So focused was Rachael on her little exercise, she didn’t notice the snickering laughter until it was right in her ear.

Her head snapped up and she found herself staring into a pair of huge green eyes. She yelped and threw herself against the hard green vinyl seat.

“Whatcha doin’?” said Jenice. In the dim light of highway ambiance, her sharp smile glowed like a knife. Her huge, feline eyes were framed by a shaggy bob of red hair. Shadows moved behind Jenice but Rachael was entirely focused on this troublemaker. Dee-Dee was prone to stupid decisions, and Frances was a natural leader, but Jenice… was a devil. She never seemed to care about popularity or friends or power, but when something went horribly wrong she was usually there, licking her teeth, her huge green eyes glowing with spooky fire.

Stunned, Rachael couldn’t draw the breath to formulate a response. Quicker than a snake, Jenice’s hand shot down the neck of Rachael’s shirt, and suddenly there was a small emptiness upon her left boob. Rachael gaped at her chest in disbelief, then up at Jenice.

Her green eyes were drinking in the stolen prize in her palm. “What the fuck,” she whispered.

“What? What is it?” Dee-Dee loomed over Jenice’s shoulder. The tallest girl on the team, she also had the most exaggerated features: oversized eyes, a broad and wobbly grin with too many teeth, and off the court she was all elbows and knees. Trying to peer into Jenice’s hands, she lost balance and tumbled into the more mischievous girl.

“Goddamn it!” Jenice elbowed the tall and lanky girl in the ribs. To keep from falling over, Dee-Dee wrapped her long arms around her friend, bumped her cupped hands, and only barely managed to snatch the tiny old man out of the air. The two girls struggled to right themselves before either knew just what had happened; Rachael could only stare in horror.

Jenice glanced at her now-empty hands. “The fuck was that?” She looked around the bus seat ahead of Rachael’s, glanced at the floor, but when Dee-Dee recovered she dangled the tiny man by the leg, swinging him through the cool night air. Dee-Dee’s laughter sounded like a donkey with the hiccoughs, and this was enough to gradually attract the attention of the other young women who owned the back of the bus. All eyes trained upon the tiny half-naked morsel Dee-Dee was shaking like a little bell, except for Jenice’s.

Her face, framed in writhing red hair, hovered before Rachael’s like a snake, and though she never lost her smile, Rachael found no friendliness in it at all. “What exactly was that, Rachael? Where did you get it? And what were you doing with it?” She had a way of asking questions that gave the listener the sense that she already knew the answers: it would just be more humiliating to hear the recipient say them out loud.

Rachael gulped hard to keep from crying with fear. “I don’t know what that was,” she muttered. “I found it in the diner.”

“It looks like a little man or something!” Dee-Dee brayed, but the growl of the diesel bus motor and the roar of a dozen tires on the highway muffled her beyond the near perimeter of her friends.

A sleepy-eyed Latina looked up, straightening her sweatshirt. “What do you mean, a little man?” Ariana slurred, coming out of a nap. She could pass out anywhere, and a noisy bus of rambunctious volleyball players posed no challenge for her. She rubbed her eyes, rolled to a mostly upright position, and tried to glimpse what Dee-Dee was waving around in her long, spidery fingers. Rachael could see two tiny arms pinwheeling through space

“Tell them,” hissed Jenice, grinning.

Rachael could only shake her head. Too quietly for anyone to hear, she asked for him back.

Jenice’s smile wavered for a second, then it widened. This was always a bad sign. “Hey, Dee-Dee,” she called over her shoulder, never losing Rachael’s gaze, “Rachael says it’s a Japanese snack, like squid jerky or something. Why don’t you try eating it?”

Dee-Dee’s huge brown eyes rolled horse-like at Jenice and Rachael, and then her own grin widened to a gaping maw. “Sure!” she brayed, and she threw her head back and unhinged her jaw to an uncommonly wide degree. Her hand hoisted the tiny man over her head, and Rachael could almost see him screaming. It wasn’t hard to imagine, the way he was waving at her mouth as though he could reach out and stop this.

“What’s going on?” Across the aisle from Ariana, Mona was shyly peeking around her oversized teammate. Mona had mousy brown hair, parted plainly down the middle, and she was neither short nor tall, fat nor skinny. What she had, though, was a pair of prematurely enormous breasts, and these strained the tank top she favored in warmups and exercises. With her characteristically soft grin, she craned beneath Dee-Dee’s armpit to glance up at the struggling little guy. If she was surprised, she gave nothing away: maybe she blinked less, and her thick lips parted to show the tips of her teeth, but her placid face retained its dull neutrality. She didn’t even ask what Dee-Dee was flinging around in her grip, what she was about to drop down her throat.

“Come on, guys,” Rachael whimpered, “be careful with him. Give him back.” Yet she was so frightened, her voice sounded like she didn’t even want him back. She sounded like she wanted to be a hundred miles away, in bed.

Jenice’s eyes flickered up and down Rachael’s frail body. Rachael could feel her sizing up her own flaws, her weaknesses. It felt like those green eyes could push right through her chest and stomach and ribs, and peer into her very soul. Broken, Rachael looked away first and stared at the inky environment, intermittent highway signs providing brief streaks of light to break up the void of emptiness outside the bus.

Ariana was fully awake and Mona was inadvertently nudging her breasts against Dee-Dee’s side, as the tall girl laughed awkwardly out of her throat and began to drape the tiny man over her long, broad tongue. Her tongue poured up out of her abnormally wide jaw, then folded sharply over her thick bottom lip and stretched down her chin. The naked little man was mopped back and forth over her tongue, flailing ineffectually, screaming into the din of young women and machinery.

“How’s it taste?” called back Jenice.

Dee-Dee jerked the little man aside thoughtlessly. She smacked her lips exaggeratedly and declared him “Salty!” All four girls laughed at this, and their laughter stabbed Rachael down her side as she peered desperately into the darkened landscape.

Ariana kneeled on her seat, her eyes suddenly huge, and leaned toward Dee-Dee and her little morsel. “Hold on a second,” she started. Her tone of voice had no laughter in it: it was deep and serious, with a little wonder floating around it. “What the fuck is that?” She turned to Jenice’s back, where she continued to leer at Rachael. Ariana’s dramatic eyebrows told a new narrative, working with her round, dark eyes and her own slack lips. “Hold on a fucking second! What the fuck is that Dee-Dee’s got?”

Jenice began to shake with laughter, leaning over the back of the bus seat. “Rachael tells me it’s an eensy-weensy little man. Isn’t that right, Rachael?” Rachael could feel Jenice’s words pouring down her neck like ice water. “Didn’t you kidnap a tiny little man from that diner?”

Rachael’s eyes bugged in their sockets and all the breath left her lungs. How did Jenice know everything?

Dee-Dee paused, her untrimmed brows beetling on her broad forehead. “Wait, what the fuck did you say? This is a what?” Never the brightest bulb in the chandelier, the tall girl eventually caught up with current events. She reared back to look at her captive, and that graceful, swan-like neck made it seem like her head reared back a couple feet. And then her eyes went wider than everyone’s around her, and her jaw went slack, and she slowly drew the breath to shriek that yes, holy fuck, she had a little man and everyone should come look at it.

Ariana’s head snapped back, her thick, glossy locks swinging in the air. Mona almost registered an emotion as she bobbed on tiptoe, trying to get a look but succeeding only massaging Dee-Dee’s 98% low-fat abs with her enormous breasts. Even Jenice finally had enough of tormenting weak, wimpy little Rachael and slithered back to look at the shrunken man in earnest.

Beyond thought, Rachael suddenly broke from the window and lunged at Dee-Dee, who slowly turned the naked little man over in her hand. “He’s naked,” Dee-Dee sagely observed, and as Mona and Jenice moved in to confirm this, Rachael shouldered her way through them, and her spindly little arms shot up toward Dee-Dee’s graceless mitt.

“Uh-oh, hold on there!” Ariana, not quite under the tiny man’s spell, was the first to respond. She wheeled around Jenice with surprising grace for such a short, stout young woman, and her forearm planted in Rachael’s shoulder by her neck. It wasn’t enough to cause damage, but it definitely halted Rachael’s forward momentum, and the frail girl slumped back in her seat. For good measure, Ariana hustled around the seat and spun around: she was in possession of a pair of positively planetoid buttocks, stress-testing her ubiquitous black yoga tights to the limits of their tensile strength, and it was this huge, bulbous ass she used to pin Rachael back down into her seat.

Rachael’s cheeks flushed. It was bad enough she had to undress in the locker room, bad enough she had to see her teammates naked. But any time she brushed up against any of them, even casually, shoulder-to-shoulder on the court or chest-to-back in the crowded hallway between classes, her skin shivered and went all goose-pimply. Generally she couldn’t tolerate people touching her, grabbing her, brushing against her. And now, to have Ariana’s tremendous buttocks pinning her down, covering her entire body… Rachael was dizzy with surging, churning emotions.

“Tell me what you see!” Ariana barked at her friends.

Mona gave no response, only grinned shyly at the Latina with the syrupy affection of a black Labrador. Dee-Dee struggled with her vocabulary but declared that it did indeed look like a minuscule, naked old man. Not in so many words.

Jenice only snickered and licked her teeth.