Too Little, Too Late Shrunken First Semester chapter 21 by maximally

Bea left Sunnyvale at nine-forty Monday morning. Max wasn't there to see it. He was in Lupe's kitchen, on the Formica table, eating a crumb of concha, when Lupe's phone buzzed against the sugar bowl and she read the text over her glasses and said, "Hm."

"What?"

"Your Mamá's coming to get you." She turned the screen so he could see. Bea's gone. Coming down. Kettleman 1:00. No emoji. No Mama. Victoria didn't send texts without emoji.

"What did Bea say?"

"It doesn't say, mijo." Lupe put the phone face down. "Eat your bread."

He didn't ask about the other texts. His phone was still on her nightstand, still plugged in, and he hadn't let her bring it out. He'd seen the two lines in the dark. That was enough.

*

So he did the drive in reverse. Lupe in the minivan, the Neapolitan shake, the In-N-Out parking lot at Kettleman City, the trucks on the freeway. Victoria in the red Mercedes, her hair up in a claw clip, sunglasses on, in jeans and a white button-down, which was the least Victoria outfit he'd ever seen her in. She kissed her mother's cheek. Lupe held on to her arm a second too long and said something low in Spanish, and Victoria said, "I know, Mamá," and didn't take her sunglasses off.

She didn't put him in the cup holder this time.

She tucked him under her bra strap. She unbuttoned the top two buttons of the shirt and slid him in at her left shoulder, between the strap and her skin, and buttoned back up, so he rode for three hours with his back against her collarbone and his face to the inside of the white shirt and the elastic across his stomach, holding him there. It was number three on the list. He was pretty sure she didn't know that. She did it the way you'd tuck in a tag.

"Bea says it's handled," she said, somewhere past Coalinga. "She talked to Residential Life. They let the room go." A truck passed them. "She can hold you a spot for spring. Or not. Nobody has to decide anything until the twenty-third."

"Okay," Max said, into her shirt.

"Bea was very nice about it."

He didn't say anything to that either. Her pulse ticked in the strap against his ribs, quick and even, the whole way up the 5. She smelled of her own perfume again, plain and familiar. No smoke.

*

There was a car in the driveway when they got home.

It was a green Subaru with an Oakland co-op parking permit and a bumper sticker that said MY OTHER CAR IS ALSO A BICYCLE, and the rear window was so covered in stickers he couldn't see through it. Victoria braked so hard he slid down an inch inside her shirt.

"Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no."

Artemis was sitting on the front steps.

Even sitting, she was big. Six-four of her folded down onto the second step with her knees up around her ears in ripped black jeans and Docs, a gray hoodie with the sleeves shoved up over forearms covered in tattoos, purple hair hanging in her eyes with an inch of black at the roots. A barista apron was still tied around her waist, green, OATLY across the front, losing the fight with her hips. She was vaping. When she saw the Mercedes, she stood up, all the way up, and kept standing up, and put the vape in her pocket.

Victoria got out of the car. "Artie, mija. What a—you didn't call."

"I texted Max," Artemis said.

Her voice was flat. Dead calm. He'd heard her use it exactly once before, at Thanksgiving two years ago, when she'd dropped a whole tray of her own vegan enchiladas on the kitchen floor and looked at them for a long time.

"Izzy let me in at one," she said. "I've been out here since two. Because I couldn't be in there with her." She looked at Victoria's chest. At the white shirt. "Is he in there?"

"Artie—"

"Tía. Is he in your shirt."

Victoria didn't answer. She didn't have to. Max had moved, without meaning to, and the shirt had moved with him.

Artemis made a sound in her throat. Then she put both hands over her face, and dragged them down, and her septum ring clicked against her knuckle.

"What the fuck," she said. "What the fuck, Max."

"Language," Victoria said automatically.

"Sorry. Sorry, Tía. I just—" Artemis held up her phone. The screen was a screenshot of a screenshot, gone grainy and blown out, but he knew it. The checkered Van. Rory's foot. Nine skull emojis. A tiny pale smear on the insole that was him. "Somebody's little sister at my co-op goes to school with Kenzie whatever. The story's gone. But somebody screenshotted it and it went around our house chat Saturday as, like, a deepfake thing. People thought it was funny. Somebody zoomed in." She swallowed. "I zoomed in more. That's his face. I've known that face since he was fourteen."

"Mija, let's go inside, it's so hot—"

"I don't want to go inside, Tía, I want to know why Max is three inches tall and living in your bra."

The front door opened.

*

Izzy was in Miguel's tank top. Same one, white, gone gray at the armpits, hanging off one shoulder over a black bra. Black bike shorts. Bare feet. Her eyeliner was fresh.

"Hi, Mom," she said. "Hi, Max." She leaned in the doorframe and looked up, a long way up, at her cousin. "She's been out here vaping on our steps for two hours. Mrs. Kim asked if she was a delivery."

"Izzy," Victoria said.

"What? I let her in. I made her a coffee. With oat milk. She didn't drink it."

"Because I didn't want anything from you," Artemis said.

*

They ended up in the kitchen, because that was where the Vasquez women always ended up. Victoria took him out of her shirt and set him on a folded dish towel on the island, and stayed standing beside it with one hand flat on the counter next to him, not touching. Izzy sat up on the counter by the sink, swinging her heels against the cabinet. Artemis didn't sit at all. She paced. Three steps took her across the whole kitchen. She kept almost hitting her head on the pendant light.

She'd stopped and bent down to look at him, twice. The first time, her face filled the whole world: green eyes behind the purple bangs, freckles across her nose, the silver ring in her lip, and she'd said, "Hey. Hey, Max. Are you hurt? Is anything—are you hurt?" and he'd said no, and she'd said, "Okay. Okay," and straightened up and put both hands in her hair.

The second time she'd just looked at him for a long time and said, "You look like shit."

"Thanks," he said.

"Sorry. Sorry. You don't, you look—you look fine for a guy who's—I'm going to stop talking." She stood up. "Tía. How long."

Victoria opened her mouth.

"Three weeks," Izzy said. "Ish. Twenty-four days. Not that anybody's counting."

"Twenty-four days." Artemis turned all the way around. "And nobody called a doctor. Nobody called me. Nobody called, I don't know, a chemist, the police—"

"And say what?" Izzy said. "Hi, my stepbrother's the size of a lipstick?"

"Yes!"

"Mija," Victoria said to Artemis, very gently. "We're handling it."

"How?" Artemis spread her arms, and her hoodie rode up over her belly, a round freckled curve with a silver barbell in the navel. "How are you handling it, Tía? Kenzie whoever has him in her friend's shoe. On Instagram. His school called you, right? He's supposed to be at Ventus in, what, three weeks?"

"Nineteen days," Max said.

Nobody looked at him.

"That's handled," Victoria said. "Bea handled it."

"Bea." Artemis laughed once, not a laugh. "Bea Clydesdale. Okay. Great. So he's not even going."

"Nobody has to decide anything until the—"

"Tía, he's three inches tall. He's not deciding anything. You're deciding. Or—" She turned, and looked at Izzy on the counter, and her face changed. "Or she is."

Izzy stopped swinging her heels.

"Where did it come from?" Artemis asked. Her voice had gone flat again. "Not you, Tía. You'd have told me by now, you'd have cried about it by now. Where'd the stuff come from, Iz?"

"How would I know?"

"Because you know everything that happens in this house. You've known everything that happens in this house since you were twelve."

"Maybe ask your co-op." Izzy smiled. "Isn't that where people order weird chemicals off the internet? You told it at Abuela's birthday. Everybody heard. Some girl who shrank her ex for a week and put him in a hydroponics tent."

Artemis went red. All the way to her ears, so the piercings in them looked suddenly teenage. "That was a story. That was secondhand. That was, like, a bit, and it was April—"

"Mm. Okay."

"Don't do that. Don't mm-okay me. You don't get to do that to me, Iz, I taught you that."

"You didn't teach me shit."

"Language," said Victoria, faintly.

"I taught you eyeliner." Artemis's voice cracked a little and came back. "I taught you how to get into shows with a fake wristband. You slept on my floor every Christmas till you were fifteen. You used to call me when your mom was being—" She stopped and glanced at Victoria and didn't finish it. "You used to call me."

"Yeah. Used to." Izzy hopped down off the counter. She was more than a foot shorter than Artemis, and she walked right up to her anyway, chin up, the tank top sliding off her shoulder. "Then you left for your gays-and-theys house and got a septum ring and decided we were all trash. You don't answer. You come down for laundry. You come down for Mom's food. You look at me like I'm a phase. And now you drive down here and you're, like, so worried about Max? You've known him four years and you still called him the stepbrother."

"That's not—"

"You called him the stepbrother to my face, Artie."

"I was seventeen! I was being an asshole! I'm sorry! I've been sorry for, like, two years, I just—you stopped talking to me, Iz, you stopped first—"

"Because you left."

It came out loud. It rang off the cabinets. Izzy's face did something Max had never seen it do. It crumpled, for half a second, and then it went hard again, so fast he almost didn't believe it.

Nobody said anything. The fridge hummed.

"Girls," Victoria said. "Please."

It wasn't to either of them. It was to the kitchen in general, and her hand had come down over him on the dish towel, finally, cupping him, the way she did when the phone rang. Her palm was damp. Her pulse was going hard in it.

*

Artemis looked at her aunt's hand for a long moment. Then she came over and crouched down beside the island, down and down, until her eyes were level with the countertop and she was looking straight at him through the gap in Victoria's fingers.

"Tía. Can I." She held out her hand, palm up, flat on the counter. "Please."

Victoria hesitated. Then she lifted her hand.

Artemis picked him up. She did it carefully, two hands cupped, holding her breath, and then, because she was Artemis and she was panicking, she put him in the front pocket of her hoodie. The big kangaroo one. It was dark and smelled of weed and espresso grounds and old lint, and of her, sweet and musky, with her belly right there against the fabric behind him, rising and falling fast.

"Sorry," she said down into it. "Sorry. I don't—I didn't know where else to put you. I need my hands. I talk with my hands. If I put you down I'll forget where I put you."

"It's fine," he said.

"It's not fine. None of this is fine." She stood up. He swayed in the pocket. Her voice came down through the fabric, close and low, just for him. "Max. Listen. I don't know who did this and I don't know how to undo it and I am not a chemist. But I know people who know people. There's a girl at the co-op whose girlfriend is in the Berkeley chem PhD program. I can make calls. I can take you home with me tonight. Right now. You can sleep in my sock drawer. You'd hate it. It's very gay in there."

He laughed. He didn't mean to. It came out of him in a croak into the lint.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. So that's a yes, you still have a sense of humor. Good." Then her hand came down on the outside of the pocket, over him, not pressing, just there. "So. Real question. And I need you to answer it, not her. Not Tía. You."

He waited.

"Do you even want to go back?" Artemis asked. "To normal. To, like. Big. College. Your own room. Your own life. Do you want that?"

He opened his mouth.

He thought about Ventus. The blue shower caddy. Aisle twelve. TWIN XL in big blue letters. Brianna from Residential Life and the waitlist and somebody else in his room. Zeke, whoever Zeke was. Four girls to every boy. Miserable by October.

He thought about Lupe's arch over his chest at Zumba, and the churro crumb, and the lullaby. Izzy's fist closing all the way around him at one in the morning. He's mine.

He thought about being five-foot-eight, alone, in a twin XL bed, with nobody's heartbeat under him at all.

Nothing came out.

"Max," Artemis said.

He shut his eyes in the dark of her pocket and tried. He really tried. His throat closed on it.

In the kitchen, nobody breathed. He could feel Artemis waiting, through the hoodie, her belly gone still against his back. He could feel Victoria not saying anything, which was louder than anything she could have said.

Then Izzy laughed. Not her mean laugh. A small, tired one.

"You drove down from Oakland to ask him that?" she said. "Artie. Come on. He's not you. He doesn't leave."