They said everything would be different after high school, and I was dumb enough to believe them.  Everyone still ran in their own cliques and acted according to their archetypes.  Nerds got brownie points for regurgitating the textbooks, theater kids got treated like they were made of glass, goths got excluded for being too weird, and jocks?  Jocks ran the whole campus in college, not just one building.  Cliques were like castes, and trying to move to a different one got you excluded from both as I learned the hard way.

Though they would never admit it, all the freshmen took marching orders from their Queen Jock, Stacey Stephens.  We were grouped together during orientation, and I saw it as my chance to become part of the in crowd.  I had barely started talking to her when she excused herself from the conversation, and every time I tried she leave as soon as she could.  Her stuck-up friends were no better, and I knew it was because she poisoned them against me in advance.  Before the first month of classes was over they started forming a circle when they saw me coming to discourage me from joining in, preferring to act like I was non-existent instead of talking with me.

After today, everything would be better.  Stacey was in the middle of a field, repeatedly throwing a metal ball as far as she could for some reason.  The whole thing seemed asinine, but most importantly she was alone.  None of her sycophant underlings would be able to stop me, and without her managing the opinions of the other students I could join the popular crowd.  I squeezed the metal cylinder in my hand, careful not to activate it, sure of my imminent triumph.

It was easy to see why the weak-minded sheep had given up their free will and deferred to her.  Stacey looked like a Greek goddess given flesh, with long blond hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and the most stunning pair of blue eyes I had ever seen.  Her face was perfectly symmetrical, from her thin eyebrows through her aquiline nose to her full lips and rounded chin.  Sweat glistened on the tanned skin exposed by her white tank top and tiny, elastic black shorts, making her well-sculpted muscles more defined.  She wore every inch of her over six-foot tall frame perfectly, as though she had been sculped out of marble.

Once I was done, however, she would not be drawing any more gazes.  I had managed to get a shrinking rod before they sold out, then overcharged it so it could go past the maximum setting.  If my modification worked, after I touched the tip to her and pressed the button, she would be smaller than an ant.  After she mysteriously disappeared under the sole of my boot, there would be nothing between me and the in crowd.

Stacey hurled one of her dumb balls into the air when I reached the concrete platform she stood on, and I got ready to strike.  A few more steps and I would be in range.  She watched the ball sail through the air until it landed on the ground with a thud about fifteen yards away and nodded appreciatively.  It would be perfect if I caught her from behind and everything was over before she knew what was happening.

Right when I thrusted she turned around, but I had already committed.  Stacey intercepted my arm with hers and pushed it wide, then rotated her shoulder so hers was on bottom.  She shifted her hips, putting me off-balance and stressing my arm enough that my fingers barely maintained their grip on the shrinking rod.  The base of her palm slammed into the bridge of my nose, snapping my head back and making me see stars.

“Did you just try to fucking stab me, Abby?” she demanded.  All I could manage in reply was a quiet moan while my brain settled from the strike, and she pried the rod from my hand.  She held it up to her face and inspected it.  “No, definitely not a knife.”  Stacey flipped it around to wield it like I had.  “Be a pal and tell me what this thing is.”

I shook my head and replied, “No, I can’t tell you.”

Stacey let out an exasperated sigh and responded, “I’m not letting you go until I find out what this does.  You can tell me, or I’ll use it on you and find out.  Either way, I’m gonna know.”

“Guess you better use it, then.”  I had nothing to worry about.  A dumb jock like her would never be able to figure out how to use it.  Besides, if she knew I tried to shrink her, she would have her goons hound me until I transferred. 

“The hard way it is, then.”  Stacey placed the tip between my neck and collar bone and adjusted her grip so her thumb rested on the button.  She squeezed, and the rod emitted a high-pitched tone when the button depressed.

My eyes went wide.  “No, wait!” I shouted, but it was too late.  Current coursed from the rod and ran through my body, and my vision went white.  I felt my body dwindle rapidly, and my arm slipped out of Stacey’s when I got too small for her to restrain.  She had made me feel inferior before, but I was about to get an all new perspective on that.

When my vision returned, all I could see was a black rubber surface.  I looked up and saw that it curved over me, with a clean white wall extending hundreds of feet behind it.  An embroidered gray swoosh the size of a billboard confirmed that this was Stacey’s shoe, now several times the size of my dormitory building.  In the distance, her shins rose like towers, defiantly holding her monolithic body upright.  Her ankles were hundreds of feet above me, and it was over a thousand to her knees.  If she rolled her shoe forward, I would be squished; my life now depended on the ability of a vapid jock’s ability to put two and two together.  In short, I was doomed.

“You were trying to shrink me!” Stacey exclaimed.  Maybe it was not so hopeless after all.  “Why the hell do you want to shrink me?  I barely even know you!”

“You know damn well why!” I shouted back.  “You got your friends together and conspired to make me an outcast because I’m different!”

Stacey waited a few seconds before replying.  “If you just said something, I didn’t hear it.  I guess you’re too small for your voice to reach my ears.”  That made me feel incredibly small, even if she did not mean it that way.  She probably did, though.  “Hold on, I’ll get closer so we can talk.”

She knelt on one knee, bringing her head significantly closer.  Luckily the dense concrete absorbed the impact of her knee before it reached me, or I would have felt even smaller than before.  I looked up until the toe of her shoe no longer dominating my vision and saw her round chin resting atop a knee.  Despite the distance, it was still large enough to block the sky, with her eyes like two blazing blue suns.

“Now, why did you want to shrink me?”  I repeated myself, and she could not keep from smirking while I spoke.  “Look Abby, I’m sorry.  I really am.  But I can still barely hear you!  I need to pick you up so I can understand what you’re saying.”

“No, you do not!” I protested, even while her hand descended toward me.  “You’re just using your physical size to bully me like everyone in high school did!  Well I’m used to it, and it doesn’t work on me!”  Stacey’s hand settled on the ground behind me, then inched toward me until her fingertips shoved me forward.  She adjusted her hand so I was between the tips of her thumb and forefinger, then gingerly pinched tight enough to grasp me, the oils on her skin helping me stick to it.

She plucked me off the pavement, and I screamed while my stomach dropped to the floor.  “Put me down right now!” I cried out.  “Just because you’re bigger than me doesn’t give you the right to push me around!”  Stacey did not listen and continued lifting me along the gleaming tower of her shin.  When I reached her knee, she apparently decided I had not been through enough and leaned back, bringing me with her.  As she dragged me up to her face I let out another scream, though I was sure that only made her happier.

When she finally stopped moving me, I was in front of one of her gigantic eyes.  Even with outdoor light making it retract I could fit inside the pupil, and the brilliant blue field of her iris controlled my view, with just a bit of the sclera visible around the rim.  “Okay, one more time,” she said.  At this size and distance, her voice was horrific.  It was a deep, primal roar where I had to focus on each syllable to understand any of it, like if Godzilla were trying to speak.  “Why were you trying to shrink me just now?”

I repeated what I said verbatim, and added, “How you’re treating me now just proves you think I’m beneath you!”

Stacey was silent a moment, and I expected her to pull the same shit about not being able to hear me.  Instead, she asked, “Is that what you really think happened?  You think I have nothing better to do than gossip about you with my friends?”

“Well, yeah!” I shouted back.  “That’s what you popular girls do, right?  You talk shit about the freaks and find ways to exclude us from your reindeer games!”

Stacey blinked, and I heard the squish of her eyelids coming together.  “For the record,” she began, “the first thing you said to me was trying to put down Jennifer for dressing weird.  I talked to Jenny later that night, and she’s pretty cool!  She knows a lot about crows and ravens, and I was happy to listen to her!”

“What about all those other times?” I demanded.

“You always started talking to me about something superbly weird and violent, and I couldn’t wait to get away.  Once you snuck up beside me and said you’d pluck out the eyes of a guy I just gave my number to, and another time you talked about how you wanted to disembowel one of our professors!  That’s not normal conversation!”

“Okay, well, what about all your friends?” I pressed.  “You clearly turned them against me, they won’t even acknowledge I exist anymore!”

“You alienated yourself from them on your own!” Stacey shot back.  “If it wasn’t enough that you always started talking shit about someone who could hear you, word got around fast that you kept derailing lectures by arguing with professors for twenty minutes about something not even related to the topic!  There’s a time and place for that, and it’s not when there are fifty other people trying to learn.  No one wanted to be associated with you even tangentially, and we had to cut you off or risk being pariahs ourselves.”

 “Well, you still singled me out!  If it wasn’t for how I look and dress, you would’ve been fine with all that!”

Stacey chuckled, a horrifying rumble that made my blood run cold.  “Jenny dresses and looks a lot like you, she just doesn’t talk about flensing dudes at parties.  That’s why I’m smoking her out on Saturday and you’re smaller than an ant.”

“This is just more jock bullshit!  You’re not hanging out with her, you’re treating her the same way you treated me, I’m just the first one with enough of a spine to call you out on it!”

“Are you even listening to yourself?”  Stacey’s pupil dilated and retracted while she focused harder on me.  “This shit you’re talking about, with jocks, and nerds, and social exclusion?  It doesn’t matter anymore.  That’s all high school shit.  You’re just so insistent on using bullying to excuse your social ineptitude that you see it in everything that negatively affects you.  I bet you think the professors are bullying you because you didn’t get A’s in their classes, right?”

“That’s different!” I replied.  “They can’t handle someone challenging their ideas, and…”

“That’s enough,” Stacey cut me off.  “Look, I’ll be frank with you.  You’re delusional.  I’m pretty sure that if I grow you back you’ll shoot up a lecture hall before too long, and I’m not going to take care of you for the rest of your life.  So, how do you want to do this?”

“Do what?”

Stacey sighed.  “For how smart you claim to be, I sure have to spell a lot out for you.  I can drop you right now and let you fend for yourself, and you’ll probably get taken apart by some bug’s mandibles in a few hours.  Or I can pinch my fingers together a little more and squish you right now.”

“I’d rather you squished me.”  For all her big talk and confidence, I knew Stacey was still a coward.  She did not have it in her to kill someone.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Okay, if you’re sure!”  Stacey squeezed her fingers together, and I immediately felt an intense amount of pressure building from both sides.  I let out a loud screech, both from pain and the surprise that she was actually doing it, while her thumb and index finger compressed my body flatter.  My bones cracked and my shoulders were yanked from their sockets, sending jolts of pain through my body.  A moment later the rest of my body collapsed, crushed to a puny stain on her fingertips while a wave of agony overwhelmed my senses.  Intense pain was the last thing I felt before Stacey crushed me.

Stacey wiped Abby’s remains on her thigh, mixing the blood with her own sweat.  With how she acted, Stacey doubted anyone would miss her.  She went back to throwing shotputs for the rest of the hour, then went back to her dorm.  By then the shrunken woman’s remains had become so integrated with her sweat they were indistinguishable, and all she needed was a shower to completely erase her.