With each step she took, Eric and Michael's whole world felt like it was shattering. Her toes pushed them deeper into her skin against the bottom of the sock. Michael was practically in heaven but even he had to admit to himself, the toe gunk and he was picking up with his kisses burned his mouth and his throat, and he hoped his goddess would feed them real food at some point. Eric was licking out of fear, but his mind was a million miles away. Why did Michael and Jared fall so easily under her spell? They had all been shrunk, but he felt like he was the only one who wanted to escape. Not like an opportunity had come up yet, but if they were ever left alone for even a second, Eric knew he could talk some sense into the other two. Even living out there at one inch tall with no hope of growing back had to be better than this, he thought between gulps of sweaty feet.
Jared meanwhile was enjoying the view from above. He thought that by endearing himself to Caitlyn early, he could avoid any trouble later. He had enough common sense to realize she wouldn't treat them as equals. How could she? When her smallest toe could put up more than a match for the three of them combined? He didn't care if the other two thought poorly of him, this was survival of the fittest, and right now the fittest was the one who pleased Caitlyn the most.
As she took her seat in the large Psych 101 classroom, Caitlyn looked around to make sure her plan would go off without a hitch. As far as she could tell, no one had suspected a thing. She hadn't overheard anyone talking about the disappearance of three boys the night before, she felt a little sad that not one person out of 300 in the class had been good enough friends with them to notice they were gone. “Gone, but not forgotten” Caitlyn thought to herself with a satisfied smile.
Devon finally entered the room with just two minutes left until the test began, her long blonde hair in bangs, framing her small rectangular glasses. She had a new nose ring in her left nostril, Caitlyn noticed. Most of the students already had papers, with the last few being passed around the back rows. With an open seat next to her, Caitlyn felt calm and ready to ace this test.
“Hey, Devon! Come sit over here, I got something to show you after class.”
Josh, Devon's on-and-off boyfriend of the last year or so, was sitting a few rows down from Caitlyn, near the front of the room. “Shit...” Caitlyn whispered under her breath. If Devon sat that far down, there'd be no way for her to get the answers off her paper. She had to think quickly, Devon had already made eye contact with Josh and was on a direct course for the empty seat to his right. Panicking, Caitlyn tried to fake a sneeze, anything to get Devon's attention off of Josh. Unfortunately, not being a very talented actress, the sneeze failed to do much more than get some confused looks from the people sitting around her; Devon hadn't even turned to look. She was about to stand up and do something more drastic when the professor called out “The test starts now. Eyes on your own paper, turn it in to the front when you're finished.”
With a disheartened look, Caitlyn sat back down from her half stand and started to write her name on the test. From her ear, Jared had felt the biggest impact of the fake sneeze, and had fallen deeper into Caitlyn's inner ear. His legs and one arm were trapped in some kind of ear wax, he was afraid to move because Caitlyn would obviously hear him, and he couldn't get very far from the ear anyway. From his new vantage point, he couldn't see out beyond the end of the ear, except to stare at the ceiling. Jared panicked, with no way to get the answers from Devon he would surely be punished.
Caitlyn meanwhile, was silently fuming. “That stupid Josh, who does he think he is? He treats Devon like crap anyway. He's always at parties trying to be the funniest guy there, talking all over everybody just to be the center of attention. I bet no one would even miss him if he disappeared.” She thought to herself as she scrunched her toes around Eric and Michael. The bruises on both of them were slowly but steadily getting worse, they made note to later work out some kind of emergency signal to Caitlyn to let them out when things got hairy
There were 30 minutes left in the test, and Caitlyn had barely made a dent in the multiple choice. The short essay section was going a little better, but much of the vocabulary was still new and confusing to her. Looking down a few rows, Devon looked to be writing the finishing touches on her essay, surely ready to turn in what should have been Caitlyn's perfect test. In her gaze she caught something strange; Josh was nowhere to be found. She was sure he was sitting right next to Devon and now there was only a half finished test on the desk where he was. “Maybe he went to the bathroom.” Caitlyn thought, slightly worried about a sinking suspicion in her gut.
Devon handed in her paper and left out the side door of the room, playing on her phone while she waited for Josh to finish the test. The clock quickly ticked towards 10:50 AM, when the test would be called over and Caitlyn would have to turn in the meager attempt she put together for a third of her overall grade. The moment inevitably came, Caitlyn looked down at her paper and the three sentences she had written for her essay: “The brains of men and women, though nearly identical, contain some important differences. Men tend to harbor more aggressive and negative emotions, if those even show up at all. Women, on the other hand, have less control over their physical impulses, but greater emotional control and stability.” Defeated, Caitlyn and the other two students who took the whole time walked down the row to turn in their tests. Caitlyn's was the last to be turned in, the top of the pile. As she walked out of the classroom, she saw Devon sitting on a bench just outside, nervously scrolling through something on her phone.
“Wasn't Josh supposed to meet you out here or something?” Caitlyn asked.
“Ha, that asshole. He probably just wants to fuck me again so he can throw me out.” Devon looked on the brink of tears.
Sitting down next to her, with a supportive hand on her shoulder, Caitlyn reassured her: “Devon, you don't need to keep going back to him. There are plenty of guys around here that would die if you gave them a look. You have the power to do whatever you want with these guys, so don't let one pushy asshole ruin all the fun for you.”
“Easy for you to say” Devon scoffed, “You're pretty, so you just get whatever you want without any effort. I try, but all the skincare and makeup in the world can't do anything to fix this lumpy face of mine. The glasses don't help either.”
Caitlyn tried to stay positive, “Well, I happen to know that some guys like the way glasses look on a girl. Say, do you wanna come over for a movies and ice cream night tonight? I don't have any finals tomorrow so if you're free you're so welcome to come over.”
“Thanks, I just need to know what Josh wants to say first. God, where is he? Everyone's out of the room and the test is over and I haven't seen him leave the room at all. At some point in the test he must've gotten up without me realizing it, just before I finished I looked at the clock and noticed he wasn't sitting next to me anymore.”
“I'll go back in there and check, he's probably hiding from you cause he's afraid of how confident you'll be when you turn him down.” Caitlyn laughed as she headed back towards the room. The professor had left, leaving Caitlyn totally alone in the room. Making sure she was alone first, she reached into her ear and dug Jared out with her index finger. Holding him in her hand, she explained what happened on the test and that she wasn't mad at him.
“I hope you didn't worry about not being able to help me out! Next time I'll just have to come up with a better plan.”
Eric could barely hear her from inside her sock, but he thought studying might avoid this confusion in the future.
“Say, do you know Josh Lewiston? Tall, lanky guy, short black hair, always wears band tees?” Caitlyn asked Jared.
“Oh Josh, yeah I know him, real party animal kinda guy. Last I heard he was in trouble with the law for things getting out of hand at some dude's party downtown. Say, he's in this class isn't he? He's always complaining about some kinda psychology whenever I talk to him” he replied.
“I have a hunch, and if that hunch is correct, he's in a lot more trouble than the law can possibly put him in.” Walking over to the row where he had been sitting earlier, Caitlyn crouched down to look around the chair legs. She was crawling on all fours which gave Eric and Michael a little more breathing room, which even Michael appreciated very much. She grabbed around the bottoms of the chair legs and felt nothing for the whole half of the row she was sure Josh had been sitting in. “Maybe he really did leave for some other reason. It wouldn't surprise me that that kind of scumbag would lead a sweetheart like Devon on.”
Just as she was about to get up, she thought she saw something moving in the outlets on the floor for students to plug in their laptops. As she slowly opened the safety lock on the case a smile formed on her face as she thought about what might be behind there. That smile quickly faded and turned into a scream when a moth flew out of the case, however.
“Jesus! How long have you been stuck in there little guy? It must have been so cramped” she said to the moth as she walked towards the window to let it out. On her way back towards Devon outside, she thought she saw something else on the floor.
“Oh my God...” as another smile mischievously spread on Caitlyn's face, seeing a one inch tall Josh Lewiston hanging on a carpet fiber of the row above his seat.