IT'S TIME TO MOVE ON

     I think one of the worst places to be is the time when you just wake up. You feel groggy and you just want to go back to sleep. But you know that you have to get up and face the day. I hate it when that happens.
     Then finally you wake up and then you see your family. I don't like seeing my sister first thing in the morning, it annoys me. She always picks on me, even though I'm older than her. She's only 13 and I'm 15. I don't think it's right. She knows I can pound her, but for some reason I don't. Maybe the next time she pokes fun at me, I'll knock her out. Today, she starts poking at me. One good thing about that is that she is waking me up.
     "Hey Kristen, stop it. I WILL make you stop, if you know what I mean," I tell her. She keeps going. "Listen, you stop or I will."
     "Try me," the long blond haired girl says. And she has the nerve to keep poking me too!
     "Alright, Miss Pokey, you really have gotten on my last nerve. You better quit!" and I punch her in the stomach. I know it's not right to punch a girl, but is this a girl? I thought it was an alien from the planet Mars!
     "You made a big mistake, buddy," she replies. What mistake? I mean that I'm around eight inches taller than her! This has GOT to be a joke.
     "Oh, did I hurt your little girly body?" I ask her with a playful concern. I hit her a little softer on the shoulder this time.
     "No, but I promise you that I'll hurt yours." This was really getting me. I would think that a girl her size wouldn't do this. You THINK.
     "Listen, why don't we sit down and eat breakfast. Then we'll forget about the whole thing."
     "Okay. Sure." I hope she understood. Maybe she'll leave me alone for a while.
     Now we're eating breakfast, and it's my favorite cereal, Lucky Charms. Suddenly, I drop my spoon. My right hand starts shaking. Then my left. Now my whole body's shaking. I am feeling a little drowsy, and then I see a bright light coming towards me. "What's happening?" I thought. "Is this a joke?" Next, I start feeling cold and wet, like I was in a big thing of ice cold water. I didn't know that truthfully I was in a big thing of milk. I looked around, and I saw a big pink thing next to me. I climbed up on it, not knowing what it was. I get on it, half dazed, and a bright shining silver comes toward me. I try to swim away from it with the pink thing, and it worked, but I barely made it, and lots of milk waves came in towards me. I slipped and fell, and now the silver thing comes back down again. It goes right under me, and then it picks me up. I see that my sister is there, only a LOT bigger. Hold up? I'm on a spoon! And it's going closer to her mouth...

Now, you might think that I was getting into a lot more than a bargained for here. I didn't have much time to think, so I did the only thing I could think of: scream.
     "Hey, HEY! KRISTEN!" I shouted. But there was no hope, I was going into a black hole of despair. I came closer, and now I could see her teeth. I yell again, "Kristen! I'M ON THE SPOON! HELP! PLEASE!" The spoon finally get to her lips and I'm halfway into darkness, when I'm pulled back into the light really fast. Then I see eyes looking at me real strange. "Jason, is that you?" I hear Kristen ask.
     "Yes, it's me! It's really me!" I tell her.
     "Oh, I was wondering where you were. I mean, I did shrink you." What? This is something. So this is what she meant when she said she'd hurt me. Well, she didn't hurt me yet, but she scared the life out of me. "When someone shrinks, you don't know where they end up. You ended up in the cereal I see. Well, let me get my ruler out." She put the spoon down and sat me down on her napkin. Then she tells me, "Stand up straight and tall. I know that milk has got you weighed down, but you're going to have to." I stood up straight, and a big "1" is marked above my face. "Well, just as I thought. You're one inch for now. I don't know if you'll grow or shrink more. It's even a mystery if you ever grow back."
     "Well, why did you do it?" I asked her. I'm getting very frustrated that she doesn't know the full effects of what she did to me.
     "Listen, Jason, you're going to have to get used to your new size. I've got about a minute until I have to go to school. I hope you're ready to go with me."
     "Go with you? Why not stay here?"
     "Let me put it this way. You stay here, and you might get into something you're not supposed to. Namely MY stuff." She had no idea what she was doing. When I get bigger... well, I don't know if I ever will get bigger. And, by the way, woudn't I be in her stuff anyway? But there was no arguing when you're an inch tall. "Okay," I reluctantly agree.
     "Okay." She grabs me and puts her purse on the table. She unzips the zipper and puts me inside. I land right beside a set of house keys and a stick of lipstick. A 13 year old needs this stuff? I then hear something above me. It goes, "I hope you're comfy, because I can't wait to show you to my friends." And then I felt the purse being lifted up and then it swayed back and forth. I had little light in the purse, but I did see a note and a quarter in the purse. I sat on the quarter, which was bigger than me in width, and thought. How would I get out of my sister's clutches? And what about her friends? If this was her idea of fun, well, she's pretty sick. And what would happen if I get lost? Finally, the purse stops swaying and a big burst of light comes along with a few new faces I've only seen a couple of times before. Then she takes a pocket mirror which is five times higher than me. She zips me back up. I overhear a conversation from the girls.
     I hear Kristen say, "Hey, girls, you know I have something to show you all. It will change its life, and of course yours."
     "What is it?" one of the girls asked.
     "I can tell you that it's small and that it's very cute... to you all anyway." She then unzips the purse, and her hand goes inside, and it reaches for me. I dodge, and now her hand is searching. I can't let her find me. But she's coming closer. A finger then comes towards me, and it grabs me. I start to go up in the light and I feel like I'm going to throw up...
 

I'm closed up in her hand now, in the darkness. I then hear Kristen say, "Girls, what you are about to see is a marvel in itself. He's quite a character, and quite a dream of mine. I love him so much, and I hope you do too."

     I could tell that the girls were getting irritated. "What is it?" the girls were asking. Then Kristen opened her hand up slowly, and the light came to me and then I saw the two girls, and I'll say, they were pretty girls for 13 year olds. One had pretty blue eyes and long blond hair, while the other had dark hair and brown eyes. They were huge at my perspective, and I hoped that the girls wouldn't just panic and kill me. I was hoping that they wouldn't drop me on the floor or something like that. It's not something you think about everyday. But they sat me down on a desk and then put a cup on the desk.

     "Okay," Kristen said. "I don't want my brother all day. In fact, I really don't want him at all. So I'm picking one of YOU two girls to take him with you." One of THOSE girls? Okay, this was a little better than I thought. At least I wasn't being tortured by someone who'd massacre me. I'd be cared by some one who cared.

     Kristen picks me up and puts me in the clear cup. Kristen then takes the cup and spins it around. Now that I'm totally dizzy, she says, "Hey! Dana! He's all yours! Just one moment..." She then walks off a little ways from the group, then faces towards me and gives me some advice. "Listen," she starts, "I don't want you to be killed. Be careful. Besides, you need to realize that you could shrink or grow at any moment. But as I read when I did this, the subject normally doesn't grow but three inches tall until they grow to full size."

     I said to her, "Well, did you read about how small you can get?"

     Kristen answered, "Yes, I did. It said that it wasn't known how small you can get, but when they tested it before, the smallest anyone got was one-fourth of an inch. As you can tell, that's four times smaller than you are now. Everything would be four times bigger than you are now. Besides, you were 5' 4". Now you're one inch. That means everything is 64 times bigger. 64 times faster. 64 times almost everything. Smells are 63 times stronger. And Dana is five foot. That means she's 320 feet tall to you. That's a lot. And I'm not even going to mention weight, since you KNOW that pretty much anything that's bigger than you can kill you. A fall could kill you. The process is very complicated, I hope you know. Dana's going to take care of you, and I KNOW that you and her are going to have a great time together. Believe me."

     With that, she gives me to Dana, the girl with the long blonde hair, and she says nothing but, "Be careful! Bye!" Then I see the two other girls walking off.

     "Hello, Jason! It's been so long and I've wanted to meet you so bad!" Dana cries out to me. "Jason, you don't know how cute you look. You really don't. But Kristen already told me earlier what I need to do with you and what is going to happen to you. She told me that everything that she has told you has been a complete lie, that she knew pretty much everything about the shrinking process. She told me that I was going to experiment. Now, I want you to think that you're a half inch tall."

     "Why?" I ask her.

     "Because I CAN kill you," she replies. That's enough to get me stirred up. So I thought about being a half inch tall. One half inch. One half inch.

     Then I start to get shaky. "Don't worry, Jason. Kristen told me that was the first signs of shrinking," is all I hear. I then shake all over, and then I pass out.

     When I woke up, I saw the world twice as big. I thought to myself, "Goodness, I am smaller. I am a HALF INCH!"

     Then Dana throws me up in the air and then catches me with her hand. Then she goes again, and her head turns sideways. I fall in her ear. "Listen," she says, "you need to stay alert. I put you in my ear so I could hear you. Can you answer me this question: I was 320 feet, now I am how many feet?"

     That question was easy. "640 feet now, Dana."

     "Good. Now how big is one of my strands of hair to you?"

     "About as big as a grapefruit. Why?"

     "Just wondering. Listen, I'm your trainer. And the way this week is going to go for you, you'll need it. Besides, it's good to train at a half inch. Besides, that's how you're gonna be for a while."

     Okay. Time out. This girl, a very pretty girl, tells me that I need to be trained. How?!? There's no training school for shrunk people, is there? And with this 640 foot girl, and most of the girls taller than that, how would I survive. Maybe I'd find a friend. Hah!

     "Oh, and by the way," she says, "this isn't a training school as such. It's pretty much on the job training. And your first job is going to go to the gym. I'll meet you there!" She puts me down on the ground, outside the classroom in the hallway. I see lots of feet come near me.

     Hold up here!