Brett awoke with a start. He fumbled in total darkness, rubbed his forehead and tried to gather his surroundings. Faintly, in the back of his nose, he still felt like he could smell his teacher's sweaty ass.
Working backward, he'd remembered being washed in a bathroom sink in his leotard, weary, cradled in Mrs. Gomez's ever-warm hands while she quietly murmured supportive, appreciative words to him. This had been her mood as she put her kids to bed and completed her threatened full 2-hour ass session with Brett. She still thought, with not a little selfish equivocation, that he'd voluntarily shrunk himself down to near minimum size and let himself be squished very near her anus. The feeling had been unexpectedly delightful for her, but on his end the experience was decidedly more extreme. He'd gotten so short of fresh oxygen crammed near the source of the unremitting flatulence that he'd felt he could pass out. But mercifully for him, the gas tapered off after the vicious salvo at the outset.
And then, of course, there was the fact that he hadn't initiated it. Even though he may have secretly felt a desire for the presence of that rotund, monumental ass, he was still aghast that Mrs. Gomez's kids had done this intending to have him consumed by their mother's anus, despite his pleading in a series of texts. He would make sure that he didn't fall in completely, but it took some doing. When in the full embrace of her butt, he grimly spread his limbs outward and tried to keep his distance from the fearsome black hole. The movements seemed to make his captor react even more, and she wriggled her booty whenever he was especially forceful pressing against the flabby buttocks surrounding him. He got frustrated in the apparent observation that she was doing nothing to save him from being engulfed in her ass, and was in fact using her posterior muscles to orient him close to the hole.
Slowly, the world he was in returned to him as he pushed past the memory of last night. He didn't have long to wait before Mrs. Gomez came to retrieve him. She gently pried off the lid to his confinement and he realized he was in a box by her bedside. As she cheerfully greeted him in Spanish, he noticed that she looked a bit disheveled, but he realized that this was the first time he'd ever seen her without makeup. Despite what could be achieved with cosmetics, real-life 43-year-olds did not have perfect skin and perfectly red lips and their eyes don't captivate as much anymore.

The disconnect between last night and this morning was puzzling to Brett. She woke him up early to give him plenty of time to prep, and she herself made ready rapidly, did her hair and makeup with the deftness of 30 years practice, and was then in her element as super-mom, extremely solicitous of him. She started cooking him breakfast before her kids woke up, which he ate eagerly. But he couldn't help but feel she was now treating him uncharacteristically like a kid, as though making amends for her behavior yesterday. The feeling continued as he got a strange look in asking for a cup of coffee, as she held a freshly brewed pot in hand. To Alicia, kids didn't drink coffee yet, and coffee was for adults. But Brett felt like he ought to be treated as an adult given what he was going through.

Finally, as she and Brett finished their coffee, Alicia picked up her phone. It had died last night as she'd forgotten to charge it, and she'd had to recharge it this morning. She scrolled through the notifications first. Brett watched her tap out a text response and then look over to him.
"Brett your mom had a long night, but she told me she got Don out and he is okay. She offered to give you a ride. I could give you a ride too but my kids aren't up yet and I thought you'd want to go in earlier."
Brett merely nodded. This was what he basically expected, and he was glad that he'd be going into school with his mom and not back with Mrs. Gomez. But he was expectng some other reaction from her as she continued to catch up on her phone's messages. Then, almost on cue, he saw the reaction. She tensed up when she reached the messages passed on the shrinking app.
What she was reading was:
"enjoy your stay loser. you're about to get even smaller." Alicia at first did not know who sent that, but she could contextually piece together that it was one of her kids.
"what kind of joke is this?" Brett had responded after a few minutes.
"what do you think lol."
Ten minutes later, she saw the following.
"please just give your phone to your mom. I wont tell on you. I can hardly breathe and her farts are so strong. she doesn't seem to be noticing my struggles."
"tooooo bad brett. you should have thought about it first."
After a few more minutes, she saw Brett try again.
"please just help. I could suffocate in here."
"No way. You signed up for it. I hope mom invites you over all the time."
"if you unshrink me I will tell your mom that she shouldn't do this to you because it's worse than I thought."
Alicia saw that a few minutes had elapsed while Isabel had evidently considered the trade.
"Nice try but no. You won't change a thing. You're staying right where you are until my mom moves you."
And then the next message came a half hour later. As she recalled, that was when most of the stomach difficulty had passed and Brett's movement had died down a bit. She noted that Brett was no longer pleading, and was making threats of his own.
"Nevermind. I'm going to tell your mom that it was fine and she should do exactly the same butt confinement to both of you."
"lol try it, see if I care."

She looked up at Brett, who was looking at her already. Her expression was that of regret.
"Brett I'm so sorry. It was too much, wasn't it?"
The boy across the table couldn't bring himself to blame her, and shook his head slightly as he was hedging again. "You really did a number on me, but I got used to it. I was just worried you didn't realize I was falling in that's all."
"Oh honey, of course I felt "your struggles." I wouldn't let you fall in. I wouldn't crush you. I was paying attention."
"But you really followed through on that threat of farting, eh?" he said, a little grin spreading on his reddening face. As Alicia parsed hidden affection from the boy, she again had to sample that forbidden glee, though this time, she was resisting.
"Yes I'm sorry, I gave you everything I had hehe.... but you know, you really made me feel better. I kept doing it because I liked the way it felt."
Brett looked down, a bit frightened at her frankness. Why was she telling him this? How should he respond?
She sighed, and then lowered her voice to barely above a whisper. "Brett... I think I need to be honest, ok? I really thought you also enjoyed being in my big butt. I thought you shrunk yourself and tried to get closer. I didn't realize it was my kids who did it." She paused as she noticed that Brett was kind of looking downward awkwardly. "Now I don't know why I tell you this. It was a mistake. I guess I'm just telling you why I did it, why I played with you in my ass - it wasn't because I thought I was actually doing it to punish you, it wasn't something I would do with any random fighting teenager, but I did it because it turned me on and I thought it turned you on too."

Brett struggled to respond. He was desperate to not say something he'd regret, but his inner desires momentarily took the upper hand. "I guess I did." He said, marvelling briefly at his boldness.

But to his surprise, this relevation didn't please Alicia to hear. Not at all. She wrinkled her brow and looked at him as though he had made her job all the harder. The words came emotionlessly afterward. "This is all a silly mistake. I am sorry Brett. I said in the beginning I did not want to shrink anybody, and I think my shrinking days are over. I don't want to deal with this kind of punishment with a young student. It brings bad feelings. We did the shrink training and now I can get certified. Thank you for helping me. Now, I'm going to delete my app and clear the chat history on your wrist control. Don't worry about Isabel and Raph, I'll deal with them. For you, I think you can just tell Mrs. Lee-Reilly and your mom that we did the training and that's that, nothing of interest to discuss."
He nodded vigorously and grasped onto the proposed conclusion with the all-consuming relief of a teenager pardoned of an awkward situation. Sputtering, he added "Yeah yeah of course, I get it. Of course. This was all basically for school."
And then seamlessly, Mrs. Gomez moved back into super-mom mode.
His mind was racing. Perhaps he had erred in admitting his thrill even in an equivocal sense, putting her on the spot of deciding the course of action, but it couldn't be helped now. For fuck's sake, what was wrong with him for even broaching the thought that he liked being in her ass and letting it happen this way. She may have a fine ass, but she was old enough to be his mom, and she was married goddamn it. She had been visibly nervous as she had told him all of that. Maybe she was telling the truth and had enjoyed shrinking him, but without a good pretense like this once-in-a-lifetime shrink training opportunity, there was no way she'd ever organize something like this again and that therefore meant it may as well never have happened.

But he had to get out of here now. Mom couldn't arrive soon enough.


---


The rest of the day was uneventful for Brett. If Mom was weary from picking up Don last night and picking him up this morning, she didn't seem to show it and seemed to be in decent spirits. Don rode with them to get to work. What awaited him was a load of nothing in all his classes. As it was the second-to-last week of school for Brett and he hadn't got any exams today, there was only token effort to keep students engaged.

He had next year to look forward to while absorbed in his thoughts. All of the shrinking training was occupying his mind, but when he could distance himself from it, he felt energized by the hope of the work advancing his career goals.
Career-wise, Brett had very recently (in just the past few months) gotten to know his dad a lot better. Jason Henderson, 51, business analyst at a hedge fund, had divorced acrimoniously from his wife when Brett was very young. Though Brett hadn't seen much of him growing up, he had finally heard enough to have a good idea that this line of work was for him, and that dad was willing to show him the ropes and help him make connections. Compared to the upstate prospects, financial jobs in the city were still much better-paying, the environment was more exciting, and as dad pointed out, the intense volatility in markets expected in coming years would always be an opportunity for the ambitious and smart. Yet Brett wasn't quite as interested in the business itself as becoming a technologist for the business, a decision which greatly pleased his father, who was not tech-savvy by any means. Brett wanted to become a guru who would be treated with respect and well-paid for his knowledge. A key assumption was that Brett would be able to get the CS degree no sweat, and the very first step in his plan was now: Brett would need to parlay his computer interests into kicking butt in Ms. Issakinen's AP CS class next year and lean on her for extra steps to take to maximize his prospects. His dad could do part of the networking, but he had to take advantage of every opportunity he currently had.
Loren Issakinen, he reckoned, was one of those opportunities.
Ms. Issakinen's story was kind of legendary among both the boys and girls of Westwood. Born in Minnesota to a working-class family of Scandinavian descent, she had early on been a prodigy with math and computer science. That she was utterly unflappable and deeply experienced in what she taught was one thing, and it would not have been unprecedented to see these characteristics in an older teacher who had retired from a previous industry, but it was quite another to see in a woman still in her 20s, and both intimidatingly beautiful and feminine. This condition led to many amusing occurrences as masculine gamer bros who would belittle women outside class swallowed their tongues or heard their voices falter awkwardly when they tried to address the tall Nordic teacher's towering intellect and intolerance for fools. She was seemingly as principled as she was intelligent, having started with a big tech company in Silicon Valley, to moving to a senior quantitative analyst role at Morgan Stanley at the youngest age ever in the history of that firm, before concluding in her humble Midwestern way that the clash of motives was impossible, that big money on either coast corrupted the world around her and she needed to take a big pay cut and start pouring her energy into teaching and volunteering. But rather than going back to the Midwest, she acknowledged the necessity of money, and stayed within a half-day's commute of New York City, going back to visit her former colleagues in the city when she wanted to solicit their donations for tech education and sometimes trading them speaking slots and teaching seminars on diversity and inclusiveness and outreach to women in tech. There was some element of horse-trading tht she found distasteful, but she was ostensibly a true believer in getting women into tech in a big way. Despite this, she seemed to have a true friendship with Principal Lee-Reilly of all people. Issakinen approved of the principal's no-prisoners approach to expanding their high-stakes, high-discipline, tough educational program that was envisaged to turn Westwood students into the envy of the state and nation. The CS teacher was aware that there would be bureaucratic obstacles and, having a general distaste for dealing with them, freely allowed her prestigious background to be used for Lee-Reilly to steamroll opposition. Lee-Reilly for her part had considered Issakinen a tremendous asset, and carved out a protected niche for her, getting strong participation and support by parents for her girl coder clubs, hack-a-thons, and presentations by both industry and open-source people.
In trying to make her intellect and persuasiveness an asset of his own, Brett wanted to handle this relationship with Ms. Issakinen with the greatest of care. That meant three things to Brett.
Firstly, based on her history, she was known to have a profound distaste for boorish financial types. He reckoned she probably would not sympathize greatly if Brett told her he wanted to work on Wall Street, but he didn't have to tell her that precisely.
Secondly, he knew nothing of what Ms. Issakinen might know about him. His mom being a gym teacher, she had some friendships among the staff, but he reckoned that the much younger Loren Issakinen was not among them. At least, he hoped that much. His mom's involvement could only make this worse. He would have to debrief his mom on whatever communications she'd had with Ms. Issakinen if the latter told him that they'd known each other.
But, finally, and most worryingly, he felt that the shrinking training may limit the scope of her estimation of him. He would have a chance to show he was a team player and a decent person, but the experience of treating him like a shrinkee may dampen Ms. Issakinen's appreciation of his actual potential in the future. Unless he somehow impressed her.

But he had then gotten a terse school email from Ms. Issakinen at the end of final period.
"Hiya Brett - don't come by my afternoon classroom, I won't be there. Come to the computer lab by the library, I was just finishing up an experiment."
He got a knot in his stomach. Trepidation overcame his legs as he tried to rise from the bench. He couldn't afford to blow this and the pressure was making him nauseous. But he steeled himself. He drank a big bottle of water and zipped up his bag, venturing toward the computer lab.


---


Brett knew who to look for, but he didn't see her at first. The lab was poorly lit as though she enjoyed working in the dark. Brett did not know where the light switch was as he'd rarely been in this lab. Most of the student PCs were off, while against the back wall he saw a dizzying array of peripherals attached to a few new specialized workstations. There were Raspberry Pi boards, incomplete chassis for wheeled robots, a 3D printer, and some larger boards which he had heard were called FPGAs.
Then he saw her actually on the floor, evidently wiring something up. She start to sit up and nearly hit her head on the desk above.
"Brett, welcome. I didn't hear you come in. Just finishing up my new cable management." she said messily, gripping a screwdriver in her teeth, which was getting slightly smeared with her bright cotton-candy pink lip gloss.
Grasping the edge of the desk above her, the young teacher climbed effortlessly to her feet, which were clad in some beat-up black and white Converse. She was even younger-looking in this environment than he expected. The natural blonde hair color that he'd seen a few months ago was gone, replaced with a mostly aquamarine dye job, which was currently gathered in a hasty ponytail. She had a multi-colored tattoo of some sort on the side and back of her neck. As she righted herself, she brushed off the dust on her oversized-neck tee and leggings. Her body was fantastically trim, excepting her large chest which was said to be especially breathtaking whenever she leaned over a seated student to help him or her with something on their computer. Normally smart boys seemed to be much dumber on any days she wore a particularly low neckline. But none of this made her self-conscious per se; clearly she had no intention of hiding her figure. Unwanted, impolite attention by students or adults would be met by Ms. Issakinen with withering sarcasm and creative insults.
Taking the screwdriver out of her mouth and putting it in her left hand, she extended her right hand and smiled at Brett with an eye contact that made his heart leap a little. "Call me Loren please, but if you must use my last name I pronounce it EES-ah-kai-nen."
This was the first time he got this kind of treatment. A handshake was a good sign. He shook her hand with as much force as he thought he should given her soft, well manicured hand. It seemed to be just the right amount, as her grip matched his. Perhaps she was screening him for excessive masculinity, a test he would doubtlessly pass as he had fairly weak hands and no desire to project power. That was not going to get him anywhere today.
"By the way Brett, our IT department here is brain-dead. Jim is so stupid and still hasn't patched our email server vulnerabilities. I told him so many times. So I only sent you an email earlier as I had no side channel option with you. Have you heard of Signal?"
Brett replied no, he hadn't.
"It's a secure messaging app. Get the app and look me up by my phone number. We'll communicate through that method except when you are shrunk, in which case you will have to use the wrist control's embedded Android app as before."
Then without warning she walked quickly to her office in the back and closed the door behind Brett. It was, as in the main lab, fairly dark.
"Have a seat Brett." She asked robotically. He sat down on one of the black leather chairs and peered around. She had an eclectic array of equipment in here, including what appeared to be a small-scale wind turbine against the wall. He caught a whiff of chalk dust, like he was back in kindergarten, and saw a chalkboard covering one of the walls, absolutely festooned with scary equations and poorly scaled diagrams, with a half full box of Hagoromo chalk perched underneath the board.

"I want to get to know you, but first I want to thank you for doing this shrinking business. I'm sure it has not all been fun and games. I heard you had to stay overnight with Fatima and Alicia. You must be having a tough week and I want to let you know that I'm already impressed with what I hear."
Brett responded with a certain sense of pride, "It's definitely been a challenge to fit in all the sessions. But most of the legwork I did with Miss Olivier the week before last. I'm just trying to help out the faculty and do what Mrs. Lee-Reilly needs me to do. I do think that-" he paused with hesitation.
Loren nodded in silence. She had a piercing gaze and with the vaguest motion of her eyes implored Brett to go on.
"I do think that Mrs. Lee-Reilly does not like me and wants me to be shrunk under the worst possible conditions."
Loren then started to speak. "I appreciate your candor, and Kelly wanted me to talk about this with you. Kelly Lee-Reilly is my boss and friend, and I want to state frankly - I don't want to shrink kids in general. I'm not a disciplinarian. I tend to think it's a lazy way to educate. I use my wits to keep students in their place and engaged. That's enough, don't you think?"
Brett nodded intently in approval.
"But she uses all of this as a way to get attention from the public. She has larger purposes. She wants to revitalize the educational system of this country and make our kids better at math, better at logic, better at algorithms than any other kids in the world. She doesn't want teachers to be shrinking and humiliating students for no reason, but she does want a system where students are appropriately humbled and teachers understand the awesome responsibility they have. You've seen that the faculty of this school has held your life in their hands this week - but candidly, you have figuratively had your life in their hands long before that. The abilities of a child, and their ultimate destiny, can be squandered or grown by the efforts of teachers. We have several research papers in progress on the results of this study. I personally am involved not just in the analysis of pedagogy where shrinking can be involved, but also in improving the technology itself. I am part of a regular working group with all three of the world's bioengineering firms that are producing shrinking machines."
Then silence. Did she think he needed a pep speech or some kind of ideological basis for this? Was THIS kind of coaching supposed to put him at ease?
"I'll be honest Brett, you've been astonishing. I have debriefed every teacher after their experience with you. I wanted to know all the details, and they have told me. You have great patience for some fairly extreme scenarios. Lee-Reilly was trying to give us new experimental data, and we have learned a lot from this already. But, ugh, I'm getting ahead of myself. Why don't you tell me about yourself, Brett?"

Brett cleared his throat and tried to begin. "Well, I'm a pretty asocial kid. I have always liked computers. I wasn't taking school too seriously until last year or so, but now I'm really sure that I want to get involved in designing computers and hardware and stuff."
"Why did you sign up for the volunteer program in the first place?" She asked as though she hadn't heard a word he'd said.
"Well... I figured that there'd be extra credit or something-"
The woman looked disappointed and interrupted him. "C'mon Brett, don't make up lies. I need you to be totally honest to help me with this project, ok?" Softening, she took off her glasses and looked at him. "Let me be clear. I am interacting with you at this moment in confidence except for the results of the research itself. I won't tell your mom anything you tell me if you don't want her to hear it. I won't judge you unfairly. Your name is never going to be revealed in any publication. You will NEVER be known to be the shrinkee for this program by anyone outside of the program itself. Are you with me Brett?"
Her eyes, beautiful globes of blue, locked with his and caught him. "Yyy-yes, Loren." Brett finally stammered out.
"So I just need to confirm the origins. I have verified that the first sign-up was very vague. It didn't say what you'd be doing and it did not specify what kind of credit you'd be getting. All the other students who signed up at first, except you, seem to have voiced their concern with the rumors about what the shrinking involved, and dropped out. Now, were you aware of the rumors?"
Brett sighed and removed all shame from his mind. "Yes. I heard that shrunken students were put into teacher's shoes."
"Fascinating. And you chose to sign up?"
"Yes I did."
"You did all this in the first place because you wanted to be in Sondra's shoes?"
Brett paused, reddening, and then said "I suppose yes, although I would never have asked her outright and I don't like to say it aloud-"
"Fascinating. Now, would you have signed up to do the same with any male teachers?"
Brett said "No way!" with great finality and no delay. Dear God, he thought, Loren was going to confront him with his fetish right here and now. He could only hope she wouldn't make it that awkward.
But she reacted as though she expected the answer. The next question came in a monotone. "Are there any female teachers on the faculty that you know of with whom you very definitely wouldn't want to do this shrinking?"
Brett thought for a second and said "Definitely. My mom for sure.... eh, I'm a little worried that Mrs. Samson would be really strict and harsh with me, but I'm still going to go through with her. Also I really don't like Mrs. Sweeney, because she has always been mean to me, but she is already certified, so I didn't have to do her. Others already certified, like Mrs. Moore and Mrs. Iqbal, are a lot older and sort of distant; I guess I don't have anything against them but it just doesn't sound appealing to me. Most of the rest of the ladies in the faculty have been good to me in the past and I don't, uh, mind the idea necessarily."
Nodding, Loren Issakinen bit her lip, raised her eyebrows, and then tried to sum up what she was hearing. "So to sum up: there is a subset of female faculty at this school whose feet you'd be prepared to be underneath, whose butts you'd be prepared to be underneath, whose mouths you'd be willing to enter, along with possibly other yet-to-be-determined punishment simulations - even under particularly gross conditions artificially created, even with the knowledge that some of the teachers may be less than completely neutral in their feelings. This is a group with whom generally you'd place complete trust with your safety in a shrunken state. And it comes down to your perception of their niceness and likeability, perhaps mingled with some other intangible feelings?"
There was the fig leaf. He exhaled and said nervously: "Yep, I guess that describes it."
"Fascinating." She said finally, looking away and continuing to read the document in her hand. "That is all that I need for now."

Minutes seemed to pass as she continued reading. Brett stewed. He hadn't been asked to be quiet, but he was simply being ignored.
Brett continued to silently balk at the finality of her response. His mind was going into deep rabbit holes, pleading with itself for relief from this awkwardness, and he was deeply distressed with her coldness. Obviously he'd have no chance getting her favor and the whole idea of using Loren as a mentor was falling apart. Why did she want to dwell on his motivations? Why couldn't they talk together like normal people talk, with pleasantries? Why was this happening to him? He had a silent emotional implosion as she continued to look away to finish reading the rest of her packet, then the implosion flared up as he started sputtering rapid-fire questions.
"Well, wait a minute. What is going to happen now? Why did you want to know all that? Why are you treating me so coldly, like some kind of scientific subject? Why did you ask me to explain myself to you if you didn't care about my answer? You gave me your thanks but do you care about anything outside of this research of yours? I'm trying to help the principal get done on her schedule and I'm not trying to give you a hard time but this is just nuts-"

Putting her glasses back on, she actually laughed for the first time, stopping Brett in his tracks. She shook her head. "You are right Brett. The teacher has failed the student in this case. I sometimes have communication difficulties. I am on the spectrum. I reacted with hidden hostility at your earlier intention to impress me. You did not have to state it, I perceived it. It was such a routine response that I must have misjudged you in my application of it. I'm gratified that you know how to be honest, and even moreso, that you know when to admit that you're scared or feel insecure. That's a healthy kind of masculinity, Brett, which I find rare among young men. I'm sorry that I sort of slip into a kind of mode - my mind is inherently and violently scientific and analyzing, but it is fallible, and sometimes it leads me to communicate in a brusque and transactional way. I may have given the wrong impression, but I beg your forgiveness. I will try to be more earnest and emotive with you since it is important to me that you feel happy with me."
She actually placed her hand on top of Brett's when saying the final sentence, slightly wrapping her fingers around his. It astonished Brett, who could barely hold his mouth shut. The room seemed to be stuck in time. Again, her effortlessly entrancing eyes, now squinching from her uncharacteristically wide smile, were disarming him and holding him in stasis. From one hateful moment to one loving moment, he wished that the warm feeling he now had could be hermetically sealed and preserved for all time. Loren was holding his hand as though she had just needed an excuse to do it, and he'd evidently found that the key to her friendly side, almost never witnessed by students in one-on-one settings, was to be utterly sincere and expose your weaknesses pitifully.

"And now, Brett, can we continue my shrinking training from my house? I'll give you a ride. I don't really want to do it here in the school. I know that you value your secrecy and I believe it will be better there."
Brett didn't need to even hear the justification, he said yes.