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Story Notes:

[For littletoy]

The dowdy woman sat at the bar of the diner, sawing a burger apart with great diligence. She was middle-aged and full-bodied, with a round rump planted on a candy-apple red vinyl stool. It seemed important to her that she slice her hamburger into very small, thin bites. Her large purse slumped at the foot of the stool, and a rumpled paper napkin was parked at her elbow.

“More fries?” she asked her husband.

“Maybe just one more.” With both hands, he tugged it off his wife’s plate.

“Look at you, just packing them away.” Grinning at her husband’s appetite, she subtly arranged the napkin to hide him again.

This is what Rachael saw, sitting at her booth with three teammates. She stared rapt at the couple, not understanding at first what she was looking at. She thought maybe the woman had a pet rat beneath the napkin, little pink fingers darting out to seize the food and nibble it beneath its tent. But as the woman shared slices of burger and small french fries, and especially the way she talked to the little thing, the young woman came to realize it was, impossibly, a tiny man on the counter.

Rachael could barely move. Her hands rested on her lap, palms increasingly sweaty, and her eyes never blinked as she studied the man under the napkin. She couldn’t see much of him, just his hands and some discoloration on his arms, as though he were wearing a suit, which made even less sense. How did he get so small? Why did the woman bring him out in public? A thousand questions raced through Rachael’s mind as she gawked.

None of her teammates noticed. They were accustomed to her shyness. Sometimes she just wanted to hang out with other people, silently, while they roared their jokes and sang their songs and accused each other of ridiculous things. They accepted her and when she zoned out, like now, they thought nothing of it.

Rachael hadn’t zoned out, though. She was focused on the little miracle happening at the diner counter. Part of her wondered why no one else had noticed this, and part of her wanted that tiny man. She’d never seen anything like it before and curiosity consumed her. All she had to do was bide her time, wait for the moment to present itself… she had no specific plan in mind, but she knew these things generally worked out, if only she’d wait for the opportunity.

“Awright, ladies,” bellowed their coach, “dinner’s over. Back on the bus.”

The conversational clamor of young women pitched into a roar as they grabbed their leftovers and belongings, wrapped up conversations and thought up new jokes, piling into the aisle like a white-and-blue stampede. Rachael slipped out of her booth and hovered beside it, her gaze unbroken by the activity, as young women flowed around her like a frothing river. She just had to wait for the opportunity.

One young woman tripped and collided with another. The recipient of this turned and shoved her, and the original offender shouted and retaliated harder. The wronged party stumbled over a teammate’s trainers, then kicked the large handbag belonging to the woman at the counter, with a clatter of plastic and glass objects.

“What the hell?” The woman twisted to check on her bag, make sure nothing was being stolen or scattered across the floor. In that half-second, Rachael slipped through her teammates like water around stones, snaked her thin hand under the napkin, and seized anything that felt like a tiny man. She clutched the diminutive being to her white t-shirt and rode the wave of young athletes out the doors of the diner. There and gone again.

She could feel him squirming in her sweaty palms, mashed against her flat belly, as the cool night air settled on her face and shoulders. She even thought she could hear him screaming, a thin, tinny noise barely perceptible above the roar of the visiting volleyball team. When she climbed the steps of the charter bus, the noise fought for space in close, humid quarters and she couldn’t hear anything else as she carefully picked her way to the very back of the bus.

Rachael settled into her seat, hands molded into a protective dome on her belly, and watched the chaos on the bus settle into regular patterns. The players near the front of the bus chatted with the chaperones, brown-nosing to show everyone how adult they were. In the middle of the bus were the regular athletes, the average students, discussing the game and talking about homework or boys or TV shows. They didn’t need to ingratiate themselves with the chaperones, and they didn’t like as much trouble as the bad girls who sat in the back.

The same five always sat in the back—Jenice, Dee-Dee, Ariana, Mona, and the pack leader, Frances—plus or minus the hangers-on of the week. And these young women weren’t necessarily evil, they just had a different sense of humor than their teammates. They liked a different kind of fun, and sometimes that fun resembled abuse, but they all had it in common and that’s what bonded them. Rachael wasn’t one of the bad girls, but they didn’t mind her back there because they knew she was shy. She minded her own business and she didn’t narc to the grown-ups.

Frances sat kitty-corner from Rachael. Each of them had their seats to themselves and were being quiet, for different reasons. Frances was resting, having played hard tonight; Rachael was hiding something and was working hard at avoiding attention, knowing full well that trying too hard necessarily attracted attention.

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