Lying on her stomach on the floor of her dorm room and sprawled over an open textbook, Ellie gingerly pinches your tiny body between her pillowy thumb and index as she removes you from her mouth.  The skin on the tips of her fingers glistens with saliva and she holds you just above her chin for closer examination.

            Standing at barely a half-inch in height in your black wetsuit, not even the length of the girl’s thumbnail, all you can see from here without craning your neck up or down is the gorgeous pink entrance to the saturated grotto you found yourself in moments before.  Her plush mouth curls upward into a coy smirk and she playfully bites her lower lip near the corner.  Toying with your mind, like she always does: the same game you both crave so much it almost hurts, though neither of you would ever openly admit it.

            You can’t help but shudder at this sight and her smile only widens, revealing two immaculate rows of her rigorously maintained teeth.  Their opal ivory is so pure you imagine you could see yourself in them like a mirror if you ever got a close enough gaze at them in the light of day.

            A single strand of her crystalline saliva hangs like the ornament of a chandelier from her lip to your chest.

            “Almost lost you there for a minute,” she whispers gently, chuckling a couple of times in lilting succession that releases a few calming puffs of air onto your face.  You know she’s lying, but her laugh is infectious.

            “I had it under control,” you say, your voice cracking a little after having gone so long without speaking.  “It was fine.”

            “Oh really?  I could feel you kick at my uvula a couple times,” she says, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow inquisitively.  “That’s no good.”

            “Really, it was fine,” you repeat again, resting your arms on your friend’s two fingers, still cradling you on either side with just enough pressure that the fabric of your wetsuit barely compresses.  You used to tremble when she held you like this for fear of falling, but that’s a complete thing of the past.  Right now, you feel just as secure as when you’re standing on your own two feet at your normal, human height.

            In fact, you feel safer.

            “You’ve been in there for twenty minutes.  I figured you should take a break,” she says, concern entering her voice.

            “Only that long?”

            The smile creeps back across her lips with satisfaction.  “Yes, only that long.”

            “That’s nothing.”

            “So why the heck am I still talking to your scrawny self?” she snorts with false condescension.  “When I could be chewing you over again?”  Her two fingers around your sides shift a little as she nimbly caresses you between them without thinking as if you were a coin, but you remain steady.

            She knows exactly what she’s doing.  She is completely in control of your body, as much as she is of her own.

            “Obviously nothing important,” you boldly say, crossing your arms with feigned pride.

            “I think all that time in my mouth has made you go loopy,” she says smarmily, rolling her eyes at your indignant little display.  “You have no idea how hard it is to take you seriously while you’ve still got my spit in your hair.”

            “That’s not the point,” you say sheepishly, dabbing at a gooey droplet of her potent saliva still matted thickly in your shaggy bangs.

            “No regrets, then?” she asks, though she’s already opening her lips as wide as possible and moving her fingers back toward the dark maw.  The decision is made.

            “None,” you answer truthfully.

            “Good.  I’ll check back with you after I finish this chem lab, then” she giggles, and with that her fingers slide away from your sides, suspending you in freefall for the blink of an eye before you plop with a loud squish back onto the damp landing pad of her tongue, curled upward slightly and waiting patiently to receive you again.

            Her hand remains just a few inches outside of her mouth and her shapely fingers begin to waggle at you as a gesture of friendly farewell.  You watch them, gripping the slippery tip of her tongue for support, and wave back, even though you feel a little silly doing it when no one can see it.

            Slowly, then, her lips begin closing until they pop together with a moist smack.  You brace yourself, well-familiarized with the game now, as her tongue springs into action below you like a previously slumbering animal.  You’re bounced upward by the thrust of her slithering red muscle and land in the soggy lower circle of her mouth, where the saliva is already pooling anew in thick, gummy puddles behind her teeth.  It clings to your sides and begins to rise higher as she salivates a fresh supply into the hazy darkness.

            You inch forward, pressing your hands against the back of her teeth, entranced by their intricacy as though you were touching smooth granite in a rainstorm.  Your fingers slide down lower until you can feel her gums, squishy and flexible to the touch.

            Ellie doesn’t allow your idle moment of touch-and-go to last very long, and suddenly her tongue is splashing downward into the collected saliva, lapping it everywhere until the goop is sprayed across your face and hair again.  Wherever your hands go, they pull away with warm strands of saliva entangled between your fingers.

            Every texture brings fresh goose bumps to your skin, and you positively tingle from the wonderful sensory overload of it all.  In the darkness of your friend’s mouth, you feel wildly, violently alive, something you know would be impossible to explain to anyone else who tried to understand.  That’s probably the reason why you’ve never tried.

            Her tongue rises again, this time aiming for you, and pins you down firmly against the base of her mouth.

            Happily, you turn yourself over and wrap your limbs around as much of the massive, writhing monster tongue as you can handle, which admittedly isn’t very much considering you only stand at half an inch tall.  Despite your playfully aggressive antics in trying to wrestle it, you and Ellie both are fully aware of how much stronger her tongue is than your entire half-inch body.  This thought is with you at all times when playing around inside her mouth.  It’s at once humbling and comforting to you in a way that no other human being could truly understand.  You squirm around, letting it dunk you again and again into the shallow collection of saliva and enjoying every move it makes.

            Clearly bored with your paltry antics at restraining her mighty muscle, Ellie rears her tongue back with a swift motion that flecks spittle around in a fresh, hot mist.  Before you can even get back onto your haunches, the tongue is flattening back out, scooping you up on top, and curling into a loose tube shape: one of your friend’s favorite tricks to show off to you.  Her lips part ever so slightly to make room for the girth of her performing organ.

            “Yeah, yeah, so you can burrito your tongue.  Really impressive!” you groan loudly out into the small opening as you lie perfectly flat on your back.  Almost like a dare.  Her tubed tongue cradles you higher in the hazy cavern of her perfect mouth.

            Obviously hearing your peanut gallery commentary, Ellie flattens her tongue again and points upward with startling speed, pinning you expertly to the smoothly ridged roof of her mouth with the very tip of her tongue.

            “Okay, okay, so maybe that’s kind of impressive,” you breathe, careful not to move a muscle.

            All around, the gooey walls rumble in response, echoing with the satisfied chuckle that begins as a murmur but ascends until your every muscle is experiencing Ellie’s victorious laughter.  You rattle and shake, listening and enjoying the sound like a concert prepared specially for you, because in reality, it is.

            No maliciousness.  No condescension.  Her laugh, even in the dark stickiness, is buoyant and renews your energy, and you want to spring forth into the unknown to see what she’ll do next with you.  Even if her tongue dropped away right at this instant, suspending you in another heartbeat of freefall, your breathing wouldn’t hasten and your arms would lie peacefully at their sides.  You would anticipate with absolute certainty the relaxing landing in the cupped muscle of her ravenous tongue.

            When this precise thing happens, you follow your bodily protocol exactly and allow yourself to fade back into the playful fold of Ellie’s tongue, enjoying every instant and wishing that time would slow down until all you had to do was float and exist, savoring every sensation she gifted to you between her lips.

You lie back at your full height, freshly showered and clothed with your eyes shut tight, and your head resting in Ellie’s lap as her fingers slow-dance through your hair.

            Her dorm bed is cushy, though secretly no comparison with her tongue.  You could fall asleep in your friend’s mouth, and you know it’s no joke because it happened once when Ellie was too tired from the day to swish you around, and you awoke to find yourself face-to-iris with those gray pools of her eyes staring you down and trying not to laugh.

            You would do just about anything for this girl.  If she picked you up and asked casually about whether she could place you on her tongue and never remove you again, you probably would say no, but you would have to at least consider it for a second.  You know this can’t entirely be a hyperbole because the scenario has entered your dreams from time to time, and almost nothing before has felt so startlingly real to you.

            She’s not a fool, and neither are you.  What you have now is not like an ordinary friendship.  Even though the idea of shrinking human beings has been ingrained into society’s conception of reality for going on twenty years now, what you do isn’t exactly normal, or at least wouldn’t be to anyone else.  For the both of you, there’s as much calm in it as there is in what you’re doing at this instant with your head resting against her denim-clad thigh.

            You can’t say for certain what it is you feel for her.  Maybe you’ve simply become infatuated with the way you feel around her, so you decided a while ago to not risk asking and damaging what you have.  That’s the line, and you’re sticking to it, no matter how much your subconscious has been prodding at you of late to think on it.  You can’t know for sure, but you imagine something similar is going on in her head.  Part of you wishes desperately for the unspoken to be reversed, but the rest of you is too scared to ask.

            Yet here you are, ostensible friends, lying on the fresh white sheets of her bed with your head cradled across her legs while she plays with your hair with one hand and skims through a chemistry book in the other.  You haven’t said anything to one another for at least fifteen minutes, and neither of you is made uncomfortable with that fact.  With her fingertips sliding across your head, scrunching around your bangs and then slowly releasing them between her parted digits as they glide soothingly back across your scalp, you feel you could just melt, and to speak might interrupt the essence of this peace.

            You can see her eyes are following the words on the page, but her sharp mind is always on the move, and she couldn’t possibly have this much finesse in her fingers if her attention wasn’t occasionally diverted to you as she massages the top of your head with such endless care.  As you look up, you watch her palm pass over your eyes again in preparation to stroke your hair, imagining it at titanic scale with the exact same fearless revere.

            The dying glisten of the sun that’s spread through the open window creeps through the rippling locks of her honey-colored hair, dappled here and there with darkness.  Patterns you could lose yourself in.  You love her hair, but it’s almost redundant to admit to yourself, because you love everything about her.

            Maybe even Ellie herself, but still, the thought of admitting that to yourself is too terrifying.

            It’s only been thirty minutes since she finished her chemistry homework and plucked your worn-out form from under the baking, mammoth blanket of her tongue, declaring that you had had enough, because she wasn’t going to be responsible for you becoming too sore simply for her amusement.  She sounded apologetic, seeing as how the pair of you had stretched this out further than ever before: forty minutes, all told, straddling her tongue in the blackness and letting it marinate you in her luscious mouth juices.

            All you could do was joke right back at her, but this time she was serious, carrying you to the bathroom in her cupped palm after ensuring no one else was around.  In short order she had brought you back up to an even six feet tall with the press of a button and a quick green flash from her Portable Matter Reduction Device: the newest model of the year, which had been so streamlined in its design, it might easily have been mistaken for a digital camera.

            “How do you feel?” she’d asked as you sat on the scuffed countertop of the sink, as though you were a patient with mysterious aches visiting a clinical physician.

            “Great,” you’d said with a swallow, lying a little out of guilt, and then hung your head, knowing she could see right through you the instant her eyebrow rose up.  “A little tired, though.”

            “I thought so,” she’d sighed with disappointment.  “You shouldn’t have talked me into putting you back in.  And I shouldn’t have done it.”

            “It’s okay,” you defended quietly.  “I can take it.”

            “Uh-huh,” she had said with a disbelieving shake of her head, hands on her hips after she had pocketed the small tablet-sized shrinking device again.  “Why don’t you come sit in here with me for a while after you get cleaned up?”

            “It’s fine.  I’ll be fine.  I have to get some homework done,” you’d said, not necessarily lying now, but not wanting to appear even more to long for her attention than you’d probably already made yourself look.  That’s the last thing either of you needs.

            “You’re staying here with me for a while,” she’d repeated adamantly, clearly not making it a choice, as she turned and walked the twenty-something paces back to her dorm room to give you some privacy to shower.

            You couldn’t help but grin to yourself.

            God, she’s magnetic.

            “What are you looking at?” she accuses suddenly as you gaze up at the light through her practically sun-shimmering locks, though through her intentionally abrasive tone you sense her kidding.  Her eyes don’t even leave the page, and confirm for you how much she notices without it seeming so.

            “Your hair,” you admit without thinking, careful not to come off as flirty.  That’s ground you don’t want to stand on.

            “My hair,” she repeats back with a half-smirk.  “Something wrong with it?”

            “No.  It’s just the way the light hits it.  The way it trickles in.  Like… liquid sun washing through,” you answer truthfully.  “I like it.”

            “What are you, some kind of poet now?” she snorts, knowing you only get into these loopy word rambles when you’re exhausted.  Her hand has paused in its path through your dark hair, and now she’s simply thumbing the same tuft back and forth until she’s practically got your brain in the palm of her hand, even if she can’t have your body at this moment.  You are absolute putty at her touch.

            “Maybe,” you shrug.  She knows you like to write and ceaselessly teases you about it, though you still notice her eyes giving strict attention to the scribbled words whenever she manages to convince you to let her read some of it.  You’re bashful about it, and the fact that she’s so blazingly intelligent makes it even worse.  You’ll never understand fully what she could want with you and your fluffy ramblings.

            She tilts her head and pouts her lips, clearly fighting the urge to roll her eyes, and her hand continues moving again in your hair, but this time her fingers trace their way down your temple and to your cheek, where she clasps her palm to the side of your face.  Her skin is warm and inviting, and once again you can’t help but feel transported back to a size where every crease in her skin is a valley to you.

            She sighs, leaving you both in silence again, and you wonder if there’s something you should say.

            Should you try to ask her?

            You’ve locked eyes now and you can tell there’s something you both want to say, but you’re far too petrified.  And despite how, right now, you feel safer than you have before, possibly in your whole life, why shouldn’t you be?

            Then the words come from her soft lips with a final tiny motion: “Do you want to stay tonight?”

            It’s less terrifying than you were expecting, and you both instantly understand what the words mean.

            They don’t mean sex, and more importantly, they don’t mean what you both feared was coming, so a collective sigh of relief is shared.

            “Yes.”

            “Good,” she responds, closing up her book at last and setting it on the bed.  Her freed hand slides back into her pocket while her other continues to caress your hair, and retrieves the PMRD.  She bypasses the security with a password and a thumbprint, then clicks through the settings, the light from the touchscreen reflected in her glowing eyes like furrowed storm clouds.

            There’s a certain humorous irony you can’t help but miss now as you watch her work in preparation for this calmly platonic night in the same room.

            For everyone who knows the pair of you, or at least thinks they know you without actually knowing the slightest thing about either of you or your desires, it’s the public assumption that you’re both at least bang buddies if not already embroiled in some deeply passionate romantic affair.

            Neither of you has put in the effort to try and deny it, because to explain the truth would take far more time and understanding your friends probably don’t have.  In the lunchroom, at study group, and before class, when the pair of you sit together as often as you can, you’re made the constant subject of good-natured and curious jokes due to your total lack of PDA, as though you’re purposefully hiding something from everyone.

            If your subconscious, and that odd silent look in her gorgeous gray eyes, were any indication, you’re probably hiding something from even yourselves.

            “How small?” she intones softly.

            “I don’t care,” you answer truthfully.  “It’s your ray.”

            “It’s your body,” she retorts.

            You shrug.  “I trust you.”

            A shudder almost goes through your body.  Despite the phrase being a radical redundancy, considering what activities the pair of you usually engage in, this is probably the most provocative thing you’ve said all evening, and you instantly regret it as your eyes meet in a strange flash.

            You didn’t mean it in the sense that you know she won’t hurt you; that’s been well established.  You said it in the simplest, broadest way that means so much more, and she knows it too.

            “Thanks,” she says, her face expressionless with surprise at your bluntness but her voice lulled and sweet as magnanimous summer air.

            Maybe it wasn’t something to regret after all.

            A few more taps on the screen as the miniature barrel extends like a camera lens, and her eyes widen at you to ask if you’re ready, which of course you have been for several minutes.  You close your lids for the green flash and actually allow yourself to savor the telltale chill that runs under your skin while shrinking, because despite the heat the PMRD takes from you, as you lie on this bed, with your head in your friend’s lap, everything sort of evens out.

            You become aware that Ellie’s hand, which had moved to the back of your head, is becoming your whole world, swallowing you up until it’s not just your head but your entire body cradled in the center of her palm, smooth as cream and scented faintly of a flowery lotion, the tiny lines running like a road map in all directions around you.

            Her fingers curl upward as fleshy spires, protectively forming a wall despite the fact that you know her hand wouldn’t budge unless the earth itself started trembling violently enough to topple buildings.  You can’t say for certain, but you’d assume you’re back down to a half an inch.

            You know you’d trust her just the same at a tenth of that.

            “Well,” she sighs, her voice musical and booming at once while still managing to soothe your trembling frame as you readjust to chilly life at the size of a fingernail.  “Let’s get you tucked in.”

            “You’re still awake,” comes the lilting observation, dispersing altruistically through the dark from behind you.

            You don’t even flinch, but as usual, you’re surprised at Ellie’s continual ability to perceive your tiniest changes in equilibrium, despite the fact that you’re lying down at a half an inch tall in the near pitch-black of her bedroom and breathing gently enough that you’re not even bothering the dust.

            Wrapped up for about two hours now in the wooly fabric of the cloth she provided for you to sleep in on her bedside table, you’ve been warm and happy as could be, but sleep eludes you with particular ferocity this evening.  Not that you care.  Your mind isn’t plagued with difficulties or worries tonight, at least not when Ellie is so close, mighty and wonderful.

            It’s just that your brain won’t shut off.  You think you know why, but you’re still too nervous to confront it.

            “You are, too,” you answer, rolling over and facing her bed.  As your eyes try to adjust and drink in the serene void, you can make out her unbelievably massive form stretched out for longer than a city block in silhouette, her enormous eyes glinting with the smallest fractal of light from underneath the crack of the door to the hallway.

            No matter how many times you experience it, you always have to do a double-take in Ellie’s presence at this size.  It seems beyond fathoming that a person that massive, that powerful, that capable of controlling your existence could give a damn how you’re doing, and yet her tender voice billows through the dark again, only for you.

            “Are you cold?” she murmurs.

            You are, but it simply comes with the territory of standing at half an inch tall, and it’s something you’re fully prepared to live with.

            “No,” you lie convincingly.

            Before another response can be uttered, you become aware of the expansive canopy of her palm looming above you: a sky of skin, her fingers closing in cautiously.  She’s obviously perfectly aware of your exact location in the dark, not even needing another word from you as guidance.  The peachy pads of those fingertips graze against your shoulders and find your sides, gripping you and letting you sink lightly into the give of her pliable flesh.

            And then you’re in the air, rushing over a gap that would kill you via heart attack before you even hit the ground if her thumb and index finger were to shift a matter of millimeters further apart in either direction, but you feel no sickness nor spend any time pondering this severe impossibility.

            “Yes, you are,” she corrects, the warmth of her breath washing reassuringly over you as she grips you closer, mere inches from her chin until each of her restful sighs wash relaxingly over you in everlasting balmy waves.  Your face brushes past one of the seemingly infinite honey tresses of her hair as though you’ve dipped a hand into a still river.

            “Oh,” you respond with false discovery, falling so habitually into this dry sense of humor you both share and probably use as a shield against your true intentions.  You wrap your arms as far around the curvature of her embracing thumbprint as you can.  “I guess I was off.”

            “It’s totally normal,” she reports in a whisper.  “When you shrink, the cold comes as a natural process of your body adapting at a molecular level.  All your energy is going into that, and doesn’t leave enough to warm you up, even after you’ve stopped changing.  That’s why you feel coldest when you start getting smaller.  It’s called recalcifention.”

            Hearing Ellie spout wisdom from her textbooks is one of your favorite things, because she utters each factoid with such heartfelt resonance and passion that it becomes just as fascinating to you as it is to her in that moment.  Or at least nearly so.

            “I don’t think I’ve heard of recalculus,” you say ponderously, intentionally mispronouncing it.

            “Recalcifention,” she corrects with a snicker of feigned annoyance, and you can just picture her playful smirk forming in the dark above as wide as a river to you.  “And you probably wouldn’t have unless you took a science of size-changing course.”

            “Why would I need that when I’ve got you to just give me the greatest hits?”

            “Maybe I should stop giving this stuff away, or you’ll never learn anything for yourself,” she teases, and as she says it, you feel two more of her fingers encircling you until both her thumbs and index fingers are each pressed to a surface of your body, instantly providing heat and security in the comforting huddle of her soft fingertips.

            You can’t help but sigh from the gloriously secure sensation.

            “Better?” she chuckles at your reaction.

            “Much,” you say.

            “Let me know if it gets too hot.”

            “No, it… feels nice.”

            “Well, then, we’ll just sit tight for a little while.”

            “I don’t want to keep you awake, though.”

            “I was already awake.  You know that,” she says, undulating her fingers with tiny, almost imperceptible quivers that massage your back and chest.  It’s like she’s practiced her whole life.

            “Neither of us are going to be able to stay awake in class tomorrow,” you comment.

            “I know,” she admits, and you can see the frame of her shoulders nudge in the dark against the cushy hillside of her pillow, shrugging.  “But that’s okay.  That’s why they invented tape recorder apps.”

            “Oh, so that was it,” you gasp with fake amazement.

            You hear a low rumble of laughter from her throat, and then return to the silence of before, even as her fingers continue with their precise motions: minute adjustments that make all the difference in the world to you.  You’re fairly certain you would fall asleep right here between Ellie’s fingertips, if not for that same wonder in the back of your mind, and the longer you stay awake with it there, the more you come to realize it’s not simply a wonder but a yearning of some sort.

            Even without seeing Ellie’s swimming gray eyes, you can tell the yearning is there for her, too, in some part, though why, you still can’t imagine.  Simply asking her, of course, is out of the question.

            “Maybe we shouldn’t play as long as we did today anymore,” she sighs.  “I think we overdid it.”

            “Maybe a little,” you admit, truthfully not wanting to cut back on your sessions between your friend’s lips, but recognizing the wisdom of this decision as well.

            “We’ll still do it,” she adds.  “Just not as long.”

            “Sure,” you agree, trying not to sound too eager.

            “Okay.  Deal.”

            “Why do we do it?”

            You both freeze in the darkness, her fingers pausing momentarily in their noble work of petting you into slumber.  You’re hardly aware that the question came from your own mouth with such careless spontaneity, considering how scared you’ve been of phantom phrases all night, and for a moment, you’re certain it came from her titanic lips instead of your pathetically miniscule ones, but that’s absurd, because you can still taste the instantaneous regret in the back of your throat.

            Neither of you can see the other’s face still, but in the blackness, you can feel a different mood settling in, miraculously devoid of uncomfortable omen, but different all the same.

            Open.

            “What…” she utters, seemingly with incredible ease, but something in her voice tells you she’s been nervous about this moment as well.  “You mean why do we shrink you down to the size of a crumb so I can play with you in my mouth?”

            “Yeah, um… what you said,” you mumble, clearing your throat and forcing yourself to be more present.  You asked the question.  You’re in it now.  You’re not backing down.  “You know.  I was just kind of… curious.”

            “Well,” Ellie continues, aware as well as you are that this long-overdue conversation is at last taking place.  “That’s a good question.”

“It’s… probably not my best question,” you mumble sheepishly from between the tremendous flanks of your friend’s gentle fingertips, as if apologizing for plunging the pair of you into this exchange at last.

            “No.  No, it’s okay.  We probably should talk about it,” she says, and on the ends of her words you can hear tiny quavers of anxiety, something you can’t recall hearing in her tone before, and something that, against the odds, manages to bring her a little closer to your scale in this singular moment.  “We definitely should talk about it.”

            You’re pulled instantaneously back to the moment you first laid eyes on each other as you took your assigned seats in Intro to Organic Molecules class next to one another last semester.  Science was never your strongest suit, but you still took it out of pure academic interest, and had to fight yourself to not stare creepily at Ellie as she took her seat, clad in an unassuming olive jacket and jeans, her honey-toned hair pulled back in a ponytail.  And those deep gray eyes, gorgeously drilling in their every passing glance.  Living clouds, behind her pupils.

            Of course, you had to put a lot of this aside immediately, because you soon found yourself very nearly in over your head in a collegiate chemistry course, despite your drive to succeed.  That was when you actually came to know Ellie, with her steel-sharpened mind primed for anything the scientific world threw at her, who noticed fairly easily your troubles when you just barely managed to claw your way above the B-minus line.  Her offering of tutoring was a surprise to you that, despite its initial awkwardness, led to discussions beyond science and into philosophy and art, eventually allowing you to summon the courage to suggest she take a 19th century British literature course with you, allowing your conversations to become a blending of discoveries in every discipline.

            You can replay all the conversations in your head from those months back, but no matter how many times you do, feeling all the same feelings again, you can’t comprehend how you started off at that lab table as strangers and ended up in these odd little platonic sleepovers that stood in defiance of nearly every ordinary social law.

            “I think you’re pretty cool,” you mutter stupidly in the silence, hating yourself for these words that make you feel like some petrified middle schooler trying to get a girl to carpool to a basketball game with you and share a crappy box of popcorn.  You’re this far; you owe her a little honesty, or at least the part of it that you can admit fully even to yourself: “I like being around you.”

            “I like being around you, too,” Ellie coos after a heart-rending pause that probably lasts no more than a split second.

            “Do you think it’s that easy, then?” you choke out, your throat dangerously dry now.  “That by itself can’t be what makes us do it.”

            “Probably not,” she agrees warmly.  “I think when most people feel like that, they just go see a movie, fuck each other afterward, and then never speak again.”

            Despite the tension, you laugh with her, incredibly grateful for her willingness to look at this all so frankly in equal measure to help alleviate your fears.  And suddenly, you feel spurred to take another little leap.

            “I do it because I feel safe with you,” you admit, your voice cracking embarrassingly from nervousness, and you can hear her intake of breath as she concentrates her entire consciousness on your stumbling words.  The phrases come easier the further you go, as though you’d been practicing them in your subconscious for some time.  “I get so tired of everything sometimes that I can’t even think.  When I’m… like this, I can just let go for a while and focus on one thing.  A feeling, or… I don’t know.  Something.  But it lets me wake up.  It lets me recharge so I can try to pretend like I’m normal again.”

            Realizing this might well-be the longest string of words you’ve ever spoken to your friend that didn’t include a joke or a deflection from your true feelings, you bite your lip and force yourself to shut up, wanting once again to meld with the darkness and become anonymous out of self-imposed humiliation.

            Seriously, what the hell could she possibly want with your blubbering, wearisome little self?

            “I do it because I feel safe with you, too,” she admits, instantly knowing that such a statement requires clarifying, given who’s pinning who between fingertips the size of oak trunks at this moment.  “I’ve… always been like this.  I need to feel like I can help.  Like I can… protect someone.  Completely.  And I’ve never found another way to do it, until now.  So that’s kind of it, I guess.  I… want to watch over someone.  Over you.”

            “Thanks,” you breathe delicately, feeling palpably soothed by this revelation.  “That wasn’t the worst thing ever, was it?”

            “Nope.”

            “We’re still friends?”
            “You’re my best friend,” she corrects definitively, and your whole being floods with relief.

            “You’re mine too,” you say.  “Why did it take us almost a year to do that?”

            She shrugs again.  “I don’t think we’re so great at this straight-talking thing just yet.  It scares the hell out of both of us.”

            “Maybe we’ll be a little better at it now,” you suggest hopefully.

            “I think we will,” she says with another lyrical chuckle.  “I know we will.  We’ll try it together.  Keep each other honest.”

            “Agreed.”

            “Do you think you’re ready to fall asleep?” she asks, pursing her lips and blowing forth a concentrated gale of lukewarm wind that sends a tingling sensation down your miniscule arms and legs.  “You’re starting to wilt a little.”

            “I… I think I am.  Thanks.”

            Still the bigger question hovers over you both in the warm darkness, even bigger than the one regarding your equal desires to interact at this scale, but again without true eye contact you silently agree to let it be for now as she places you back into your bed with such mind-bending delicacy that you almost forget that her hand is the length of a school bus to you right now.

            “Good night, Ellie,” you whisper gently, momentarily lost in the soothing flight, and wonder if you should repeat it with your already insignificant volume raised up to an actually audible speaking level.

            “Good night, Aaron,” she replies, having obviously heard you without a problem, and after her colossal fingertips have delivered you into the fabric on the bedside table again, you feel the folds of it covering you back up as she tucks you snugly in again.

            It’s enough for one night, and with a foreign-feeling smile on your lips, you sink into sleep almost immediately.

            “Oh, God,” your friend Chris cackles the next morning, idly tossing a frisbee to himself as he leans against a wall.  He shakes his head as you saunter as casually as possible back into the men’s dorm hallway, still wearing your clothes from the previous day, your backpack slung over one shoulder.  “Oh, man.”

            “Running out of exclamations already?” you groan smarmily as you try to pat down your hopelessly shaggy hair with the heel of your hand.

            “Hey, you’re so not going to turn this on me when it’s you doing the walk of shame,” he counters, clapping you on the shoulder several times as congratulations while you fumble with the key to your room.  “Not that I’m judging.  I couldn’t be prouder, actually.”

            “I’m so glad you approve.”

            “Don’t even tell me you’re not going to talk about this one, either.”

            “Talk about what one either?”

            He rolls his eyes and jokingly bonks the frisbee against your head.  “Dude, do not do this to me.  Me and bunch of the others have been trying for months to get you to tell a single detail about you and Ellie, and all I get is this again and again, even when I catch you red-handed.”

            “I don’t know what you want.  We just hung out later than we were meaning to,” you answer nonchalantly.  “If you want something steamy, go check out 90% of the internet.”

            “Everybody knows you’re doing it, man.  It’s nothing to be ashamed of.  Ellie’s cute as hell.  Plus she’s smarter than pretty much everybody around here,” Chris quips with his arms crossed while leaning back against the door frame.

            “Definitely smarter than you,” you agree as you pull on a different shirt.  “Turn around unless you want to see the strip-down.”

            “I’m telling you, man, you’re going to need to confide in somebody if you don’t want it just building up inside you, ready to explode!” he continues, quickly turning his back on you as you change.  “Why can’t that be me?  I know how to keep a secret.”

            “I’m sure Professor Darbin would beg to differ.”

            “Oh c’mon, how am I not supposed to tell people where they can find good booze for cheap without an ID?  That would’ve been the real crime.  Almost as bad as what he was doing.”

            “You’re not really making yourself out to be the perfect candidate for talking about this,” you snort as you fish through your bookshelf for the right supplies for your first class of the day.

            “Ah-ha!  So you admit there is something to talk about,” Chris laughs as he turns back around and points an accusatory finger at you.

            “Guilty as charged,” you sigh with false dejection as you sling your backpack over your shoulder again and scoop up an apple from your desk that’s getting dangerously close to going brown.

            “All right, so what?  C’mon.  Give me one thing.  One thing to get me through this day.”

            “Okay, here’s something.  It’s a little thing I like to call book-learning.  Give it a shot,” you say with a wink, crunching a bite off the apple and clasping a book of French poetry into Chris’s chest as you slip back out the door.

            “How’s the reading coming?” you ask up to Ellie as you perch cross-legged at half an inch on her arched knee that feels more like a towering hill of denim to you.  With your homework already finished for the evening, all you have to do is enjoy the grand view of open expanse around you.  You peer across the chasm formed by Ellie’s torso stretched across her bed and almost lose your breath.

            “Just fantastic.  This Romanticism stuff might be the most boring thing I’ve ever read,” she groans, running a hand through her tinted golden locks.  “And I once had to read forty pages about PMRD patent models in size science.  I don’t know how you talked me into taking this class.”

            “I’m just real persuasive like that,” you shrug.

            “I’ve got a good mind to make you take a biochem course with me next semester so you’ll be the one squirming instead of me,” she says, slamming the book dramatically onto the sheets beside her, though her leg remains motionless as a mountain.

            “I think you’ve already seen enough of me squirming after that first semester here,” you retort.  “Seriously, science can go ahead and exist and run the functions of the world without my input.”

            “You have such a sad way of looking at things,” Ellie sighs piteously as she shakes her head.  Your heart flutters in your chest a little with adrenaline to see her gazing at you across this distance, but it quickly fades again.

            “Okay, fine.  If the world stops running just because I can’t tell you the first thing about recalcifract-”

            “Recalcifention.”

            “-recalcifention, then you just let me know, and I’ll do everything I can to study up.”

            “I’ll hold you to that,” she whispers seriously through narrowed lips as she leans closer toward her raised knee.  You can see her hand rising up from below, her tree-sized fingers walking themselves up the dizzying vertical climb of her jean-clad thigh, until her palm upturns just short of your perch at the summit of her bent leg, though you don’t rise immediately to clamber in like usual.  “Well?”

            “Sorry.  It’s just that you said “I’ll hold you to that,” and now I’m trying to come up with a good pun because you’re offering to actually hold me,” you say, holding up a finger as you chew it over.  “I got nothin’ though.”

            “Shut up and get into my hand,” she grumbles back at you, trying to hide a smile.  The both of you know full-well the hand would be instantly retracted if you didn’t actually want to board her massive appendage, but of course you do.

            Climbing into Ellie’s hand at this scale is always a fresh experience, no matter how many times you do it.  The sheer size of its rosy surface alone is overwhelming; most people don’t even have front yards this expansive.  There’s an inviting aura of her favorite tangerine hand lotion that wafts thickly in the air and fills your lungs pleasantly with every breath, intermixed with a hint of sweet perspiration from clammy palms earlier in the day.  That first step into the malleable pink terrain is warm and comforting despite the adjustment you have to make in your balance, as though entering a moon bounce for the first time, but other than any wobbling that comes from your motions, her hand doesn’t budge, and you doubt it possibly could.  She’s that focused, even though she doesn’t let it show in her eyes, and you can tell she takes pride in it.

            “I hope the soreness went away after yesterday,” she comments quietly, having seemingly decided that study time is over.  “Or if it didn’t, you really should lie about it to make me feel better.”

            “Will do,” you promise.  The both of you know that, even with your best poker face on, she’d see directly through any attempt at lying in an instant, whether you were six feet tall or the size of Ellie’s tooth.  It’s really just the thought that counts.

            Sighing, then, you force yourself to confront something else inside yourself as you smile up at Ellie’s eyes, telltale laugh lines forming on the edges of her beautiful gray pools as she smirks right back at you.  Now is the time, if ever.

            You’ve been tossing it back and forth in your mind all day, hardly able to concentrate in class after the implications of last night’s conversation with your best friend in the whole world and quite possibly more if you can learn to stop lying to yourself.  The very idea of mentioning it before seemed foolish and far too risky.

            Now, though, with your newfound policy of trusting Ellie to not only prevent you from being swallowed but, far more dangerously, trusting her to accept your vulnerabilities, it seems like a tangible possibility.

            “I was just… kind of wondering something,” you mumble under your breath.

            “What?” she asks with an earnest smirk.

            “I wanted to know…” you begin, but your throat goes dry at the sight of those enormous gray irises boring back into your skull, and suddenly you want to swallow your previous words from existence.

            Why are you doing this now?

            “Wanted to know what?”

            “Never mind.  It was… stupid.”

            “Hey.  C’mon,” she wheedles softly, tilting your chin up with the tiniest tap from the very tip of her hill of a fingertip, forcing you to make eye contact again.  How in the hell does she manage to do that so tenderly, let alone without breaking your neck?  “I thought we were trying out this new straight-talking thing?”

            You sigh.  She’s right, of course.  There’s never been a safer time or place to try laying a few things on the line.

            “I was wondering…” you utter, not allowing yourself another second to mull it over.  “…how small that thing can make me?”

            Ellie’s enormous eyelashes bat in a blink of stony-faced surprise.  You both understand instantly what the real question is, but neither of you is going to admit it.

            “Ummm…” she drones, her mouth hanging slightly open.  “I’m… not sure, exactly.  I’ve never used it to make anything less than a quarter inch, and those weren’t people, that was just when I moved my things to campus.  I mean, ten years ago, it… didn’t even used to let anything go below one.  For safety.  It’s just the new models with all the extra security protocols.”

            “Ah,” you say with a nod, trying to look nonchalant but knowing full-well that Ellie’s already completely read your intentions.

            “Why?” she asks, her flattened palm rising higher until you’re level with her eyes and free to intimately study their every twitch and flicker of light.

            Apparently she wants to give you the chance to offer your reasoning freely, and again remembering the unofficial pact you’d made together to be more open, you fold your hands behind your back, puff up your chest, and let the words come.

            “I wanted to try going even smaller.  As… small as you’re willing to make me.”

            Ellie nods, her lips pursed thin and pale, but there’s a flash of silvery inspiration in her eyes you can’t help but notice.  Despite the grim look of hesitation she’s wearing now, you can tell it’s not the most hateful idea to her, either.

            “What if I said I didn’t want to take you down to any less than half an inch?” she counters calmly, compressing the fingers of her other hand to her temple.

            “I… guess I’d just drop it, then.  Like I said.  It was stupid,” you respond quickly.

            Above all else, you don’t want to make her uncomfortable.  After all, with every fraction of an inch you lose, it’s more responsibility placed in her hands: responsibility you have every confidence that she’s capable of handling, but responsibility nonetheless that she has to be content with for any of your usual games to work mutually.

            She sighs, lowering her gaze for a moment and biting her lip.  That same flash in her irises from before.

            “Look, I…” she begins uncertainly, the words caught in her throat.  “You know it’s not that I don’t think it could be… fun.  It’s just that… having you this small, already, I have to make sure I know what I’m doing while you’re in there.  Any smaller would just make me nervous.”

            “I know,” you accept truthfully.

            “Plus, at that size… if you dropped too fast, or I bumped you the wrong way off a tooth, you…” she barrels onward, clearly intent on airing her grievances with the notion.  Her mouth hangs open again, unable to get out the last word before her eyes meet yours again.  The titanic fingertip returns, this time stroking down the side of your cheek with such gentility you’d swear it was just a butterfly alighting on your skin.

            “If anything… ever happened to you…” she continues with painful gravity in every syllable. “…because of me.  While we were just messing around.  I… I don’t think I could handle it.”

            “I understand.  Forget I asked about it,” you breathe.

            “Thank you,” she whispers.  “You know the way we play.  It’s never a dull moment.  That’s not something I could trust myself with if you were any smaller.”

            “What if I wasn’t talking about playing like that,” you blurt, risking one last olive branch extension on the subject.  “What if we just… did it.  Nothing wild.  Just to try it.”

            Ellie takes a deep breath, and you can see from the now-lingering glow of eagerness in her eyes that she’s not going to shoot it down directly.

            “For how long?  I’m not letting you do it for almost an hour like last time.  I already feel bad enough about that,” she presses.

            “For as long as you’re okay with it,” you shrug.  “Really.  I’m… just throwing it out there.  If you hate it, I won’t mention it again.  Ever.”

            Instead of a response, this time Ellie’s eyes bashfully pull away from yours and descend toward her pocket as she draws out the PMRD and taps through its security measures.  After a few more seconds of scrolling, you see her pupils dilate and another near-silent intake of gasping breath, not from shock, but from what you could only estimate as earnest elation.

            She gulps audibly.

            “If you’re serious about it only being for a little while.  And nothing crazy…” she sighs, reviewing her words a final time before speaking them.  “I’d be willing to put you down to two-tenths of an inch.”

            “That would be just fine,” you say as coolly as possible, despite having to fight back a victory dance inside with every fiber of your being.

            “You can look excited if you want to,” she simpers with a raised eyebrow.

            “Thank you,” you sigh, pumping your fist dramatically for show.  “That would’ve been a tough one.”

            “I could see that,” she says, and suddenly the PMRD is hovering over the heel of her hand, pointed at you.  “So, are you ready to… you know…”

            “Yes,” you say simply, not pausing for breath.  “If you are.”

            “I am,” she replies.  “If you really do trust that I’m not gonna move, or mess anything up.  You… do, don’t you?”

            “I trust you with my life,” you say without a moment’s hesitation, refusing to break eye contact as Ellie’s lips part in shock at your boldness.  “I mean, you might as well know, with our fancy new straight-talk thing happening.”

            “I think I’m liking this straight-talk thing more and more,” Ellie admits warmly, her cheeks blushing a deep pink as she clicks through the settings, clearly unconcerned with how aware of it you are at your scale.  “Ready?  No turning back now.  And by no turning back, obviously I mean literally, as soon as you decide you’re done, just let me know and we’ll turn back right then and there.”

            “I was born ready,” you growl as daringly as possible, thrusting your chest forward and holding your meager biceps up to flex them.

            “Again: you are absolutely impossible to take seriously like this,” Ellie mumbles as she rolls her eyes and squeezes the button on the PMRD, bathing you in its familiar green light and recalcifention-induced chills.  “But you are pretty adorable.”

            “What?” you squeak, not from the sudden reduction in size but from embarrassed cheerfulness.

            “Straight-talking.  Didn’t you hear?  It’s the hip thing.  All the kids are doing it,” Ellie giggles under her breath as the world around you exponentially swells in size, enlarging your best friend from mere feminine titan to mountain goddess.

            The air is sucked from your lungs as you unsuccessfully attempt to drink in the visionary majesty of Ellie who, as far as you’re concerned, now stands at nearly two thousand feet tall.  That hair might as well be a snowpeak of gold and honey.  Those eyes are like silver moons unto themselves hovering above.  Her hand is a living island beneath you, pulsing with energy and muscle and the power to tear the world asunder if those fingers the size of lighthouses were to curl inward just a little.

            And all she’s doing is staring down at you with affection welled in her kind eyes, watching over your very existence, and promising silently with each passing second that you maintain that contact that nothing can possibly happen to you as long as you’re with her.

            You believe it just as thoroughly as you ever did.

            “Well,” she whispers so softly the word is barely sculpted, though you get it loud and clear, echoing roundly in your ear drums.  “How does it feel?”

            “I think I might need smaller shoes now,” you call out with hands cupped around your mouth, trusting in your friend’s impeccable sense of hearing to pick it up clearly.

            She shakes her head as she lets a smile creep over those sumptuous pink lips that look wide enough to drink a lake in just a couple gulps, relieved that your poor joke-making capacity has remained intact in favor of the gut-twisting fear she obviously was nervous about you experiencing.  Her first glance put that thought to rest, and you wish she could accept it as quickly as possible, so she could start being as comfortable as you are now.

            “You’re insane, you know that?” she mouths with a broad beam plastered on her face, light dancing in her eyes, and only letting the sounds emerge on emphasized consonants.

            “I’ve been telling myself that for a while.  Nice to have it confirmed,” you bellow more casually, satisfied that she can hear everything without you straining your throat.  “So this is two-tenths, huh?”

            “This is… two tenths,” she repeats, fighting back a chuckle of disbelief.  You can tell she’s slowed her breathing down to avoid any sudden gusts of wind descending on you like a typhoon, and she seems to have curtailed laughter under the same logic, though you secretly resent this a little.  Hearing the booming music of her laugh at this size seems positively amazing.

            “I’m surprised you haven’t asked yet,” she coos under her breath, her tone suddenly becoming noticeably more confident.  Almost… coy.  You can see a smile struggling to stay hidden in the corners of her lips.

            “Asked what?” you yell out, too tantalized to drag this out with any games.

            “Asked if… we can play yet,” she answers simply, and from between her lips you watch her writhing pink tongue the size of an aircraft carrier runway slithering out into the open air, its sticky heat reaching you even this far away and beckoning you inside.

“Wait…” you gulp, trying not to let abject wonderment cross stupidly over your microscopic face for your mountain-sized best friend to witness.  You already look pathetic enough, after all.  “I thought you said you weren’t going to let us do anything, um…”

            “Crazy?” she answers for you with a self-satisfied smirk as she continues glowering comically down at you, dwarfed humbly in the living landscape of her palm, your body not even long enough to reach across the surface of an M&M.  “That was what I said, wasn’t it?”

            “Yeah.  Not that I’m… a stickler for words.  The past is the past, you know?” you offer lightly, wondering if you’re being subtle enough.  “I’m all about the future.”

            “I’ll just bet you are.  Especially now,” Ellie counters teasingly, biting her lip.  Steadily, her hand rises closer to her lips until each time she lifts her lips to speak you can see into the concert hall-sized space of her mouth, churning with literal rivers of her soupy saliva, the walls glistening and gorgeous and billowing out puffs of swished steam with every vigorous exhalation.

            God, you want to be in there so bad that it aches from your core and out to every extremity.

            “I’m… sensing that you’re open to discussion on the subject now,” you manage dryly at last, words extinguished from you at the breathtaking visage before you.

            “I am,” she murmurs winsomely.

            “Why?” you ask.  The reason could be just about anything and your opinion probably wouldn’t budge in the slightest, but your curiosity has gotten the better of you.  Plus, you need as much time as possible to wrap your head around what you assume to be the purest form of earthly euphoria that might well-await you now past the plush gates of those lips.

            “It’s… just what you said.  Before I made you like this,” she says.  With you so close to her mouth, and a rush of air with every syllable, she only allows the words to click gently from the back of her throat with just enough clarity to be understood.  “How you…”

            “Trust you with my life.”

            “Yes.  That.  I…” she continues weightily, and you hear another heavy intake of breath, as though she’s suddenly having difficulty.  Befuddled, you peer upward at the towering wall of her angelic face, past the winding honey tresses, and realize her moonlight irises are pooled with enough moisture to drown you.

            She’s… tearing up?

            “Ellie,” you utter, your voice cracking with surprise and concern for her.  “What are you-”

            “Sorry.  I… know I don’t get like this a whole lot.  Or ever,” she gulps, sniffling and pursing her lips again.  “But I just wanted you to know that I… I appreciate what you said.  More than you know.”

            “Maybe you can help me to know sometime, then,” you suggest, patting a hand down onto the immense plain of palm flesh below you as consolingly as you can muster considering the difference in your scale, though you feel the slightest tremor in the earth below you.  She obviously felt it.

            “I will,” she vows with a steady nod, biting her lip to quell herself, and a tired smile appears on her lips again.  “If we really are trying to be more honest now, and you’re willing to say that to me, well… maybe I have to trust you just as much, and have some faith in your instincts.”

            “Okay,” you utter, at an even more thorough loss for words now.

            “So if you want to play a little,” she continues with bracing finality, blinking once again and batting away a drop of the welled tears from her eyes.  “Then we’ll play.”

            The journey of the next few seconds is an odyssey that passes into a crawling rush of bliss that you wish you could savor until the end of time.  You lose yourself between the pads of those tenderly pinching fingers as she picks you up, somehow knowing the exact pressure to exert on you without causing the slightest twinge of pain in your body, which at this scale is fragile enough to be shattered by the average human being’s nervous tic.  All you can see is the swirling skin, plush and warm to your touch, and if you didn’t know what was coming next, you know for certain you could nuzzle into this cocoon of Ellie’s fingertip flesh for hours on end.

            But of course, you know what’s coming, and your breath is caught in your chest, stinging with anticipation.

            As promised, this time is indeed different, and despite her change of heart, you can tell Ellie’s taking every precaution as you are released from the almighty vice of her fingertips directly onto the spongy surface of her tongue, which has flattened itself uncharacteristically to the floor of her foggy cave.

            The heat hits you immediately in a billowing wave that clings like a film to your skin, but as the cold is still settling into your bloodstream without a clear sign of stopping, your body finds a happy medium as you try to regain your sea legs, or rather tongue legs.  Each taste bud is a hill in the terrain under your steps, sampling your flavor on every stride, and you can feel fresh saliva flooding back over the surface within seconds of your arrival like a low tide licking at your heels on a beach.  The path of her tongue leads too far back into blackness for you to make out clearly, but her uvula dangles in the back like a squishy, organic flag claiming sovereignty.  For the moment, with her maw still spread wide open to give you light, Ellie seems content to let you adapt to your newly colossal surroundings.

            You’re pleased to find that moment doesn’t last long as her perfect truck-sized ivories close together with a clean clack that echoes all the way to the back of her throat and leaves you in her friendly, familiar darkness.

            A seismic wave somewhere below rumbles through the fibers of the powerful organ you stand upon.  You can hear the suction of the saliva smacking against skin and swirling in whirlpools and cataracts, even feel it splashing up against your chest and the nape of your neck.

            It’s starting.

            You’re almost too excited to stand still.  Surrendering your every move as well as your body to Ellie’s divine selection seems the best and only option in these humbling grounds, so you flatten yourself down against the tremoring floor, letting the monstrous taste buds cling to you.  Letting the stickiness alight like a warm kiss on your skin.  Letting the sides of the tongue tube up around you in a veritable tidal wave of uncompromising red muscle, sealing you in a hot vacuum of air and trickling fluids.  Gloriously protective and violently experiential at once.  You’re rocked back and forth, cradled by the generosity of a heavenly creature of such might that you could hardly be said to exist amongst her, and yet somehow, you do, against every rule of logic.

            She senses your every move and every breath as you begin to slide down the slimy tunnel toward the dank region beyond, but you feel no anxiety or doubt for even an instant.  All you have to do is let yourself go.  You are alone in body, yet all around you is Ellie and her body taking charge of you for a little while.  The rush of muggy air and sloshing slave against your cheeks brings you on a relentless rush into the most refined approximation of the present moment you think you’ve ever experienced.

            You are awake.  You are here.  That’s all that matters for this heartbeat.

            Your trust in Ellie’s control pays off when gravity shifts again and you’re slipping back toward the cavernous front well before you find yourself wrapping around her uvula.  Her tongue is twitching and swirling with great care and practice, like clockwork, aware of your existence in every sense.  Every move is calculated several seconds ahead and probably further than that.

            Next you’re cupped into a shallow pool of frothy saliva that you sink easily into up to your neck, weighing you down with its gooey heft and still keeping you afloat, but it all drains away back down the rosy valley of her tongue as you’re served back to the center, still lying on your back, still totally in serenity and feeling happier than you have in a long time.

            And the longer you let yourself float under Ellie’s godlike power, the more you realize it’s not just because of where you are right now physically, but where your mind and heart have found themselves so seamlessly.  You realize how easy it is to exist here, and if not here, anywhere, at any size, as long as you are near Ellie and she can protect you.  The size of a pill.  The size of a crumb.  The size of an ant’s eye.  It wouldn’t matter; she’d be there, watching over.

            You are a single particle of the universe, clinging to a leaf on the surface of the still ocean before a storm.

            Like the storm in Ellie’s eyes.

            Your heart is in your throat from the thrill of all this perfect madness, and still simultaneously calm and steady, beating even a bit below normal: as peaceful as the previous evening when you had your head cradled in Ellie’s lap, her fingers playing with your hair and occasionally crossing to cup your cheek against her warm palm.

            You feel it, all of a sudden.  The bond is white-hot in your chest.  Unceasing and infinite.  You know for certain you have never felt this close to a human being in your whole life, and you probably never will to any other.  In this moment, it’s just the two of you in a vacant and peaceful world, and it is yours.

“Do you ever think it’s kind of funny?” Ellie whispers.

            “Think what’s kind of funny?” you ask while lying on your best friend’s bed again, freshly cleansed and returned to your normal size.  You peer over the expanse of the ceiling, occasionally letting your eyes catch on the glow-in-the-dark stars Ellie taped up as a joke at the start of the year.

            “The way people talk about us,” she responds, reclining prone on her bed as well, though her head is up on the pillow, while yours remains roughly level with her stomach, as the pair of you had to play body Tetris to make room on the relatively narrow mattress in order to lay down.

            “I don’t know.  I guess a little,” you answer.  “You mean how they all think we’re in here just…”

            “Yeah,” she snickers.  “Kaleigh and a couple of the others were on me all day about it.  Trying to make sure I’m not letting you take advantage of me.”

            “And Chris just wanted the juicy details,” you say, eliciting a laugh from the both of you.  “We’re turning into the biggest running joke in the freshman dorms.”

            “More like the biggest running mystery.  But I say we let them think whatever they want,” Ellie shrugs, and you nod, genuinely agreeing with this arrangement.  Building up lies or, even more foolishly, attempting to explain anything to outsiders would afford far more complication than either of you cares to deal with.  Plus, in another unsurprising parallel, neither of you has ever given a damn about public opinion.

            You recognize now that you’ve been synced up with Ellie since that fatefully unassuming conversation in the library months back when you both simultaneously realized what you wanted to do, without any of the uncomfortable fanfare you might’ve expected.

            The idea to register you to Ellie’s PMRD had come less as a hesitant suggestion from one party afraid of rejection and more as a unanimous acceptance of reality, silent and contented.  Since then, everything between the two of you has been unbreakably connected, and these past days have shed light on it like never before.  It’s so bizarrely easy to exist around her.

            It’s like living in some euphoric little dream that you don’t have to wake up from.

            “So this straight-talking thing,” you chuckle.  “I think maybe it’s fair to say we’ve made it into an art form.”

            “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Michelangelo.  I don’t think either of us is even close to there yet,” Ellie corrects with a giggle.

            “Yeah, I know,” you state honestly.  “Still, we’re… further from the last two days than we’ve been since either of us started school here.”

            “That might be an understatement,” she agrees.  “Talking about… me.  It’s not really something I know how to do well.”

            “Me neither.”

            “Yeah, I know.  I’ve heard enough of your crappy jokes to figure out when you’re hiding behind them,” Ellie interjects with a furtive glare further down on the bed at you.  She pats the back of her hand gingerly against your cheek, then turns it around so she can cup her palm against your cheek again.

            “Not like you don’t do the same.”

            “Yeah, except I use science and scintillating conversation to do it.  I’m way more graceful,” she retorts.  “Don’t try to deny it.”

            “I… wasn’t planning on it,” you answer quietly, too incredibly soothed by the feeling of her hand on your face to object.

            “Darn right,” she chuckles, drawing her fingers away from you again at this.  “You give up way too easily, you know that?  You better hope I never get in deep with a loan shark or something and need a massive favor, because all I’ll have to do is pat you on the head and there you’ll be.”

            “There I’ll be,” you repeat with stark sincerity, and Ellie seems to sense it, because her hand returns to your skin, this time caressing your hair again between her fingers like she does so well.

             “You were way wrong about one thing, though,” she says as a few more blissful seconds drag by of nearly lulling you into a secondary consciousness.

            “What was that?”

            “When you were telling me why you… do it.  Why you like our games.”

            “Oh?”

            “Yes,” she sighs.  “You said you do it so you can recharge and pretend like you’re normal again.”

            “And?”

            “I don’t know what you think you’re pretending to be, but it’s not that.  You’re not normal.”

            You go silent.  You’re perfectly aware that the label isn’t inaccurate, but somehow hearing it validated from Ellie makes it sound less like a societal death sentence and more like a simple, colorful fact of your wild reality.

            “Normal isn’t the “in” thing anymore.  Normal doesn’t work.  I wouldn’t call myself that, either.  And I wouldn’t be as close to you if you were any different than you are now,” Ellie declares fluidly.  “So there’s no need to try to be.”

            You bite your lip and find your eyes focusing on a particularly odd plastic star, the dull neon glow of which seems to be bursting through in spite of the evening daylight.  Opening your hand, then, you reach to Ellie further up on the bed and locate her hand hovering an inch away from your face as though she was afraid to touch it again.  The fingers of both your hands clasp together, and for a second, you feel as though you’ve melded with her.

            It’s spectacular and everything you could possibly want in this moment.

            “Thank you,” you breathe quietly.

            “You’re welcome,” she answers, giving your palm a squeeze.

            There’s so much you don’t even understand about yourself now, and even more you don’t understand about this guardian angel of a young woman you’re laying so close to now.  There are a lot of words hovering invisibly above the pair of you, waiting their turns but going ignored for today as the two of you just experience the immaculate silence and the warmth of each other’s company.

            Those other things will wait: a bridge to be crossed when you both reach it.  Today, you allow yourself and your best friend this moment of effortless harmony.

            For now, you can just be.

            For now, this is far more than enough.