Full Disclosure Shrunken First Semester chapter 6 by maximally

“Tell her,” Max said.

It came out before he’d decided anything. His mouth had just gotten tired of waiting for the rest of him.

Fanny’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Tell her. Tell her everything. Tell her about Izzy.”

Because the other way was the car. He could see it from here: the gold sedan with one tire in the lawn, the 5 going by at eighty, him riding to LA in the cupholder with the FAFSA folder still sitting on his desktop like a time bomb, and Izzy next door with a whole summer to decide who got to find it next. At least Victoria was a grown-up. A terrible, hovering, seating-chart grown-up, but a grown-up, with a car that wasn’t held together with zip ties and a brain that could hold two thoughts at once. Maybe one of them could be Isabella.

“Everything,” Fanny repeated.

“Everything.”

“Okay, baby.” She nodded, fast, like a woman psyching herself up at the top of a waterslide. “Okay. Tía can do everything. Everything is my best thing.”

She did not close the laptop.

Max noticed that, and opened his mouth to say not that part, and the door was already swinging open.

“—because Mrs. Okafor already sent me a picture of your back tire, Fernanda, in her group chat, which means the whole street has seen your back tire, and I would like for once in my life to host a dinner where the neighbors aren’t—”

Victoria stopped in the doorway.

His stepmom was dressed for a day of getting ready, which for Victoria took as much work as the night itself. At six-one and two-fifty, every pound of it retired plus-size model, she’d stuffed herself into a white ribbed tank top that was mostly a suggestion and a pair of green bike shorts that had been to more Pilates classes than Pilates had. Her hips filled the doorframe from one side of the trim to the other. Her hair was rolled up in a dozen pink Velcro rollers for tonight, her reading glasses were pushed up into the middle of them, and her gold bangles slid down her forearm and clanked together when she raised her coffee mug to point it at her sister. Her phone was in the other hand, the screen lit up with what was absolutely a seating chart. Behind her came the smell: dark roast, coconut hair oil, and the expensive perfume she wore even to take out the recycling.

She took in Fanny. Fanny bent over the desk. Fanny in front of Max’s laptop.

“Are you on his computer?”

“Tori,” said Fanny. “Close the door.”

“Where’s Max? Is he in the shower? Fanny, you can’t just go through a boy’s—”

“Victoria. Close the door. And put the coffee down.”

Something in her voice did it. Max had never in his life seen Fanny tell Victoria to do anything and have it work. Victoria’s mouth stayed open a second longer, and then she reached back and pushed the door shut with two fingers, and she set her mug down on top of his dresser, right on his calc textbook, which she would never have allowed anybody else to do.

“What,” Victoria said. “What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything,” said Fanny. “Somebody did something to him.”

She reached two fingers into the front of her crop top, and Max let go of the necklace.

He came up out of the dark into the bright morning room the same way he’d gone in, a little wet and a lot pink, pinched by the scruff between Fanny’s thumb and finger like a kitten. She set him down on her flat palm and held him out across the room toward her sister at the height of Victoria’s chin.

Victoria looked at the hand.

He watched her see him. It didn’t happen all at once. First she saw something on Fanny’s palm and her face went tight, like it might be a bug. Then she saw that it had arms. Then she saw that the arms were waving at her, slowly, sort of apologetically. And then her eyes came all the way down to his face and stayed.

“Hi,” said Max. “It’s me.”

Victoria put her hand over her mouth.

She didn’t scream. That was the first surprise. She just stood there with her palm over her lips and her bangles stacked up at her elbow, and made a long, thin noise through her fingers, like a teakettle somebody had taken off the burner a little too late. Then she lowered the hand.

“I know what that is,” she said.

“You what?” said Max.

“I know what that is.” A shiver went through her, up from her knees to the rollers. Then she shut it down so fast he almost missed it. “It was all over Milan when I was twenty. Guys would put two drops in a mojito for a joke and wake up living in somebody’s clutch.” She stepped closer, and her eyes went from Max to Fanny’s face. They narrowed. “Fernanda.”

“Don’t.”

“Was this Gerald’s?”

“Gerald took his stuff to Van Nuys!”

“You show up at the crack of dawn. Unannounced. You sneak into my son’s bedroom—”

“I brought him a hoodie—”

“—and now he’s the size of a lipstick, and you want me to—”

“Tori.” Fanny took a breath that lifted Max a full inch. “Baby nephew said tell you everything, so I’m gonna tell you everything, and you’re gonna let me get to the end, because if I stop in the middle I’ll lose my place. Okay?”

Victoria folded her arms under her breasts. It meant go.

And Fanny told her everything.

Max had asked for that, and he regretted it almost immediately. Fanny didn’t have a summary setting. She had one speed, which was all of it, in order, with no editing, like a dashcam. She told Victoria about the drive up and the Crunchwrap and the gift bag. She told her about the dive across the bed. She told her, unprompted and in detail, about the box of condoms under his pillow, and Victoria’s head swiveled to the pillow and swiveled back so fast the rollers rattled. She told her about Max landing in her butt. Max said, “You don’t have to—” and Fanny held up one finger without stopping and told her about the fart anyway. Then she told her about Izzy knocking, and the cleavage, and the side-of-the-foot sweep, which she acted out on the carpet with her bare foot. She told her about the laundry pile and the thong.

“Whose thong?” Victoria said.

“Whose thong do you think?”

Victoria closed her eyes for a second.

Then Fanny got to the part where Izzy stood at the desk with her hand on the laptop. And because Fanny was telling everything, she told that part exactly the way it had happened, word for word. Click, click, click, till five. His face was all red. I’m just worried about him. It’s his business.

Max listened to it come out of his aunt’s mouth and felt the whole plan click shut around him like a seatbelt. Every sad, soft, sanded little line Izzy had set out that morning, Fanny picked up and handed over, word for word, to the one person they had been meant for all along. She didn’t mean to. That was the trick of it. Fanny was just being honest. Izzy had known she would be.

“She came in worried about him,” Victoria said slowly.

“She came in fishing,” said Fanny.

“She came in for her charger. She asked me where her charger was last night.” Victoria frowned. “She was worried?”

“Mom,” said Max. “She did this. Izzy did this to me. She came in to make sure Tía found the laptop. She looked right at the pile where I was. She knew.”

He’d expected the look Victoria always gave him when he said anything about Izzy, the one that said sweetie, you’re being sensitive. He didn’t get it. What he got was worse. She was looking at him with her eyes all soft and wet, the way you look at somebody in a hospital bed who’s talking about how fine he feels.

“Sweetie,” she said. “Isabella can’t get the Roku to change inputs.”

“That’s not—”

“And then the laptop,” Fanny barreled on, “which, Tori, I swear, I opened it for him, so we’d know, and it’s—okay. You know what. It’s easier if you just look.”

Fanny stepped aside, which in that room was a whole event. And Victoria came forward and bent over the desk, the same desk Fanny had just been bent over, and looked.

The text file was still on top. Fanny reached past her and clicked it out of the way, and there it was again: FAFSA, wide open, four hundred and twelve thumbnails across the screen.

Victoria’s glasses came down out of her rollers and onto her nose.

Max had watched Fanny go through that folder like a clearance rack. Victoria went through it like a casting director. She didn’t whistle. She didn’t talk. She took the trackpad in one long red nail and scrolled one slow row at a time, and her lips pressed together and her chin pulled back, and every so often she stopped and leaned in close to the screen and made a small, critical hm.

“The lighting on these is terrible,” she said finally.

“Tori.”

“I’m just saying. Somebody should tell these girls.”

Then she stopped scrolling, and leaned in again, and the hm didn’t come.

It was one of the tall ones. Max could see it past Fanny’s thumb: a woman built like a column of something soft, broad-shouldered and heavy and very tall, standing barefoot by a kitchen counter in a white ribbed tank top. She had a little man pinned in place on the granite under one big finger, the way you’d hold down a recipe card in a breeze. She was peering at him over a pair of reading glasses.

Victoria took her own glasses off. She looked at them. She put them back on.

“Oh,” she said.

“What?” Fanny leaned in over her shoulder and squinted. Then she saw it, and her mouth went flat. “No.”

“Fernanda, that is obviously—”

“That is a tall lady. There’s, like, sixty tall ladies. Scroll down two. There’s a short one sitting on a guy on a bed, laughing her head off, and that’s obviously—”

“That’s not you.”

“That’s exactly me, she has my knees.”

“Your knees are not that famous.”

“Okay, can we not,” Max said, “do this? Please? While I’m right here? Can we not fight over which one of you is the one?”

Both of them looked at him. Then they looked at each other. And Max heard it, too late, the way it sounded. Which one of you is the one.

“Mijo,” said Fanny, very gently.

“That’s not what I—”

“Oh, sweetie,” said Victoria, and that was much, much worse.

She straightened up. She pushed her glasses back up into her rollers, and she took a long breath, and when she let it go she was sad in a way that had nothing to do with him being three inches tall.

“You never told me any of this,” she said. To him. But she was looking at Fanny. “Four years. Four years under my roof, and you never told me anything. You told her.”

“He tells me stuff because I don’t make a spreadsheet out of it,” said Fanny.

“I don’t make—”

Fanny pointed at the phone in Victoria’s hand, where the seating chart was still glowing.

Victoria set the phone face-down on the dresser, next to her mug.

“I’m going to sit down,” she announced, to no one.

She turned toward the bed. Fanny was still holding Max out on her palm, a little too far from her body, like she wasn’t sure who he belonged to right now. So Fanny did the obvious thing. She tipped her hand and slid him off onto the comforter, to get him out of the middle of things while two grown women argued.

He landed on his butt on the navy Pokéball, right on the white band through the middle of it, and looked up.

Victoria was already sitting down.

She didn’t sit like Fanny. Fanny flopped. Victoria lowered, the way she’d been taught to do it for photos, knees together, back long, one hand on the mattress to guide herself. It was slow. It was graceful. And from where Max was sitting, it was the green bike shorts coming down out of the sky over him like the bottom of an elevator, two huge Lycra hemispheres, each one bigger from down here than the whole house had ever looked from the street, the seam between them stretched dark down the middle, blotting out the window, the poster, the light, everything.

“TORI, BUTT!”

Victoria stopped.

She stopped with maybe half an inch to spare. Max lay flat on his back on the comforter, arms over his face, and looked straight up into green. There was so much of it. The shorts were thin enough that he could see the texture of the skin underneath, the dimples and the faint crease where each cheek met the back of her thigh, and the heat coming off her pressed down on him before she ever did, a damp, heavy pocket of air that smelled like laundry soap and the inside of a Pilates studio and, underneath that, plain warm Victoria. The bed had already sunk toward her. He was sliding.

“What?” said Victoria, frozen in a half-squat with her knees together. “What, what?”

“He’s under you.”

“Where?”

“Under your butt, Tori, where do you think?”

Victoria looked down between her own legs, which didn’t help, because there was a whole Victoria in the way.

“Don’t move,” she whispered. “Mama’s not moving.”

“You are moving,” Max yelled up. “You’re shaking.”

Fanny’s hand shot in under her sister’s butt like she was grabbing a dropped phone off a subway track, all four rings, and scooped him out sideways. Max went skidding across her palm and fetched up against her wrist bracelets. And Victoria, released, finally sat, all at once, with a big full-body flump that bounced Fanny’s whole arm.

The comforter puffed out on both sides of her.

So did something else.

pfft

It was small. It was practically polite. It came out into the Pokéball right where Max had been lying four seconds earlier, and it hung there over the bed, and the three of them sat with it.

Victoria didn’t blink. She looked straight ahead at the Attack on Titan poster with her chin up and her hands folded in her lap, like a woman waiting for her name to be called at the DMV.

“That was the mattress,” she said.

“That was the carne asada,” said Fanny.

“It was the mattress, Fernanda.”

It reached Max a second later, curling up off the bed and over Fanny’s wrist. Garlic and lime. Last night’s grill. That same sweet, sneaky, familiar Victoria smell that he used to wake up to through his old air purifier back in tenth grade, when she would come barging into his room after a big dinner and stand next to it like she was just checking the filter. He had spent two years pretending he didn’t know what that was about.

He didn’t cough. He noticed that he didn’t cough, and he hated that he noticed.

“Give him to me,” Victoria said.

Fanny didn’t move. “Say please.”

“I’m his mother.”

“You’re his stepmom, and you just almost sat on him.”

“You did sit on him! You told me so! In detail!”

Fanny opened her mouth, and closed it. She’d walked into that one. She held out her hand.

Victoria took Max the way you’d take a ring out of a box. Two fingers under his armpits, the bangles clinking, and then she cupped him in her palm and brought him up close to her face. She tugged her reading glasses back down, and up this close they made her eyes twice the size they already were. She looked at his face. She tipped his chin up with a fingernail and looked at his pupils, one, two, like the school nurse. She turned him around and looked at his back.

Then she sniffed him.

Her nose came down over him like the nose of a plane, and she breathed in long and slow, and her whole face went through about five feelings in a row.

“Why,” she said, “does he smell like Isabella.”

“The thong,” said Fanny. “I told you about the—”

“You said he landed in it.”

“He landed in it crotch-first.”

“And,” Victoria said, sniffing again, a little suspiciously, “Crunchwrap.”

“I said everything.”

Victoria lowered him to her lap. Her thighs were bare under the bike shorts, a wide warm brown plain, and she set him on top of the right one. It felt like sitting on a heated car seat that breathed. Then she leaned past him toward the desk.

“The other one,” she said. “The file. Let me see the file.”

“Tori, maybe skip the—”

“I want to see the file, Fernanda.”

Izzy had walked off with the charger, so there was nothing to unplug. Fanny clicked the file open again, picked the whole laptop up off the desk, and carried it over to the bed, holding it open in front of her sister like a waiter with a wine list. Victoria read ideas the way she read everything: like an invoice she suspected was padded.

She went through the green without a word. When she hit 2. butt, her eyes flicked to the dent she’d just made in the comforter and away. At 3. breasts, she shifted a little in her tank top, which didn’t help her and didn’t help Max. At 5. sweat she glanced down at the faint wet print his body had left on her thigh, and said nothing.

The yellow slowed her down. Max watched her get to 11. fart and press her lips together very hard. She didn’t look at the comforter. She didn’t look at Fanny. She looked so carefully at nothing that it was the loudest thing in the room.

Then she got to 13.

“Smothering,” Victoria read. And then, sincerely, as if it were the strangest word on the list: “Who would want that?”

Nobody said anything.

Fanny looked at Victoria. Max looked at Victoria. Fanny looked at Max, and he looked back up at her from his stepmom’s lap, and for one second the two of them were in perfect agreement.

“What?” said Victoria.

“Nothing,” said Fanny.

“What?”

“Tori. You made him wear a bike helmet to the mailbox.”

“That was one summer.”

“It was all of high school, Mom,” Max said.

“There was a sinkhole in Cupertino.”

Her nail went on down the screen anyway. She hit 14. humiliation and made a small, offended sound that sounded like it was on his behalf. She hit the red and went silent. She read that part the way she read a lease, every line, jaw working a little, and at 18. cuckold her gaze went sideways to her sister for half a second, and Fanny said, “Don’t,” and Victoria said, “I didn’t say a word,” and kept going. She got to the bottom. To 21. To 21 total. green first.

She read the footer twice.

“Green first,” she said. “Well. At least it’s organized.”

Then she reached up and closed the laptop in Fanny’s hands. Not slammed. Closed, the way you close a menu after you’ve ordered, with one flat palm on the lid. The fan whined down. The room got very quiet.

“Okay,” said Victoria. “Here is what we’re going to do.”

“Oh, God,” said Fanny. “She’s got a plan.”

“I have a plan. One of us has to have a plan. Number one.” She held up one finger. “Nobody is going to a hospital. I have seen what happens to boys like this in hospitals, and it is not getting better. It’s getting on the news.”

“Agreed,” said Fanny, which seemed to surprise both of them.

“Number two. Nobody tells Mom.” Victoria said it fast, and she didn’t look at either of them. “Not yet. If Mom finds out, Mom will be in my kitchen by lunch, and she’ll stay until Christmas.”

“Super agreed.”

“Number three. The dinner is still happening.”

“Tori—”

“I have people coming at six to say goodbye to my son, and I have a seating chart, and he is going to be at it.” She looked down at Max. Her voice did something soft and terrifying. “It’s just going to be a smaller chair.”

“Mom,” said Max. “Number four. Ask Izzy.”

Victoria looked at him.

“Just ask her,” he said. “That’s all. Just ask her where she was last night. Ask her why the laptop was warm. Ask her why she was in here this morning and then went in her room and didn’t put her music on. She always puts her music on. She’s been sitting on the other side of that wall this whole time, listening. Ask her.”

For a second, Victoria didn’t answer. She turned her head toward the wall over his desk. The one with the Smash print on it, still hanging crooked from when Fanny hit her knees. Izzy’s room was right through there, and it hadn’t made a peep in twenty minutes.

Max watched his stepmom listen to it. The silence. Her rollers tipped a little to one side, like a dog hearing a whistle.

Then she looked back down at him in her lap, and at Fanny, and at the closed laptop in Fanny’s arms, and at the comforter with her own print still pressed into it.

“Sweetie,” Victoria said. “Your sister went back to bed. It’s July. She doesn’t do mornings.”

From the other side of the wall, very softly, somebody’s phone made the little ding of a text going out.

All three of them heard it.

Victoria’s eyes went narrow behind her reading glasses. Fanny hugged the closed laptop against her chest like a riot shield. And on top of the dresser, next to the mug, the phone with the seating chart on it buzzed once, face-down, against the calc textbook.

Victoria didn’t reach for it.

“Isabella?” she called. Then, louder, in the voice that had once gotten a whole Costco checkout line to move to register nine: “Isabella. Could you come in here a second, please?”