Company Shrunken First Semester chapter 16 by maximally

Victoria's dentist was in Redwood City, and the appointment was at one, and she talked about it for two days like it was a deployment.

"It's just a cleaning," she told Max on Tuesday morning, for the fourth time, standing in the kitchen in her good jeans with her purse already on her shoulder. "Ninety minutes. Two hours with traffic. Maybe two and a half if Dr. Patel wants X-rays, because she always wants X-rays." She held him up to her face. "Mama could bring you. You could ride in my bra the whole time, nobody would know."

"They'll lean you back in the chair," said Izzy from the couch, without looking up from her phone. "He'll, like, slide out."

Victoria thought about this with real horror.

"Izzy can watch him," she decided. "Can't you, mija? Just for two hours?"

"Totally," said Izzy.

Max had heard that word out of her mouth a thousand times. He had never heard it sound so much like a door locking.

Victoria set him down on the coffee table, on a folded dish towel she'd laid out like a little bed, with a bottle cap of water and a crumb of tortilla. She kissed him with the very tip of her lip so the lipstick wouldn't come off on all of him. She told Izzy where the emergency numbers were. She told Izzy she'd text. Then, in the doorway, she turned around one more time.

"And no friends over," she said. "Not with Max here. Especially not that boy with the Civic."

"Oh my God, Mom. Obviously."

The front door shut. The red Mercedes backed out of the driveway. Izzy sat perfectly still on the couch, listening, until the sound of it was gone completely at the end of the street.

Then she picked up her phone and typed something with both thumbs.

"He's ten minutes out," she said, to nobody, and smiled.

*

It was more like twenty-five.

Max spent them on the dish towel, watching Izzy get ready without getting up. She didn't change. She pulled her hair out of its scrunchie and shook it, put it back in a messier scrunchie, and that was all. She was in gray sweatpants with a hole in one knee and an oversized Gunn Titans tee with the collar cut off, and her socks were the same black ones she'd had on since at least yesterday. From the coffee table, her feet were propped up on the cushion just across from him, and he could see the shine on the heels where they'd worn thin. The smell came over in waves whenever the air conditioning kicked on.

"Are you going to say anything to him?" Max asked finally.

"About what?"

"About me."

Izzy laughed. It was not a nice laugh.

"Max," she said, "he already knows."

Outside, a car pulled up in front of the house. Its exhaust had a hole in it. It rattled the window. The engine cut out, and a car door slammed, and someone came up the front walk whistling.

Izzy didn't get up. She just yelled, "It's open!"

*

Miguel came in like he'd been there a hundred times, which, Max realized, he probably had.

He was tall, six-one or six-two, and lanky in a way that didn't look weak, all long arms and long legs and loose, easy shoulders. His dreads were pulled back in a thick bunch at the back of his head. He had a chinstrap beard trimmed so sharp it looked drawn on with a marker, and a gold chain over a white tank top, and basketball shorts that hung low on his hips. He smelled like weed and cologne and car. He kicked off his slides at the door, which Victoria would have liked, and then dropped onto the couch next to Izzy with his arm already around her, which Victoria would not have.

"Sup, babe."

"Hey."

He kissed her. It took a while. Max looked at the ceiling.

When they came up for air, Miguel looked around the living room, at the cream sectional and the framed family photos and the decorative bowl of fake lemons, like a guy taking in a hotel lobby. Then his eyes landed on the coffee table.

They stopped there.

"Yo," he said slowly. "Is that him?"

Izzy grinned. "Say hi, Max."

Max said nothing.

Miguel leaned forward on his elbows and looked at him closely, his face filling up Max's whole field of vision: wide brown eyes, red around the edges, a little gold stud in one ear, the dark sharp line of the beard. His breath smelled like Flamin' Hot Cheetos.

"Bro," said Miguel. "Bro." He started to laugh. "That's actually him. That's your stepbrother."

"I told you."

"I thought you were bullshitting, babe. I thought it was, like, a bit." He shook his head, still laughing, not looking away. "My cousin's guy said it works, but I didn't think it worked worked. Yo, Max. Little man. How's the weather down there?"

Max stared back at him. He had a lot of things he could have said. He had been composing them in his head for twenty-five minutes. None of them came out.

"He doesn't talk much," Izzy said. "Unless Mom asks him to."

"What's Mom ask him to do?"

Izzy looked at Max, and her smile got bigger and slower. Max knew that look. It was the same one she'd worn at the bottom of the stairs on Saturday when she asked Abuela if she'd gotten her message.

Only now there was nobody to hide it from.

"Oh my God," she said. "Okay. So you know how I said Mom's been, like, weird about him?"

"Yeah."

"So she thinks he's into it. Like, into it."

"Into what?"

"Everything." Izzy curled her legs up under herself, delighted. "Feet. Sitting. Getting carried around in her bra. She thinks it's, like, his thing. Because I made her think it's his thing."

Miguel's eyebrows went up. "Wait, you did that?"

"I put a bunch of stuff on his laptop. Like, forums and pictures and stuff. And Mom found it." She shrugged. "And now he can't say he's not into it, because she has proof."

Miguel looked at her with something like awe. Then he looked down at Max with something like pity, if pity was mostly a smirk.

"Damn, babe. That's cold."

"He deserved it."

"What'd he do?"

Izzy thought about it, which was somehow worse than an answer. "He was going to Ventus," she said finally. "And he was being smug about it."

Miguel nodded as though this was a completely reasonable explanation. Maybe, to him, it was.

*

"Okay, but for real," said Miguel. "What's the worst one?"

"The worst one?" Izzy tapped her lip with one chipped black nail. "Okay. So. She has these new underwear, right? Like, big ones. Granny ones. And she puts him in the back."

Miguel stared at her.

"Like, in the back," said Izzy, enjoying herself. "In there with her butt. For hours. She slept with him in there."

There was a pause. Then Miguel laughed so hard he slid halfway off the couch. He had to put one hand on the coffee table to catch himself, right beside the dish towel. The table shook. Max's bottle cap of water tipped over.

"Bro," Miguel wheezed. "Bro. You live in your mom's panties?"

"Stepmom's," said Izzy.

"That makes it worse, babe!"

"And then my abuela came up," Izzy went on, "and they, like, shared him."

"Shared him for what?"

Izzy leaned over and whispered in his ear. Max couldn't hear what she said. He didn't need to. He watched Miguel's face go through about five things in a row, and land on pure, gleeful disgust.

"Nah," Miguel said. "Nah. Your grandma? Little man, I gotta be honest with you. I thought Iz was exaggerating. But this—" He spread his hands. "This is so much worse than she said."

"I told you he'd beat your expectations," said Izzy.

"You were supposed to go to college, bro. You had a whole thing lined up. Dorms. Parties. College girls." Miguel shook his head sadly. "And instead you're eating your mom's ass for rent."

"Stepmom," said Izzy.

"Stepmom's ass."

Max sat on his dish towel in the puddle from his bottle cap and said nothing at all.

The thing was, he had heard worse. He had heard worse from himself, in his own head, at two in the morning in the dark of Victoria's briefs. But that was him. This was a guy who couldn't spell Ventus, sitting on the couch where Victoria fed him his breakfast, saying it out loud, with Izzy right there leaning on his shoulder and laughing until she snorted.

She had a good laugh, Izzy. He'd forgotten. He hadn't heard it in a long time. Around the house, around Victoria, she smirked and she sneered and she said totally like a door locking. With Miguel, she just laughed. She looked younger. She looked happy.

She had never once looked like that around Max.

*

After a while, they stopped paying attention to him.

Miguel put the TV on and didn't watch it. Izzy put her feet in his lap and he rubbed them without being asked, his long fingers digging into the arches of her filthy black socks, and she groaned and let her head fall back over the arm of the couch. Max watched from the table and thought, with a strange, distant clarity, that he knew exactly how those socks smelled up close, and Miguel didn't seem to care at all.

Then Miguel's hands went higher. Izzy's sweatpants didn't stop them.

"Babe," Izzy said, laughing, slapping at his wrist. "Not here. He's watching."

Miguel looked over at the coffee table. He met Max's eyes. He grinned slow, lazy and white.

"So?" he said. "Let him learn something."

"Ew. No." She swung her legs off him and stood up. Her tee rode up over the soft round swell of her belly, and she tugged it down again. "Upstairs."

"What about him?"

Izzy looked at Max on his dish towel. For a second, just a second, something passed over her face, too quick for him to read. Then it was gone.

"He's fine," she said. "He's not going anywhere. Right, Max?"

She grabbed Miguel's hand. He let himself be pulled up off the couch, unfolding to his full height, and the two of them went up the stairs together. Izzy was in front and Miguel was right behind her, with both hands on her hips and his face somewhere around her neck, and she was giggling.

The third stair creaked under Miguel's foot. Then her bedroom door shut.

*

The house was quiet for about a minute.

Then it wasn't.

Izzy's room was right above the living room. Max had known that for four years without ever once thinking about it. He thought about it now. He thought about it as the bedsprings started up, slow and then not slow, a steady creak coming down through the ceiling like a metronome. He thought about it when the headboard joined in, thudding against the wall over his head, a dull, regular knock. He thought about it when Izzy's voice came through the floor. It wasn't words. It was just her, higher and louder than he had ever heard it, and then Miguel's voice under hers, low, saying something that made her laugh and then gasp.

Max sat on the dish towel and looked at the ceiling.

He didn't want to listen. There wasn't anywhere else to go. He was three inches tall on a glass coffee table in an empty living room, and the stairs were a mountain range, and the front door might as well have been on the moon. He couldn't even put his hands over his ears without the sound coming up through the table under his feet.

So he listened.

The thing was, he'd never heard it before. Not really. Not like this. He'd seen it on his laptop, the real stuff, before Izzy filled it up with fake stuff. He'd paid Bella for her videos and then felt sick about it. He'd been to exactly one party in high school, where a girl he didn't know had kissed him on a dare and then wiped her mouth. He was eighteen, and he had been planning, in a vague and hopeful way, for college to be where it finally happened. Some dorm room. Some girl. Some fumbling, embarrassing, ordinary night, the kind of thing everybody else had already gotten around to.

Ventus had been going to be that. Ventus was supposed to be a lot of things.

Above him, the headboard sped up. Izzy said Miguel's name, twice, the second time much louder.

Max lay down on his back on the dish towel, in the dried water stain, and looked at the white popcorn ceiling, which was shaking very slightly.

It occurred to him that he would never be in a room like that one up there. Not in a dorm. Not anywhere. Not the way Miguel was. He'd be on coffee tables, and in bras, and in briefs, and on the backs of women who loved him so much they fought over him. Maybe that was something. Sunday morning, on Victoria's back, it had almost felt like something.

But it wasn't that.

The bed upstairs went still. There was a long silence, and then a laugh, Izzy's laugh, the good one, muffled by a door and a floor and a whole world.

Downstairs, alone, Max listened to it until it stopped.