. Online.” Izzy said online the way church ladies said Las Vegas. “Like, there are these guys? Who want to be tiny? On purpose? Like, they’re into it. They have whole forums and stuff, and they post these pictures of, like, giant ladies, and they write these stories about getting…” She made a vague squishing gesture. “I don’t know. It’s really weird.”

 

The pocket got very hot.

 

“I only know because it was on his laptop,” she added quickly. “He left it open in the living room, like, last week, and I wasn’t snooping, but it was just there. And I closed it. But I kind of saw some stuff first.”

 

“What stuff?”

 

“Like a folder. A bunch of folders.” Izzy hugged her knees. “And I thought, okay, that’s gross, whatever, he’s a guy, guys are gross. But now he’s like this, and I’m just, like… what if he did it to himself? What if he, like, ordered something? You can buy anything on the internet, Abuela.”

 

Max opened his mouth to say are you kidding me, and a fingertip as big as his whole torso came down and pressed very gently on top of his head again. Not hard. Just there.

 

He shut his mouth.

 

Lupe didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just looked at her granddaughter over the top of her glasses. Then, very deliberately, she rocked her weight onto one hip in the desk chair, the way a woman settles in for a long sermon.

 

Max had time to think oh no and nothing else.

 

PRRRRRRRRRRRRMMMMMMMPPPPPPPPPP

 

It wasn’t a big one, by Abuela standards. Long and low and patient, pressed flat into the vinyl, like a cello warming up. It buzzed up through the chair into the pocket like a phone on vibrate, and then the warmth came drifting up after it, garlic and coffee and something deep and stewy from the bottom of a crockpot. Max buried his face in the church bulletin.

 

Across the room, Izzy’s nose wrinkled. To her enormous credit, the princess voice didn’t crack.

 

“Okay, wow.”

 

“Perdón,” said Lupe, entirely unbothered. “I’m thinking.”

 

She let it hang in the air another few seconds, the way she used to let silence hang in a classroom until somebody in the third row confessed to the spitball. Max realized, through watering eyes, that the fart was the wait time. It just smelled worse.

 

“Your brother,” Lupe said at last, “did not do this to himself.”

 

“I’m just saying—”

 

“And I’m just telling you. Max? Max ordered something off the internet and drank it?” Lupe laughed, one big warm bark that bounced the pocket. “Mija, this boy cannot order a pizza on the telephone. He makes me do it.”

 

Max, from the bottom of the pocket, couldn’t decide whether to be offended or grateful. He landed on both.

 

“In ninth grade, he couldn’t ask the girl at Jamba Juice for a straw. He stood there five minutes waiting for God to give him one. He doesn’t drink a mystery potion from a stranger. He doesn’t have the nerve. He doesn’t have the spine.” She patted the pocket. “No offense, gordito.”

 

“Some offense,” Max muttered.

 

“So no. He didn’t dose himself.” Lupe took her glasses off, polished them on the lapel of her housecoat, and put them back on. “But the pictures?”

 

The pocket went quiet.

 

“That,” said Lupe, “I believe.”

 

Izzy didn’t smile. She was way too good to smile. But something behind her face sat up a little straighter, like a dog that had just heard the treat bag.

 

“It’s not his fault,” she said, softly. “Like, I don’t think he even can talk to real girls, Abuela. He gets so red. You know how he gets.”

 

“I know how he gets.”

 

“And he’s on his laptop, like, all night. Every night. I can hear it through the wall.” She looked down at her socks. “I just think the internet kind of… got to him? Before anybody noticed. And I think it’s really bad. And if Mom sees that stuff first, she’s gonna lose it. Like, she’ll cry for a week and call some doctor, and then she’ll put him in a Tupperware with holes in the lid and carry him around in her purse till he’s thirty.”

 

Max’s heart stopped.

 

Tupperware.

 

He tipped his head back and looked straight up the canyon of terrycloth at the underside of his grandmother’s chin, and he could tell, from the way her jaw set, that she’d heard it too. Ten minutes ago, with her voice down low, Lupe had said Tupperware with holes in the lid to him and only him.

 

Lupe didn’t say a word about it.

 

She just said, “Mm-hm,” in a voice so mild it made the back of Max’s neck prickle.

 

“And it’s not like I can do anything,” Izzy went on, warming up. “Like, he’d never listen to me. I’d mess it up. I mess everything up, Mom says so.” A little shrug. “But you’re, like, the only one who ever actually made him do stuff. Mom does everything for him. You made him mow your lawn. You made him do your feet. You made him carry, like, every grocery bag in Sunnyvale.” She looked up, and her eyes were big and brown and perfectly, beautifully earnest. “Mom just keeps people, Abuela. You actually raise them.”

 

Max felt it land.

 

He felt it in the chair, in the way all of her settled a quarter-inch deeper into the vinyl. He felt it in her belly against the back of the pocket, a long, slow breath in, and a longer breath out. Izzy had not said one word that wasn’t true. That was what made it so awful.

 

“What’s in the folder?” Lupe asked.

 

“I don’t really wanna say.”

 

“Say.”

 

Izzy chewed her lip ring. Then she leaned forward, and dropped her voice like she was telling a secret at a sleepover, and Max knew, in the split second before she opened her mouth, exactly who she was going to aim it at.

 

“There was one of a lady in a pink bathrobe,” she said. “Like, a really big lady. Older. And a little guy was sitting in her pocket.”

 

Lupe looked down.

 

Max was already on fire.

 

He could feel it happening and couldn’t do a thing about it. It started at his ears and poured down his neck and spread across his chest and kept going, all the way to his toes, until he was sure he was glowing in the dark of the pocket like an ember. He had never seen that picture. He had never seen any folder.

 

But she’d been right about the hugs this morning. She had always been right about the hugs. He’d just never let himself think about why, not on purpose.

 

He was thinking about it now. And he was sitting in her pocket.

 

“Those aren’t mine,” he croaked.

 

Lupe looked at him for a long time, her eye swimming behind a reading lens the size of a satellite dish.

 

Then, very quietly: “Look at that color.”

 

“Abuela, I swear—”

 

“I know, mijo.” She said it gently. That was the worst part. She said it the way you’d tell a seventh grader with cookie crumbs on his shirt that you knew he didn’t eat the cookies. “I know.”

 

*

 

“So,” Izzy said, brightly, borrowed coat buttoned all the way to the top. “His laptop’s in my room. I was charging it for him. Do you want it?”

 

Lupe’s eyebrow went up behind her glasses. “You were charging it.”

 

“Mm-hm. He always lets it die.”

 

“Go get it,” said Lupe. “Walk.”

 

Izzy walked. She was back in eleven seconds; Max counted. She came through the door with it held out in both hands like an offering: his scratched gray laptop, Ventus sticker peeling off one corner, charger trailing like a tail.

 

“The password’s his birthday backwards and then ‘ventus,’ lowercase,” Izzy said helpfully. “And it’s in Documents, then School, then Calc Two, then Old Notes. There’s, like, a folder in there called ‘misc.’ That’s where all of it—”

 

“How do you know his password, mija?”

 

Izzy blinked. “He’s not careful, Abuela. He’s never been careful.”

 

“Mm-hm.” Lupe held out one hand, palm up. “Give it.”

 

Izzy gave it. Max felt the weight come down across Lupe’s knees, just above the pocket, a slab of warm plastic the size of a tabletop.

 

“I can open it for you,” Izzy offered. “If you want. It’s kind of a lot of clicking.”

 

Lupe laid her whole hand down flat on the closed lid.

 

That was all. She didn’t say no. She didn’t need to. Her hand covered most of the laptop, and it stayed there, red fingernails spread across the gray plastic like a paperweight on a stack of tests.

 

“Now you listen to me, Isabella,” she said. The princess voice in the room suddenly had nowhere to go; it just hung there, embarrassed, while the real voice in the room took over. “This stays in the family. Nobody else. No doctors. No friends. No TikTok. No little group chat with your little friends. I find one picture of my grandson on your phone, I will know, and you will not like how I know.”

 

“I would never—”

 

“And your Mamá does not hear about this from you.” Lupe leaned forward, just slightly, and the pocket tilted, and Max slid down into the warm bottom of it against her belly. “When she hears, she hears from me. In my words. When I say. ¿Entendido?”

 

“Totally,” said Izzy.

 

“Totally,” Lupe repeated, like she was tasting it for salt. “Okay. Go.”

 

Izzy stood. At the door, she turned back one more time, hand on the frame, with the sweet, worried face still perfectly in place.

 

“Text me if you need anything,” she said. “Like, literally anything. I’m right next door.”

 

“I know where you are, mija,” said Lupe. “That’s the problem.”

 

Izzy laughed, a little tinkly laugh that didn’t belong to her, and slipped out.

 

The door clicked shut.

 

Max listened to her socks on the runner. They didn’t go to her room. They went down the stairs, unhurried, and a minute later, faint through the floor, came the fridge opening and closing, and then nothing.

 

*

 

Lupe lifted him out of the pocket and set him on her palm.

 

The room came back in a rush of light. Through the window, the driveway was half empty now: just her old silver minivan, sitting there in the sun where the red Mercedes used to be. Two hours. Maybe two and a half.

 

Under her other hand, the laptop sat closed on her knees.

 

“She heard the Tupperware,” Max said.

 

“She heard the Tupperware,” Lupe agreed.

 

“So she was listening at the door. Before. The whole time.”

 

“Mm-hm.”

 

“So it’s her! Abuela, it’s obviously—”

 

“Obviously is what kids say right before they get the wrong answer.” She didn’t say it unkindly. She raised her palm so his face was level with hers. “Your sister was listening. Your sister is lying about something. Your sister is always lying about something, gordito. That doesn’t tell me what.”

 

“And the folder?”

 

Lupe looked down at the laptop. She drummed her fingernails on the lid, once, a short, hard little roll like rain on a car roof. Then she stopped.

 

“The folder,” she said slowly, “is the internet.”

 

“They’re not mine—”

 

“I know you didn’t drink anything, mijo. You don’t have the nerve. I said that, and I meant it.” Her thumb came down and brushed a crumb of concha out of his hair. “But I have been telling your Mamá for four years. Four years. That machine was eating you. Every time she left town, you came to my house a little paler and a little quieter, and I gave you back a little better, and she gave you back to the screen.” She let out a breath that seemed to go on for a long time. “And now look. Now you are this big, and you can’t even lift it.”

 

Max opened his mouth to argue and found he didn’t have anything to say that would help.

 

Lupe was quiet a while, looking at him. Then she looked at the laptop. Then at him again. Something was moving behind her eyes, slow and heavy and patient, the way a big ship turns in a harbor. He couldn’t tell yet which way it was turning.

 

He didn’t think she could either.

 

“Abuela,” he said finally. “What are you gonna do?”

 

Lupe didn’t open the laptop.

 

She didn’t put it down, either. Her hand just stayed there on the lid, flat and warm and heavy, like a teacher’s hand on a test she hasn’t graded yet.

 

“Abuela is thinking,” she said.