Aisle Twelve Shrunken First Semester chapter 13 by maximally

The pancakes came out lopsided, because Victoria made them one-handed while she read the list again.

Max ate a crumb of one off the edge of a saucer. Izzy ate four, in last night's eyeliner and a fresh hoodie pulled over the mesh top, and went back upstairs to "nap" without saying a word to him. Victoria didn't notice that either. She was busy tapping the legal pad with her fork.

"Three," she said thoughtfully.

He didn't have to ask. Three already had two ticks, but she was tapping the part in parentheses. Riding in them, bra strap, shirt pocket, "anywhere i can see out." Izzy had underlined the last bit and doodled a little shopping cart next to it, because Izzy was nothing if not thorough.

"Mom, I really don't think—"

"We have to go to Target anyway, sweetie," Victoria said. "And you can't stay home alone. What if Izzy steps on you again?" She shuddered. "No. Mama's not letting you out of her sight."

*

She dressed for it.

Max watched from the vanity while she went through four tops. The first was too high in the neck. The second was too loose, and she frowned at it in the mirror and said, "He'll fall out of this one." The third made her look "like a soccer mom," which, Max did not point out, she was. The fourth was a cream-colored wrap blouse with a deep V that crossed over under her tits and tied at the hip. When she pulled the knot tight, it hauled both tits up and together until they swelled out of the neckline in two round brown domes with a deep, dark split between them. The blouse did all the holding. It didn't leave much room for anything else.

"Perfect," she decided.

Then she picked him up, held him over the V, and lowered him in.

It was different from the bra. In the bra, he'd been pinned flat against her breastbone under padding and lace. This was skin on both sides and nothing but thin cream rayon in front, two big heavy tits squeezed together by the wrap and holding him upright between them. He sank in up to his armpits. She tugged the fabric up a quarter-inch, then pushed him down another, until only the top of his head stuck out of the V.

"Can you breathe?"

"Barely."

"Perfect," she said again, and kissed the top of his head, which left berry lipstick in his hair.

She put on her sunglasses, grabbed her keys, and walked out the door with him wedged in her cleavage like it was the most normal thing in the world.

*

The red Mercedes had leather seats that had been baking in the driveway since ten, and the AC took most of the drive to catch up. Max spent it sweating. Victoria's tits sweated too, and the seat belt cut diagonally right across them, mashing the left one down and pushing the right one up, so that he spent ten minutes tilted sideways at an angle like a fence post in a mudslide. Every time she braked, he slid. Every time she turned left, he got squished.

She sang along to the radio. She was bad at it.

The Target on El Camino was packed. It was late July, and every parent in the South Bay had apparently had the same idea at the same time. The parking lot shimmered. Inside, the AC hit like a wall, and Max felt goosebumps pop up all over the small part of him that was still exposed. The rest of him stayed cooked.

Victoria grabbed a cart and went straight for the home section, cooing at throw pillows.

He had a strange view from in there. Most of it was the inside of the blouse and the curving brown walls of her tits rising up on both sides. But when he tilted his head back and pushed up on his toes, he could see over the edge of the V, past the lip of the fabric, to a slice of the store. Bright red endcaps. Fluorescent lights. Strangers' faces going by at the height of her chest, which, for a lot of them, was eye level.

A lot of them looked.

He'd known that, sort of. You didn't live with Victoria for four years without noticing how people looked at her. But he'd never been on the receiving end of it before. A dad in a golf shirt glanced over, glanced away, glanced back. A teenage cashier stocking cereal stared so openly that his mouth hung open. A woman pushing a toddler gave Victoria's neckline a long, disapproving once-over, and Max ducked down so fast he slid an inch deeper and got a mouthful of sweaty skin.

None of them saw him. They saw tits. That was all anyone was looking at. He was hiding in the most-watched spot in the building, and he was invisible.

Victoria patted him once through the blouse without looking down and kept walking.

*

Back-to-school had taken over the whole middle of the store.

Aisle twelve was all dorm stuff. Shower caddies. Laundry hampers that folded flat. Mattress toppers rolled up in plastic, extra-long, TWIN XL in big blue letters across every one. Mini-fridges. Desk lamps. Command hooks. A whole wall of plastic storage bins, the same ones Max had bought in June, stacked and labeled in his room right now.

Victoria slowed down in front of it all.

He felt her slow. Her breathing shifted, and her tits rose and fell a little higher against him.

"Look at all this, mijo," she said softly, more to herself than to him. She reached out and touched a shower caddy, bright blue, with a little suction-cup soap dish. "We were going to get you one of these."

Max didn't say anything. He was looking at the mattress toppers.

"Tori?"

The voice came from the end of the aisle, loud and delighted. Victoria turned. Max, wedged sideways, got a glimpse of a cart with a mini-fridge balanced in it and, behind the cart, someone tall.

"Oh my God, it is you!"

He knew that voice. It took him a second to place it, because the last time he'd heard it was graduation, from across a football field, and before that, maybe a hundred times in hallways and classrooms without it ever once being pointed at him.

Nikki Allais.

She came down the aisle at a jog, ponytail bouncing, a big grin on her face, and stopped right in front of Victoria. Six feet even, in slides and black basketball shorts and a cut-off sage-green tee that showed her stomach, ridged with muscle, and her arms. Dirty-blonde hair. Freckles across her nose and cheeks. Big brown eyes. Her mom came up behind her, pushing the cart: a shorter, sunburned woman in a visor who looked like she'd been shopping since dawn.

"Nikki!" Victoria said warmly, and opened her arms.

Max realized a second too late what was going to happen.

They hugged.

Victoria was an inch taller, but Nikki was all muscle, and she hugged the way she played, hard and all in. She wrapped both arms around Victoria and squeezed, and Victoria's tits mashed flat against Nikki's chest, and Max was right there in the middle of it. For three long seconds he was smushed between his stepmother's tits and Nikki Allais's sports bra, his face mashed into the cream rayon, the heat coming off both of them, smelling of cocoa butter and Victoria and sharp, clean sweat and something like Gatorade. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't even squeak.

Then they let go, and he gasped into the V.

"Wow, Tori, you look amazing," Nikki said.

"Oh, stop." Victoria fluffed her hair. "And look at you! You're so tall! Did you get taller?"

"Maybe, like, half an inch?" Nikki laughed. "Coach says I'm done, though."

The moms introduced themselves. Nikki's was named Carol, and she'd driven down from Mountain View. They agreed it was a madhouse in here. They agreed the parking was a nightmare. They agreed on everything, with that cheerful mom-at-Target energy that made Max want to crawl out of his own skin.

Then Nikki said it.

"So, wait. Isn't your son going to Ventus, too? Mark?"

Max shut his eyes.

"Max," Victoria said.

"Max! Yeah, sorry, Max." Nikki winced. "We had, like, chem together. I think? He was quiet."

He'd sat behind her in chemistry for an entire year. She'd borrowed his calculator in October and never given it back.

"He's very quiet," Victoria agreed fondly.

"So is he doing move-in on August twenty-third, too? We should, like, carpool or something. It's six hours. Or we could split a U-Haul? My mom's freaking out about the fridge." Nikki gestured at the mini-fridge in her cart. "Is he in the freshman towers? I'm in Diana, but that's, like, an athlete thing."

Victoria didn't miss a beat.

"Oh, he's away, sweetie," she said breezily. "Didn't he tell anybody? He's in Mexico. With his abuelo."

Max's eyes flew open.

"Oh, cool!" said Nikki. "Like, vacation?"

"Like a service trip." Victoria put a hand over her heart, right over the top of Max's head, and pressed. He sank another half-inch into her cleavage. "His grandfather's down there working with some old friends from the union. Building a school. Max wanted to go so badly. He's going to be there through the end of summer. No cell service. Not even email." She sighed. "Mama misses him so much."

"Aw," said Carol.

"That's so sick," Nikki said, sounding genuinely impressed. "I didn't know he was, like, a service guy."

"He's very private," Victoria said.

Max lay in the dark between her tits, eight inches from Nikki Allais, and listened to himself become a better person than he'd ever been.

*

"But he's still doing Ventus, though, right?" Nikki asked. "Like, after?"

There was a pause. It was tiny. Max felt it more than heard it, a hitch in the rise and fall of Victoria's chest, a single beat where her heart stumbled against the side of his head.

"We'll see," she said. "Maybe he'll start in the spring."

"Oh, bummer. Orientation's gonna be so fun." Nikki started ticking things off on her fingers. "There's a whole welcome week thing. And this big party at the lake. And House Proserpina does this pancake breakfast, and Minerva does a scavenger hunt, and apparently my house throws, like, the most insane parties on campus. My roommate already made a group chat for our floor. There's, like, sixty people in it. Somebody's bringing a karaoke machine."

Max listened to all of it.

He hadn't let himself think about it in days. Not really. He'd been too busy being sat on and carried around and scrubbed. But now here it was, all at once, in Nikki Allais's loud happy voice: the lake, the pancake breakfast, the group chat. Sixty people he'd never get to meet. A karaoke machine he'd never get to avoid.

The bins were still stacked by his door.

"Tell him to look me up when he gets there," Nikki said. "Seriously. I'll show him around. I know, like, everybody already."

"I'll tell him," Victoria said softly. "He'd like that."

Then Nikki leaned in. She leaned in close, right up into Victoria's space, the way she always did with everybody, and for one terrible second, she was looking straight down at the V of the blouse.

Max froze.

Her face was a foot above him. Big brown eyes, freckles, a tiny scar on her chin he'd never noticed in four years of sitting behind her. If she looked one inch lower, if she so much as squinted, she was going to see a pair of eyes looking back at her from between Victoria's tits.

"I love this top, Tori," Nikki said. "Where'd you get it?"

"Nordstrom," Victoria said. "On sale."

"Sick."

Nikki straightened up. Max started breathing again.

*

They said goodbye in a flurry of hugs. Max braced himself this time and got through it with only a little whimper. Carol and Victoria exchanged numbers "for move-in stuff." Nikki promised to send a picture of her dorm. Then they pushed off down the aisle with their mini-fridge, and Nikki turned around at the end of it and waved.

"Tell Mark I said hi!" she called.

"I will!" Victoria called back.

She didn't correct her.

They stood in aisle twelve for a while after that. The store noise went on around them, carts and kids and some announcement over the speakers about a lost child in electronics. Victoria didn't move. She stood in front of the wall of shower caddies with one hand resting on her chest, right over him, her fingers curled just a little.

Then she reached out and took the blue shower caddy off the hook.

She turned it over in her hand. She looked at the little suction-cup soap dish. It was about the size of a saucer, just deep enough to sit in.

She dropped it in the cart.

"For the shower, mijo," she said brightly, and pushed on toward the registers.