Kyle Stevens pushed open the bathroom door and flipped on the light switch, clearly in a hurry, when his gaze fell upon the sink, where his older brother was still seated silently at four inches tall.
“What the… why are you in here in the dark?” the fifteen-year-old groaned with a roll of his eyes.
“Maggie,” Scott said simply, glancing at the edge of the marble countertop.
“I thought she left with Libby.”
“She did.”
“Why the hell are you four? She never makes you four,” Kyle observed with a confused frown.
“Libby asked her.”
“What were you before that? One?”
“Obviously,” Scott deadpanned.
“Geez,” Kyle grumbled, his eyes darting back and forth between the toilet and Scott, as he shifted his stance from side to side with discomfort. “I really have to take a piss.”
“I’ll turn around if that helps,” Scott answered sarcastically, not particularly wanting to interact with anyone now after the ordeal of his afternoon, and shifting himself so that his back was to the commode.
“Yeah, yeah. Look, just because Mom and Maggie don’t care if you see them in their underwear doesn’t mean it goes the same way with everyone. C’mon, stand up, we’re leaving,” Kyle ordered, poising his hand near the edge of the sink.
“Okay,” Scott shrugged again, rising unsteadily to his feet and keeping the tissue wrapped like a towel around his waist with as much dignity as he could muster.
“For God’s sake, are you just wearing a Kleenex?” Kyle asked with disgust, withdrawing his hand for a moment.
“Yeah.”
“Where are the ones you were wearing before she found you?”
“Back in Mom’s room, I think, but they’re not going to fit, and she took the PMRD with her.”
“Of course she did,” Kyle grunted, laying his hand back on the sink. “Whatever, just hop in and I’ll take you to the dresser with your other stuff.”
“Really?”
“Did I stutter? C’mon, I’m bursting,” Kyle commanded with another tap of his fingers on the surface, more out of urological necessity than anger.
“Right, right. Sorry,” Scott peeped as he hurriedly boarded his brother’s hand. “Um, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” the lanky teen said under his breath as he quickly made his way into Judy’s bedroom toward the top two drawers of her dresser, which for the past month had become Scott’s designated wardrobe. It contained clothes of all sizes he could be changed to, particularly with Maggie’s penchant for reducing her brother before disrobing him and leaving the garments to be forgotten, which in this case was a plus.
“No, really. I… appreciate it, man,” Scott said again as earnestly as possible while his brother dragged open both drawers before lowering his palm into the midst of the folded outfits for his four-inch passenger to disembark.
“Yeah, well, I said I’d help you if they did this to you, so here we are,” Kyle repeated, crossing his arms while Scott got his bearings on the uneven terrain of the drawer. “Think there’s something you can use in there? I saw Mom a couple days ago trying to match stuff up by size, so there’s probably a set for four in there.”
“I think I’m good,” agreed the twenty-one-year-old as he glanced around the neatly organized piles of clothes, quickly observing several outfits that would suit his needs. “Listen, I just… wanted to say something real quick before you go.”
“Can you say whatever it is in two words or less? Cuz I still have to go really fricking bad,” Kyle groused, though he remained standing in the same place, his attention surprisingly undivided.
“I’m sorry,” Scott said dryly, having for a while owed this same phrase to his brother that he’d so unsuccessfully tried with Maggie a month before. The icy reception he’d received from his youngest sibling on his original arrival home after the sentencing had discouraged making an attempt before, but now, regardless of the response it got, Scott knew he just had to get it out in the open.
Kyle observed his brother for a moment, his forehead furrowed, his eyes obviously searching intently for some sign of disingenuousness or the clever wordplay that Scott had become such a magician with in getting himself out of sticky situations during his youth.
“I know, man,” the youngest Stevens sibling breathed at last, his tone genuine, finally breaking the gaze with the brother he had once respected like a celebrity as he ambled out of the room and back toward the hall.
Scott’s breath caught in his chest as he hunkered over the mouthpiece of Maggie’s cell phone, swallowing profusely and licking his lips in a desperate attempt to remove the painful dryness in his throat. The dull ring sounded out on the lowered volume as Ella’s number flashed on the screen.
Flanking him on either side were his sister’s smooth, tanned legs as she stretched out on her bed to relax, having deposited Scott and her phone onto the mattress between the valley of her limbs to, against all odds, fulfill her end of the bargain. Maggie’s toes danced back and forth, scrunching over the edge of the bed in time with the dial tone. With arms crossed, she was gazing down at him with a simpering smirk and a raised eyebrow to suggest she didn’t believe he’d made a very wise exchange, but the sixteen-year-old had no desire to argue after she’d won the right to use him as her personal gumball without complaint.
Upon arriving home from her time with Libby and surprising her brother with this bizarrely out-of-character revelation of truth in her previous promises, she’d insisted upon reducing Scott back to one inch in order to make sure the phone call stayed as secret as possible.
Idly, the young man wondered why she even bothered to offer an excuse such as this. At least she’d allowed him to keep his clothes, though, to help keep the attention of the rest of the house off of him as she casually carried him up to her room for some privacy.
The tone buzzed for the eighth time without an answer.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to talk anymore,” Maggie suggested casually. Scott shivered and looked his sister in the eye.
“She’ll answer.”
“How do you know?” the girl pressed. Steadily, she drew both of her legs back in toward her body until both feet were flat against the buoyant surface of her pink bed sheets and sinking heavily into the fabric a matter of inches away from her sibling, throwing Scott slightly off balance and forcing him to grip the edge of the phone to stay standing.
“I just… I just do,” Scott reaffirmed, losing his confidence more and more with each successive drone from the mouthpiece, then added defensively: “Besides, this is your phone. She can’t even know it’s me calling yet.”
“It’d be a huge shame if you went to all that trouble to do this and she doesn’t even want to talk,” Maggie continued teasingly with a tilt of her head and a creeping smirk.
“She’ll answer.”
A thirteenth tone.
Maggie’s right foot slid closer across the springy pink landscape, her big toe pointed downward like a ballerina’s as it neared her inch-tall brother.
“C’mon, little boy, just give it up and stop worrying about it for now. Tell you what. I’ve got a little itch that needs scratching, right in here,” the girl advertised brightly. Bunching her toes up together again, she parted her big and second toes as far as she could, revealing the tender skin in between at close enough range that Scott could’ve reached out and touched it.
“Please,” Scott wheedled, fighting the urge to put his hands together in faux-prayer to his sister. “You… you promised that I could talk to her.”
Leaning her head against her shoulder and rolling her eyes as emphatically as possible, Maggie huffed out a sigh. “Well, no I didn’t, actually. I said I’d help you call her, and I did that. I can’t make her talk to you, though. That’s kinda a thing that you have to hope for.”
Hanging his head and biting his lip, Scott wrung his hands together. For once, Maggie wasn’t just talking a big game to dampen his spirits. She was actually being brutally honest, and he knew he might have gotten his hopes into heretofore unexplored sky-high territories when the reality might well be that Ella was done with him.
“Yeah. I know,” Scott croaked, crossing his arms.
“Aww, don’t start crying or anything on me. C’mere and relax for a bit,” Maggie cooed. Her foot inched forward until her two toes sandwiched around Scott, who remained motionless, uncaring what happened at this point. The two plush digits gently squeezed around him in a squishy embrace until they had a good enough grip to lift him safely off the bedspread.
Grunting with the effort to keep himself level as his sister’s possessive bare foot ascended, Scott couldn’t help but feel silent gratitude that Maggie apparently wasn’t in the mood to squeeze the oxygen out of him at this moment, because she seemed to be holding him with just enough pressure to ensure he couldn’t wriggle free. The soft appendage lithely kept Scott even with the surface and hovered just six inches over, swaying side to side as though trying to gently rock him into a sense of false security. And given who the foot belonged to, that was a pretty real possibility, but its passenger was drowning in a little too much apathy to be concerned with this.
“Feeling happier yet?” Maggie queried with a soft giggle. “Why don’t you give it a little scratch as long as you’re in there?”
Shrugging, Scott dug his miniscule fingernails into the doughy wall that made up the crevice between his sister’s toes and commenced kneading as hard as he could, knowing only this level of exertion would actually accomplish anything given his current stature.
“Hello?” came the soft answer at last from the cell phone.