Some quick jostling and awkward positioning on a textbook allowed Tom to sit down without getting thrown around too much as his sister shifted her backpack up from the bus seat and marched into the school. Tom folded his arms behind his back, simply trying to stay focused on the little he had to work with.
Enough light came through the upper fabric patch of the pocket that the teen didn’t completely lose his bearings inside Emma’s backpack. By this point in his life as a compulsive liar, Tom was fairly adept at knowing where he was going without having the benefit of visual confirmation. Watching shadows pass by and hearing the muffled voices and laughter changing all around, he was able to tell which path through the halls Emma was taking to her locker. After a pause, a quick snap of the metal door again and the shuffle of his sister’s sneakers below told him they were on the way to first period.
Through the auditory onslaught of freshmen, he could make out the chirpy commentary of his sister’s friends, one on either side of her, as they marched through the throngs of unassuming teens. Gratefully, it didn’t even occur to her to draw him back out of the pack for a playful demonstration. Emma usually wasn’t one to be shy about how small she’d gotten her brother down to, and enjoyed showing him off to her peers with usually more than a few challenging acrobatics as she gently tossed him between her palms or balanced him on the end of her nose, depending on his size. These games usually got a pretty massive laugh from anyone watching, which Emma always soaked up with a broad grin and some entreating pets on Tom’s head.
It wasn’t that the boy didn’t want his sister to be happy, considering how civilly she treated him compared to the rest of his kin, but it did begin to wear on the nerves when she’d fasten his body under the folds of her hair scrunchie and allow him to dangle upside-down from her silky ponytail through a full period. Especially when it left him vulnerable to soggy soccer-sized spitballs from kids sitting behind her. Today, though, to his muted delight, she seemed in enough of a hurry that her favorite school accessory wasn’t even introduced.
Once they were in the classroom, with the backpack positioned on the floor between Emma’s legs, Tom could more or less relax. Occasionally he’d feel his sibling’s tennis-toned calves rocking absentmindedly against the bag, nearly knocking him over, but that was about all there was to bother him now.
For a little while he even tried listening to the lesson through the thin layer of zipper and fibers. He’d actually had this very same geography teacher the previous year, though given his less-than-stellar academic track record, a reunion was best avoided, which made him grateful to be inside his sister’s bag. Tom wasn’t particularly keen on making pleasantries when he was this small, especially to someone he’d once witnessed dunking a shrunken student into an iced coffee cup for making some falsely insipid remarks about the president. The words of the lecture sounded fairly unfamiliar to him, though that wasn’t a huge surprise; odds were he wasn’t really paying attention at the time.
By the time first period was over, Tom had regained another twelve inches, forcing him to hug his knees to his chest to make room in the pocket amidst the books. Emma clearly noticed the difference, too, as she lurched the bag onto the desktop and pulled back the pocket to examine her misbehaving charge. Her face was framed through the modest opening of the top, where she could plainly display a melodramatic pout for him. As usual, she looked saddened to see him beginning the transition back to normal height.
“C-C… Can I…” Tom questioned pleasantly as he wrestled with the secondhand gum again, having grown large enough now that talking was possible without removing the wad, though it was difficult. The stuttering came as a byproduct of slackening jaws rather than nerves. “C-C-Can I go now?”
Emma tilted her head at the baby-sized boy in her backpack, thinking it over, then sighed and shook back and forth.
“No, I don’t think so, Tommy. You’re still too small to be on your own. You know they wouldn’t let you in to class,” she reasoned sensibly. She tapped a pensive fingertip against her chin as she explained.
This conclusion of Emma’s was actually entirely true, and an answer he was grimly prepared for. Tom’s second period teacher, in particular, would have a cow to see a student anywhere shorter than three feet marching up to a desk. The far safer option, unfortunately, meant staying exactly and unproductively where he was now. He hung his head, shrugging again.
“Hey, don’t look so gloomy,” Emma giggled at the sight of her backpacked brother’s dismay. She tucked a fingertip under the crook of his neck, tilting his head back up toward her. “Be a good little backpack buddy for me and I’ll have a prize for you later.”
“A p-prize?” Tom said after a confused moment of silence.
“Yeah,” she drawled for suspense. “I’m starting a new piece of gum in second period. Mint this time. And you can have first dibs on it once I’m done if you want.”
For a moment Emma savored the blank look of withheld disgust on her brother’s face. It got even better once he realized she wasn’t joking. Then, with another wink and a waggle of her soft fingers, she patted Tom on the head to encourage him to duck and zipped him back up inside her bag, pulling the now-heavier load onto her shoulders and setting off undeterred toward her next class.
Tom settled himself against the jumbled books of his little sister’s backpack in a vain attempt to make room. Shrugging to himself with an affable sense of resignation, he set about chewing on the enormous ball of used gum again, slurping at it with more vigor now that he’d been numbed to its squalid flavor.
Complaining seemed like a waste of time. After all, he’d certainly had far worse mornings than this.