Before long, an unusually warm Spring rolled around and once again, the girl was out and about, wearing very revealing clothing, exposing a lot of her tanned skin, including her midriff, her well-toned legs and, on occasion, the lower portion of her butt cheeks, as she liked to wear one pair of jean shorts which barely covered her buttocks. Quite often, she would also wear revealing tank-tops, leaving her arms bare and showing off the sides of her little boobs.
Brett knew he shouldn’t ogle the now-sixteen-year-old young girl. He was no pedophile. There were barriers he simply wouldn’t cross. Still, the cute girl teasing and occasionally acting flirtatious (winking at him or sticking out her tongue) tugged at his primal urges.
The urges became tougher and tougher to curtail as the summer advanced. It was during one hot summer day that he watched with interest as the girl, along with her mother and some friends, set up a small, cheap blow-up pool big enough to accommodate a few of the kids at a time. They set it up in the grass just off the sidewalk, somewhat closer to his apartment and certainly well within his field of vision.
It wasn’t long before the girls had gone back inside to change into their swimsuits. The girl wore a small 2-piece bikini and he took note of her nice smooth legs and bubble butt. This was the first time he’d seen her unencumbered by other clothing. He also noticed that although she was still rather flat-chested, small bumps had begun to sprout out. The girls took turns jumping into the pool and it soon became a splash-and-giggle fest. The girl and one of her friends noticed his voyeurism and stared up at him a couple times, making eye contact as they posed for him. His eyes were drawn from her eyes to her chest – it was clear that her nipples were hardened during all the excitement and were poking into the threads of her sheer top. This caused him to look away and pretend he was looking elsewhere, which in turn caused the girls to giggle and return to playing.
He went back to what he was doing on his computer. It was on that first time observing her at the pool playing with her friends that he heard some commotion after awhile (as he had the window open and could hear through the screen) and looked down to see the girls screaming and yelling. They were tossing something at each other and each girl moved out of the way as if they were playing a game of hot potato. He thought perhaps they’d come across a big bug and were terrorizing each other. Eventually, the girl put her flip-flops on and stomped hard with her foot on the ‘bug’.
To his horror, the stomping had left quite a bit of bloody gore residue behind. Brett came to realize, after her mother had come out of their house to scold the girls for ‘playing with their food’, that what the girls were playing with was a LUMP shrinky. When the girl took off her flip-flops, he noticed even from his distance how cute her small feet were, with her feminine toes and perfectly smooth tan skin. He loved the way she scrunched and flexed her toes as she held her foot up to inspect it, making sure none of the lump’s guts got on her sole.
Thus ended the life of Kelly Baxter, a young Congressional staffer who had recently ‘disappeared’. The aspiring young blond was working for a U.S. Representative that was vehemently opposed to LUMP Foods and was working diligently to get their sales banned in the U.S. Special LUMP agents had snuck into her home in the middle of the night and shrunk her down as she slept. She had awoken not long after within the confines of a large LUMP food box, not knowing where she was or what had happened to her, but had quickly come to the realization of her ironic and surreal situation, for what good it had done her.
Having watched the stomping of the tiny person, Brett reflected on his own thoughts about LUMP Foods. He’d enjoyed many a LUMPs box over the years, never paying much mind to the individual lumps. He was enthralled when success of the shrinking technology was announced to the public – knowing that the military as well as environmental scientists had initiated their own studies for decades, with their own purposes in mind, of course. LUMP Foods, he felt, was doing a real service for mankind, ridding the world of criminals and losers, basically on the cheap, while making it a fun and profitable business to recoup a portion of their huge technical investment. Good for them, he had thought at the time. Who knew what doors the technology would open and which tangential uses and offshoots could be discovered. In his mind, it was definitely a positive impact on society. However, while he agreed with the capital punishment of death by shrinking and consumption, he didn’t care for the violent act of squishing lumps. He shuddered as he watched the girl pick pieces of gore from the sole of her flip-flop.
--
Over the summer, he saw the girl out and about several times, grunting a hello on occasion. The girl was likewise lacking in verbosity, often not even replying, though she would look up at him. On more than one occasion, she caught him watching her from his office and took a few moments to look up at him. It struck Brett as odd that he never noticed the girl alone with a boy in the roughly year and a half that he’d live in the complex. Sure, on occasion when there was a group playing, one or two boys would invariably join, but she never showed the slightest inclination for any of them. He wondered if she didn’t like boys in a sexual way. She seemed confident enough in herself. Perhaps she thought of him as a fatherly figure. But if that were the case, he found it confusing when he finished his jogging sessions and walked back through the square, often shirtless when it was really hot out, and caught her looking out her window, staring at him.
It was around this time when he noticed the girl’s mother begin to sneer and scowl at him on the rare occasion when he saw her, which caused him some consternation, since he didn’t feel he had done anything to earn the woman’s enmity. Brett seldom saw the mother about. If she worked, he reckoned, than she must be up at the crack of dawn and return home before her daughter finished school.
On one of his jogging sessions, he was surprised to come across an old acquaintance at his mail drop box next to the stairwell. It was an old family friend, Geno. Geno had refused to retire when he passed 65 and instead had taken on a part-time job as a mail delivery man. He was a man who had connections in town and always seemed to know more than he should about the goings-on in the town. It was one of the reasons his father had liked him.
“You’re keeping in good shape, I see”, Geno said, “And it looks like you’ve got a fan”, he continued, nodding towards the apartment across the way, where the girl stood standing and observing them.
“Um, yeah. Thanks”, Brett replied, accepting the compliment, adding “Speaking of, do you know anything about that girl? She lives there with her mother, I think.”
A shadow passed over Geno’s face, as if he were remembering something. He turned his back to towards the girl and his normally ebullient voice dropped a couple levels. “Her name’s Becca. Becca Watson. She’s a peach, isn’t she? But you’d best keep your distance from that family.”
When Brett pressed him about the ominous warning, Geno wouldn’t go into further detail. He just wished him well and changed the subject, recalling how well Brett played golf and saying that he was still his ‘idol’, an inside joke between he and Geno and his father whereby Geno’s mock worship of their golfing talent was always good for a friendly laugh, neither taking the game too seriously.
--
Things began to linger for Brett and he became content in his extended break from the business world. He decided that his finances could easily survive another year and his mental health could use another year of recuperation.
Time marched on.
It was on one chilly September morning that Brett saw the girl skipping down the sidewalk with her mother. She was so attractive and full of energy – and yet her mother’s looks and mannerisms were rather frumpy, being heavy-set with messy black curly hair and a slightly unkempt look. This gave him pause in regards to the girl’s looks. Wouldn’t she surely grow up to eventually look like her mother?
Of course, he couldn’t realize that the mother was once quite the looker herself and had undergone a deep depression upon her husband’s leaving her and Becca cold turkey when the girl was but 6 years old. Of Hungarian descent, the woman had married into the English surname of Watson. She had put on lots of weight over the next ten years and let herself go. It was with this state of mind that she had reluctantly taken a job as a low-level technician at the local LUMP Foods plant, relinquishing her suspicions and dislike of the company and, over time, her morals as she discovered just how corrupt the company was. And yet, the woman, Francine, was very protective of her daughter especially when it pertained to males. None were allowed in the house and her daughter was not allowed to date. She had considered loosening the hold on her child once the girl turned seventeen and giving her a bit more freedom. But she didn’t like how the young man from across the way looked at her little girl. He was much older than she and was undoubtedly considering Becca as an easy target. Having had her share of bad luck with men, the last thing she needed was to have her teenage daughter get used and abused (and possibly impregnated) by some man that was nearly twice her age. And yet, she was reluctant to warn the girl off too harshly, for she knew Becca had a rebellious streak that would flare up from time to time. Better to try to scare the man away in her subtle, yet effective, ways.
However, Becca’s burgeoning hormones were just really starting to rev up as she came of age. She was flattered by the attention of the older man next door. She found him strong-looking and attractive and he often smiled at her, though his silence around her was something of a mystery to her. She had overheard him talking with family and an occasional friend he invited over and she liked the man’s vigorous voice and sense of humor, from what she could gather. She had spied his jogging on occasion and thought him very buff. He seemed nothing like the immature boys that hung around her at school. Initially self-conscious about her own looks, her confidence had begun to grow as her bee-stings had grown into half-cups. Her mother assured her she was simply a late bloomer – a comment which made her feel better about herself, seeing as how her mother was well-endowed.
She had asked her mother about the strange young man in the opposite and above apartment; she had inquired about him when she caught him looking at her one day as she played and talked with her friends. That day, she had lingered outside, giving the man the opportunity to come and visit with her had he so chosen. She had hoped he would, but he never did. The mother had suggested she stay clear of the man, that he was bad luck. Of course, when she was told to stay away from the man, her natural inclination was to disobey. She would not abide a loss of freedom in the complex in which she lived. It was bad enough her mother didn’t allow her to date boys from school.
***