Gina poured out some orange juice for herself only to find the carton empty. She shook it with disgust, as if that would dislodge any hidden remains, then shouted out the kitchen, “Ashley! We’re out of juice!”

“What?” Ashley’s faint voice shouted back from her room. Gina slammed the empty carton into recycling and opened the fridge again.

“Don’t just put empty cartons back in the fridge, you asshole!” It was a futile scolding, but one she was obligated to give. For the principle of the matter.

The fridge was woefully devoid of drinks. Well, except for a small glass bottle labeled “Ashley’s,” which meant it was off limits, but really you could argue that Ashley owed her a drink and therefore, by proxy, this was hers. Grabbing the bottle and tearing off the saran wrap on the top (Ashley must have thrown away the cap without even finishing it), Gina chugged the dark blue liquid and started washing the bottle before recycling it.

As she washed it, the bottle kept threatening to slip out of her hands, forcing her to shift her grip constantly. Gina frowned, carefully swirling the water inside. The bottle hadn’t felt particularly slick or anything and she wasn’t even using soap, but she could still feel the glass sliding against her skin. Staring at it, it almost looked like it was expanding. Which was weird, right? Wasn’t it metal that expanded in hot water? And she wasn’t even using hot water anyways —

Gina’s elbows suddenly hit the sink counter and she dropped the bottle and stepped back. And saw that there was something horribly wrong about everything.

Her sleeves drooped, swinging around as she recoiled; her jeans were piling at her feet; under them, she could feel her socks sag and flop when she stumbled, almost stepping straight out of them. Her surroundings weren’t any more comforting, looking as oversized as her clothes. And getting more oversized as she watched. The sink was approaching chest height, passing it even, and there wasn’t any sign of it slowing.

Gina screamed.

Ashley pounded into the kitchen, skidding to a stop at the entrance and looking much too tall herself, making Gina scream again and skitter backwards, step on her own pants, and fall straight on her butt, her shirt ballooning over her.

Ashley, looking panicked, said, “You drank my potion?!”

“Potion?!” Gina echoed as she pulled her shirt off her head. Her breath caught for a moment as Ashley hastily stepped over her to check the fridge. She tried standing up, juggling her baggy clothes in her hands, though this only served to send her spiraling into further hysteria as she stood just in time to see the sink counter rise past her eyeline. “What’s happening? Oh god, am I dying?! Help me!”

Ashley glanced down at her, chewing her lip. “Okay so don’t freak out,” she said, looking twice as big as she should have been. Gina pressed her back against a cabinet door and tried not to whimper as she caught the handle passing by her head from the corner of her eye. “So. Um. Remember when I said I was going to school for pharmacology? That wasn’t, like, a complete lie or anything, but, well…I mean, like if you really think about it, witchcraft is like a type of pharmacology. Yeah? Yeah.” She paused. “Anyways, I’m going to school for witchcraft.”

“Witches aren’t a thing!” Gina shouted desperately. Her witch roommate, whose (okay, fine, she can’t deny it) shrinking potion she had inadvertently drank, crossed her arms at her from above. Gina self-consciously clutched her shirt to herself. The back of her collar dipped down her back despite her efforts. “Please, I need help!”

“You need help,” Ashley muttered, running a hand through her hair as she strode back to her room. Gina yelped as the giant leg in front of her whooshed by and landed (relatively) eight feet away. “I don’t have the homework I need to turn in.”

“Homework?!” Gina chased after Ashley as best as she could. Her shirt was now too much of a burden, crumpled around her like a small camping tent, and she tripped over a crease and rolled right out of her collar, fully nude. Despite her current frantic situation, the sheer embarrassment overturned her priorities enough for her to hesitate and consider how to get her shirt to cover her again, before she remembered that she didn’t have the time and sprinted to Ashley’s room instead.

Ashley had already made it inside her room and was clanging about. “Yeah, I didn’t make extras because I didn’t think that someone would drink my homework! Do you know how long these — well, no, you don’t, but they take an hour to brew!”

It took a minute to cross a distance that Ashley had covered in seconds. Gina paused to lean against Ashley’s doorway. At least she had the consideration (or the absentmindedness) to leave it open. “But you can’t leave me like this! I’m shrinking! What if it doesn’t stop?!”

Ashley waved a hand dismissively without looking at her. “Don’t be dramatic, you’ve stopped already. It only shrinks you by a factor of four.”

Gina looked around. “Oh.” Still, she easily regained her bluster. “But I have to get to work! You need to make, I dunno, a growth potion?”

“No,” said Ashley, turning around and pointing a wooden spoon down at her. Even if she wasn’t currently able to kick her across a room, the look in her eyes would have been enough to make Gina retreat a few steps. Confronted by both, she retreated six. “I need to remake the shrink potion so I can turn it in to a professor that already hates me.” Seeing Gina’s shivering form, Ashley’s expression softened. “Look. It’s fine. Just call in sick for a — “

“Don’t witches have spells? Just get a wand or something and,” Gina ended her sentence with an incomprehensible gesture.

Her roommate frowned. “You aren’t listening — “

“Ashley!”

At first, when a dark look crossed Ashley’s face, Gina was afraid that she was just going to ignore her. But then Ashley sighed and stomped over to her, which was terrifying, but in a relieving sort of way.

With a hand on her doorknob, Ashley glared down, muttered a phrase that Gina couldn’t decipher, and pointed at her. Immediately, Gina grew back to normal at a dizzying rate, the sudden burst of friction burning her feet a little. After anxiously measuring herself against the doorframe, Gina turned to Ashley to thank her, only for Ashley to slam the door in her face.

“Thanks,” she said anyways, before collecting her clothes from the kitchen and running out the door.

It took four hours for Gina to stop thinking about the morning’s events, and that was mostly because of lunch break. Food had a way of refreshing the mind. Thinking about it, she hadn’t managed to eat a proper breakfast before the, uh, accident, but now that she was full, her mood improved significantly. Of course, there was a lot to unpack about everything she had just learned. And she would probably have to talk with Ashley about the whole…witch thing. And hopefully Ashley wouldn’t have to kill her to keep magic a secret or something. But all of that could wait until work was over. She hadn’t made much progress in the coding errors she was supposed to fix today what with all those distracting thoughts and needed to make up for lost time.

Gina cracked her knuckles and got typing. She made it for half an hour before getting distracted again, though this time it was with her typos. For whatever reason, she was starting to fumble. A lot. She could excuse a mistype once in a while, but at this point it seemed every key she pressed she was accidentally pressing another one. Her fingers felt clumsy and swollen against the keys, and was it getting hard to breathe?

Gina pushed herself away from her desk with a sinking feeling. Now that she was looking up from her work, she noticed that her head was inching up over her cubicle’s walls.

“Something the matter?” Simon asked her from the next cubicle. “You need to go somewhere? If it’s an emergency, I can tell Daniel for you.”

He thinks I’m standing up, Gina realized. As she unwedged herself from her chair, she said, “Yeah, thanks,” and half-jogged to the women’s room, slouching the entire way.

Nobody was in there, which was great, though Gina wasn’t happy about how easily she was able to tell, considering she could basically see right into the stalls. Sitting against the door, she managed to slide her phone out of her pocket. She could hear the seams of her shirt straining against her expanding form as she made the call.

“Having problems?” Ashley said casually as soon as she answered.

“Ashley, there’s something — you already know what’s happening, don’t you.”

“You really should’ve listened to me.”

“Okay, yes, excuse me for freaking out and making bad decisions the first time I experience getting shrunk by my roommate!” Gina hissed. Or tried to. It really was more like a wheeze. Her collar was really choking her.

“Hey, don’t pin that on me. You got shrunk by a potion. That you drank on your own.”

“You made the potion! Ow, fuck!”

“What’s wrong?”

“A button just fucking shot itself in my eye. Hang on,” Gina said. Cupping her increasingly smaller phone in one hand, she carefully aimed her pinky and tapped it. “Okay, it’s getting hard to hold this to my ear, so you’re on speakerphone. Look, can you just tell me why this is happening?”

“What? You haven’t figured it out?”

“Why would I be able to figure it out?!” Gina gasped as, almost simultaneously, all her clothes gave up around her, a symphony of rips that represented the destruction of about eighty dollars. At least she could breathe easily again. “I don’t know if you realize this, but magic rules aren’t obvious to me!”

“The potion wore off, dummy.”

“Huh?” Gina cringed as she started feeling the cool floor tiles on her butt.

Ashley sighed. “Potion effects are temporary because we digest them. That’s why I told you it was fine, because you’d grow back anyways. It’s like drinking alcohol. You get sober eventually.”

That did make a lot of sense.

“Okay. Got it. Now I know,” Gina said, slouching lower as her head approached the ceiling. Her legs were still able to fit in the space between the stalls and the sinks, but that was changing very quickly. She hugged her knees to her chest, careful to keep her postage stamp of a phone in the center of her palm. “Can you please come over and help me? I don’t want to outgrow the room!”

“Don’t be dramatic. When you drank the potion, you lost...what, four and a half feet? You’re just getting that back now. So you’re gonna be ten feet six at the most.”

“That’s not too bad,” she said, nervously hitching a leg over the toilets. “But I’m definitely bigger than that. I can’t even fit my hand through the door.”

“Oh.” The phone went silent. “That’s not a good sign.”

“Yeah, no kidding!”

“I don’t know how that could happen, that’s definitely more than double what you lost,” Ashley mumbled to herself, not listening. Gina sighed and let her talk, shifting onto her side. She morosely picked at the tiny scraps of fabric stuck to her body and flicked them off. “How can you be growing that much just from a potion wearing off? All that’s supposed to happen is the effects being reversed, essentially – unless…”

“What?” Gina said sullenly.

“...the effect of the potion was reducing a person’s size by a factor of four...normally, for you, that meant losing the four and a half feet, but then you had me use a spell to make you six feet again before the potion’s effect wore off!” There were vague sounds of clattering, as if Ashley was throwing several things into a bag and running outside. “Of course digesting it isn’t just undoing what it’s done! It’s reversing what it’s done! It’s just that usually means the same thing because nobody’s been stupid enough to undo a potion’s effect with a spell! So of course when a potion that shrinks you by a factor of four wears off, you grow by a factor of four!”

“I’m gonna be twenty-four feet tall?!” Gina shrieked, sitting up, only to hit her head on the ceiling, causing plaster to dust her face. Her foot kicked out reflexively as she suffered a coughing fit and knocked a stall door off its hinges. When she finally managed to clear her throat, her phone was missing from her hand. “Oh god,” she moaned, trying to scan her body for a place that her phone could have bounced off to, hopefully unbroken. She thought she heard some sort of buzzing noise somewhere around the folds of her belly, but then it abruptly stopped. At least it looked like she was done growing. And Ashley sounded like she was coming. Though it was ambiguous whether she was coming to actually help.

Half an hour later, there was a knock. “It’s me,” Ashley’s voice called out, and Gina dutifully tried to shift herself and unblock the door. “I mean, I don’t think anybody’s written a paper on this,” she babbled as she squeezed in, gesturing wildly as she crawled over Gina’s arm. “This could – well, I wouldn’t say revolutionize anything, but this opens up like a whole field of study at the very least! I don’t think anybody’s done anything with abusing, like, the temporary-ness of effects with permanent -- “

“Ashley.”

“Yes, yes, okay.” Ashley waved a hand at her in irritation, muttering a different phrase that was similarly indecipherable, and Gina almost cracked her head on the floor when the wall retreated from her back.

Once again, the spell worked faster than the potion, though this wasn’t as fast as growing had been. Probably because she had a lot more ground to cover than back then. She sat up, happy to not have to duck, found her phone when it tumbled between her legs, remembered that she was absolutely naked, and curled up to conceal herself, blushing.

Ashley laughed. “You didn’t seem that bothered when your tit was bigger than my eye.”

“Shut up,” Gina snapped, turning towards her. “That’s – um.”

Ashley smirked down at her, which was natural since she was still sitting down. But Gina was pretty sure that she shouldn’t be smirking that far down at her. Gina jumped to her feet, finding herself only standing as tall as Ashley’s chest and dwindling even more. She was shedding plaster dust during her descent, but most of it was still sticking to her skin and a lot of it was decidedly no longer dust, more like pebbles. There was a stray piece of toilet paper that must have gotten caught on her when she was boxed up in the bathroom that was now curling around her leg, engulfing it.

“Ashley,” she said, mouth dry, “I think you overshot it.”

“Nah, you still got a bit to go.” Looking satisfied with the trajectory of her work, Ashley started collecting the shreds of Gina’s clothes near the door and tossing them in a plastic bag that Gina only now noticed she was carrying. “Otherwise, you can’t fit in my purse.”

“You’re kidnapping me!?”

Ashley laughed and crouched down next to her. “It’s not kidnapping if I’m taking you home. I mean, your other option is to go out with no clothes -- “

“This is better,” Gina said, battling the toilet paper off. She watched the tiles under her grow to the size of cobblestones. “Uh. But, aren’t I getting too small…?”

“Hey, I don’t think I’d be able to hide you if you’re over a foot tall.” Ashley’s hands scooped up Gina from under her shoulders and she yelped, kicking instinctively. Not that her feet could reach anything. Ashley didn’t even seem to notice, seamlessly shifting her grip on Gina to one hand as she turned on a sink with the other. It was disorienting to find herself go from being the size of an arm to being the size of a phone in one second, almost as disorienting as suddenly being thrust under a torrent of water and then rolled up in a hand towel before being dumped into a bag. “Anyways, be quiet. We wouldn’t want anybody to search my bag because you made a weird noise.”

Well, thought Gina as she swung in Ashley’s purse, at least it looks like she won’t have to kill me to keep magic a secret.