On the day Kevin had been let out from his freshman year of high school, watching all his friends excitedly charge toward the buses, freed at last, he’d had to trudge out to the carpool line for the inevitable, knowing the luxury of being normal-sized with access to clean fresh air was about to be taken from him later that evening. It had all been discussed ahead of time. There was no escaping it: the number of F’s on his report card from both semesters, despite the valiant efforts of a few tutors, had rendered the teen a moron in the eyes of administrators, and he was doomed to repeat. A rare “A” from the art teacher, known to give B minuses or worse to all but the finest creative types, had showered glowing praise on the teen for his drawing craft, but aside from this odd phenomenon, he was an academic pariah.
His mother, while disappointed, had spent the last four years designating several hours of extra study time for Kevin in the evenings to try to catch up. She pitied him for his apparent ineptitude despite his efforts, and had accepted that he wasn’t going to achieve as highly as his peers. As long as he was putting in the time to improve, it was enough for her.
That was, until the morning two weeks before school ended when she went rooting around his bedroom after he’d left for school, something she almost never did due to her personal policy of the room maintenance being kept up by the owner. An old dresser had been shoved into the back of the boy’s closet for storing paper and practice sketches, a hobby that Kevin’s mother occasionally feared was affecting her son’s schoolwork, but several spot checks had convinced her he apparently didn’t draw during his study time. On this particularly day, though, a scrap of paper sticking out against the wall had revealed a compartment she hadn’t been aware of, and once she’d pulled it out, revealed a lot more.
The compartment was filled to the absolute brim, pages numbering well over a hundred, of intricately detailed and stunningly realized drawings of bare feet. Standing, swinging, arched against a floor with toes splayed with the sole on full display, either in dark pencil sketches or fully colored in pastels. Kevin’s parent acknowledged the first drawing she found for its artistry, marveling at her son’s talent, until she began skimming through the rest of the stack. A more thorough search of the room revealed innumerable folders of them hidden under the mattress, in old boxes beneath the bed, and even hidden under boards in the closet. A veritable library of drawings of female feet, outnumbering by a staggering margin anything else drawn in the room, and what was more, it revealed that Kevin spent far more of his time drawing than his mother realized. Finally, searching through a desk drawer, the woman discovered a partially finished drawing wedged between the pages of a tutoring textbook Kevin had supposedly been working in the night before, and that moment, Courtney knew what her son actually spent his supposed study sessions on.
When the doomed teen arrived home that afternoon, he was greeted by being ordered into a kitchen chair by both cross-armed parents, followed by a stack of more than two-hundred full size foot drawings being placed onto the table before him with a thunderous slam. For a while, the mother and father just drilled into her guilty son with their gaze and let him stew in anxiety and hopeless humiliation. There wasn’t much he could say to snake out of this one. Indeed, after forty minutes of tense reprimanding, a few outpourings of truth about how little studying the boy truly did, a conveniently placed advertisement for Techilogic’s new summer rehab program, and even a few embarrassed tears from Kevin, the decision was made. And thanks to a day of hard pontificating and a predilection for poetic justice, Kevin’s mother knew precisely how to make sure the message stuck for once in her son’s life. It had taken an hour of begging just to avoid having Ms. Foster being made aware of the precise reason for this tipping point.
So here Kevin was, spending his eighth day in the muggy confines of his teacher’s shoe at the office, with only the occasional nonchalant tapping of her heel to remind him there was life outside of being squeezed mercilessly between sweat-matted shoe fabric and the unrelenting weight of firm flesh and muscle. He’d reached the point of being surprised to rediscover light and fresh air every time Courtney mercifully arched her deep sole above her miniscule sprawled student.
Despite the fact that Kevin came away each day with no injuries, and the process was relatively painless, all things considered, a few pills of the protective Sizac drug wasn’t going to save him from the claustrophobia that now settled in exactly when Courtney first lowered her foot over her charge and strapped her shoes on at the beginning of each day.
Nor could it save him from the omnipresent stench of dry skin and shoe fabric cooked in conjunction for an entire day in a stew of gummy foot sweat and smeared toe jam. The sheer wallop packed by his teacher’s sole, where he usually found himself mashed, was putrescent and borderline rancid. If nothing else, this experience had taught Kevin things about the human body he had never wanted to know. The very idea that any human foot, let alone one belonging to his math teacher, could produce musk this unholy and sour in its balmy filth made him squirm to consider, even when he was safely out of her shoe for the day and trying hopelessly to shower the stench away that had been permanently stamped into his skin.
And, maybe most unfortunate of all, the technical painlessness provided by the medication did absolutely nothing to save him from the endless cataracts of sweat seeping in vigorous rivulets from Courtney’s sole from about two hours into work until the end of the day when she luxuriously kicked the heels off. It was already akin to a sauna being in the shoe, the air moist and so thick it stung to inhale its nauseating fog. However, being pinned under the eventually soggy mass of flesh, its wrinkles contoured to allow for maximum liquid flow as Courtney’s pores gifted sweat drops seemingly by the gallon, was the capper that made it the heinous sentence that it was.
Every day thus far had begun with the same foolish hope that the oncoming river could be avoided. Yet as sure as the sun rose and set, he would find himself all but swimming in the warm, sticky rain of it all. Soon, his goal was shifted to merely avoiding getting his face too deeply ensconced in it. His hair usually ended up crusted with Courtney’s sweat by day’s end, his clothes were dampened through to the underwear far sooner than that, and his lips became chapped from the amount of salty liquid that made their way forcibly between them, no matter how tightly he closed his mouth. Spitting it out was a dangerous move, as it often required that he open his mouth wide again and risk an even bigger gulp. The day left his entire body glued into the swollen bulk of Courtney’s sole such that he remained stuck to it until the cool air outside allowed him to be peeled off.
Over and over. An endless cycle.
Right now, the teen estimated that it was about two in the afternoon, and right on schedule, his body felt soaked through and redolent of the smelliest location on his teacher’s body, all but indistinguishable from her sole thanks to the heavy mashing into the flesh he’d received. And even though the pills ensured he couldn’t be damaged or feel pain to an extent, the brute force attack of being stood on by feet the size of buses to him for at least nine hours a day definitely took its toll.
By day’s end, Kevin would feel ready to flop over and fall asleep, as though he’d run a half marathon, yet he couldn’t manage it with the ease his aching body demanded, partially as a side effect of the Sizac, and partially because he couldn’t calm himself down well enough after such rigorous existence in the personal hell his vindictive teacher and furious parents had constructed for him.