Browser History Shrunken First Semester chapter 5 by maximally

The keys lost.

Max watched it happen. Fanny’s eyes went to the bed one last time, to the keys lying by the pillow, and then she let out a long breath through her nose, like a bull in a cartoon, and worked her thumbnail under the lid.

“Okay,” she said. “Rip the Band-Aid. Tía’s ripped a lot of Band-Aids. Most of them were on other people.”

“Tía, wait—”

“Baby, we got five minutes, and your mom counts fast.”

She didn’t sit. His desk chair was a skinny mesh thing from Target that had never done anything to deserve her, and anyway there wasn’t time. She stood bent over the desk with one hand braced on the edge and the other cupped against her collarbone with him in it, and she flipped the lid up with one ringed finger.

The screen came on bright. No password. No lock screen. Just the desktop, wide open and waiting, exactly the way Izzy had said.

“See, that’s rude,” Fanny muttered. “Lock your stuff, baby. I lock my stuff. My phone code is the date of my third divorce. I’ll never forget it, and nobody’s ever gonna guess it, because nobody else remembers him.”

The fan was still spinning. Max could hear it, a thin, whiny hum from somewhere under the keyboard, and when Fanny shifted her hand on the edge of the desk, her pinky brushed the bottom of the laptop and she pulled it back like she’d touched a stove.

“Hot,” she said. “Like, hot hot.”

“Because somebody was just on it,” Max said. “Tía. Somebody was on it this morning. While I was—while I was like this. I couldn’t even reach the lid.”

Fanny looked at the laptop. Then at him. He watched her actually think about it, and for one second he thought he had her.

Then her eyes went to the blinds. A fat stripe of July sun came through the slats and lay across the desk like a hot iron, right on top of the keyboard.

“Or,” she said slowly, “it’s been sitting in that since six in the morning with a charger plugged in. Baby, I left a lip gloss on my dashboard in Glendale once and came back to a crime scene. You know how hot my car gets at a Vons? Things get hot in July.” She nodded, mostly to herself. “Things get hot.”

“That’s not—”

“And she said you were clicking till five. So.”

And there it went. Max felt it go, like a bus pulling away from the curb with him still on the bench.

Down in the corner of the screen, the clock said 7:48.

The desktop was mostly his. The Ventus campus at sunset for a wallpaper, crooked because he’d never figured out how to center it. Steam. A folder of Smash screenshots. A Word doc called calc final DO NOT DELETE. A trash can that hadn’t been emptied since sophomore year.

And down at the bottom, in the last row, two icons he had never seen in his life.

A folder called FAFSA. And a little text file next to it called ideas.txt.

“I didn’t make those,” Max said.

Fanny wasn’t listening. Fanny was staring at the folder with a look of dawning, professional respect.

“FAFSA,” she said. “Baby. That is genius. No mom in the world clicks on a FAFSA folder for fun. Your mom would sooner open a casket.” She shook her head slowly. “I kept my good stuff in a folder called QuickBooks for nine years. Nobody ever touched it. I didn’t even have QuickBooks.”

“Tía, I’m serious, I didn’t—”

She double-clicked.

The window bloomed open, and it was full.

Thumbnails, rows and rows of them, packed edge to edge like tiles on a bathroom floor. Max saw the number at the bottom of the window, 412 items, and then he stopped being able to see the number, because Fanny had found the zoom and everything got bigger.

He had expected her to scream. Or laugh. Or slam it shut and lecture him, maybe, in a Fanny way, which would have involved a lot of swearing and possibly a story about the Carloses.

She whistled. Low, through her teeth, like a guy at a car show.

“Ohhh, okay,” she said. “Okay. Somebody’s got a type.”

Then she started scrolling, and her face changed into a face Max had only ever seen on her at the Ross on Sunset, flipping through a clearance rack. Fast, expert, and merciless. Hanger, hanger, hanger. Nope. Nope. Maybe.

“See, this is the thing,” she said, scrolling. “Gerald had a folder like this. Gerald’s folder was garbage. All these skinny little blondes, somebody stretched them up to the size of the Hollywood sign, and one sad little guy stuck in the corner like a sticker. No lighting. Nobody looking at anybody.” She clicked one open, studied it, clicked out. “This is different. This is a cup holder. Look how she’s looking at him. That’s cute. That one’s a pocket girl.” Click. “That one’s a foot girl. Look at her arch, she knows exactly what she’s doing.” Click. “Okay, that one’s a little much before breakfast, but I respect it.”

“Tía.”

“Shh, shh. I’m not judging. I’m reviewing.” She patted the top of his head with the tip of her thumb. “Baby, you have no idea. I’ve seen folders. I was married to the folders. This is curated. This is somebody who knows what they like and went and got it.”

“Somebody does know what they like,” Max said. “It just isn’t me.”

“Mm.” She wasn’t really hearing him. She was leaning in.

Downstairs, a mug clunked on granite.

“Three minutes, Fernanda!”

“I heard you!” Fanny yelled back, without taking her eyes off the screen. Then, much quieter: “She did not give me two minutes. That was not two minutes.”

It took her a little while.

Max could tell when it started, because the scrolling slowed down. The clearance-rack face went away. She stopped clicking things open and just looked at the rows, one at a time, and her mouth closed.

She held up her free arm, the one with him in it, and set it on the desk right next to the screen.

He didn’t understand what she was doing. Then he did. She was comparing.

Her forearm, soft and wide and caramel, ringed at the wrist with three bead bracelets. And on the screen, right beside it, a woman’s forearm, soft and wide and the exact same caramel, holding a little man up by the back of his shirt. And next to her, another one. And another. Down the whole row. Down every row.

There wasn’t a Barbie in the bunch. They were short and round, or tall and heavy, or somewhere in between, but all of them were big in the same direction: wide hips, soft guts, big loose breasts sitting on top of them, thighs that touched from the crotch to the knee. Brown skin. Black hair, piled up or falling down. Gold hoops. Lip liner. A couple of them old enough to have reading glasses. One with a tattoo of a rose on her calf that looked like every rose on every calf at every quinceañera Max had ever been dragged to.

Strangers, every one. It didn’t help at all.

“Huh,” Fanny said. It came out small.

“Tía—”

“Every one of these girls,” she said slowly, “could walk into our Thanksgiving with a pan of something, and nobody would ask who brought her.”

She didn’t laugh. Max waited for her to, and she didn’t.

She scrolled down one more row. Then she stopped, and her hand stopped, and something in her whole huge body went still from the top of her bun down to her toes.

It was a photo. Or close enough to one. A bedroom, cheap blinds, morning light. On the end of an unmade bed sat a woman maybe five feet tall and built like a beanbag chair somebody had filled all the way to the top. Her gut sat on her thighs in two soft rolls. Her black leggings had given up at the back, and so had she, cheerfully. She was looking back over her own shoulder at the camera and laughing, open-mouthed, eyes squeezed shut, the way you laugh when you’ve done something terrible and it’s the funniest thing that ever happened.

She was sitting on him.

The little guy was underneath, mostly. What was left of him stuck up out of the deep middle of her, one arm and the top of his head, like a man going down in quicksand who had decided to wave.

“That’s my whole ass,” said Fanny.

It just came out. Loud. Then her hand flew up and slapped over her mouth, rings and all, and Max nearly went flying off her palm with it.

“I didn’t say that,” she said through her fingers.

“You said it really loud.”

“I said it at a normal volume for a woman my size.”

Max looked at the wall. On the other side of it was Izzy’s room. Izzy’s room was completely silent. No playlist. No mango vape crackle. No TikTok voices. It was the kind of silence you only get from somebody holding very still with her ear against the drywall.

Fanny didn’t look at the wall. Fanny was looking at the laughing woman on the bed.

“The elevator at the Galleria,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“Fresno. The backseat. Abuelo’s birthday, the pew.” She took her hand off her mouth and laid it flat on the desk. “Baby, I have sat on you so many times. So many. And you never got mad at me. Not one time. You’d just lay there and wait for me to get up, all quiet, and I always thought, ay, what a polite boy. What a gentleman. Victoria got him so nice.”

“I was being polite! I was being crushed!”

“I know, baby. I know.” She sniffed. “I’m just saying. You never yelled.”

“Because you weigh three hundred and—”

“Don’t finish that.”

The clock said 7:50.

She lifted him up off the desk and held him in front of the screen, right up close, so that the light from it fell all over him. He was eye level with the bed. With the woman. With the waving arm.

“Look,” Fanny whispered. “Baby, look. You’re the same size as him.”

He was. That was the awful part. The little man in the picture was three inches tall, more or less, and so was Max, and for one strange second it stopped feeling like a picture at all and started feeling like a window into the next room.

“I don’t want to look,” Max said.

“Okay.”

He looked.

He didn’t mean to. He meant to look at the floor, or at the Smash print, or at literally anything else in the room, and instead his eyes went right back to that bed and stayed there. The rolls. The leggings. The way she was laughing. The little arm sticking up out of the middle of all of it like it was the only part of him that had anything left to say.

He kept looking. He could hear the fan. He could hear Fanny breathing. He could hear his own pulse in his ears, and he kept looking anyway, for way, way longer than a person looks at something they don’t want to look at.

“Baby,” Fanny said, very gently. “You haven’t blinked in like ten seconds.”

He blinked. Hard. Twice. It was too late, and they both knew it.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Max said. “That’s just—it’s the light, it’s right in my face—”

“I know.”

“Izzy did this, Tía. I swear. On Gerald.”

“Don’t swear on Gerald. Nothing good’s ever been sworn on Gerald.” She brought him down from the screen and tucked him in against her chest, right up in the hot top of her cleavage, the way you’d hold a kid who was crying, except Max wasn’t crying. He was just cooked. The skin there was soft and damp and smelled like cheap vanilla and old menthols, and her heart was going a lot slower than it had been in the pile. Steady. Thinking.

“Listen to me,” she said, into the top of his head. “I believe you that Izzy’s a little shit. I’ve always believed that. Izzy could put a dirty folder on your computer in about four seconds. Izzy’s been doing worse than that to you since you were fourteen.”

“So—”

“But this?” She tipped her chin at the screen. “Baby, that’s not four seconds. You don’t find four hundred girls who all look like your tías by accident. Somebody’d have to look for years. Izzy doesn’t do anything for years.” She stroked his back with one fingertip, down and up. “Nobody hates anybody that much. You only look that hard for something you love.”

“I didn’t—”

“Maybe you didn’t know.” Her voice went soft, softer than he’d ever heard it, softer than at Abuelo’s birthday, softer than the night she drove him to In-N-Out after his dad missed another Christmas. “Maybe you just didn’t know you wanted it, baby. That happens. That happens to everybody. That’s happened to me, like, six times. It’s why I got six divorces.”

Max opened his mouth to argue and found out there was nothing in it.

Because she was being nice to him. That was the whole problem. If she’d yelled, he could have yelled back. If she’d called him a pervert, he could have called her a hypocrite and brought up the condoms under the pillow. But she was standing there holding him against her heart, being kind about it, and every kind thing she said nailed the lid down a little tighter. Izzy hadn’t needed to fool Fanny. Izzy had just needed Fanny to love him.

From the other side of the wall, nothing. Still nothing.

“Okay,” Fanny said, wiping one eye with her knuckle. “What’s the other one?”

“What other one?”

She was already clicking. The folder slid away and the little text file opened over it in plain white, in the plain, ugly font that came free with every laptop in the world.

ideas

GREEN
1. feet
2. butt
3. breasts
4. armpits
5. sweat

YELLOW
6. foot worship
7. shoeplay
8. ass worship
9. breastfeeding
10. mouth play
11. fart
12. entrapment
13. smothering
14. humiliation

RED
15. masturbation
16. pussy
17. sex
18. cuckold
19. insertion
20. anal insertion
21. scat

21 total. green first.

Fanny read it the way Max had seen her read a menu at a Denny’s at two in the morning: the whole thing at once, top to bottom, with her lips moving and her eyebrows doing all the work.

“Baby,” she said. “You made a menu.”

“I didn’t make anything!”

“Green first. That’s responsible. I like that.” She tapped the screen on 1. feet with one long nail. “Feet I can do in my sleep. I have done feet in my sleep. There was a guy in Reseda who only wanted me to nap.” Tap. “Butt. Well.” She looked down at him. “I mean. We’ve been doing that one since the Galleria, apparently.”

“That was an accident—”

“Breasts.” She jiggled her chest a little, very slightly, and Max went sliding down an inch into the dark of her cleavage and had to grab a necklace to stop. “Look at you. You’re already doing three. You’re ahead of the class.”

“Tía—”

“Armpits.” She lifted one elbow off the desk and took a cautious sniff in that direction and made a face. “Not today, baby. I drove up the 5. That one’s gonna need a shower or a really brave boy.” Tap. “Sweat. Honey, that’s not a kink, that’s July.”

Max wanted to die. He’d wanted to die several times this morning, but this was the first time he’d wanted it to be quick.

She skimmed the yellow. She went faster here, ticking things off with little noises, a woman who had been around the block enough times to have a parking spot on it. Foot worship: “That’s just feet with manners.” Shoeplay: she glanced at her pump lying on its side by the nightstand and said nothing at all, which was worse. Ass worship: “One of the Carloses,” she said fondly, and didn’t explain. Breastfeeding got a long pause and a little laugh. “Baby, I got nothing in there. I haven’t had anything in there since never.” And then, after a second, a lot quieter, looking at nothing: “I mean. Never is a long time.”

Fart got an eye-roll so big it took her whole head with it. Entrapment got: “Gerald.” Smothering got: “I smothered a guy on the Matterhorn once. By accident. He sent a thank-you card.” Humiliation made her sigh.

“Baby, I’ve been divorced six times,” she said. “I am a professional at humiliation. Just usually from the other side.”

Then she got to the red, and she slowed down.

Max watched her read it. She didn’t say any of it out loud. Her eyes went down the list one line at a time, and her face didn’t do anything shocked, or disgusted, or even surprised. It did something worse. It thought about them. She read masturbation and pussy and sex the way you’d read the price on something nice in a window, a little sad and a little interested, and moved on. Her lips pressed together on insertion, and pressed harder on the one after it, and on cuckold her eyebrows went up and stayed up, and she let out a short, rough laugh with no joke in it.

“Cuckold,” she said. “Ay, baby. I have been on every side of that one. Twice I was the reason.” She shook her head. “I don’t know which side you’d even want. Hell. I don’t know which side I’d want.”

“I don’t want any side—”

Her nail came to a stop on the last line.

She looked at 21 for a long time.

“Okay,” she said finally. “Okay. Not today.” She scrolled it gently up and out of sight, like pushing a plate back across a table. “Today is not a twenty-one kind of day. Today’s barely a one kind of day.” She looked down at him, and there was nothing mean in it at all, just a kind of tired, crooked love. “We’ll see, baby. We got time. You’re not going anywhere.”

That last part landed on him like a piano. She didn’t even notice she’d said it.

The clock said 7:53.

Downstairs, a chair scraped across the kitchen tile.

“Okay!” Victoria called up, bright as a smoke alarm. “That’s five! I’m coming up! And you’re moving that car, Fernanda, I have people coming tonight!”

Fanny froze.

Max felt it go through her, the whole enormous length of her, from her bun down to her bare toes curling in the carpet. Her heart, which had been so slow a second ago, kicked back up to a gallop.

The laptop was wide open in front of her. ideas.txt was sitting on top of the screen in plain white with 21 total. green first. at the bottom. Behind it, four hundred and twelve brown women filled the FAFSA folder, and one of them was laughing on a bed with her whole ass on a man the size of a Lego. And the man the size of a Lego was down the front of Fanny’s crop top, hanging onto a strand of her necklace with both arms.

“Okay,” Fanny breathed. “Okay, okay, okay.”

The first stair creaked. It was the bottom one, the one that had creaked for as long as Max could remember. Then the next.

Fanny looked down at him. Then at the door. Then at the screen. Her free hand hovered over the lid, and hovered, and didn’t close it.

“Baby nephew,” she whispered. “Tell me something. You want your mom to know, or you want your mom to not know? ’Cause I can do either one. I’m really good at both. I just can’t do both at once.”

Max opened his mouth.

The footsteps kept coming. Three. Four. Five. Victoria’s sandals, slapping the wood, quick and cheerful, and her voice coming up ahead of her, already halfway through a sentence about parking.