Chapter 1: The Gala

For the most part, Emily Parker was a happy young woman. She had a boyfriend whom she loved, a family she could always count on, and friends that consistently showed her a good time. The one thing she wasn’t happy about was her body. 

She was 5 feet tall. She was basically a stick. She was always the smallest in the room, and it often made her complacent. 

But Emily got a lucky break when she nailed her job interview for Miss Eternity. Miss Eternity was a pharmaceutical company started by two ambitious female scientists who wanted to unlock the keys to immortality. That didn’t pan out, but eventually, Miss Eternity researchers found the keys to something else. Eternal female empowerment. 

In their rigid quest for immortality, the scientists accidentally discovered how to make women grow. At the end of the clinical trials, Miss Eternity was able to give a pill to a man and the same pill to a woman. In just under a year’s time, the woman had absorbed nearly all of the man’s mass, leaving him a just a few inches tall. Obviously, this was one of the most closely guarded trade secrets in the world. Only the CEO and the panel of top scientists at Miss Eternity were aware of chemical nuances that allowed this process of what they called “Rebalancing” to occur between the sexes. 

Emily, who graduated college with a master’s in chemistry, was astounded by Miss Eternity. She wanted to work there more than anything in the world. And her boyfriend Cameron was the one who finally convinced her to apply when she got cold feet. 

“Honey,” he said, “You’ve been raving about this company forever, and now they have an opening for a lab technician. You’re the best chemist I know. Apply for god’s sake!”

“I’m the only chemist you know,” she said, dismissing his point. 

“That may be true, but come on, Em. The worst they can do is say no.”

That was all the encouragement she needed to go into Miss Eternity’s headquarters and wow the recruiters. She really impressed the panel of interviewers with her knowledge, her passion for the company, and her confidence. She also wore a push-up bra, just to be safe. Even a female-run company like Miss Eternity had two male recruiters and one female recruiter.

The next day, Emily was offered the job and accepted instantly. When she got off the phone with the hiring manager, she screamed with joy and ran into Cameron’s arms. He hugged her tight to his body as he spun around. He was 6’5”, so it looked like he was embracing a small child. 

Fast forward two years and Emily hardly had the same enthusiasm about her job. While she loved the work she was doing, it was hard to fit in when most of her co-workers were over seven or even eight feet tall. She was unable to join in on conversations naturally when she was the height of everyone else’s stomach. She always had to use step stools and ladders to reach things in the lab, which was now built for women way above seven feet tall. 

The reason all her co-workers grew, and Emily did not, was because her co-workers had rejected the stock options the company afforded to them. You see, as an employee at Miss Eternity, you either got stock options in the company or the chance to grow with their miracle drug. Nearly all the female employees chose to grow. But Cameron convinced Emily it was better to have Miss Eternity stock. 

“This company can make us rich! Miss Eternity has insane growth potential!” he told her.

Cameron was an entrepreneur who prided himself on his investing prowess. His income came from stock dividends and whatever income he made from the gym he owned.  

So, she defaulted to her boyfriend’s expertise, and accepted the stock offering instead of the growth pill. Cameron believed so much in the company that he too loaded up on shares in Miss Eternity.

But now, she was miserable. Her misery came to a head at the Eternity Gala, which was conveniently held at a venue with a glass ceiling. 

Emily attended with Cameron. She wore a strapless blue dress and six-inch heels. Her dirty blonde hair was tied into a swirling bun, with two thicker wisps coming down to frame her face. Cameron, in his standard tuxedo, kept reassuring Emily.

“You look amazing, honey,” he said over and over. He couldn’t believe how lucky he was to be with her. 

But that didn’t matter to Emily. The only thing she could think about was the fact that she was the shortest woman in the room. Diane, one of her co-workers, had the nerve to walk up to her and say, “Lookin’ cute!”

She then patted Emily on the head like she was a little kid. And Cameron was too preoccupied with the little men accompanying the giantesses to even notice. This was the first time he ever saw the effects of the Miss Eternity growth pill. All the men at the party couldn’t have been more than three inches tall. Most of them were hanging from their significant other’s necklace or stuck in their cleavage. One of the tiny men was just sitting on a woman’s shoulder. Cameron couldn’t believe how everyone was just treating this as normal. 

“Cameron! You’re staring!” Emily hissed at him. 

When they sat down at their assigned table, she reamed him out for being so oblivious. 

She leaned over and whispered in his hear, “You didn’t even notice what Diane did to me! You’re here to support me, not gawk at the shrunken men!”

Cameron genuinely felt bad and began to realize what Emily was going through. 

After some eating, drinking and socializing, everyone sat down at their respective tables to listen to Miss Eternity CEO Andrea Beaufort’s rousing speech. The speech was supposed to be inspirational, but it had the opposite effect for Emily. Especially when Beaufort said this:

“All of us, we’re gonna break that glass ceiling together! All of us!”

Cameron looked over at her. She was moments from tears. He put a hand on her back, giving her gentle rubs to try to silently console her. All she wanted to do was run back out to the car and cry her eyes out, but Andrea wasn’t done yet. It wouldn’t be polite to get up during the CEO’s speech. 

Emily managed to hold together for the rest of the speech, and as soon as it was done, she told Cameron to come up with an excuse for why they had to leave early. If Cameron was good at anything, it was saving his girlfriend when she was in a bind. He texted one of his buddies and asked him to call him. 

Need an excuse to get out of gala, Emily’s upset.

Two minutes later, he got a call. He made it sound really authentic. All the people at their table really believed that his pipes had sprung a leak. 

“Alright pal, thanks for letting me know,” Cameron hung up the phone. “Come on, sweetie. We gotta go. Leak at the house.”

As the uneven couple walked out, Cameron told every person who crossed their path the same lie. And no one suspected a thing. 

As soon as they got in the car, Emily finally broke down. 

“Honey, what’s wrong? I want to help you,” he said. 

She stopped crying long enough to say, “Those bitches in there is what’s wrong! They’re all taller than me, and they rub it in my face every day! I can’t take it!”

Cameron tried to console his girlfriend, but it was no use. When they got home, he helped her with her dress, and she went straight to bed. 

“I’ll come to bed in a little bit, baby. There’s just one thing I have to do first,” he said, standing in the doorframe leading to their bedroom. 

She didn’t respond. She only pulled the covers over her head until she was completely invisible.

He was pissed. He never realized how much of a hard time Emily’s co-workers were giving her just because she was so much smaller than them. He wished Emily had told him about all this earlier, so he could’ve done something about it. 

Better late than never, he said.

Cameron sat down at the dining room table and opened his laptop. Luckily, he’d chosen to schmooze a little bit with the CEO and gotten her business card. Andrea Beaufort was certainly an imposing person at 9 feet tall, but she actually seemed to take a liking to him. They vibed over basketball, both having played in high school. 

But the email Cameron was about to send to Ms. Beaufort was not about basketball. It was about his girlfriend Emily and what he had to do to get her to grow into the woman she deserved to be.