“…Forty-seven.  Forty-eight.  Forty-nine.  Fifty!”    

            Roxy hopped off Allen’s bed and sauntered purposefully for the hallway, her eyes darting from shelf to shelf in his bedroom, just in case he had been foolish enough to not even leave the immediate area for his hiding place.  She listened for any kind of rustling or hushed breathing, but the room was completely silent.

            Satisfied, she entered into the room next door, which happened to be hers.

            “Any little nerds hiding in here?” she whispered into the dark room, flipping the light switch on for a better look around.

            With about forty seconds to go, Allen had crouched down by the top of the stairs and then, taking a deep breath, begun sidling down each one along his stomach, one after the other, in rapid succession.  It wasn’t the most ideal of ways to move, and he knew he was losing serious ground by choosing to go downstairs, but he knew his sister would be hunting mostly upstairs, thinking he had skipped over this very possibility.

            Once he’d reached the bottom floor, he took off running again.  He passed by the doorframe that led into the living room.  There were couches and chairs to hide under, but he figured once Roxy realized he wasn’t upstairs, those would be the first and most obvious places to check downstairs.  Thinking quickly, Allen sprinted across the worn carpet and onto the cool tile of the kitchen floor.  With the bright light of the miniature chandelier glowing over every conceivable hiding place on the floor, he knew there wasn’t much to choose from.

            “Gonna find you!” Roxy threatened loudly from upstairs with an over-the-top cackle.  Her gleeful voice echoed through the halls of the house as she wandered aimlessly past doorways.  “And when I do, I’m going to stand on you, and we’ll test how durable you are when you’re my little Raggedy Andy doll.”

            Knowing she was, at most, 60% kidding on that “standing on him” concept, Allen shrugged and pressed himself against a countertop, waiting breathlessly to know if the coast was clear.  He heard his sister’s heavy footfalls as she practically skipped through the upstairs hallway toward the guest bedroom.

            Good.  He was right.  She was passing by the stairs, having assumed he’d stayed up there.  Now he had a little longer to find someplace to hide.  The laundry room by the door from the garage was the most obvious place to consider next, as the light had been turned off, and given how messy the floor usually was, it was ideal for hiding.  His breath catching in his chest with anxiety, Allen darted out from behind the countertop and made the treacherously exposed journey across the tile.  He made his way under the kitchen table, vaulting over the low-hanging wooden bars lining the legs of the structure.  With a final adrenaline-fueled sprint, he ducked into the darkness of the laundry room and pounced onto a small wrinkled pile of t-shirts requiring a wash.

            Allen couldn’t help but smile and snicker silently to himself with amusement as he sat up in the pile of clothes.  He had forgotten the little rush he got from this particularly dire brand of hide and seek with his towering sister.  It had probably been at least five years since they’d done this.

            With some secret disappointment, he had supposed that the pair of them had simply outgrown those kind of games, though in the back of his mind, he had never stopped enjoying them.  Evidently, he had severely underestimated how creatively juvenile Roxy could be when she was in the right mood.

            The trick now was finding somewhere unexpected to stow away.  The pile of shirts he had landed on when dashing into the room seemed the most obvious place to pick once Roxy gave up on the top floor and made her way downstairs to continue searching.  Other piles of shirts and jeans littered the floor carelessly that didn’t seem to be any better as hiding options.  There was also a bench he could duck under, but it was too obvious.

            Allen couldn’t help but smirk to himself at the sight of the mess.  His parents, despite all their immense sorcery, had insisted on raising Roxy in an environment that at least partially prepared her for interaction with humans, and required that she wash her clothes in a machine.  He had a feeling this floor wasn’t going to look any cleaner in the coming days, though, if her past propensity to use magic to get out of chores was any indication.

            It was at that moment that, in the dim view of the darkened laundry room, Allen caught sight of his sister’s favorite green Converse, well-worn and well-loved, the fabric lip fraying with threads and streaks of dirt clotted around the rims where the treads ended.  Not really knowing what it was he had planned, he scampered across the floor for a closer look at them.  It was strange to be standing before them like this, with the back white lip rising up to about the height of Allen’s waist.  It had been a long time since he viewed shoes from this angle, with the bulk of them comprising the size of a hefty rowboat to him.  After a few seconds of curious observation of these preferred adornments of Roxy’s, Allen noticed they weren’t alone.

            Hanging out the top of each opening of the shoes was a black sock, rumpled and partially tugged inside out from being so recently shorn from the warm, slender feet of their owner.  Having been breathing as shallowly as possible out of nervousness at being found too soon, Allen realized that he had been missing the signs of their presence the whole time, and began breathing normally again, inhaling the atmosphere of the room.

            He was instantly greeted by the familiar downy, earthy stench that always clouded so potently from his sister’s socks whenever she wore them for more than a few consecutive hours.  The air was also flavored with the fleshy tenderness of her soft skin, and the additional odiferous shot of soggy toe jam and salt only made it all more potent.

            Those black socks had been a weird sticking point for their parents and even some of Roxy’s friends, all telling her how strange they looked and how much they clashed with her outfits and look.  She being Roxy, of course, hadn’t listened to a single one of them, and Allen was glad.  They were part of what made Roxy so uniquely herself.

            Grinning to himself cunningly, Allen realized that tricking Roxy into giving up on finding him was going to take some real doing.  After all, they had played this game innumerable times in earlier years, and she knew all his favorite and most predictable hiding places.  In fact, he could only recall two occasions where he had actually managed to remain concealed to the point of Roxy’s forfeit, and after that, she had those places covered.  The only way he was going to win now was to play the game in a way she would not see coming, and to use the most twistedly obvious place he could think of.

            Hearing Roxy’s steps pounding on the floor up above, indicating she must’ve finished her search of the bedrooms, Allen wasted no more time in pondering his odd choice.  Clambering over the lip of the left shoe, he grasped the ruffled rim of the sock in his hands and began burrowing his way inside it like a gopher.

            At his size, his body was going to fill up most of the shoe, and so he quickly had to begin scrunching himself into a fetal position in order to make it work, though once he got moving, he found it very easy to wiggle his way deeper and deeper into the darkness of the sock, the heavy fabric folding downward around him to conceal him further until he had backed himself as far as he could go into the shoe.

            The aroma became all the more intoxicatingly drug-like as Allen settled into the deepest round of the sock’s toe section.  Each breath filled his lungs with the omnipotent musk of skin, sweat, and dirt: spicy and persistent in its every wild taste.  Coughing in the first few breaths of it, Allen quickly got himself accustomed to the festering, organic odor that rapidly seemed to take on a life of its own within his throat and nostrils.  This was what it took to win against a witch.

            Roxy would for sure want to have a good, mocking laugh over his choice of hiding place, though even she would have to concede his brilliance once she inevitably gave up, and that was far more important to Allen as he waited smugly for new sounds beyond the walls of the shoe.  It was difficult to make out much, with both a layer of cottony sock fabric and a rubbery shoe acting as sounding boards, and after the footsteps from upstairs had ceased, Allen could hear no more.

            He slowed his heart rate and meditated cheekily in waiting.  No way was he going to be found.  No way.  He’d really shown her this time.

            The force of the sock being yanked from the shoe and rocketing into the air would’ve hurt Allen’s neck, had he not been surrounded by the squishy and buoyant fabric that caught him like a full-body trampoline.

            The mouth of the sock unfolded and Roxy’s gorgeous green irises peeped inside, laugh wrinkles instantly appearing around them.

            “Well, this is a new one,” Roxy commented triumphantly, not bothering to hide the smirk on her lips.

            “New is probably a little hyperbolic here.  Seriously, do you ever buy new clothes, or do you just wait for them to disintegrate?” Allen corrected earnestly, coughing again for show.

            “Oh, look at Mr. Man, being all hilarious and stuff, and totally forgetting that he’s the one in the bottom of my sock, which I’m now holding way high above the ground,” Roxy mocked back at him indignantly.  “What do you think of that?”

            “What do I think of what?”

            “That I’ve got you right where I want you, weirdo.  You seriously couldn’t do better than this?  Look how vulnerable you left yourself.  I could just drop you right now.  You’d probably break a few bones on the way down.”

            “You could’ve done that with anything I chose to hide in,” Allen smarmed.

            “True,” Roxy shrugged, biting her lip thoughtfully.  A sly glint appeared in her eye, and she added: “Of course, I could also just slide my big ol’ foot back in there, put the shoe on, and walk on you for a while.  How does that sound?”

            “Again, you could’ve done that no matter where I hid,” Allen stated, though at her words, his heart simultaneously fluttered nervously in his chest.  Such a thing sounded fairly extreme, even for someone with a semi-sick sense of humor like Roxy.  Given how much fun she seemed to be having with him right now, though, was it something she was actually going to try?

            “You’re missing the point, nerd,” Roxy chuckled.  “You did all the work for me!  You chose to put yourself in a place where all I have to do is aim for you while I get dressed again, and bam, you’re in a pickle.”

            “Well, somebody’s got to give you a pointer here or there, or you’d never learn to do it yourself,” Allen drawled innocuously.

            “Oh, shut up,” Roxy instructed playfully.  “You talk big now, little guy, but you are not even going to believe how good of a kiss you’re going to have to give my toe later as an apology.”

            “Oh, I’m sure I will believe it.”

            “I said shut up!  Now…” Roxy drawled.  “That was a pretty good round, I guess, for a beginner player.  You’re a little tuckered out now from running all the way downstairs only to get caught after like five minutes of me looking, huh?”

            “Totally.”

            “Thought so,” Roxy agreed, shaking her head.  While her hand had been underneath the sock to support Allen’s lithe weight at the bottom like a guinea pig, she slowly released and began sliding her fingers back up the rows of black fuzzy fabric toward the lip of the sock.   “I could probably just leave you in here for a nap, but as it happens, that would be pretty boring for me, so we’re gonna pick something else to do that you aren’t quite as crap at.”

            With this, Roxy’s fingers began fishing down into the fabric tube and coiled around Allen’s sides so she could lift him out.  His face became buried in the fuzzy ridges on the way out as she roughly peeled him away from the smelly article of clothing.