For hours Alan lay inside Sadie’s sock, tossing and turning, unable to fall asleep or find a comfortable position. Thoughts and memories filed continually into his consciousness, until he gave up and admitted defeat, decided to go for a walk that night, and think.

But Sadie had foreseen this. As he crept toward the mouth of the sock, in the blue darkness, he found she’d tied it in a triple knot. He was trapped.

Crawling back to the toe, he lay down again and curled himself up into a little ball, gathering the blue fabric and winding it around his tiny body. For the first time in at least ten years, as memories flooded back again, and the present weighed down on him more and more heavily – he began to sob. And then he fell asleep.

The beeping of her alarm clock woke him up. Bathed in warm, sticky sweat, he reached out his hands sleepily for phantom bedsheets, and swept his fingers across a warm, moist surface that responded to his touch. It was difficult to breathe, and the air was suffused with a sour-sweet smell like unwashed hair on a dirty pillow, mixed with the stale flowery scent of old shampoo. He opened his eyes in the darkness, and stood up. All he knew, stumbling over the soft surface hands-forward, was that he wasn’t in the sock. He was outside, somehow.

And then he touched something warm, and slightly damp. Stroking it, running his palms and fingers over the small, sensitive hairs and ridges, he felt it respond again (and something in himself, this time, responded to that response).

“Alan…” He heard a yawn, muffled. He felt her skin shiver, as she stretched her arms and legs.

She laughed: “Not between my ribs, Alan.” In a single movement, she threw back her covers and swept him up in her hand. Pulling her knees against her chest, and smiling with a sleepy grin at the little man in her palm, she arched her back and turned on the lamp behind her.

Rubbing her eyes, slowly, she blinked against the light. “Ready to get to work, Mr. Alan? Want me to pick out a tie for you?”

The corners of his mouth rose, faintly, and he was about to say something, but then stopped. Sadie watched him more intently, how he opened his eyes and lips, how he turned his head around, how he moved his arms and midsection. Everything seemed to fascinate her.

“I hope you’re feeling better this morning, Alan. Were you crying last night?”

She sounded concerned, and Alan pushed himself up onto her palm. Sadie twitched, and let out an abrupt snort. “I’m ticklish! Sorry!”

“OK,” Alan said, after a moment’s silence. “So you moved me?”

“Yeah.” Now she looked concerned, and brought her free hand up underneath him, as a precaution. “I had you in my hand, at one point. You must have moved.”

Alan wanted to be angry with her for putting his life in danger – she might have rolled over him in her sleep – but instead he felt gratitude for that small act of thoughtfulness.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Not necessary.” Carefully, Sadie set him down on her pillow. “That was just for last night, Alan. Tonight, we’re going to try something different.” She took a quick breath, as though she were about to explain – Alan looked at her inquisitively – but she had second thoughts, and closed her mouth again.

“Now,” she said, pushing herself out of bed, stepping into her slippers, and pulling on her white cotton bathrobe, “I’m going to take a shower. And then we’re going to get breakfast together.”

Halfway toward the door, she stopped and hopped over to her desk. “Oh! I almost forgot. Here’s your clean clothes, and your briefcase, and your notebooks.” She picked them up and dropped them beside him on the pillow.

“But,” Alan raised his hand, overwhelmed. “Thanks, Sadie -- but -- I need a shower, too.”

She winked. “No you don’t!”

Alan stared. “Why not?”

“No time. But, if you want," she offered, turning half around, "I mean I could clean you up in the sink."

Alan pictured Sadie’s wet and soapy hands caressing his body, up and down, under a steel faucet pouring out steaming hot water, and shook his head. How could she clean him, at his size, without leaving him feeling physically violated – raped? He stiffened slightly, imagining it.

“No -- no, thanks,” he said.

“Aw,” she said, and he felt a warm blast of her sour morning breath blowing over his bare face and chest. A few beads of saliva settled over him, like water-spray. “That’s what Marina –” She stopped, and looked confused. “Well, we’ll figure it out later, I promise.” With a shifty smile, she crossed the fingers of her right hand, and ran out of the room. Seconds later, he heard the shower curtain pulled back, the pipes squeak on, and the water spew out.

While the shower ran, he clambered up Sadie’s pillow, over the long, black stray hairs and faint greasy patches left there from the night or the week before, and tried to find a vantage point from where he could look out over the room. Outside the window, he could see, there was a kind of leaden glow, a cloudiness in the air. It could be gray and dry or drizzly outside – he didn’t know which until the water in the shower flow was cut off. He heard Sadie’s wet feet slap over the tiles, and the scratching sound of the bath-towel, as she dried off her naked body. Quickly, he dressed himself in the clothes she’d laid out, and slid down her pillow to the dark green comforter, with a soft, plushy plop.

She walked in, screwing the corners of the towel into her ears, cleaning them out. Paying Alan not the slightest attention, she lobbed the towel onto the bed, and bent down over her dresser; pulling on her panties, snapping on her bra, and rummaging through her drawers for the day’s socks, skirt, and blouse, she got dressed.

He, meanwhile, wasn’t sure whether to feel pleased or offended by her indifference – he watched for a while, but then instinctively turned his eyes away toward  the window, to the stitching in the pillow, and the music posters on the wall. Twice he flipped through the French textbook, as she was sitting down at the end of the bed, as though to jog his memory. But he couldn’t read it – and after thumbing a few pages, tucked it away in the matching doll-briefcase that seemed to have come with his outfit. Ten minutes later, Sadie was ready. After brushing her teeth and blow-drying her hair, she took a seat at her desk, and put on her old shoes.

“Alan,” Sadie said, contemplatively, gazing out the window at the gray morning. “I want to tell you something, ahead of time.”

From the bed, he looked up, and stared at the small of her back as she brought back her long dark hair and secured it with a clip.

“Today’s going to be… difficult. For you, I mean.” She stood up and walked over to the bed. A crease formed between her eyes: she was thinking hard about what to say to him.

“This afternoon,” she said, “after lunch, there’s an initiation. A ceremony, for me.” She sat down beside him. The bedsprings groaned under her weight.

“Initiation for what?” Alan already dreaded the answer.

“Psi Phi,” Sadie answered. “The Pi chapter.”

“A sorority.”

“Yeah.”

“Why difficult?” Alan asked. Despite what she’d said about its being difficult for him, he tried to sound as though he were comforting her.

She didn’t answer immediately. “Do you maybe wanna talk about this over breakfast? It’s getting late.”

He glanced at the digital clock over her bed, and nodded. She picked him up and, briefly hesitating, stuffed him away with his briefcase and books, in her jacket pocket. They began to move.

Sadie had forgotten, or perhaps she simply didn’t care, that inside the same pocket there was an old used tissue, half of a peanut, a piece of scrap-paper, a rubber band, two dimes, and a chewed piece of gum wrapped up in a crumpled wad of gum-paper. He heard her open the door to Marina’s room, a few inches – but her roommate either wasn’t in, or was still asleep. She unlocked the door to the flat, and strolled out into the morning. She opened up her umbrella – so it was drizzling – and as she walked he rolled around in her pocket, jolted about and colliding with all of the other scraps of garbage and loose objects, until she arrived at the dining hall for breakfast.

After about a quarter of an hour, light broke through her zipper, and her hand reached in, searchingly, pushing aside the gum wrapper, tearing through the tissue, flicking the half-peanut into a corner, until she found him, and seized him, knocking him hard just north of the solar plexus. Out he came into the light. He looked out at the new surroundings.

Sadie was alone at the table, eating her cereal and sipping from a glass of orange juice. Around the lunchroom, he saw other girls eating breakfast, some with tiny men at their tables, and others alone. It was crowded and loud; the room hummed and echoed with conversation.

“Hungry?” Sadie asked, slurping her juice and shoveling a spoonful of milky cereal into her mouth. Alan walked over to her bowl, and looked up into her face. She smiled down at him [Alan: She looked different, like a goddess this time – I couldn’t decide whether to admire her or to be afraid – this was new and I wasn’t used to it] and dipped her spoon back into the milky cereal bowl, resurfacing with some Cheerios. She picked them out, one by one, laying them out in front of him, like tiny oysters.

“How’s that?” she asked. Again he looked up at her shyly – grateful.

But their conversation was cut short by the laughter of  three girls at the next table. A shrunken man, Alan’s size, was seen running around on the floor, either looking for or running away from someone – his mistress. Wherever he was going, he seemed lost.

“Whitney!” squealed one of them, “he’s by your feet. Get him!”

Whitney, a blonde with a ponytail, wearing a tea-shirt and soccer shorts, slid her feet out of her flip-flops and arched her leg over the tiny man. From Sadie's table, Alan watched as the man jumped around and peered up, fascinated, face to face with the giant, crushing sole of her foot. Eying him under the table, Whitney pressed her toes over the man, pinning him against the cafeteria floor, and slowly, carefully, dragged him headfirst over to her sandal.

“Got him!” She celebrated by pumping one of her fists in the air.

“Whitney, hide him! Hurry!” whispered the third girl. Sadie and Alan followed her eyes, and they saw together another girl exiting the bathroom, her face strained and somewhat haggard, her hair in disarray, and a pair of ankle-high boots in her hands.

“Where?”

“Drop him in your rain-boots…”

Whitney quickly reached down and snatched the man from the floor. Then she wheeled around behind her chair and plunked him into one of her rubber boots, wet from the early morning drizzle. She’d removed them at the table, after coming indoors.

Before turning back to her meal, and burying her face behind her hands, Whitney met Sadie’s eyes. Alan noticed – with a sickening shock – that they exchanged a smile. Who smirked first, he didn’t know. It passed by in a flash, and then both became instantly very grave and absorbed in their meal – but he caught that look, and never forgot it.

The other girl, frazzled, ran from table to table, and questioned everyone. Getting no definitive information, and advised by the cafeteria manager to log a report with the campus security, she finally ran out into the rain, and disappeared down the walkway, and around the corner.

As the buzz of conversation resumed again, Sadie and Alan returned to their meal.

“What was that about?” he asked, when she offered him another spoonful of her cereal.

She gave him a tight-lipped grin. “Don’t worry,” she said. “We’ll never be like that.”

“Who was she?”

“That,” Sadie whispered, bending her head down to the table, blowing her syrupy breath softly into Alan’s ear, and rustling his hair, “was Annabelle.” She licked her lips, and smacked them as she opened her mouth again. “She lives with us.”

Sadie’s warm breath whistling in his ear sent a tingle up his spine, and made him feel very drowsy and content. But he forced himself to turn his head and make eye contact with her. She was looking at him with her luminous eyes, wide open and intelligent. She wanted him to see and be amused by the comedy and budding drama here: as though she were incapable of understanding, or perhaps sympathizing with his fear – even after he saw what happened to the other man. If something like that could happen, in full view of dozens of other people, then what else is permissible?

~~~

I held up my palm, and mouthed the word Stop. Alan pressed the red button again, and the machine whirred to a crawl, the high-pitched tone descending to a low bass.

“Yeah,” Alan said.

“Sorry: I just want to confirm this with you: the male kidnapped was a dependent of this girl – Annabelle.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re saying that Sadie, your caretaker at the time, witnessed the kidnapping and failed to report it?”

Alan hesitated. “There were others present, Charlotte.”

“But how many would you say – give me a round estimate, Alan –  directly observed this girl – Whitney, you said – abduct this male?”

“That I can’t say.”

I took a sip from my coffee, and flicked the ashes off the end of my smoldering cigarette. “Go on.”

Alan stole another glance at my sneakers, and gulped. “We had French class that day, you know. Whitney and Annabelle were both there.”

I inhaled deeply, and the fiery end of my tab crackled in the semi-darkness. “Don’t you want to record this?” I asked.

He shook his head, as though to clear it, and tore his eyes away from my shoes. “There’s nothing to say – except that we took one class that day, before the ceremony. After that, she – Sadie, I mean…”

“Talk about the class,” I cut in, to focus his mind. “Who was there?”

He thought for a second, and then said, “Whitney was there, and so was Annabelle, and, I don’t know. Maybe ten, fifteen other girls.”

“Did you see any men?”

“No,” he answered. “Except for one in the back, with a girl. Another tutor, like me, taking notes and listening. Shrunken. Annabelle looked miserable – had her head in her arms all class long. So I assumed nothing had changed.”

I nodded, to encourage him. “Well, where did you go after class?”

“There was a brick townhouse, just off campus.” Alan sighed, and then hovered his finger, like a mouse pointer, over the red button. “I should record this,” he said.

And he pressed the button.

~~~

The rain was pouring when Sadie collapsed her umbrella and rang the brass doorbell. Seconds passed, and Alan, clenched and half-suffocated in her damp left hand, heard the door open and a woman’s voice, gentle and pleasant, welcome them inside.

“I’m Olivia,” the voice said. He caught dark hair, a young face, Italian maybe, and casual clothing, shorts, a t-shirt, and indoor flats.

“Sadie.”

“Nice to meet you. Follow me.”

Sadie followed her through the first door on the right, entering on a spacious living room with three couches and three chairs. Alan noticed that Whitney and Annabelle were there, along with twelve other girls he didn’t know, besides one or two he seemed to recognize from breakfast that morning.

[I asked if Marina was present. “No,” Alan said. And then added mysteriously: “Not yet.”]

“Do you have him with you?” Olivia asked, as she guided Sadie into the room.

“Yes.”

Hooking her by the arm, Olivia escorted her into the neighboring kitchen. On the island in the center of the kitchen, there was a plastic tub, covered. Holes were punched into the blue lid.

“Put him in here for now.”

Sadie hesitated, but only for a moment. Then she gave Alan a quick smooch and lowered him down carefully to the bottom of the tub.

“See ya later, Alan. Don’t worry!” It was the same voice she’d used with him on the phone, earlier that week. He must have looked back at her with dismay in his eyes, in fear and disbelief.

When the lid closed above him with a cold snap, he looked across the blue shadows at two other men at the opposite end of the plastic tub, one in each corner. Neither of them was Annabelle’s man, he noticed, and neither seemed inclined to talk. One raised his eyes at Alan, frowned, and buried his face in his arms. The other, disheveled and reeking, unmistakably, like a girl’s locker room, stared with absent eyes at a point somewhere to the left of where Alan was standing, and never gave a sign, not by the raising of an eyebrow, or by moving a single finger, that he was conscious of the other two men’s presence. They sat there for a few minutes, until the lid shook again, and a hand reached in for the silent man. He cowered against the wall, and gasped, as though he were choking. The black nail-polished fingers seized him – and he flew upwards, without a word of explanation from him or the giant woman. And the lid snapped shut again.

The young man opposite Alan was trembling. Their eyes met.

“What’s happening?” Alan murmured.

“Initiation Day,” the other man stammered out, after a moment’s pause.

He heard a chorus of laughter from the other room. One girl, not Sadie or Olivia, shouted something, and then the laughter died down again. A low hum of conversation replaced it. Footsteps approached again.

“For them?”

“Yes, but—” The lid tore open, and another hand, this one with unpolished nails and long fingers, reached in and snatched the other man up before he could finish his thought. He heard a girl’s voice high up, hushing him – he was trying to scream, protest, beg, say something, but she’d pressed her finger up against his mouth. “It’s OK,” Alan heard her say. Before the lid closed again, he’d placed the voice. He recognized the blonde girl from the morning. Yes: it was Whitney.

Another roar of laughter rose from the next room. Again he waited, and again the footsteps came back. The blue lid was lifted once again, and the hand that came down  -- for him, this time – was Sadie’s.

“Sadie!” Alan pleaded with her, gripping her thumb tightly with his arm. “What’s happening? Tell me!”

But she just smiled, and held him close against her breasts. Her old black and white saddle shoes squeaked over the kitchen tiles. “Just roll with it, Alan. It’s going to be OK.”

“What? What is?” She didn’t answer him, and now it was too late. Olivia introduced her, when she walked into the room.

“This is Sadie,” she said. All the other girls, legs crossed or sprawled out on the couches, waved and smiled.

“And this is Alan, her new – tutor. Right?”

“That’s right,” Sadie said.

There was a hush over the room, and then Olivia continued. “Sadie: are you willing to accept the responsibilities of a Soror of the Psi Phi sorority, Pi chapter? If so, repeat after me: ‘I am.’”

“I am,” she repeated.

“Do you solemnly promise obedience to the laws governing this organization? If so repeat after me, ‘I do.’”

“I do,” she repeated.

“Alan,” Olivia addressed him now. “Are you willing to be submissive and in every way subjugate yourself to the highest authority, your new caretaker, Sadie?”

Alan was bewildered, and started to tremble. “Wha—”

“He is,” Sadie answered.

“What proof have you?” Olivia asked.

Sadie took off her saddle shoe, and removed her wet sock. “Alan,” she said, “this is just for today. Don’t worry.”

Alan, stiff with fear and unable to respond, stared into Sadie’s huge, dazzling eyes, at her black hair, curled at the ends, and at the zipper of her blue jacket. Then she dropped him down, and he tumbled down, to the toe of her sock. In the dark, twilit glow, breathing for the first time the complex, cheesy smell of Sadie’s feet mixed with the musty odor of the rain, and soaked cotton cloth, he heard a crescendo of laughter outside. Then, though he couldn’t believe it – it was impossible for him to accept – Sadie, his old friend, the one girl in the world he thought he could trust, squeezed her foot back into the sock, and pinned Alan underneath the soft, damp arch of her sole.

When she re-inserted her foot, she’d disturbed a few flakes of lint and dark matter from the toe of her sock, and as she pushed Alan’s tiny body forward underneath her warm, antsy toes, he swallowed and gagged on some of those flakes, and a sweaty, watery mix of foot-grime trickled down into his mouth. Sadie’s toes, as she tried to find a comfy position for them, pulled Alan facefirst underneath them, and his face was besmeared with a foul, strange and greasy mixture of stale toejam and old, damp fabric. He pushed back against her toes, helplessly – and then, as he heard her heel pop into her shoe, sealing him in, he tried to yell, to say something, but couldn’t. She was tying her shoelaces, double-knotting them quickly, as she always did. Part of him felt betrayed – but the other part…

~~~

“No.” Alan broke off. “Tomorrow,” he said, waving his hand. “I can’t talk anymore.”

I was sympathetic. “Alan, it’s OK. I really had no idea.”

He turned off the machine, and stood up. I didn’t know whether or not he wanted a hug – so I stood up too. Instead, he asked where the guest room was.

“Second door on the right, as you turn the corner.”

He thanked me – his face scarlet, his eyes evading mine – and said goodnight. I would have to wait until the morning. I picked up my shoes and put away the machine.

I could wait.