“Sorry, Tom-Tom. I really thought you’d be a little bigger by last period,” Heather said as she cradled her friend in the palm of her hand. This wasn’t technically a lie. Tom was now up to three inches, mathematically larger than the pitiful fraction of a stature he held earlier when he was being washed around the inside of the girl’s mouth at the size of a crumb.
Still, the both of them knew very well that putting him down to such a drastically miniscule scale was going to take a long while to recover from, well-beyond the last class of the day. Once again, Tom had missed a full day of classes, between riding around in his sister’s backpack, playing seat cushion to Ms. Evans, and being suckled like a human breath mint between his best friend’s lips.
Heather trudged her way into the high school’s front office, earning a drearily dismayed expression from the secretary at the main desk. The woman didn’t even need to see Tom perched in Heather’s hand to get the picture, and she already had the overhead speaker phone to her lips before the pair could reach her.
“Bakers. Could I get one of the Bakers down to the main office for a pick-up? Thanks,” the woman droned into the microphone so that the entire student population could hear, having had to repeat this particular phrase at this particular time of day at least two-dozen times this school year alone.
It was easier to say “Bakers,” though really Tom knew only one of his three siblings would be willing to come get him. There was no need to specify the kind of pick-up, either; practically everyone in the school knew exactly what the call meant, and most shared a collective giggle at the sound of it. Those who personally knew Tom would often place bets about how low he’d shrunken, though the rules of this tended to be shaky, since these people were often not only present but directly responsible for his reduction in size.
“Hiiiii, Mrs. Cratchet,” Heather said, grinning almost too cheesily to be bearable. With her opposite hand she plucked Tom out of her palm between a thumb and forefinger and lowered him to the desktop, where he stood as casually as possible in waiting. “I guess you already know why we’re here, huh?”
“Hello,” the woman groaned to Heather alone, returning to tapping away on her desk keyboard almost immediately. The little liar didn’t even receive visual acknowledgement, which he was more than fine with. The woman tended to carry something of a temper just below the surface of her rigid face and tight bun.
“All right, I gotta get going. If you want the anatomy and geometry notes later, give me a call once you’re tall enough to hold a phone,” Heather said cheekily to Tom. Blowing him a joking kiss, she waved goodbye and heading back out the glass door of the main office.
Tom continued facing the door with his hands folded together, knowing that turning and looking up to the semi-haggard and most-likely scowling countenance of Mrs. Cratchet wouldn’t be in his best interest. He’d found it was best to make his presence in these circumstances as unobtrusive as possible, and it was much easier just to watch the exit like the little mindless trinket so many considered him to be at this size.
With a start, he realized this reasoning may not have been entirely sound, as a broad hand flattened itself to the glass outside, the slender fingers tapping impatiently away and causing the nails to clack each time. Tom flinched dutifully with each repetition, then tried not to let his stomach get too twisted as Ms. Evans swiftly entered the office, moving eerily like a shark as she made her way toward the desk with those seething irises squared directly to her most disobedient student.
“Well, Mr. Baker,” the woman greeted through grinding teeth, her hands on her hips as she looked down upon the pitifully reduced pupil, who was now dramatically smaller than he’d been after the verbal thrashing she gave him that morning. “I suppose it was just wishful thinking on my part to believe a single word or action I employed today to teach you a lesson made any kind of impact at all?”
Tom almost had to fasten his hands around his neck to keep himself from nodding in either the affirmative or negative. Neither one was going to do him much good now as he gazed up at his towering teacher, trying to ignore the continuous drumming of her fingers against her thighs. Each digit was longer than his entire body still, and he didn’t particularly enjoy accidentally conceiving of what might happen if one of those pale, probably-muscular logs were to coil around his frail frame. He swallowed a lump the size of a golf ball.
“No answer. No defense whatsoever,” she scowled, rolling her eyes and running her fingertips down the narrow bridge of her nose in disdain. “What are we going to do with you, Mr. Baker?”
The question was apparently rhetorical, as she at least had the decency not to fire a few optical daggers through the already frail three-inch Tom, and instead looked to Mrs. Cratchet, still ticking away at the keyboard with nary a glance at anyone who entered. The teacher’s hand then descended into the pocket of her suit pant, rifling through for a moment before drawing out the six-inch form of another unfortunate deviant, though apparently one who had at least not sunken quite as sinfully low as Tom. A girl, whose dark hair had become rather unruly and frizzy in the probably static-filled darkness of the teacher’s pocket. So that was what that fidgeting lump through the dark fabric was. Tom was fairly certain his strict educator wasn’t in the habit of carrying live gerbils around, though if she did, he was pretty sure they’d be primarily for the purposes of midday snacks.
Ms. Evans cupped the half-foot liar upright and brandished her before the desk, smoothing out her frayed locks with the pointed edge of her pinky finger nail. Tom suspected this was rather to instill some kind of unpredictable feeling of befuddled fear on his part rather than to help the poor girl upkeep her personal hygiene. After all, it was perfectly possible for the woman to transport the girl in her hand rather than stuffing her in a pocket like an afterthought. Of course, it was probably a little easier to breath in there than when pinned beneath the woman’s curvaceous rump.
“Got another one for you,” Ms. Evans reported coldly to the secretary, snorting derisively at the girl in her palm, who remained unapologetically still with her arms crossed and a bitter grimace on her tiny lips.
“Hansen. Could I get Archie Hansen to come down to the main office to pick up Sheila? Thanks,” the woman monotoned, punctuating the announcement with a stiff cough as she returned to her keyboard. Clearly Sheila was enough of a repeat offender that no checking of the records was required to rattle off the names. Tom wondered if Mrs. Cratchet saw this as a good thing, as it meant she didn’t have to roll across the carpet to the filing cabinet to fish out the necessary information. If she didn’t, she was seriously missing out on a rather sizable positive in an otherwise grimly tedious existence.
Ms. Evans lowered her hand to the tabletop, unceremoniously tipping it so that Sheila was more or less forced to roll out and over her fingers. The girl stumbled to her knees and rose back up, losing none of her apparently vitally withheld dignity as gave her long, messy hair a toss over her shoulders. The miniature student straightened her skintight Truplex, patting it down on the more complimentary angles of her hips and bosom, and sauntered further across the sheer surface, not even bothering to turn and give the teacher another glance.
Tom looked up at the shrunken girl who still managed to dwarf him so pathetically, as his head only touched the level of her waist. He couldn’t help but be filled with admiration at her defiance even in the face of what had most likely been an afternoon of degrading torment in the hands of the especially consequence-prone English teacher, and wished she could look him in the eye for just a second so he could give her a salute. Evidently he too was not worth the time of day to her, though, as she kept her chin held high and took a few more steps into the center of the desk before plopping down onto her haunches and crossing her legs to sit in wait.
If Tom had been wishing for attention, though, it seemed the universe had a twisted sense of righteousness about it, among a few other equally twisted senses, because he suddenly found himself enveloped in two firm pads of finger flesh, far more overpowering than he was imagining even just from staring at the pale pillars of his teacher’s splayed fingers for too long. As usual, he wasn’t particularly skilled at estimating exactly how severe the wages of his sins would turn out to be.
His attention had been momentarily diverted to Sheila, hoping for some acknowledgement of their solidarity that had obviously been mistaken due to her social status and the fact that she still could’ve beaten him in a wrestling match with three fingers at her current stature. In that awkward moment of missed connections, he’d left himself wide open to be scooped up like the babbling toy he knew he was to the world and quite possibly himself.
Mrs. Evans’ fingers tightened menacingly around his sides, practically causing his bones to creak in the nonetheless plush vice as he was swooped upward on a wing and a prayer toward the increasingly massive and even more increasingly stern countenance of his authoritarian despot of a grammar instructor.