“Well, boys. I’m off to school. Those easy A’s won’t make themselves, after all,” Nicole smarmed from the doorframe. She twirled a finger through the goldenrod locks of her blonde crown, while the opposite hand swung a keyring in jangling loops about her index digit, round and round. Her grin sifted from one corner of her lips to the other, as her cheeks occasionally puffed from casually chewing her bubblegum. Her opal-blue eyes sparkled with amusement. “Brandon? Aren’t you going to say good-bye to me, big brother?”
Brandon rolled his eyes, taking his time to turn his head in his sister’s direction from where he lay on the couch, just to ensure it thoroughly annoyed her. Blinking, he stared with blank disinterest at his glamorously dolled-up nineteen-year-old sibling: the queen bee of her every social circle, but under this roof, he made it his personal mission to never give her the satisfaction of thinking she was as important as everyone else made her feel. She, in turn, liked to serve up lots of passive-aggressive honey at every possible occasion.
“Uh-huh, sure. I’m definitely not in the middle of something over here,” Brandon muttered sarcastically.
“Rotting into the couch and staring at the TV for five straight hours? Yeah, yeah, I guess you are busy,” Nicole snapped. Her gaze shifted over to Jason, her brother’s best friend, where he too was sprawled across the cushions; though, as soon as she’d entered the room, the young man had made a noticeable effort to prop himself up in a more respectable pose upon the pillows, and with a posture that helped accentuate his biceps. The alluring blonde smiled, popping her gum loudly in her cheeks.
“What about you, Jason? Care to be a little nicer than my couch potato brother over here?” Nicole teased. She winked with great aplomb, more than enough to make Jason blush and Brandon grit his teeth in annoyance.
“You better get going,” Brandon said, “Or those easy A’s will go away, and then who knows which professors you may or may not have to blow to get the numbers back up.”
“Hey, c’mon, man,” Jason grumbled. He looked back to Nicole with a winning smile and clenched his arms; his heart thumped in his chest with its usual racing pulse, an effect which had trolled him for the previous eight years or so of his adolescence in the presence of his secret crush. “Sorry about that, Nicole. He’s just pissed cuz of how the last play-off went. Have a good time in class!”
“Aw. That’s so sweet of you, Jason. I guess between the two of you, one of you had to be the non-jerk,” Nicole swooned. “Or should I say, one of you had to be the really cool guy who actually knows how to talk to women?” She couldn’t have given two craps about Jason, of course, or his obvious feelings for her, but it was more than worth it watching the silent agony of her brother on the couch as she casually flirted with his friend. Just for good measure, she gave her ass a little push outward, until it was on the verge of testing her cut-off jean seams. The juicy mounds of her cheeks arched, and she felt Jason’s hungry gaze on her, fighting not to be too evident. Idly her hand crested down her lower back and over her rump, righting itself again at her voluptuous thigh. She pouted, then made her way for the side door exited and stepped out onto the porch, leaving the boys in front of the still-flickering TV in awkward silence.
“Why’ve you gotta do that, man?” Brandon said, flicking the channel on the screen.
“What?”
“You know what. Getting a hard-on for my sister while I’m in the room.”
“Oh, c’mon, man, shut the hell up,” Jason laughed. “All I’m doing is being nice.”
“What you’re doing is trying to get in her pants, under this roof, where I live.”
“Awfully concerned about who your sister gets with, aren’t ya?”
“All right, one more remark like that, and this remote is flying right at your face,” Brandon warned.
Jason shifted in his seat, relaxing again now that the attractive young woman was out of the room, and let his gaze wander to the ceiling.
“Where does Nicole sleep?” Jason wondered aloud, starkly confused to notice he’d never actually acquired this information.
“Oh, for god’s sake. Why not just ask where her panty drawer is in the house?”
“Seriously. There’s only, like, three rooms upstairs, and none of them are hers.”
“Yeah, yeah. She sleeps in the attic.”
“The attic? What, did she draw the short straw?”
Brandon shrugged. “She likes it up there. She says she gets more room and more privacy. Hey, anything that keeps her out of the way more often. Plus, if she ever embarrasses me on campus, I have the ultimate revenge to let everyone know she sleeps in the roof. I’ve never been in it, though; she locks the door.”
“Huh. So… better for you, then, if you had a picture of it to show someone, if you had to?” Jason encouraged.
“Good try. You just want to see her room so you can jerk off into her bras or something.”
“Hey, even if I want to see it, is it bad for you if you can get a picture of her dumpy attic room, in case you need to prank her?”
Beyond bored with the TV, Brandon looked from his friend to the screen and grimaced. What else was there to do on a day with no class, work, or anything interesting on ESPN? He threw the remote aside.
“All right, just a quick look. And we’ll have to pick the lock, obviously.”
Trying not to let his excitement show, Jason hustled after his friend as they made their way upstairs, then the secondary landing at the end of the hall, where the door to Nicole’s room waited.
“Give me a second,” Brandon muttered. He twiddled a paper clip between his thumbs and stuck it in the opening, fiddling with the lock for a few minutes. Just when Jason was about to suggest they give up for the time being and look for an actual key, the mechanism snapped and the door swung open.
Brandon and Jason stealthily made their way up the stairs into Nicole’s attic bedroom, despite there being no one else on the premises to catch them. The wooden slats creaked under their shoes as they emerged in the wide-open pyramid span of Nicole’s attic lair.
For a full minute, the boys paused in staid quietude. Their hands hung at their sides, their jaws tipped open. Neither had the capacity to blink nor intake breath as they gazed in perturbed confusion at the array which awaited them in Brandon’s sister’s bedroom. There was, indeed, a bed, a dresser, and a desk in one corner, but this only accounted for a quarter of the space.
The rest of the room’s floor area, and several of its raised surfaces as well, were occupied by one-foot-by-one-foot pads of varied greenery and silver-speckled microcosms, like macro scale models of computer chips. There were more than a dozen of these patches, laid out in the manner of a garden across the wooden floor. Each box was walled in by a roughly three-inch-high barrier.
Gathering their composure enough to move again, Brandon and Jason ventured forward into the room. The latter led the way, intensely curious as to the bizarre setting they found themselves in, while the former hung back, having long ago forgotten to pull out his camera phone.
“Holy shit,” Jason uttered as he stooped over one of the boxes. “I think… I think this is supposed to be…”
The last words couldn’t escape Jason’s lips, which was just as well, because Brandon had puzzled out the identities of these objects within a few seconds of entering the room, implausible though it seemed.
They were tiny cities. Each box a self-contained urban metropolis, with skyscrapers one-inch high, and a bustling life below: and assuredly, there was indeed life, as insect-like vehicles zipped through the streets and mite-resembling throngs of creatures filled in the spaces between.
The young man gawked at the impossible madness of his sister’s possessions, unsure whether to disregard this all as a strange dream, or actually allow himself the realization that he was currently standing over the distillation of his innermost fetishes and desires: the very concept of tiny civilizations, owned by a giant woman as subjects to a goddess. It was just unfortunate they happened to be owned by his annoying brat of a little sister, because otherwise, the sight alone would’ve given Brandon ammo for a lifetime’s worth of masturbation. Never in his life had he felt more conflicted than he did in this precise moment.