“Go, girl! Look at you!”

“Ha ha ha, omigod!”

Mona only smiled sweetly at her friend as Ariana hopped and bounced up the aisle. Jenice liked watching her little monkeys dance for her, and Dee-Dee was elated by anything that Jenice approved of. Frances was off in her own world, and only a couple women up in the front broke from their conversations with their handlers to glance at what was going on in the back. Everyone else had drifted from homework or listening to music to dozing lightly, if they could on this rattling bus.

Rachael only turned her head miserably toward the darkened wasteland outside, broad horizon with occasional lights in the far distance below a clear sky. They were far enough from any city that the stars stood out prominently, but she couldn’t make them out through her tears. Once in a while she tried to jerk her arms free or to slip them slyly away, but Dee-Dee’s grasp was firm. The only blessing here was that she didn’t turn back to Rachael and swear at her or threaten her. She just wanted to see all the action and laugh her fool head off, so she’d only tighten her huge mitts around the smaller girl’s forearms and keep her locked in place. Rachael had no idea what kind of person Dee-Dee was outside of the group, away from Frances and Jenice. She knew that Ariana could be a good person sometimes, and she thought that Mona looked kind but her behavior… the fact that she never said anything made her seem sinister and unpredictable. Jenice was clearly evil. Frances was evil, but in a different way. Jenice liked to set people up for failure, or she liked to hover around a disaster or an accident and gloat about it, but Frances wasn’t so underhanded.

Frances would bring the disaster to you. She was active and responsible. Jenice just snickered while things went to shit, but Frances was brutal. Rachael didn’t know why Frances kept her on this team, instead of transferring her to one of the other squads. Rachael’s presence lost this team several victories, but Frances never kicked her off, only moved her to a new position to watch her fail there, too. Her bottom lip crumpled and she turned to the window again. She couldn’t even wipe her tears away on her shoulder, because the middle blocker held her down so solidly. If her vision were clearer, she wanted to look around her lap or her seat or the floor to try and find some of Harold’s clothing. It was stupid of her to undress him like that, she thought too late. She should’ve waited until she got home. There was no privacy on the bus. Now, not only did she lose all those fascinating little garments and things, she lost the little old man, too. Ruining everything again, like always. Why wouldn’t Frances let her go…

Despite all the attention of some truly nasty young women focused on her, Ariana found some solace in getting to dance around like this. It felt good to move her limbs and be sexy, even if her team was encouraging her for the wrong reasons. She walked up to where Mona blocked the aisle, blew her a kiss, then trotted back to the emergency door. She shimmied her way down, slamming her hips into each padded green seat back as she went. And she, like the women watching her, wondered what this experience was like for the tiny man in her butt. Surely he must have felt the thunderous collision, despite the padding around her hips and the foam padding around the steel seat backs. She wasn’t sparing with the hip check, either: even Jenice whistled at the force Ariana was banging away with.

“You’re gonna feel that in the morning,” she said, which was less a warning and more a hint at hoping to enjoy Ariana’s pain in the morning.

“Ha ha, do it! Do it!” Dee-Dee was hysterical, shaking with laughter. What it was Ariana was supposed to do was unclear, but Dee-Dee clearly wanted more of it. She was long enough in all her limbs that she could hold Rachael down in her seat, and her head still easily cleared the seat back to watch Ariana swinging her mighty buttocks down the aisle. In many ways, when she bothered to think about it at all, she was unalike anyone else on her team. She was the tallest by far, but Frances felt taller due to the force of her personality. She was long and lean, and she liked to see her own muscle tone when she worked out, but she didn’t have tits like Mona or an ass like Ariana. Hell, no one did. And most of the time she didn’t want that, she liked being… her father called her a giraffe, and an ex-boyfriend described her as a gazelle. Long, thin animals from around the hottest belt around the world. Animals… Dee-Dee didn’t feel like an animal. She didn’t feel brutal or competitive, even when her team went to championships. She was awkward and uncoordinated most of the time, falling up staircases rather than down, moving too fast and knocking things over at home. All that changed when she stepped into the court: suddenly her body tightened up and she was in control of every last joint. The ball glowed and commanded her vision, with an extra-sensory awareness of her teammates. She wasn’t even afraid of Frances or Jenice at those times, she was only lost in the sense of being a team all doing the same thing.

Except for Rachael. Now she paused in her braying laughter and looked down at the frail little woman below her. Except for Rachael. Everyone moved together on the court, everyone shared thoughts, everyone acted in the trust of everyone else being where they should and doing what they should. Except for Rachael.

Dee-Dee’s head hung over the little woman, her thick lips numb and slack as the wheels churned in her mind. Why couldn’t Rachael do that? Why was she always fucking up? It’s like she wanted to be a victim, like it satisfied her. Frances would move her to another position, either to give her a break from working too hard in one area or to try and explore what she was good at in other positions. But it always ended up the same: Rachael knocking the ball offsides, Rachael catching a spike in the face and getting a bloody nose, Rachael missing the bump and losing a point.

She stared at Rachael now, with her reddened, wet cheeks and bedraggled hair. She wasn’t laughing at the ridiculous little man. She wasn’t watching Ariana shake her big round booty, dancing up and down the aisle. She was just whining and crying, and didn’t she know that was gonna piss Jenice off?

“Hey. Hey.” She shook Rachael’s forearms. “Why aren’t you watching this? It’s hilarious.”

The little woman tried to control her breathing in a very sobbing way.

“Check it out.” Dee-Dee shifted her arm to give Rachael room to see the sensual globes in stretched, smoky tights swinging by. They nearly defied gravity, sticking out in their fullness with clean, deep creases where they met the round backs of Ariana’s thighs. Dee-Dee grinned hugely to watch them bobble like that, knowing that somewhere inside, a tiny naked dude was squished flat and shaking right along with them. She said as much to Rachael.

Rachael turned her ruddy face up to the taller, longer woman arching over her. “We have to get him out of there! He can’t breathe!”

Dee-Dee snorted. “He’s fine, he’ll be fine. Just think about how lucky he is to be in there.”

“Lucky? He’s going to die.”

“Yeah, lucky. You ever hear the guys talking about her butt? She tells me she tried dating a couple guys, and they couldn’t keep their hands off her ass. Like, they’re all trying so hard to get at her ass, and here’s this little guy who can actually go inside it!” She laughed in her awkward, self-unconscious way all over Rachael. “Yeah, lucky! Don’t you think all those guys would love to be where he is? Shit, she could probably fit five tiny guys in her butt like that. Ten, maybe. That would be amazing!”

“There aren’t any other tiny people. There’s only one, and he’s going to die, and it’s because of me.”

The hilarity melted from Dee-Dee’s face. “Yeah, that’s true. Maybe you shouldn’t have stolen him. Why’d you do that, anyway? You, like, kidnapped a whole person.”

Rachael collapsed in on herself in misery. “I know, I wasn’t thinking about that. I just saw him and I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It’s impossible, you know? So I had to see for myself, and we were leaving and there wasn’t time to ask the woman.”

“So you just took him. All right, I guess. But why’s he naked?”

Rachael froze. She had no ability to lie, especially when she was intimidated, and even if Dee-Dee was being sociable to her now, she was still one of Frances’s hounds. “I don’t know.”

“But that’s weird, right? That woman, bringing a tiny naked man to a truck stop? Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“What were they doing when you saw them?”

“I dunno, just… eating dinner?”

“And he’s naked? Why didn’t the waitress say something?”

“I don’t know! Get him out of Ariana’s big butt and ask him yourself!”

Dee-Dee paused. That was actually a pretty good idea. She wanted to know how the old man got so small, or if there were any others like him. If he was the only one, and if they killed him on this busride, that would be the end of the story and probably no one else would have any answers for her. Maybe the woman following them. She looked back at the emergency door, glowing where the headlights lit up all the dust coating the back of the bus, watching Ariana’s long, dark hair fly up as she twirled at the end of her little runway.

But she didn’t like Rachael’s tone. Someone that small should know better than to talk like that to someone much bigger than herself. Now, it would’ve been easy for her to tighten her fists and hurt Rachael’s arms a little, or to wrench them and her them a lot. She could’ve kneed her in the chest with the full force of all the muscles it took to haul her long, strong body around. She could even have taken a large, horsey bite out of Rachael’s shoulder. But she didn’t know if Jenice had plans for Rachael or what, and she didn’t want to find out the wrong way.

She twisted her head back and drew a long breath. “Hey, Jenice! Rachael says we gotta let him out!”

Like three cats hearing the same strange noise, Ariana, Jenice, and Mona all looked at her, and Dee-Dee wondered if she fucked up somehow.

Jenice said, “What are you talking about.”

“She says the li’l guy’s dying in Ariana’s butt.”

Ariana interrupted her routine to regard the rumpled pile of little woman beneath Dee-Dee. “I’m not doing anything to him.”

“Maybe you’re farting on him. You farting on him?” Dee-Dee laughed while Ariana’s frown deepened.

“Why should we let him out?” Jenice’s voice was cool and neutral.

Without thinking, Rachael yelled, “You’re killing him! He can’t breathe! There’s no room for him to move, you’re crushing him to—”

Dee-Dee’s knee rammed her soft ribs. “Hey, not so loud. You’re gonna get us in trouble, and then you’ll have to deal with Frances.” She looked back at Jenice. “Sorry about that, she’ll be better now.”

Slowly Jenice rose and knelt on the seat in front of the captor and captive, folding her arms gracefully upon the seat back. “Okay.”

Ariana’s eyebrows shot up. Mona looked at the back of Jenice’s head, then at Ariana. Dee-Dee looked like someone had given her a story problem. But Rachael stopped sobbing and tried to peek around the taller girl to see Jenice’s expression. She was too afraid to even ask if Jenice meant it.

“Sure, he can’t breathe in Ariana’s butt. It’s all cramped and sweaty.”

“Hey,” Ariana started, going no further.

“Let her up, Dee-Dee.”

The tall girl did, slowly, then backed out of the seat and sat across from Rachael, openly staring at the gigantic ass-prison of the strange little man.

Rachael wiped her eyes and crudely smoothed her hair back, self-conscious now that those glowing green eyes were fixed upon her. “What’s the trick?” she croaked.

Jenice’s cheekbones swelled with a big grin. It was one thing to torment a person; it was something else when they knew they were about to be tormented and walked right into it anyway. “You’re gonna go in there and get him.”