Open Wide Shrunken First Semester chapter 18 by maximally

Victoria left at twelve-thirty on Thursday with a list of her own.

Hair at one. Brows at two-fifteen. Nails after that, if Kim could squeeze her in, and then the mall, because none of her black dresses were right, and she wouldn't say right for what. She said it was a dinner. She said it was tomorrow. She said it was sort of for work, and then she checked her teeth in the hallway mirror and didn't say anything else.

"Mama will be back by six," she told Max. She'd set him on the coffee table on his dish towel, with a bottle cap of water and a crumb of concha, and she was holding her keys in one hand and stroking his hair with the pinky of the other. "Six-thirty at the latest. Izzy has her phone. You need Mama, Izzy calls."

"I'm right here," said Izzy, from the couch.

"I know you're right here, mija." Victoria didn't look at her. She bent down and kissed the top of Max's head, a long one, and when she straightened up there was a berry print on him from his hairline to his shoulder blades. "And no list today. He had a big day yesterday."

"Totally."

The door shut. The Mercedes backed out. Izzy didn't move until the engine was gone, and then she didn't move for a while after that either. She lay on the couch in a black hoodie with the hood up and her phone held over her face, and scrolled.

Max sat on the towel and waited.

He'd learned that much in twenty days. The first time Victoria had left the two of them alone, Izzy had told him to his face that she'd done it, the beer and the folder and the forum, and then put her foot on his chest until he couldn't talk. The second time, she'd brought Miguel over and left Max on the coffee table to listen to the ceiling. There wasn't a third thing yet. He sat there with his knees up and lipstick drying on his scalp and waited for the third thing.

At one-ten, Izzy put the phone face down on her stomach.

"She got highlights for a dinner," she said to the ceiling.

Max didn't say anything.

"She didn't get highlights for my graduation. She got a blowout. At Supercuts." Izzy sat up. The hood fell back. Her eyeliner was yesterday's, gone gray at the corners, and there was a crease from the couch pillow down one cheek. "And she's been carrying you around in her shirt for three weeks. In her shirt, Max. She hasn't looked at me since the Fourth. I could shave my head. I could get a face tattoo. She'd go, that's nice, mija, have you seen Mama's boy?" She swung her legs off the couch and stood. "Anyway. I'm bored."

She went into the kitchen. He heard the fridge, and a Monster cracking open, and the legal pad sliding off the counter. When she came back, she had the can in one hand and the pad in the other, and she dropped onto the floor in front of the coffee table, cross-legged, so her face was level with his.

"Mom said no list," Max said.

"Mom said a lot of stuff." She flipped the pad around so he could see it. Purple gel pen. Skulls over every i. Her finger came down on a line halfway down the page. "Ten."

He knew ten. He'd read the pad upside down off the counter often enough to know all of them.

10. mouth stuff (her mouth. NOT eating him. i asked)

"See? I asked," Izzy said. "Very responsible of me." She grinned, and drank her Monster. "Anyway, it's yellow. Mom's been doing all the yellows, and she does them in, like, church voice. Ay, mijo, is this okay, mijo." She set the can down. "I'm not gonna do it in church voice."

*

She picked him up by the back of his body, between finger and thumb, and held him in front of her face.

Up close her mouth was the size of a doorway. Her lips were chapped, the bottom one bitten raw at one corner, a flake of black lipstick still stuck in the crease. She parted them. Her teeth came into view, big and white and a little crooked on the bottom row, and behind them, pink and wet and shining in the light from the window, her tongue.

She stuck it out.

It unrolled toward him, a long ramp of red muscle, bumpy all over, with a groove down the middle that gleamed. Her breath came out over it and hit him full in the face. Monster and spearmint gum and, under that, the sweet chemical ghost of her vape.

"Ah," Izzy said. With her tongue out, it came out as a noise and not a word. "Ahh."

She set him on it.

It was hot. It was hotter than anything on Victoria, hotter than the briefs. The surface gave under his knees and his palms, and it was rough, a carpet of tiny wet bumps that clung to his skin, and it was moving. It never stopped moving. It shifted and flexed under him, and spit welled up around his hands, and when he tried to stand he slid back toward her teeth on a film of it.

"Hhhi," said Izzy.

The word came up through the tongue and into his whole body. He felt it in his teeth.

Then she pulled her tongue back in, and him with it.

*

The light went out in stages. First the window, then the room, then the white wall of her front teeth as her lips came together over them, and then he was in the dark.

It wasn't all the way dark. A pink seam of daylight showed where her lips didn't quite meet. In it he could make out the ridges on the roof of her mouth above him, a ribbed red ceiling, and the walls of her teeth on either side, a row of molars, white boulders. The tongue under him swelled up and pinned him against the ridges, and then dropped away, and then swelled up again. Every breath she took through her nose came down the back of her throat behind him in a long rush, and every breath out came forward over him, hot, wet, spearmint, Monster.

Spit pooled under him. It was everywhere at once. It ran into his ears.

"Comfy?" Izzy asked.

He felt the word more than he heard it. It shaped the tongue under him and moved the ceiling over him, and her teeth clicked together in front of his face.

He shouted something. He didn't know what. It came out small and wet and went nowhere.

Izzy laughed. Her whole mouth shook. Then she tipped her head back.

The tongue tilted. He slid. There was nothing to hold, nothing, the bumps were slick and the walls were slick, and the back of her mouth opened up behind him into a red tunnel that went down into the dark, and the hanging thing at the top of it swung over his head, and he went toward it feet first on a river of her spit.

He grabbed a molar. He got one arm around it and hung on, his legs kicking over nothing.

Her throat worked.

GLK

It was the loudest sound he had ever heard. It came from right underneath him, a wet muscular clench that dragged at his ankles, that sucked the spit out from under him in one pull, and then let go. He hung off her tooth, sobbing for breath.

She hadn't swallowed him. She'd swallowed the spit. She'd done it on purpose, so he'd know what it sounded like from inside.

Her tongue came up and nudged him off the molar, very gently, back to the middle.

"Mm-mm," Izzy said, and he understood it. Not eating you. I asked.

*

She took him out after a while and held him dripping over her palm. Strings of spit hung off his arms and ran down into her hand. He was coughing. His eyes stung. Victoria's lipstick was gone off the top of his head; she'd sucked it off, he realized, she'd licked her mother's kiss off him with the first pass of her tongue and hadn't said a word about it.

"Okay," Izzy said. "Now ask nice."

"Ask for what?"

"To come out. You didn't ask. You just yelled." She dangled him an inch from her lips. Her breath rolled over him. "Mom gets please. Mom gets okay, Mama. I've heard you. All little and grateful." She rolled her eyes. "I want that."

"Iz—"

"Izzy."

"Izzy," he said. "Please."

"Please what?"

"Please let me out."

"You are out." She smiled. "Ask again next time. Ask better."

She put him back in.

*

The second time she chewed her gum.

She'd tucked it into her cheek before, and now she brought it out onto her tongue next to him, a gray-green lump the size of his torso, and worked it. Her molars came down on it inches from his feet. The tongue rolled him against it and the gum stuck to his back, to his arm, to his hair. When she pulled her tongue away, he went with the gum, glued to it, and hung off the side of the wad while she chewed on the other end. Every bite rocked him. Spearmint stung his eyes and burned in his nose and he could feel the teeth through the gum, closing, opening, closing, never all the way.

Then she blew.

She did it with him still stuck to the gum. The wad stretched out past her teeth and through her lips and into the light, thinning out around him, and he went with it, out into the living room on the skin of a growing bubble, a hot pink-green dome of spearmint with her breath inside it, until he was a speck on a sphere the size of a beach ball and could see the ceiling fan through the film.

pop

It went off in his face. The gum slapped back over him in a wet sticky sheet and she sucked the whole thing in, him and all, and chewed twice before she found him with her tongue and peeled him free.

He was crying by then. He was pretty sure she could taste it.

"Please," he said, into her teeth. "Izzy. Please. Please."

She opened her mouth and let the light in, and held him on the tip of her tongue, and waited.

"Please let me out, Izzy."

She thought about it.

"Better," she said, and closed her mouth again.

*

Her phone went off at two-fifty.

He heard it through her skull: the FaceTime chime, cheerful and tinny, from the couch cushion. Izzy grabbed it. He felt her sit up straighter. He felt the tongue push him sideways, out of the middle of her mouth and into her cheek, into the pocket between her molars and the inside wall, and then he felt her teeth come down on him. Not hard. Just resting there, top and bottom, the edges of two molars on his shoulder and his hip.

She answered.

"Hiii, Mom."

"Mija!" Victoria's voice, small and bright, coming out of the speaker and in through Izzy's head. He could hear a blow dryer behind her. "Mama's under the dryer, it's taking forever. Where's my baby? Let me see him."

"He's asleep."

"Just let me see."

"Mom, he's asleep, he's in a burrito." He felt Izzy lean, and something rustle, the dish towel on the coffee table, bunched up. "See? Burrito."

"Ay, I can't see anything, mija, turn the light—"

Max opened his mouth to yell.

The molars closed on him a little more. Just a little. Enough that his ribs creaked. Enough that he could feel exactly how much further they could go.

He shut his mouth.

"He's fine," said Izzy. "He ate his concha. He did his little water. He's been sleeping for, like, an hour."

"Why do you sound funny?"

"Gum."

"Don't chew gum on FaceTime, it's rude. Okay. Okay. Give him a kiss from Mama."

"Totally," said Izzy. "Bye."

The call ended. The teeth came off him. Her tongue found him in the dark of her cheek and rolled him back out into the middle, almost kindly, and held him there.

"Look at you," Izzy said, with him in her mouth. "Not telling."

*

She let him out for good at a quarter to five.

She spat him into her palm, which was its own kind of horrible, and held him under the bathroom faucet until the spearmint was mostly off, and dried him with the hem of her hoodie, rough enough to sting. Then she looked him over the way Victoria looked him over for boo-boos every night, front and back, except that Victoria looked for things to kiss and Izzy looked for evidence.

His hair stuck up in gum-stiff spikes. His skin was pink and wrinkled from spit, puckered at the fingers. Under all of it, low on his stomach, there was something else, and she saw it, and he saw her see it.

"Oh my God," Izzy said. "Again?"

"Shut up."

"From my mouth?" She wasn't laughing. That was worse. She was just looking at him, with her head on one side, interested, the way she'd looked at the ramekin the first week. "Huh. Okay. Noted."

She took him back to the living room, put him on his dish towel, and arranged the corner of it over him so it looked like he'd been sleeping there all afternoon. Then she picked the pad up off the floor, uncapped the purple pen, and sat cross-legged in front of him to write.

He couldn't see what she was writing. When she was done, she held his face against her mouth one more time, not inside, just there, his whole body on her bottom lip, and he felt her say it.

"Mine."

It came up through her lip and into his chest. Then she put him down and went upstairs.

*

The Mercedes came up the driveway at six-twenty. Victoria came through the door with four shopping bags and new honey streaks in her hair and her brows done sharp and dark, and she dropped all of it in the entryway and came straight for the coffee table.

"There's my baby." She scooped him up, towel and all, and peeled the towel off, and kissed him. The first one landed on his forehead. The second one covered him from his chin to his belly button, berry and wax and her mouth closing on nothing, never opening. Victoria's mouth had never once been anything to him but a kiss. "Did you sleep all day? Izzy said you slept all day. Why's your hair so crunchy?"

"I don't know," Max said.

"And why do you smell like gum?"

From upstairs, faint, came Izzy's music.

Victoria sniffed him again, frowned, and then let it go, because she had a dress to show him, and it was black, and it was right. She carried him up to her bedroom against her chest. On the way past the coffee table he saw the pad lying where Izzy had left it, face up, open to the list.

Ten had a tick next to it now. Purple. Beside the tick, in letters so small that nobody bigger than three inches would ever have bothered to read them, she'd written one word, and dotted the i with a skull.

mine