When I woke up, the first thing apparent to me was my hangover. My mouth was dry like cotton and a punishing headache rocketed through my skull. I groaned and fluttered open my eyes.

The sun must have come up a few hours ago. The garish light beamed through the window blinds and illuminated my disheveled bedroom. I was tangled up in a horde of sweaty sheets and I felt like trash. The light t-shirt I wore clung to my breasts and my pajama shorts were bunched up around my thighs. It had been a sloppy night.

I spotted a glass of water on my bedside table and clumsily grabbed it, chugging the life-giving liquid. As I drank, I began to remember what happened:

I hadn't blacked out last night, and it had been pretty fun for the most part. My best friend Kelsey and I had gone out to dinner with Lisa and Melissa, then hopped around a few bars. After a round of lemon drop shots at Da Vinci, it had been Melissa who suggested we go to Motiv. We were all dressed up for Saturday night and sufficiently tipsy at that point, so we gleefully Ubered to the club.

I'd done up my hair and spent a lot of time on my make-up before going out; I was ready to meet guys. Motiv never disappoints. I remember by midnight the four of us were on the dance floor, grinding on some college guys we had just met. They were all caricatures of each other and really just some meathead jocks, but one in particular took a special interest in me.

After some raunchy dancing I left the chaos of the dance floor with him and found somewhere quieter to talk. I was drunk by then but I remember clearly that his name was Brad. He was definitely acting macho around me, but I looked past this and quickly decided that I wanted to fuck him. It'd been so long and I was past the point of caring how much Kelsey would judge me in the morning.

The morning. My present situation. Ugh. At Motiv, Brad had claimed that his phone had died and that he wasn't going to be able to get home unless he charged it somewhere. That was my cue to invite him back to my apartment. I told him he could plug it in there, but we both knew it was an invitation to plug in something else.

Before I left with him, I found Kelsey and let her know Brad was coming back to our place. Since we lived together, I thought it polite to let her know we were going to have a guest tonight. She's been my best friend since our sorority days at college, and when I bring guys home I try my best to give her a heads up first. Plus, in case something went wrong later, I wanted somebody to know I was with this random guy I had just met.

The sex with Brad had been lackluster. He must have been somewhat drunk too because he had trouble getting hard, and once he was in me his cock felt small. I've slept with my fair share of guys and he was definitely one of the forgettable ones. He didn't last long, and once he finished I sullenly cleaned up in the bathroom and he gave me some lame-ass excuse. We didn't even cuddle when we both fell asleep in my bed.

As I sulked in my hungover daze, I wondered for a moment if Brad was still in bed. Rolling over, the sun coming in through the window blinded me but I could clearly see there was no one next to me in my queen-sized bed. Go figure, he had probably bailed long ago. But it was for the better honestly, I didn't really want to talk to him this morning anyways.

Summoning whatever energy I could, I slipped my legs out of bed and placed my bare feet on the cool wooden floor. I felt like shit. Standing up and swaying a bit, I found my balance and staggered into the bathroom. Luckily I pay for the master bedroom in the apartment, so my bathroom is attached to my room.

I found the toilet and tugged my shorts down, finally sitting on the bowl and letting my bladder go. As I sat there and peed, I contemplated the philosophy of my life's decisions in a meditative way that can only be done while relieving oneself in the mindless security of a bathroom. I know I'm hot, and I'm still in my twenties. Guys want to fuck me. It's fun, but how much longer can I do this? I need a real boyfriend. I'm getting sick of fuckboys.

Next to me in the trash can, I spied the used condom from last night. I rolled my eyes at the sordid reminder of the guy I had let simply crawl on top of me and take care of himself. Do guys even care when they rush sex and don't think about the girl? It made my hungover brain hurt more.

After wiping and flushing I retreated back into my bedroom like a zombie. All I wanted to do was crawl back into bed and die some more. But unfortunately the morning would get a lot worse. And weirder.

I first noticed one of Brad's big white sneakers laying carelessly on the floor of my room. The other was propped up haphazardly against the wall. What the hell? What were his shoes still doing here?

Then I saw his clothes: his jeans, still with the belt looped in them, his light green polo, and even his white baseball cap were all strewn around my room. I saw my skirt and blouse from last night on the floor with them along with my heels that I'd been relieved to remove once home.

If his clothes were still here, maybe he hadn't left then? Was he in the kitchen trying to cook breakfast? I tried to think, but thinking hurt my brain. If he was in the kitchen, why wouldn't he get dressed first? His underwear wasn't on the floor, so I figured he must be wearing it.

I opened my bedroom door to listen for Brad. The kitchen was down the hall but I heard nothing and smelled nothing. Curiously, I walked down the hallway, passing Kelsey's bedroom. Her door was closed but I could hear her stirring in there. Her hangovers were never as bad as mine.

Walking out into our living room, I could see into the kitchen. It was empty. No Brad. Weird, I thought. Had he just left the apartment in nothing but his underwear?

The clock on the oven read 9:27. Sighing, I trudged back to my bedroom, closing the door behind me. I flopped back onto my bed, wondering what was going on. Turning to my side, I noticed something tangled up in the bed.

Something gray was sticking out from under my lavender sheets. Grasping it, I slowly pulled it out. It was a pair of underwear. Brad's underwear. What the hell was going on? My head hurt like shit and nothing was making sense. I tossed his sweaty underwear out of my bed and rolled back over.

I wasn't really listening to it, so at first I thought it wasn't a real sound. But then I heard something quiet, something faint. It was really muffled. I perked up. Was it coming from outside?

After a second, I realized in horror that it was coming from in my bed. Something was in my bed! With a squeal I jumped out from under the covers, absolutely terrified. Was it a spider? A mouse? I saw the duvet move. There was something small under there.

I nearly screamed right then and there. I almost found myself running down the hall to hide with Kelsey in her room, but she was an even bigger coward than me. I was disgusted to think that some pest had been in my bed all morning and I seriously debated quarantining my room and living out on the couch for the rest of the day.

My hand grabbed the duvet and I had to calm myself down before I could lift it off. I took a deep breath, then all at once I flung the duvet off the bed like a magician revealing her final act.

Beneath the duvet, the sheets were a mess. They smelled sweaty and like sex. But my eyes were immediately drawn to the little thing flailing around amidst them. I thought it was a mouse at first. I screamed. Kelsey definitely heard me, and maybe the neighbors too.

I couldn't begin to process what I was seeing, it was unbelievable. I was scared senseless and utterly horrified.

“OH MY GOD!” I screamed out to no one but myself. The thing in my bed looked up at me, mirroring my own horror. This had to be a dream, I told myself. Except I was way too hungover for this to be a dream. What lay in front of me was impossible.

There was a fleshly creature crawling across the sheets of my bed. It wasn't big, maybe only a couple inches, but it was moving. It looked like nothing I'd seen before, until I realized it was a person. A tiny little man, to be precise. And he was naked. And looking at me.

I recognized the diminutive form of Brad in my bed. I started hyperventilating and for a moment thought I would faint. His tiny little eyes looked up at me in trepidation and I saw him raise a muscly arm. He was waving. He was waving at me!

His tiny little voice squeaked. He wasn't very loud. “Hey! Hey! Help me!!” he cried out.

I recoiled in horror and found myself standing in the corner of my room. I felt nauseated, terrified, and confused all at the same time. What the fuck was going on?!

“I need your help! Please!” Brad squeaked at me. Finding his balance on my plush mattress, he had slowly risen to his two dainty little feet. My eyes bulged in shock as I beheld this diminutive specimen of a man. He was like a living action figure.

“What the hell happened to you?!” I finally bleated out. I could hardly talk or even breathe, for that matter. How had Brad shrunk in my bed??

“I don't know!” he answered back. Despite his size, his distress dwarfed mine. He was panicking and absolutely shaken by his predicament. In an odd way, his immense discomfort began grounding me. Without a doubt I had already had an awful morning, but it was nothing compared to what was happening to him.

“Ohmigod Brad, you're tiny!” I said out loud stupidly. No shit Sherlock, I immediately thought to myself. I could hardly make sense of anything and was talking dumb.

“Please, you gotta call the police!” Brad begged me desperately as I looked over his body in horror. “You've gotta get me help!!”

The cops? He thinks the cops are going to be able to help him? It occurred to me he was also talking in more-or-less the same panicky gibberish as I, but my gut reaction was that calling the cops was going to be a dumb fucking idea.

I don't like cops. Yeah, I'm prejudiced. But ever since I got that ticket last year for taking a step out of a bar with a drink in my hand, I've been loathsome to think kindly of the police. What was I supposed to say anyways if I called 9-1-1? Uh hey, my hookup from last night is now three inches tall. Hell no.

Plus, I did not want the police coming to my house. They'd search the whole place, probably find my weed, and likely conclude I somehow had something to do with this. Who knows what would happen from there. It'd be like the Salem witch trials all over again. News cameras, reporters, my face splashed over front pages across the world. My life would be ruined. Cops would lead to lawyers which would lead to trouble.

My mind was racing at a million thoughts a minute. The dread of finding Brad shrunken in my bed withered when I began thinking of the repercussions of what this all might lead to. I still didn't understand what had happened, but I did understand what would happen when the world discovered him.

Snapping out of my thoughts, I snapped at Brad, “What the hell are the police gonna do?! You're fucking tiny!”

“I don't know!” he argued with me. “Take me to the hospital then!”

The hospital was a better idea, but it presented other problems. Even if I walked into the emergency room and dropped him at the front desk and fled, there would be an entire investigation. Research scientists would lead to the police who would then start looking for me, and who knows what Brad would tell them. There was no good solution for what to do with him. My brain ached.

“I.. I... I don't know!” I finally yelled at him. We were both insanely stressed and at our breaking points. I felt angry and disjointed, and he clearly was not having a great time either.

“Please, you gotta help me, I'm tiny!” he pleaded with me. He looked up at me with his miserable eyes. “I don't know what's going on...”

“Brad,” I tried to tell him reassuringly, “we'll figure something out. Don't worry.” I sounded disingenuous, because I was legitimately out of ideas. “Let's just... let's not rush into anything yet, let's just--”

He cut me off. “Are you crazy!?” he raved from the bed. “Get me out of here! We gotta get help!”

“I don't think that's the best--”

“Look girl, cut the shit! Call nine-one-one already!!' He was absolutely steamed and hot headed now. If he had been his normal size I would have been cowering at his anger. But looking down at his helpless form on my bed, I just couldn't take his ire seriously. It was kind of cute actually. Watching him explode actually started calming me down.

Wait, did he just call me “girl?” Girl? Oh my God. This fucker didn't even remember my name from last night.

“Excuse me?” I said back to him flatly. Now I was pissed. “Brad, do you not remember my name?”

I stunned him silent. I could tell he was still mad, but it was clear he had fucked up.

“Uh... uh...” he stammered.

He didn't remember my name! That little shit! Guys are such fucking assholes.

“I bring you back to my place and let you fuck me and you can't even remember my name?” I said to him, my anger clearly building behind my voice. “And now you want me to fucking help you?”

I was so mad at him. Mad at him for being a dick. Mad at him for shrinking and upending my day. Why did this have to happen to me? Why couldn't it all just go away? Ugh I just wanted to go back to sleep.

“Fine! You won't help me, I'll help myself!” he defiantly declared. And with that he started walking across my bed through the sheets as best he could. He was making his way toward the edge.

Was he trying to escape? What the fuck did he think he was even going to be able to do at his size? Even if he jumped off the bed, which was quite a jump, then he would just be on my floor and...

Ew. The thought of this miniature man crawling around the floor of my bedroom was so gross. You think losing a spider under your bed is bad? What if it was a person? Ew ew ew! My gut immediately told me I could not let him get away.

As he stumbled through my sheets I pounced. Leaping out of the corner of my room and lunging onto my bed, I watched Brad turn around and face me as I descended upon him. He looked surprised. And scared.

I must have been quite a sight to him: my brown hair was a mess, I had morning breath, my face without makeup probably looked ghastly, and as I loomed over him I was acutely aware that my breasts were jiggling ponderously under my loose t-shirt. Each one absolutely dwarfed his puny body.

I quickly snatched him up with my hand, no longer horrified at the thought of him. His little naked body felt warm and sweaty between my fingers; he didn't have much hair on him and his skin felt almost slippery. He started thrashing against me immediately, but even with his big muscles that he had spent years cultivating at the gym, at his current size he was powerless in my grasp. It fascinated me how easily I dominated his entire body with just my hand. Not so macho now, dickhead.

“Bitch!! Let me go!” he screamed at me. Even at his loudest, his voice was still pathetically meek.

“No, you listen here you little shit!” I said to him sternly, bringing him up to my face. He kept trying to struggle against me and loosen my grip on him, but he wasn't going anywhere. “You're staying put until we come up with a plan. I need to think!”

I had an idea. Spying my empty water glass on the bedside table, I crawled across my bed to it and dropped him in. With a thud he hit the bottom. Now in his clear glass prison, he wouldn't be going anywhere until I was ready to deal with him. The sides of the glass were too steep for him to climb out. I smirked as I admired my temporary solution to the Brad problem.

“What the fuck!” he shouted at me. “Let me go!!”

“Stay put,” I told him. I didn't want to have to worry about him while I tried figuring out what to do. He was being a petulant little asshole so he needed a time out. “I'll be back,” I said to him before climbing off my bed and moving back to the door of my room. Flinging it open, I stormed out, shutting it loudly behind me.

I needed to start acting fast. My hangover was quickly receding as my mind began activating, trying to deduce how to resolve this whole fucking mess. As I started walking down the hallway toward the living room, all I wanted was ten minutes to sit on the couch and think things over in quiet solitude.

There could be no cops. No hospital. I didn't want to turn Brad into anyone because then he could rat me out, tell the authorities it was me somehow. I hadn't even done anything wrong but somehow he was making me feel guilty. This was so fucking unfair.

As I stomped down the hall, in my mind I raced through what I knew. We had met at a bar and had never seen each other before. He went back to my place, which he had obviously never been to before. Huh. Even if his friends had seen him leave with me, nobody actually knew where he went.

And his phone. He said it was dead at the bar. Was that true? If his phone had been dead all night, then even it didn't know where he was. AT&T or Verizon or whoever couldn't have tracked him to my place. It was all starting to come together in my mind. I needed to find his phone, to make sure it was really dead...

I burst into the living room and was immediately disappointed to see Kelsey sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and wearing a sweatshirt. The TV was on in front of her. She looked up at me. Fuck.

“Hey,” she greeted me, friendly and unassuming. Raising her eyebrow, she asked “How was your night?” The insinuation was obvious.

I love Kelsey. She's my bestie, but in that moment I was not in the mood to deal with other people.

“It was fine,” I said gruffly, brushing her off and immediately redirecting myself into the kitchen. Though the kitchen was still mostly open to the living room, putting a countertop between me and her made me feel more protected. I began rifling through cupboards absentmindedly, pretending I was looking for something.

“Just fine?” she said smugly. “Bad hookup then?

“Yeah the guy kinda sucked,” I said, trying to be cool.

“He left?”

“Uh... yeah. Yeah, he's gone.”

“You don't seem so sure of yourself,” she teased me. I didn't reply. After a moment she sighed. “Guys do suck.”

She must have gone back to watching her show because she didn't say anything else. I was thinking about what to do about Brad. His clothes. I needed to hide his clothes or get rid of them somehow. And find his phone. That's right. I needed a trash bag.

Bending over, I opened the cabinet under the sink to see if I could find our roll of trash bags. When my head was practically inside the cabinet, I heard the distant sound of glass shattering. Had that come from outside?

I yanked my head out from under the sink. Oh shit. That had come from my room. It was Brad.

Without saying a word, I rushed out of the kitchen and down the hallway back to my room.

“What was that?” Kelsey called after me, clearly confused. “Is everything ok?”

“Nothing! Everything's fine!” I shouted back to her. I was doing a really pathetic job of lying so far today.

Throwing open the door to my room, I glanced at the bedside table. The glass I had put Brad in was gone, and instead bits of shattered glass covered the floor next to my bed. My shrunken hookup was nowhere to be seen.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled out loud. I was pissed off and I wanted Brad to know it. Looking back on it, the glass I used as his make-shift prison hadn't been that heavy. He must have been able to tip it over from inside, or at least wobble it off the edge of the bedside table.

“Brad, you piece of shit!” I muttered loud enough for him to hear, wherever he was. “I'm going to fucking find you and make you pay!”

I quickly got down on my hands and knees, being careful not to touch any shards of glass. Brad couldn't have gotten far on his stupid little legs; my first guess was that he was under the bed.

Looking under my bed I could see the various boxes of old clothes and college stuff I had stored and forgotten about. It was dark and dusty underneath, so one by one I started pulling out boxes into the daylight. Peering under my bed, I darted my eyes around for any sign of that little shit.

“Hey what happened?” I heard Kelsey say behind me. Shit. I'd left my door open and she had come to see what was the matter. Before I could say anything she noticed the broken glass. “Oh my God!” she blurted out.

“Not a good time Kelsey!” I tersely replied, refusing to take my eyes off my search. I was irritated at everyone in my life right now.

Suddenly there was movement. I saw a blur out of the corner of my eye as I shifted a box. Brad! Though he was small he broke out into a sprint, running out from under the other side of my bed.

Spotting the mini-man, Kelsey let out a horrified scream. I could only imagine what insane thoughts were pounding through her mind at the moment, but I had no time to calm her down as I leaped up and jumped across the room. Brad was heading for the open door of the bathroom. It was cute watching him dart and weave between the broken remnants of my water glass on the floor, but he wouldn't be able to outrun me. Looming over him, he stumbled as I closed in.

I scooped his little naked body up from off the floor as Kelsey kept screaming and stumbled back out of my room. “WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?!!” she shouted as my fingers pulled Brad higher off the floor.

Though Kelsey was howling like a banshee, I could also faintly hear Brad's little voice cussing me out. With too many things to deal with at once, I decided I needed to put Brad somewhere safe. Somewhere inescapable. I took a few steps into my bathroom and walked over to my bathtub. Pulling back the shower curtain, I peered into the tub. These tall, sloped walls would do just fine.

Without trying to be careful, I dropped Brad into my bathtub. He hit the bottom of it hard, and before he could get up and take in his new surroundings, I jammed the plug into the drain just in case. He wasn't going anywhere now.

Walking back into my room, which was still a mess, I confronted Kelsey. She was still in shock.

“Ew! Ew! Ew! EW!” she squealed in disgust when I looked at her. “What is going on in here?!”

I sighed. “It's a long story,” I admitted.

“Ok, you need to explain what the fuck that thing was you caught! It didn't have any fur on it!! Ew! Ew! Ew!”

“Yeah uh...” I didn't know what to say. Kelsey eyed me with mad suspicion as I stumbled through my thoughts.

“That wasn't a mouse, was it?” Kelsey asked me, finally bringing her voice down to a more tolerable level.

“No, it wasn't,” I said, trying not to lose myself to hysterics. I was starting to feel stressed out and overwhelmed again. “Kelsey, I don't know what the fuck is happening today! But there is some really weird fucking shit going on and I need your help.”

“My help?” she asked. “What are you talking about?”

Fuck it, I had to come clean to her. She was my best friend. If there was anyone I could tell about what had happened this morning, it was her.

“Ok, that thing you saw... that was a guy.”

“A guy?!” she replied. “What??”

“Yeah, the guy from last night I was with. I woke up and... well, I found him like that. He was small. Or something.”

Kelsey's eyes turned into dinner plates as she recoiled from me. Her face was a jigsaw puzzle of confusion and horror.

“Are you still drunk?” she finally asked.

“NO!” I burst out. I could feel myself losing it. The whole situation was too much. “He's in the fucking tub if you want to have a look! I don't know shit about what's going on, but yeah, there's a little fucking guy in my room and I have NO IDEA WHY!”

Yelling into her face seemed to have some kind of effect on Kelsey. Though she was still looking at me like I was nuts, she wasn't losing her shit anymore. Without a word, Kelsey walked past me and into the bathroom. I waited a moment, then sure enough she screamed.

“OH MY GOD!” she wailed. “HOLY SHIT WHAT THE SHIT?!”

I went back into the bathroom and came up behind her. Peering around her, I looked down into the tub. Brad's small little body was trying to climb up one of the steep bathtub walls, but he kept sliding back down. He was looking up at the two of us in wonderment and fear.

“See?! I fucking told you! He turned into a fucking leprechaun or something,” I scolded her. Relief immediately washed over me when I realized that Brad was now Kelsey's problem too. I wasn't in this by myself anymore. It was me and my best friend now, and together we had to solve our problem of the little man.

“Oh my God,” she said again, this time without shouting. Her mouth hung open and her hands were up at her face. She could hardly believe her eyes as she tried processing what was going on. Finally she said, “How'd... how'd he get so small?” She looked at me in disbelief.

“No fucking clue,” I hastily replied. “But yeah, I have no idea what to do with him now.”

Brad had temporarily stopped trying to escape and was now watching both of us. With the introduction of Kelsey, he tried his begging anew.

“Hey! Excuse me!” he shouted up to her. We both glanced back down at him in the tub. “You gotta help me, your friend here is trying to kidnap me! Call the cops! Get me out of here!”

“You didn't call the police yet?” Kelsey asked me, turning to look at me. I could tell she was nervous as hell and quite distressed too.

“Hell no I didn't call the cops!” I argued with her. “What are they gonna do except make our lives hell? You wanna to deal with the police all day? Have them snooping around here?”

Kelsey didn't respond to me but I saw her eyes drop. She knew I was right. I put a hand on her shoulder and kept talking.

“Look, I didn't cause this. If we get the police involved we'll never live normal lives again. And who knows what the cops will think about all this. Kelsey--”

I cut myself off and looked down at Brad. He looked so stupid down there, craning his neck up to see us. I was pissed at him for shrinking and upending my life. I wished he didn't exist.

“Let's talk about this in the living room,” I offered, looking back at Kelsey. “We need a plan.”

“Ok,” she agreed with me quickly. Our eyes locked for a telling moment and I knew she was onboard to conspire with me. I looked down at Brad again.

“Don't go anywhere,” I warned him even though he was trapped. I couldn't help myself. I almost giggled.

Leaving the bathroom, I closed the door just in case. Kelsey walked with me out of my room and back to the living room.

“Holy shit a mini-fucking-man,” she said out loud, still in disbelief. “Am I high right now?”

“I wish I was high as fuck,” I replied to her. But instead I was stone-cold sober and incredibly irritated.

Kelsey plopped down on the couch and started running her hands up and down her legs. She always did that when she was nervous. I took a seat in the chair next to her. The TV was on but Kelsey had paused whatever mindless Netflix show she had been watching.

“Ok, this is what I'm thinking,” I started explaining. “If we turn this guy over to anyone, this is never gonna end. There will be questioning. Lawyers. Bad shit. It'll take over our lives. We'll be famous, but in a bad way. That guy Brad in there is a little shit and a self-entitled pig in real life, and you know he'll find a way to make it suck for the both of us.”

Kelsey twitched her mouth and sighed. “Yeah, ok,” she acquiesced. “Who knows he's here right now?”

“No-bod-y,” I replied, stressing each syllable. It was the only good thing we had going for us. I explained the situation with his dead phone and his ambivalent friends. Not only did nobody know where he went at the end of the night, he still technically didn't know where he was. He was just at some random girl's apartment.

“That's good,” Kelsey said, relieved. “Let's say he disappears. Even if the police go looking for him and somehow it leads them to you, you can just say he left after you guys had sex. Haven't seen him since.”

“That's what I was thinking too,” I readily agreed. “No way they'll suspect I did anything. I mean, I didn't, but look at me.” I gestured to myself. I was just a regular girl. Five foot six. One hundred and forty five pounds. Big boobs with an ass that looked great parked in a pair of jeans.

“We need to throw out all his stuff,” Kelsey said.

“Yup. I need to find his phone too, make sure it's actually dead,” I added. My heart was thumping in my chest. I felt like I was conspiring to cover up a murder, trying get away with the perfect crime or something. It all felt awful and terrifying. But necessary.

“So what do we do with him then?” Kelsey finally asked.

I didn't have an answer for her. That was the real problem.

Kelsey narrowed her eyes and looked at me intently. I could tell she was uncomfortable. “You weren't planning on... you know, like killing him, were you?”

Though the idea had occurred to me, I couldn't bear to think of it. “No, I can't do that,” I admitted with a sigh. Kelsey immediately sat back on the couch looking relieved. “I mean, he's still a person? Kinda?”

“I guess so,” Kelsey said. “He's a douchebag though, right?”

“Yeah, just a dumb bro,” I affirmed.

“We could drop him off somewhere,” offered Kelsey. “Like drive down the freeway an hour and just leave him in a parking lot or something. Let him fend for himself.”

I considered it. It wasn't a bad idea. Even if someone discovered him and he told them what happened, he still didn't know where I lived. Or hell, what my name even was. It was a relatively clean idea.

But it didn't sit right with me. Sure, it was slightly possible that he could still eventually lead the cops or whoever back to me, but what really bothered me was the idea of abandoning him out in the middle of nowhere. I tried to imagine myself a few inches tall, trying to find food out in the world. A fucking bird could fly down and eat me. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a death sentence.

“Eh, I don't know Kelsey...” I finally replied after thinking about it. “It just... doesn't feel right just leaving him somewhere. It's basically the same as leaving him to die.”

I was torn. I didn't want to help Brad but I also didn't want to kill him. If there was a perfect way to get rid of him safely and guarantee he would shut up about what happened, I would do it. But the more I thought about it, the more impossible it seemed. I couldn't even get in touch with his friends or family without turning on his phone, and I was too terrified to do that. Using his contacts in there to ransom him off to someone would eventually bite me in the ass, I just knew it. Again, visions of lawyers and court rooms and litigation for the next five years paraded through my mind.

Was I being overly dramatic? Who knows. I just wanted the Brad thing resolved. I didn't want anyone to show up at my door some day in the future looking for him. I didn't want the entanglement of fixing his problem, but I also didn't want the guilt of killing him haunting me for the rest of my life.

Kelsey sullenly sighed when I shot down her last idea. “Fuck, then I don't know what to do about him. If you don't want to give him up then I guess you have to keep him!” She threw her arms up in the air in defeat. “You always keep saying you want to get a dog! Well, here ya go!”

Kelsey was such a drama queen sometimes. I scoffed at her remark. “You think I should keep him as a pet? Are you crazy?”

“Sure! Why not?” she argued with me sarcastically. “Fucking train him to sit and roll over for all I care.”

“Well we can't just kill him!” I shot back. I didn't like her stupid idea but for some reason I found myself defending it.

I realized I had Kelsey beat. I knew her, she wouldn't have been fine with killing him either. The thought of flushing him down the toilet like a dead goldfish gave me the chills.

“Goddammit,” she finally said, utterly exasperated. “Ok, we toss his clothes and his wallet and phone and all his stuff. Cover up that he was basically ever here. And then... keep him? What if he randomly grows back?”

“Ok, now you're just speculating, who the fuck knows what will happen to him,” I told her. “He might shrink again for all we know.”

“You know if we keep him as our pet, he's gonna be real pissed at us,” Kelsey said, giving me a weary look.

“Ok, but what's he gonna do?” I asked her. “He's like three inches tall! He's in my bathtub right now. He can't escape!”

“Wow, so you really just want to keep a pet guy around then.”

“A boy toy,” I spontaneously corrected her. It sounded absurd but it made me smile. “Yeah, I bet we could train him. He doesn't have to be our friend, he just has to do what we say.”

Kelsey raised an eyebrow at me. I had no idea where my thoughts were coming from, but I was stressed out and just blabbering now.

“I don't know, we could try it out for a few weeks or something,” I continued. “Worst case scenario we just say fuck it eventually and let him off into the wild like you suggested. But in the meantime, we could just keep him here.”

“Where are you going to keep him?” she asked me. “You're going to eventually have to use your shower.”

“We can put him in a jar or something, I don't know. Get him a hamster cage. A little wheel to run around on.”

That made Kelsey laugh. It was a silly thing to think about. But I weirdly kinda wanted to try it now. Brad had been such a boor with me that he probably deserved something like that. Plus, if we were gonna feed him and house him, he wouldn't have the right to talk back to us. We could make him do whatever we wanted.

“Ok, so if we keep him,” Kelsey said. “Now what?”

I thought for a moment. “I'll gather up all his stuff in a trash bag and walk it down the block. There's that dumpster behind that Chinese place I can toss it in. It'll all be gone. Then we go talk to him. Tell him we're keeping him and lay out the new rules.”

Kelsey didn't seem wholly pleased with me, but she was going to consent nonetheless.

“Look Kelsey,” I finally added, trying to sweeten up the plan, “we're going to have a guy in the house we can do anything with. Anything. He can paint out nails, scrub our floors, give us massages--”

“He's not gonna go along with any of that,” she countered.

“Oh he will,” I told her. “I'll fucking make him.”

I don't know what kind of look I flashed her, but I could tell from her reaction that she thought I was wickedly evil. And she liked it.

Now I was getting excited about the idea of having a little guy pet. Brad fucking owed me after how dumb he had been. Lost in the moment, my imagination swam with a whole host of ideas for how to train my new little boy toy.