Shrunk! Shrunken First Semester: (S)Mothered chapter 1 by maximally

Max woke up with his face mashed against a cold, hard slab of plywood. His head throbbed. His muscles ached. His stomach felt like it was trying to eat itself. Stale beer clung to his dry mouth, plus something else he couldn’t place — sweet, chemical, wrong. When he cracked his eyes open, the pain around his temples only got worse. Whatever he’d done last night, it couldn’t have been good.

 

He had no clue how long he’d been asleep or where he’d woken up. The only thing he knew for sure was the date. Saturday, September 30th. As of today, he’d been attending Ventus University for one month, and so far college was not the movie he’d rented in his head.

 

Senior spring had been all living on his own, meeting people, maybe a girlfriend. Four weeks in, he was barely passing. He hadn’t tried out for a team or a club. He hadn’t made a friend except his roommate, Zeke, who was stuck with him either way. Worst of all, he hadn’t been invited to a single party — not until last night. Some of that was on him. When he wasn’t in class he hid in the room, gaming and burning through anime. He still blamed the school a little.

 

Like a lot of former women’s colleges, Ventus still ran about four girls to every boy. That had looked like a win on the application. Rankings, athletics, job numbers, a sunny Southern California campus — none of that had hurt. The catch was the House System: a net of sororities that ran student life whether you liked it or not.

 

The website bragged that at least eighty percent of the women undergrads belonged to one of the majors. Diana, the Jock House. Minerva, the Nerd House. Juno, the Goth House. Fortuna, the Hot Girl House. Proserpina, the Loser House. By the end of orientation Max had understood the social map. Everything that mattered orbited the first four, especially Diana and Fortuna. Guys couldn’t join. The only way into parties was to know house girls, and Max still got tongue-tied talking to any woman who wasn’t a blood relative.

 

So the first month had been class, studying, games, sleep, repeat — not a huge upgrade from his teens, except now he had a front-row seat to everything he was missing. Every weekend the campus woke up with four or five parties. He sat in the Unaffiliated Students Dorm and waited for a break. Last night, finally, one had arrived.

 

He’d come back from class Friday and found Zeke waiting. Stocky, fluffy-haired, Mexican-American, same flavor of dork — games, anime, the whole sad toolkit — except Zeke looked better doing it and could actually talk to girls. He was already collecting invites and never missed a chance to mention it.

 

Last night the message was different. He was going out again, and this time he had permission to bring Max. Faced with a real party and only Zeke for backup, Max did the anxious-introvert special. Zeke egged him on. They pre-gamed. By the time they left, the less experienced drinker of the two had more liquid courage than he knew what to do with.

 

Fourteen hours later, the rest of the night was a blur. If his body was the evidence, all he had to show for his first big college party was the mother of all hangovers.

 

He opened his eyes for real.

 

“What the…”

 

Three things hit at once. He wasn’t in his dorm room. He was completely naked. And he was tiny. Action-figure tiny.

 

“Oh, fuck.”

 

He’d seen the stories. People got dosed with all kinds of stuff at college parties. He’d never seen this. He was on top of a coffee table. A pencil beside him was a fallen tree. A half-empty Red Bull was a silver silo. Doing the math made his stomach drop: he couldn’t have been more than a few inches tall.

 

“This can’t be happening.”

 

It was happening. Wide awake. Shivering. Cold air on every inch of bare skin. Heart hammering. The room tilted when he turned his head. Questions stacked up anyway. How. Whether it came off. Where the hell he even was.

 

He rubbed his eyes and looked again.

 

To his right, a modest flatscreen hooked to an aging Nintendo 64. To his left, two well-worn green couches buried under takeout containers and crumpled rolling papers. Behind him, Bob Marley and Pulp Fiction posters loomed like billboards over a third green couch. That was enough. He’d woken up in his own common room, in the building everybody on campus called the Unaffiliated Students Dorm. USD.

 

If Diana had the strongest girls, Minerva the smartest, Juno the scariest, Fortuna the hottest, and Proserpina the grossest, USD got the leftovers on purpose: stoners, slackers, chillers, normies. The ones who lasted four years stayed steady, either by character or by a constant stream of weed and booze. In a school of extremes they were average. Grades, parties, sex lives. Average.

 

Max let out a breath that shook on the way out. Nobody in here was going to invent a cure on a Saturday morning. He was still close to his room. He wouldn’t have to cross a jock, a horny nerd, a goth, an e-girl, or a gooner just to get down the hall. That was something.

 

Getting off the table was the rest of it. The drop to the carpet looked like the side of a building. Four stories, if he was being honest, and he had no clothes, no plan, and a hangover that made standing feel like a bad idea.

 

He got to his feet anyway. The plywood grit stuck to his palms and his knees. The Red Bull can threw a cold bar of shade across the tabletop. Somewhere in the building a pipe knocked. A fridge hummed through the wall like weather.

 

Cure. Clothes. Floor. Room. He could order it like that and pretend it was a quest log.

 

He took one careful step toward the edge. Then, the common-room door latch clicked behind him. When he turned around, he had to resist the urge to groan.

 

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

 

The doorway was full. Not a student. Not Zeke. His stepmother, dressed like Parents’ Weekend was a job she intended to win.

 

Victoria Vasquez-Calhoun, forty-two, six-one, two-fifty, Mexican-American, the kind of retired plus-size model who still treated a Saturday morning like a call time. Wavy black hair to her shoulders, freshly done. Deep brown eyes, round cheeks, full mouth, makeup heavy and tasteful. The low-cut white blouse was losing a war with her chest. The blue jeans were losing a different war with her hips, thighs, and the rest of the argument. Even the leather sandals looked overworked. Each pedicured foot was big enough, at this scale, to finish him and have room left.

 

She took two steps into the common room and squinted down at the table.

 

“What in the…” The focus landed. “Max?”

 

He swallowed. Tried not to look at the blouse. Failed in the usual way. “H-hey, Victoria.”

 

He had met her four years ago, a few weeks into freshman year of high school, the week Dad announced a new wife and a daughter Max’s age. A former model in the house. A girl who’d inherited the face and the heavy-duty curves. He had done his best to treat it like a family decision and not a hormonal accident. Then Dad took a job that lived overseas, and Victoria became the only authority left.

 

Suffocating was the polite word. She picked his clothes. Cooked his meals. Drove him to school. Chaperoned anything that happened after last period. Compared him to Izzy, who collected detentions like trading cards, came home in the back of a police car more than once, and still came out the golden child. By the time college applications came around, distance had been the point. Ventus was a safe six hours south of Sunnyvale. The freedom had been the one part of the freshman pitch that had actually shown up — even if he’d spent it in a dorm room with a controller in his hands. Now she was coming across the carpet on Parents’ Weekend, and the freedom era was already looking short.

 

“There you are.” More annoyed than surprised. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

 

“S-sorry. I just woke up.”

 

“I can tell.” Her eyes went down him and up again. The frown deepened when she hit the lack of clothes. “What the heck happened to you?”

 

“I, uh. I dunno.” He clapped both hands over himself. “Last thing I remember is a party, and then—”

 

“You? Going to a party?” She scoffed. “You really expect me to believe that, Max?”

 

“Well. Yeah?”

 

“Alright. Fine. Keep lying. See if I care.” The sigh was the old mix: frustration, plus the condescension she never seemed to hear in her own voice. “I should have known this would happen.”

 

He did a double-take. “This. As in me shrinking.”

 

“Well. Something like this.” She shook her head. “You’re lucky I found you in here before someone else.”

 

That was the first wrong note. Not the size. The way she had already filed it.

 

“What are you doing down here, anyway?”

 

“So far, mostly trying to find you.” She leaned over the table. The blouse arrived first. Warm shade. Perfume, laundry soap, and a faint salt that said she’d been walking campus since breakfast. “We can probably still make the champagne brunch if we hurry.”

 

He stepped back. “The champagne brunch for what?”

 

“You’re joking, right?” She rubbed her forehead. “Parents’ Weekend.”

 

Right. He’d been dreading it all month. “Shouldn’t we, like, find a way to get me back to normal first?”

 

“Oh, Max.” Pity. The same voice she had used after high-school rejections. She crouched. The table put her chest a few inches from his face, two heavy, clothed hills with a dark valley between them. “You really don’t know what’s going on here, do you?”

 

“No. Do you?”

 

“Like you said. You shrank. Which means someone dosed you with shrinking serum.”

 

“Shrinking… serum?”

 

“It was all over the place when I started modeling. One or two drops, you lose a couple inches. Three or four, a couple feet. Five or six, and you get the idea.” The pity didn’t leave. “The thing is — once you shrink, it’s permanent.”

 

His knees went useless. Permanent meant the month of not-quite-college had been the whole thing. Permanent meant dropout. Permanent meant Sunnyvale, Victoria, Izzy, and no other family who would take a three-inch problem.

 

PRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTT

 

A long, low, bassy sound cut the spiral in half. A second later the coffee table went under a wave of warm, eggy stink he knew from years of a shared hallway bathroom. Victoria rarely did this in public. Alone with him, she had never been shy. She cooked like it was a sport. The results had always been mean.

 

He folded onto the plywood, coughing. “God, that reeks.”

 

“Oh, get over yourself.” She rolled her eyes. “I hate to break it to you, sweetie, but this is what a real woman smells like.”

 

Pushing back on that particular habit had never been a winning game. He got his feet under him while the last of it thinned. “So there’s no cure.”

 

“None that I’ve ever heard of.” A conciliatory smile. “I’m really sorry, Max.”

 

“Okay. Well.” He looked up past the blouse because he had to. “What if there’s one you haven’t heard of?”

 

She pursed her lips the way she always did when he implied he knew something she didn’t. “I doubt it, sweetie.”

 

“But if you don’t know for sure—” He was worse at asserting himself in front of her at any size. Twenty-something times smaller did not help. “Can’t we just—”

 

“Max.” Soft. Forceful. The glare that had ended arguments in Sunnyvale. “We are not going to the hospital today, and that’s final.”

 

He kept pushing anyway. “Why?”

 

“Because I don’t see any sense in getting your hopes up for nothing.” She said that first, automatic. Then she glanced at the common-room door, and the rest of it came out like she’d already run the math on the drive down. “And because the second we walk you into student health, you stop being my problem and start being a file. Labs. Houses. Reports. This campus has a Juno and a Proserpina and a president who does not like surprises on Parents’ Weekend. I am not handing you to any of them before I know who dosed you and who thinks they get to keep you.”

 

The smile came back, smaller. “I can tell you’re upset. I’m sure this is a lot to wake up to. It’s really not the end of the world. I think you’d be very surprised how much a guy your size can still do when he puts his mind to it.”

 

“T.M.I.,” he muttered.

 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” A chuckle. “The point is, we’ll get through this. The same way we always get through everything. Together.” She reached out a finger to tousle his hair and knocked him onto his back. “Heh. Whoopsie.”

 

“It’s alright.” His shoulders slumped. Once she put a foot down, it stayed down. If there was still a hospital conversation in him, it was not going to happen in the next twelve hours. “So what now?”

 

She pulled out her phone, tapped, frowned. “It’s 11:30. As much as I was looking forward to brunch, we should get this show on the road if we want to beat traffic.”

 

“On the road.” His face fell. “You mean—”

 

“I mean we’ve got six hours of driving ahead of us. And if we wait any longer, it’s gonna start cutting into my beauty sleep.”

 

Her hand opened over the table, palm up, a warm pink platform big enough to park on. He stared at it. He almost never pushed her twice in one day. This felt like the only window he was going to get for the life he’d started, even if the life was four weeks of anime and a hangover.

 

He pulled in a breath. “What if… do you think there’s any way I could, like. Stay here?”

 

“Here. As in at school.” Her eyebrows went up. Interest, or at least not the usual dismissal. “Hmm. Well. You’d need a chaperone.”

 

He stepped forward before he could talk himself out of it. “You think it could work?”

 

“I don’t know.” She was already on the phone again, thumb hammering a text. “But I know someone who might.”

 

“Who?”

 

“You’ll see.” The hand came closer. “Anyway. You gonna hop on, or am I gonna have to grab you?”

 

He climbed on. Being held that easily by anyone would have been surreal. Being held that easily by her was worse. She brought him up to eye level, and the blouse filled the whole world behind her face.

 

“Wow.” A chuckle. “That serum really did a number on you, huh?”

 

“Yeah.” He tried, and failed, not to stare. “I… y-yeah.”

 

She caught the fluster and grinned. “Don’t worry, sweetie. Mama’s got you.”

 

He had a line for that. She wasn’t his real mom. He always felt weird when she said it. The line died because she was already lowering him, and the plan was not the palm anymore.

 

Waist-deep. Soft. Hot. The blouse and the bra made a pocket that closed around his hips like dough. Her breasts pressed in from both sides like a pair of big, warm hot-air balloons, heavy enough that breathing became a project.

 

“Victoria—” His face went red on contact. She had always been a lot, sometimes literally in his face. This was a different category. “What the—”

 

“Don’t get any funny ideas, mister.” She stood. A little jiggle seated him deeper. “I just don’t have good pockets in these pants.”

 

“O-okay, but. What if someone sees me in here?”

 

“Maybe they’ll think I’m your girlfriend.” She stuffed him farther, until only shoulders, neck, and head had air, and winked. “I’m happy to play along if it makes you feel better.”

 

PRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAPPPPPPP

 

Her ass answered for him. The aftermath crawled up her back and into the new perch between her breasts, warm and eggy and personal. He coughed into fabric.

 

“That sounds like a yes to me.” She giggled, already turning for the hall. “Now. Off we go.”