Red Pen Shrunken First Semester chapter 6 by maximally

Lupe took the list.

She didn’t snatch it. She took it the way she had taken ten thousand forged notes from home and confiscated cell phones: two fingers on the corner, a little tug, and then it was hers, and the kid on the other end was left holding air.

Izzy let go a half-second late.

“So it’s, like, kind of a lot,” she said, hands disappearing into her hoodie sleeves. “I just need help with the list. Like, figuring out which stuff is real and which is just, you know. Internet.”

“Mm.” Lupe tilted the pad toward the hall light. “Come in. Sit. Don’t touch anything.”

Max felt the pocket swing as she turned. He felt her sit down on the end of his bed hard enough to knock the headboard against the wall, and through the gap at the lip of the terrycloth he watched Izzy pad in and fold herself into his beanbag in the corner, knees up, chin on her knees, the picture of a girl who just wanted to be useful.

Lupe read.

Max couldn’t see the page from the pocket. He could see her face, though, tilted down over the yellow paper, and for the first full minute it didn’t do anything. Then he heard her make a sound, low in her chest, like the noise she made when she opened the oven and the flan hadn’t set.

“Gordo,” she said, without looking down. “You want to see what your sister wrote about you?”

“No.”

She lifted him out anyway and parked him on her knee, which put the pad right under his nose like a billboard on the freeway.

The handwriting was beautiful. That was the first insult. Round purple letters, big and bubbly, every line straight as a ruler, every i topped with its own tiny grinning skull. The title ran across the top in letters two lines tall:

STUFF MAX IS INTO (from his folder!!)

Below it, three sections, each one bracketed down the margin with a fat stripe of highlighter.

GREEN

1. Feet

2. Butt

3. Breast

4. Armpits

5. Sweat

YELLOW

6. Foot Worship

7. Shoeplay

8. Ass Worship

9. Breastfeeding

10. Mouth Play

11. Farts

12. Entrapment

13. Smothering

14. Humiliation

RED

15. Masturbation

16. Pussy

17. Sex

18. Cuckold

19. Insertion

20. Anal Insertion

21. Scat

Max read it once and his skin tried to leave his body. “Abuela,” he whispered. “I didn’t—”

“I know who wrote it, mijo. It’s purple.”

“Okay, but those are, like, categories,” Izzy said from the beanbag. “From the folder. I just organized them. Green is, like, the normal stuff. Yellow is kind of more intense. And red is…” She made a face, very delicately, like a girl smelling milk. “Red is, like, the stuff I didn’t even want to write down. But I thought you should know. For his sake.”

“For his sake,” Lupe repeated.

She reached into the other pocket of the housecoat, the empty one on the left, and came out with a pen.

It was red. Of course it was red. A fat, chewed-up Bic with the cap long gone, the ink down to the last inch, and Max realized with a lurch that she had been carrying it in her housecoat all through retirement, just in case.

“Teachers don’t retire from the red pen,” Lupe said, clicking nothing, because there was nothing to click. “We just stop getting paid for it.”

“What are you doing?” Izzy said.

“Grading.”

*

She started at the top.

She drew one clean line through STUFF MAX IS INTO (from his folder!!), not angry, not scribbled, a single straight stroke like a surgeon’s cut. Then, above it, in square red capitals that pressed through to the next page, she wrote:

ABUELA DECIDES.

Izzy sat up in the beanbag. “Wait. That’s not—”

“Shh. I’m working.”

Then the green.

She tapped her pen on 1. Feet and actually smiled.

“Feet,” she said. “Isabella, he was doing my feet back when you were still sneaking out your bedroom window.” She drew a circle around it, and beside it, in the margin, wrote ALREADY ASSIGNED. “Fifteen years old, every night after the novela, one hour. Nobody needed a folder.”

Max put his hands over his face. Through his fingers, he watched her move down.

2. Butt. She put a little dot next to it, considered, and wrote we’ll see in a neat cursive.

3. Breast. The pen hovered. She didn’t write anything. She just moved on, and Max decided that was the scariest mark on the page.

4. Armpits. “After Zumba?” she said, writing it in. “Ay, mijo. You’d need a gas mask.”

5. Sweat. “It’s July in Sunnyvale. That’s not a category. That’s the weather.” She wrote the weather and left it unmarked.

Yellow.

6. Foot Worship. She crossed out Worship with one stroke. “Worship is for God and the Virgin. Not for feet.” In its place she wrote RESPECT. Then she went down two lines to 8. Ass Worship, crossed out Worship again, and wrote a single red ditto mark underneath.

7. Shoeplay. “What is shoeplay?”

“Like,” said Izzy. “Um. In shoes? With shoes?”

“With shoes?” Lupe looked genuinely offended, as if somebody had suggested she serve tamales on a paper towel. “I have one pair of good shoes, and I wear them to church.” She wrote ? and moved on.

9. Breastfeeding.

The pen stopped. Max held his breath. For two long seconds the red tip hung above the paper, close enough to bleed a dot into it, and Lupe’s face did something he couldn’t read at all.

Then she lifted the pen and kept going without a mark.

10. Mouth Play. Ask me later.

11. Farts. She snorted, a big rude honk of a laugh that bounced him on her knee. “In this family? That one’s free.” She wrote FREE next to it, in capitals, and underlined it twice.

12. Entrapment. 13. Smothering. She looked at them, then at the pocket, then at her own lap, and drew a single bracket around both. In the margin: happens by accident.

14. Humiliation. She tapped it with the pen and peered past the rims of her glasses at the beanbag.

She held the look long enough that Izzy started picking at the seam of the beanbag.

“That one,” she said, “is your department, mija. You’ve been doing that to him for years, and for free.” She didn’t cross it out. She drew a tight box around it, like a cage around something that bites, and wrote beside it: Not yours to give. Maybe mine. Later.

Izzy’s mouth flattened, just for a second, before the sweet came back.

Then the red.

Lupe didn’t read those out loud. She ran her eyes down them once, top to bottom, and Max watched her nostrils flare on Cuckold and her eyebrows climb all the way into her hairline on Insertion and then on Anal Insertion, and when she got to 21 she closed her eyes briefly, the way she did at funerals.

Then she drew one long red bracket down the whole section, from 15 to 21, and beside it, in letters that crowded the margin:

GROWN-UP BUSINESS. NOT ON A CHILD’S LIST.

“He’s eighteen,” she said, tapping Masturbation. “He figured this one out without your help, I promise.” She tapped 18 and let out a breath through her nose like a bull. “Cuckold. Mm-hm. Twenty-seven years of middle school, mija. There is no dirty word you kids have that I didn’t hear first.” She turned the list a few degrees toward the beanbag, like a teacher showing a kid exactly where the mistake was. “This is the one where the girl brings home a big strong man, and the poor boy sits in the corner and watches, no?”

“Abuela, oh my God,” said Izzy, into her knees.

“What? You wrote it.” Lupe looked back down at the word, and one corner of her mouth went soft and wicked. “Mijo, listen to me. I have been married to Juan Vasquez since before your mother had teeth. I know what a big man is.” She held the red pen up beside the list like a ruler, considered it, and put it back down, unimpressed. “Nobody watches that and comes out the same. You’d need a chair. A priest. A nice long talk with a doctor about why God is unfair. They don’t make a list that long.”

Beside Cuckold she drew a question mark so big it took up three lines, and under it: Depends on the man. Not Juan. We’ll talk.

Her pen moved down to 21 and stopped.

“Ave María Purísima.” She crossed herself with the pen still in her hand and left a little red tick on the front of her housecoat. Then she wrote, slowly, in letters that leaned away from the word like they wanted no part of it: I need a drink first. A big one. She underlined big so hard the pen tore a little hole in the paper.

Then, at the very bottom of the page, under everything, she wrote a grade, the way she always had, inside a circle:

Neat handwriting. Wrong teacher. See me.

She sat back. Max, on her knee, stared at the page, which now looked like a crime scene at a stationery store: purple and green and yellow underneath, red over all of it, like a fire had gone through.

*

“Okay,” Izzy said carefully. “Okay, that’s—that’s totally fair. But, like, maybe we start with something easy? Like, some of the yellow ones are kind of—”

“Who is the teacher, Isabella?”

Izzy blinked. “…You?”

“Who wrote Abuela decides at the top?”

“You did.”

“Then who picks?”

The beanbag rustled. For a second, Max saw his stepsister’s real face come up through the sweet one, sharp and quick and annoyed, the way a fish comes up under the surface of a pond and is gone before you can point at it.

“You,” said Izzy.

“Good girl.” Lupe tore the page off the pad, folded it in thirds like a letter, and slid it into the left pocket with the pen. She handed the empty pad back. “This, I’m keeping.”

“It’s, like, mine, though.”

“It was yours. Now it’s confiscated.” Lupe smiled at her, very kindly. “You can have it back at the end of the school year.”

“There’s no school year. I graduated.”

“Then I guess you’ll have to wait a long time.” Lupe pointed at the door. “Downstairs. The dishwasher is clean. Unload it.”

“The whole thing?”

“Both racks. And the silverware, in the right slots, not all the forks in the spoon slot like an animal.”

Izzy unfolded herself out of the beanbag. She looked at the pocket where the list had gone, then at Max on Lupe’s knee, then back at Lupe, and she smiled the smile of a girl being sent to her room who has decided it was her idea.

“Totally,” she said. “Holler if you need me.”

The door shut behind her. Her socks went down the stairs. A minute later, the clatter of plates came up through the floor, slow and reluctant and very, very loud.

*

“You’re not seriously,” Max said, “going to do that list.”

“Nobody is doing Isabella’s list.” Lupe patted the pocket where the folded page lived. “I’m doing my list. Abuela’s list happens to have a few things on it from before.”

“What does that even—”

She was already toeing off the right slipper.

It was a big, flat, fuzzy pink thing, worn down to a shine at the heel and flattened at the toe from years of shuffling, and when it hit the carpet it landed upside down, and a small, warm, private gust came out of it that Max caught all the way up on her knee.

“Abuela—”

“Down you go.”

She set him on the carpet. Then she shifted on the edge of the bed, swung her leg around and lowered her bare foot to the floor right in front of him, and the room got smaller.

He’d rubbed this foot before. Dozens of times. Hundreds, maybe, on the floor of her living room with a telenovela playing and her heel in his lap and a bowl of chicharrones going soft on the side table. He’d thought he knew it.

He hadn’t known anything.

From three inches tall, Abuela Lupe’s foot was a landscape. It was a whole beach of warm brown skin, pale and soft at the instep, rising into a high, smooth arch like a hill he could have climbed. The heel was a wide, rounded bluff, ridged with thick, yellowish callus that had a sheen to it like old wax. The ball of the foot swelled up past his head. And at the end, five toes lined up like the backs of a row of parked cars: thick and round and padded, each one as thick as a hay bale, the big toe in front like a station wagon, the little one curled shyly under its neighbor. The nails had been painted coral for Easter and grown out since, leaving a pale crescent of bare nail at the base of each one. A bit of pink slipper fuzz was stuck between the second and third toes like a cotton ball.

And the smell.

He’d been braced for it. He had been braced for it since she’d said down you go. It still hit him like walking into a locker room: warm and sour and heavy, salty skin and old terrycloth, the cheesy, close, sweet-sour funk of a foot that had done front-row Zumba at seven, sat in a slipper on the gas pedal for six hours, and then shuffled around a house in July. It came off her in a wave. It sat on his tongue.

He took a step back.

“Ah-ah.” A toe the size of a sofa cushion wiggled at him. “Where you going?”

“It’s—Abuela, it’s really strong—”

“Of course it’s strong. It’s a foot.” She leaned back on her hands on the mattress, comfortable, the way she sat on her porch in the evening. “You think those ladies in your folder have feet like that? No. Somebody washed those feet. Somebody put them under a light and fixed them on a computer.” She flexed her toes, all five, and they spread apart with a soft, sticky little noise. “This is a real woman’s foot, gordo. Real skin. It walks. It sweats. It stands at the stove. It smells like a woman who did something today. You haven’t been this close to anything real since you were fourteen.”

“That’s not—”

“Arch first. Like always. Ándale.”

So Max did the arch.

There was no other way to do it at this size than with his whole body. He walked into the curve of her instep, set both palms flat against the warm skin, and leaned. The skin gave under him like bread dough, soft and hot and faintly damp, and he dug in with the heels of his hands and pushed, and pushed again, working his way along the curve the way he used to do it with his thumbs.

Above him, Lupe let out a long, low groan that went all the way down to her toes.

“Ay. There. Yes. Just like that.”

He did it again. And again. The skin under his hands got warmer. His arms started to burn. Somewhere around the third pass, he realized he was sweating, and then, a few seconds after that, that he wasn’t the only one. The arch was slick under his palms now. A faint sheen had come up on the skin, and when he pushed into it, his hands slid. He went in up to the elbows, then the shoulders. His cheek pressed against her instep. The smell came up off her in a fresh wave, sharper and saltier, and got into his hair.

“You’re doing very good,” Lupe said dreamily. “Now the heel. Abuela keeps all her problems in the heel.”

The heel was harder. It was like kneading a warm stone with a layer of leather on it. He had to brace his feet in the carpet and throw his whole weight into it, shoulder first, over and over, and every time he did, she made a happy little grunt, and the toes at the far end of the foot curled and uncurled like the fingers of a cat being petted.

That was when his body did the thing.

He felt it happen and couldn’t stop it. He was naked, on his knees on the carpet, pressed chest-first against his step-grandmother’s sweaty heel with her smell in his nose and her groan still ringing in his ears, and his dick had decided, entirely without him, that it was very much on board.

He froze. He turned his hips toward the heel, as if that helped, which it made worse, because then he was pressed against it.

“Mijo?” Above him, a long pause. “Mm-hm.”

“It’s not—it’s just—”

“Blood goes where it goes,” Lupe said, not unkindly. “You think I was a teacher for that long and never saw a boy stand up too fast in seventh period? Keep working.”

He kept working. It was the only option that didn’t involve dying.

She talked while he did it. That was the most mortifying part, and also, somehow, the part that kept him from going entirely to pieces. She talked the way she always had during foot rubs, about nothing: about the woman at Zumba who always stood in front of her in the good spot, about Fanny’s new boyfriend, who had a boat and no job, about the price of avocados. Every few sentences she stopped to say harder, or there, or ay, sí, and her foot sagged a little more into his arms, like a big dog leaning into a scratch.

“See?” she said, after a while. “No screen. No folder. Just you and Abuela’s foot, like before. Was that so bad?”

Max didn’t answer. He had his face mashed into the side of her heel, his arms were jelly, he smelled like her foot from his scalp to his knees, and the honest answer was so far from bad that he didn’t trust his mouth with it.

Lupe looked down at him. Then at the damp, shining stretch of skin on her arch. Then she fished the folded list and the pen out of the left pocket and shook the page open against her thigh.

“Hm,” she said. “Look at that. Two for one.”

And next to 5. Sweat, beside the weather, she made a small, neat red tick.

*

Outside, gravel crunched.

Max felt it before he heard it: a deep, smooth engine purr coming up through the floor and into the carpet under his knees. Then a car door. Then another one, for the trunk. Then the electronic chirp of a lock.

Lupe’s foot went very still.

“She’s home early,” she said.

The front door banged open downstairs. Plastic bags rustled. The dishwasher clatter stopped mid-plate.

“Mamá?” Victoria called up the stairs, bright and breathless and full of news. “I’m home! There was nobody there, it was amazing. I got the big Tums, and the good tortillas, and I got Max a new—Izzy, baby, grab a bag—Mamá? Is Max up? I want to show him!”

Sandals hit the bottom stair.

Lupe’s eyes went to the list in her hand, red all over. At Max, naked and slick and wrecked at the foot of her bare, sweaty heel. At the slipper lying upside down on the carpet.

Then at the door.